tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944skygiantsskygiantsskygiants2022-11-12T21:57:39Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:646462skygiants @ 2022-11-12T12:00:002022-11-12T18:15:34Z2022-11-12T21:57:39Zpublic24Frances Hardinge has published many books over the years and even her least favorite books of mine are still head and shoulders above many other things I read, but sometimes the sheer level of anticipation I feel for any New Hardinge book sabotages me and when I actually get it into my hands I'm like 'well that was lovely but not perhaps <i>as</i> lovely as the absolute best.' <br /><br />Anyway, I'm delighted to report that was not the case with <a href="https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/unraveller_9781419759314/">Unraveller</a>, a book which delivered me absolute gutpunches (laudatory) at a rate of approximately one a chapter. <br /><br />There's a lot that's new for Hardinge in this book. For a notable start, it's the first one where she has dual protagonists: Kellen is a loud and idealistic and extremely bullheaded youth who travels around the country breaking curses, and Nettle is a quiet dampening cloud of politely reserved judgment who comes along attempting to help clean up all the things that Kellen breaks along with the curses, and both of them find the other deeply irritating and also rely on each other absolutely and <i>also</i> are withholding matters of deep significance from each other and/or themselves ... it's a good dynamic! <br /><br />Nettle's backstory, for the record, is that she and her siblings were birds for a while until Kellen broke her curse, and for a number of extremely legitimate reasons she's not over it. Hardinge is always thematically concerned with cycles of trauma but more than any other Hardinge this is a book about various kinds of aftermath -- it has a broader plot, but it takes a while to get there, because the first approximate half is mostly an episodic exploration of the central premise, which is that sometimes someone hates someone else enough to completely ruin their life [in this case magically], and sometimes those reasons are fair and sometimes they're not, and either way fixing the immediate problem of "now you're no longer a bird" (or a [redacted] or a [redacted]) does not resolve all the lingering and underlying stress of having been a bird and the attendant related miseries. <br /><br />(One of Nettle's brothers is still a gull. Sometimes he comes to hang out. He and Kellen hate each other. This delights me, because I love mess.)<br /><br />Anyway, I liked the episodic parts of the book quite a bit as a way to quilt a bunch of individual stories into a nuanced picture of the whole -- more in some ways than the end although the end was of course also very good and included some of my favorite parts. At this point I <i>can</i> see a Hardinge villain from a mile away but I don't know that there's anything to be done about that, but on the other hand no matter how much Hardinge I read I will always be ambushed by the unexpected density of her weird and wonderful worldbuilding. There is simply always so much going on! And in this book in particular, the levels are enhanced by how much it's an in media res story, building on work that the kids have already done, people they've already met and successes and failures they've already made. There's no such thing as a finished story -- every story is in the process of being told. For that if nothing else (but there is so much else!) I think this one would have ended up as one of my favorites. <br /><br />As a last point I also appreciate that Hardinge has leveled up in ancillary queer adults; <span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/646462.html#cutid1">mild spoilers</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=646462" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:605228skygiants @ 2020-12-26T13:35:002020-12-26T19:24:59Z2020-12-26T19:25:14Zpublic5The SHRIEK I let out this morning when I looked at my inbox and realized that in addition to the Yuletide gifts of which I have already spoken I'd received two additional Yuletide treats! <br /><br />The first one is another Quest backstory fic for <i>Deeplight</i> and may I say once again how thrilled I am that my request has kicked off a rich and semi-interlocking canon of Quest backstory in the Yuletide archive! This one is an extremely devious and fun fic about the actual logistics of recruitment for the Quest's particular mission, and it made me absolutely delighted to read.<br /><br /><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletidemadness2020/works/28245063">Hooked</a><br /><br /><i>Many have suffered grief, and the process moulds and tempers men in different ways.</i><br /><br />And then there's the second one, which, well, to repeat what I said multiple times on other platforms: HOW DARE YOU? ASSASSINATED IN MY OWN HOME???<br /><br /><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletidemadness2020/works/28291707">frequency relay</a><br /><br /><i>The tape crackled to a stop, saBrihesi's parting nearly buried in static, and saGorresil lifted the cassette out of the player with gentle tenderness—like a gardener, inspecting new-grown leaves.</i><br /><br />This is an absurdly, overwhelmingly, UNJUSTLY beautiful fic with equally unjustly beautiful illustrations for my short story "This Is New Gehesran Calling" and I am literally speechlesss about how good it is. The very technically anonymous individuals who have perpetrated this have come for every one of my narrative weak spots with LASER precision, I have never been so attacked in my life and I'm going to spend the rest of the day more or less incoherent about it! Happy Boxing Day, everyone!!!!!<br /><br />(I have to admit that when I first saw this I went into a brief panic about whether it was even legal for me to read and whether I was about to ruin some poor stranger's day by sticking an authorial nose in where it didn't belong, so apologies to everyone who had to listen to me scream this morning and talk me down from the ledge of contacting the mods to make sure there hadn't been some kind of tagging mistake. Except for the people who might, hypothetically, have been in on this conspiracy. NO APOLOGIES FOR YOU, YOU DESERVE EVERYTHING YOU GOT.)<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=605228" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:605077skygiants @ 2020-12-25T13:18:002020-12-25T18:40:53Z2020-12-25T18:42:44Zpublic2Yuletide!!!! I received FOUR (four!!!!) wonderful gifts and I'm really not at all sure what I've done to deserve such bounty but I'm Overwhelmingly Delighted.<br /><br />Two are for Frances Hardinge's <i>Deeplight</i> and, serendipitously, they work as a set; one is a fantastic, harrowing fic about Quest's backstory from his own POV, and the other is the story as retold by the woman Quest loved, and they both have different exquisitely painful knives with which to stab:<br /><br /><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27329566">Pieces of the End</a><br /><br /><i>It had to be done, he told the sea. My lady, you knew it had to be done.<br /><br />A seagull cried out over his head: but, Quest, did it have to be you?</i><br /><br /><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28118352">Deeplie</a><br /><br /><i>“We tell everyone that the gods were monsters, because we cannot believe what real monsters we keep as our friends.”</i><br /><br />The other two are for <i>Hotel del Luna</i>! The first thing I saw was that someone had taken me up on my wistful rarepair suggestion of Sanchez/Grim Reaper and written 6K of absolutely adorable postcanon romance, and I thought, 'wow, this is the wonderful Yuletide gift I least expected to get!'<br /><br /><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2020/works/28303899">To Steal a Jujube</a><br /><br /><i>He always came with gifts—champagne from France, bagels from New York, the softest leather gloves from Rome, and antique vases that Sanchez suspected, but couldn't prove, were worth more than his house. Jujubes, of all things, seemed to be a particular favorite.<br /><br />Sanchez suspected the Grim Reaper was getting them from Sanchez' own trees.<br /><br />Again.</i><br /><br />And then I dove into the next one, which is 8k of impeccably characterized outsider POV casefic on Gu Chan Seong and Kim Yu Na's postcanon hotelier adventures written in the style of a dry British thriller and featuring a subplot about Scottish lobster smuggling, and I thought 'okay, no, THIS is the wonderful Yuletide gift I least expected to get!' I would never have thought of this conceit and it's INCREDIBLE. <br /><br /><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2020/works/28029135">Castle Sonas</a><br /><br /><i>I don’t know if the Harvard MBA syllabus includes a module on Advanced Level Devious Bastardry And General Shenanigans, but, if it does, Mr Koo had clearly aced it.</i><br /><br />Thank you so much, mystery authors one and all -- I'm beyond delighted by each and every one of my gifts and I'm just going to roll around in them for a while!<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=605077" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:570270skygiants @ 2019-12-05T23:07:002019-12-06T05:13:07Z2019-12-06T05:13:25Zpublic18Frances Hardinge's latest, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44647479-deeplight">Deeplight</a>, is not yet out in the states, but <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/'><b>izilen</b></a></span> sent me a copy from the UK so I could get my fix! <br /><br />This is the rare Frances Hardinge book that does not feature a more or less monstrous teen girl as the protagonist, but a lying Dickensian urchin lad is a reasonable substitute. (<span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://shati.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://shati.dreamwidth.org/'><b>shati</b></a></span> and I have been having a whole conversation about Hardinge protagonist patterns over <a href="https://shati.dreamwidth.org/62369.html">in her post about the book</a>, so I will not rehash it here, but I do think it's very clear that Hardinge has different things to say about her heroines and her heroes.) Anyway! Hark the urchin lad lives on a set of islands that used to worship great and terrible monsters of the deep, which have all died in an unspecified calamity within living memory; the islands are now grappling with the holes left by the absence of the gods, and, relatedly, the potentially ominous arrival of foreign trade from the mainland. On the bright side, the islands have developed a thriving deaf culture as a result of the boom in commercial diving! <br /><br />Among all this cultural upheaval, Hark is perfectly content with his life of small-time crime; unfortunately, his best friend, Jelt, is a.) determined to do bigger time crime and b.) equally determined that Hark will be doing the bigger time crime with him. As is often the case in Hardinge books, things spiral very rapidly out of control! Eldritch ocean horror ensues!<br /><br />Aside from Hark, other major characters include:<br /><br />Jelt: a meaner Dickensian lad rapidly exiting urchinhood; Not A Good Friend<br />Rigg: A Pirate<br />Selphin: Rigg's daughter; a feral girl, because this is a Hardinge book; afraid of the sea as a result of a diving accident, which is, unfortunately, a major drawback for a pirate's daughter<br />Dr. Vyne: morally ambiguous mentor #1, a brilliant research scientist performing experiments using leftover bits of god-carcass <br />Quest: morally ambiguous mentor #2, a dying priest with Secrets <br />The Hidden Lady: a dead god with a human torso and crab-legs; Hark has a bit of a crush on her, because Frances Hardinge has apparently been on tumblr and understands what the youth are into (it's great and terrible monsters of the deep) <br /><br />It was a good time for me to read this book; I don't know if I would have liked it as much as I did if I hadn't already been primed by <a href="https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/569323.html">Heaven's Official Blessings</a> to have a lot of thoughts and opinions about power and divinity and the way humans relate to those things. <span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/570270.html#cutid1">Major book spoilers!</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div> On a character level it's probably not my <i>favorite</i> favorite Hardinge, but the way it handles its worldbuilding and themes overall puts it pretty well up there for me.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=570270" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:495821skygiants @ 2017-10-14T14:40:002017-10-14T19:34:44Z2017-10-14T19:45:34Zpublic19I was resigned to waiting until October 17th for <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34213608-a-skinful-of-shadows">A Skinful of Shadows</a> to come out in the US. However, <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/'><b>izilen</b></a></span>, horrified at both the long wait after the UK publication and the clear inferiority of the US cover, acquired a copy on my behalf and mailed it over the ocean -- after first warning me it was the darkest Frances Hardinge book yet. <br /><br />Having now read it, I don't know that it's actually <i>that</i> much creepier than the first third of <i>Cuckoo Song</i>, or the bits of <i>Lie Tree</i> where Faith in her deepest self-loathing slithers snakelike through the island purposefully destroying everything she touches. It definitely has a higher body count -- a <i>much</i> higher body count -- but I mean it's a book about a.) ghosts and b.) the English Civil War so maybe that's to be expected ...?<br /><br />Like many of Hardinge's books, it features:<br />- a ferocious underestimated girl struggling to hold onto a sense of self in a world that wishes her to have no such thing<br />- a recognition that the people you love and who believe that they love you will sometimes betray you, sometimes for reasons they believe are good and sometimes not <br />- a ruthless and terrible female antagonist whom the heroine cannot help but respect and admire<br />- a struggling journey up out of solitude towards a coalition built of necessity with the least likely individuals<br />- including an undead bear<br />- admittedly this is the first Hardinge book to include an undead bear <br />- it is also the first Hardinge book about literal ghosts, a lot of ghosts, a lot of very unpleasant and sinister ghosts but also some ghosts for whom I have a very deep affection, including the very bearlike bear. <br /><br />I also have a great deal of affection for Makepeace - the illegitimate scion of a very old noble family that is quite confident it will be able to chew her up and spit her out, and finds itself repeatedly mistaken. I don't think I love her yet <i>quite</i> as much as Trista or Faith or Mosca, but that's what I said about Faith right after I read <i>The Lie Tree</i>, too, and LOOK AT ME NOW.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=495821" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:428460skygiants @ 2016-01-01T11:05:002016-01-01T16:25:24Z2016-01-01T16:28:55Zpublic6I've read maybe four fics in the Yuletide archive so far that weren't gifted to me -- my own gifts were so amazing and plentiful (THANKS FOR A PERFECT FIC, <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://fahye.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://fahye.dreamwidth.org/'><b>fahye</b></a></span>, YOU DELIGHTFUL RIDICULOUS HUMAN) and then things have been so busy since that I have not had the time! I am very much looking forward to working through everything in a slow and leisurely fashion over the next year. :D <br /><br />As for what I wrote:<br /><br /><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/chapters/12628865">The Raptor</a>, <i>Ladyhawke</i><br /><br />I hadn't thought about this delightfully ridiculous 80's film in years -- I actually matched with my recipient on <i>Casablanca</i> -- but when I saw she was asking for prequel fic with, like, actual logistics ... and historical context .... I COULD NOT RESIST. How <i>would</i> you cope if one day you're a fairly ordinary medieval lady and the next day you're spending half your time as an angry bird? <br /><br />Due to the fact that I am in no way a medieval scholar, this is a fic that was even more of a collaborative effort than usual. I am enormously grateful to actual medieval scholars <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://rymenhild.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://rymenhild.dreamwidth.org/'><b>rymenhild</b></a></span> and <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/'><b>izilen</b></a></span> for brainstorming historical plausibility with me, <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://izilen.dreamwidth.org/'><b>izilen</b></a></span> again for going through and catching all my accidental anachronisms, and <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://genarti.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://genarti.dreamwidth.org/'><b>genarti</b></a></span> and <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://newredshoes.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://newredshoes.dreamwidth.org/'><b>newredshoes</b></a></span> for betaing! <br /><br /><br /><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5521544">Ecdysis</a>, <i>The Lie Tree</i><br /><br />Faith, Paul, and ill-advised adventures in Victorian photography!<br /><br />I'd sort of forgotten that <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://gogollescent.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://gogollescent.dreamwidth.org/'><b>gogollescent</b></a></span> made almost exactly the same <i>Lie Tree</i> request I did until it went out on the pinch-hit list, after which I was like "well, probably no one else is going to write <i>Lie Tree</i> fic so I may as well give it a go" ... OH, HOW WONDERFULLY WRONG I WAS. In addition to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5465846">the adorable Lie Tree fic I myself received</a>, you should also read Gogol's other gift, <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5498336">The Transformation</a>, which features a Faith of a pitch-perfect terrifying fierceness that I can only dream of capturing. I am proud of the Victorian photography details, though. This was a very research-heavy Yuletide year!<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=428460" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:427529skygiants @ 2015-12-25T09:48:002015-12-25T15:42:37Z2015-12-25T16:11:04Zpublic7My day started out with a cat throwing up in my bedroom at 4 AM (three hours after I went to bed), after which I fled the house to catch a 7:30 AM bus to New York, which promptly broke down half an hour out. It's fine though! We've got another bus and also I can't really be annoyed at anything because a.) once I finally get to New York I have a great day of Jewish Christmas planned with cousins and friends and Chinese food and possibly screwball comedy and b.) I AM STILL BUSY SCREAMING INTERNALLY ABOUT HOW MUCH I WON YULETIDE THIS YEAR, like?? I've had some amazing Yuletide years in the past, but this is ABOVE AND BEYOND. <br /><br />I got all the stuff I was convinced I was least likely to get --<br /><br /><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2015/works/5465846">A Moment of Utter Stillness</a>, happy-ending postcanon fic for Frances Hardinge's <i><a href="http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/tag/frances%20hardinge">The Lie Tree</a></i>, one of my favorite books to come out this year? Featuring Further Adventures of Paul and Faith, two of my best beloved terrible children in a long roster of terrible fictional children I have loved: <br /><br /><i>Faith imagined herself sinking deeper into the mud, entombed there forever, the eons slowly turning her to stone – a fossil waiting to be discovered by another little girl from the future, a girl with an alien face, but inquisitive, multi-faceted eyes, a fly-person looking back across the ages, to a distant time when mammals ruled the earth.</i> <br /><br />Ah, scientific creepiness and a death-wish. CLASSIC FAITH. <3 ...uh, but really most of the fic is a super hopeful happy ending for them and I'm so delighted that someone wrote it for me! <br /><br />So this was wonderful and unlikely enough, BUT ALSO I got: <br /><br /><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5429789">win me, win me, an ye will</a>, an amazing?? PITCH-PERFECT???? crossover!!!! between <i><a href="http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/419592.html">Miss Marjoribanks</a></i>, the greatest obscure Victorian social engineering competence porn novel possibly ever written, and Zen Cho's <i><a href="http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/419190.html">Sorcerer to the Crown</a></i>, one of my OTHER favorite books to come out this year, in which Lucilla Marjoribanks is called upon to defeat a lady of the fairies in single! combat! TO THE SOCIAL DEATH! (and possibly also the death death) (but a lady prefers not to discuss such things explicitly)<br /><br /><i>"I am afraid that we find ourselves in a very awkward position," Lucilla told the Lady sadly. She had a horror of social awkwardness above all things. "Asking you to withdraw your influence from Marchbank was </i>my<i> intention also."</i><br /><br />Every single one of you should read this; no knowledge of either canon is really necesary for enjoyment beyond a general awareness of the tropes of Victorian literature and/or fairy stories, and I spent basically every other sentence screaming in awe, hilarity, or both. Finally, Lucilla Marjoribanks has a sphere worthy of her prodigious talents! (I do have a suspicion about who might have written this; we'll see if I am right. Either way, whoever it is, they are clearly as much of a genius as Lucilla Marjoribanks herself.) <br /><br />BUT ALSO ALSO -- as if this were not already a bounty far beyond what I could have dreamed! -- I got:<br /><br /><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5471456">the year we built the windows</a>, a NOVELLA-LENGTH <i>7 SEEDS</i> LESBIAN ARCHITECT/ENGINEER CHARACTER STUDY AND ROMANCE?!?! This is at least the fifth time I've asked for <i>7 Seeds</i> fic in an exchange without ever receiving it, and this has now become a lesson to me in the value of persistence; now and only now do I understand that the universe has just been saving up until now, when it has presented me with EVERYTHING I COULD HAVE POSSIBLY WANTED. The characterization and relationships are beautiful -- not just Ran/Nijiko, but Ran and Hana, Ran and Botan, Ran and Team Autumn, Nijiko and Team Summer A, Ran and the echoes of the past civilization, all of them get their due -- and it has everything I love in canon, all the themes of failure, and second chances, and slow, indefinable growth. <br /><br />...AND ALSO IT IS HILARIOUS AND FULL OF POST-APOCALYPTIC ENGINEERING AND EXTREMELY GAY. *__* <br /><br /><i>Nijiko frowned through her ridiculous prison-bar bangs. "How did you know it randomizes water pressure?"<br /><br />"I heard Ayu-san say so," Ran lied, because it was less soul-crushing than conceding she might have asked Akane to note the volume of water in a bath bucket, before-and-after, and dragged out some undergrad calculus to ascertain whether the Summer A girls had actually done womankind the service of getting massaging showerhead action out of a glorified flute.</i><br /><br />Picking a part to quote was incredibly difficult because did I mention there's fourteen thousand brilliant words of it?? God. THIS YULETIDE. I almost don't want to go read the rest of the archive! I need more time to just wallow in the luxury of my gifts like a dragon with a fic hoard.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=427529" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:408831skygiants @ 2015-05-18T19:39:002015-05-19T01:39:10Z2015-05-19T01:40:37Zpublic10"Frances Hardinge has a new book out!"<br />"How long will it be before <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/'><b>skygiants</b></a></span> posts incoherently about how much she loved it?"<br />"Eh. Maybe like a week? A week, tops." <br /><br />In fact it was almost two weeks because I was, as you know, trapped in an endless wasteland of Sheri Tepper, but Hardinge's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lie-Tree-Frances-Hardinge-ebook/dp/B00NLFVN5W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431994018&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lie+tree">The Lie Tree</a> redeems all. It's not my favorite of Hardinge's books, probably, but it's a GOOD book.<br /><br />(Also there are totally lesbians in it? There are totally lesbians in it.) <br /><br /><i>The Lie Tree</i> is Victorian historical, like <i>Cuckoo Song</i> was Jazz Age historical, and like <i>Cuckoo Song</i> it is REALLY INTERESTED in the ways that women are silenced, and the sometimes terrible ways they contort themselves to get around it. I mean, "it sucks to be a teenage girl in the Victorian era" is not a particularly novel thesis, but the more the book goes on the more Hardinge gives it knife-edges. Faith, the heroine of <i>The Lie Tree</i>, is quietly dull on the outside, and on the inside she's quietly dishonest and quietly manipulative and often quietly cruel, and quietly brilliant, and <i>furious</i>. She's got more in common with the villain of the book than she does anybody else. Her pet metaphor is a small, overlooked, vaguely torpid snake. I love her, OF COURSE. <br /><br />(...and everyone else! I was just talking about this book on Twitter and I'll say there what I said here: one of my favorite things about Frances Hardinge is how she likes to sow a crop of unsympathetic women for the protagonist to hate, and then gradually forces you to admire pretty much every single one of them. I mean, she always does this. But perhaps more in <i>The Lie Tree</i> than ever before.)<br /><br />Also, it's such an amazingly <i>Victorian</i> book! Like, Hardinge clearly thinks the actual Victorian era is as weird a backdrop as any of her completely made-up ones, and she's not wrong. Faith's father is a famous Gentleman Scientist, and the whole thing is wound through with earnestly terrible Victorian science, and creepy Victorian death photography (everyone loves creepy Victorian death photography!), and the stifling grip of knickknacks and rules and propriety, and the world-shattering effect of the idea of evolution on everything everyone in Victorian England has ever believed. <br /><br />-- okay, the actual plot? The plot: there's a death; Faith wants revenge; her only weapon is a tree that will (maybe) grant the truth in exchange for lies. So she gives it lies, and she makes them spread. HIJINKS ENSUE, by which I mean, our heroine is directly responsible for quite a number of terrible and life-threatening things befalling other people. Sorry, Faith. You meant it for the best. (Well, sort of.)<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=408831" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:395524skygiants @ 2014-12-24T00:13:002014-12-24T06:32:41Z2014-12-24T06:32:41Zpublic19For the 17th, for the <a href="http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/391000.html">December meme</a> (so behind!) <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://ceitfianna.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://ceitfianna.dreamwidth.org/'><b>ceitfianna</b></a></span> asked me about the top five books on my to-read list and why. <br /><br />...as usual, I don't know if this is top five really if one is grading empirically, but it's the top five I am thinking of at the moment and/or can see on my shelf! <br /><br />1. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lie-Tree-Frances-Hardinge-ebook/dp/B00NLFVN5W/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419399248&sr=1-8&keywords=frances+hardinge">The Lie Tree</a>, Frances Hardinge<br /><br />I don't even have any idea what this is about yet, I just know that NEW FRANCES HARDINGE COMES OUT IN MAY and I am PSYCHED. I loved her first book with a fiery passion and basically everything she's written since then has been consistently better (oh my god <i>Cuckoo Song</i> was SO GOOD!) and ... I know in theory someday this will not be true? But in practice I am going to JUMP ON THIS BOOK AND DEVOUR IT as soon as I can get it into my hands.<br /><br />2. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Species-Imperative-Julie-E-Czerneda/dp/0756410142/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419399376&sr=1-4&keywords=julie+czerneda">Species Imperative</a>, Julie Czerneda<br /><br />I read the first book in this trilogy <a href="http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/376525.html">a few months ago</a> and I loved it! Excellent space opera with a solid female friendship at the heart of the series, a science protagonist who feels like she does actual science (she's a MARINE BIOLOGIST, not a XENOBIOLOGIST, why does everyone keep asking her about aliens?!), and interesting weird alien politics. So then I bought the omnibus so I could read the whole thing in a go ... but I haven't yet because the omnibus is too heavy and I keep balking at carrying it around. :( I outsmarted myself! I have a cunning plan though, I'm going to bring it with me on my vacation home and read it on the bus, and then just leave it in my suitcase the rest of the time. Species Imperative trilogy, I will conquer you!<br /><br />3. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Making-Big-Diary-Broadway-Musical-ebook/dp/B003B66C3Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419399795&sr=1-1&keywords=making+it+big">Making it Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical</a>, Barbara Isenberg<br /><br />This book has been surprisingly elusive; I've wanted to read it since I first heard about it, and I finally tracked it down at one of my local libraries. To the best of my knowledge it is an account of the DISASTER that was the making of the Broadway musical <i>Big</i>, which, a.) I love disastrous making-of accounts of theatrical and film performances and b.) I was <i>in</i> a disastrous production of <i>Big</i>, when I was in middle school (ok, it was not actually that disastrous except inasmuch as all productions of <i>Big</i> are inherently disastrous, BUT STILL) and I am really looking forward to the schadenfreude. I can only hope it's as magical as <i>Song of Spiderman.</i><br /><br />4. <i>Sorcerer to the Crown</i>, Zen Cho<br /><br />Zen Cho has just sold her first full-length novel -- it comes out sometime next September, I think -- and I AM EMBARRASSINGLY EXCITED. Zen calls the genre "postcolonial fluff for book nerds," which is exactly my favorite sort of fluff, and it's set in the magic 1800s and stars London's first black Sorcerer Royal. Zen says, "It has secret dragons and schoolgirl hijinks and confrontations at balls and bossy witch aunties. It’s even got pontianak, because why not." WHY NOT INDEED. Anyway I assume now you all have heard this you are all as excited as I am! <br /><br />1. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fish-Tails-Sheri-S-Tepper-ebook/dp/B00FOPS4RM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419401893&sr=8-1&keywords=sheri+tepper">Fish Tails</a>, Sheri S. Tepper<br /><br />I am not ... 'top' is not exactly the right word here. I did not <i>willingly</i> put this book on my to-read list. Fate, helped along by the cruel hands of <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://varadia.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://varadia.dreamwidth.org/'><b>varadia</b></a></span>, has thrust it upon me. For the record, this is Sheri Tepper's latest. It is a combined sequel to <a href="http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/256097.html">the one where the heroine lays eggs that turns into cephalopod merbabies</a> and <a href="http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/246229.html">the ones with the D&D superpowers and the secret underground mountain full of evil disabled people</a>. It is SEVEN HUNDRED PAGES LONG and Lynne gave it to me for my holiday present, because she wants to laugh at me and my suffering and she KNOWS that now it's in my hands I won't be able to resist.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=395524" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:375191skygiants @ 2014-05-28T10:52:002014-05-28T15:14:26Z2014-05-28T15:14:52Zpublic11I'm currently in that state of post-new-Frances-Hardinge depression when I have to face the glum fact that it will likely be YEARS before I see another new Frances Hardinge novel.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoo-Song-Frances-Hardinge-ebook/dp/B00IXLVUFW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401288853&sr=8-1&keywords=cuckoo+song">Cuckoo Song</a>, though! So good! Has anyone else read it yet? I want to flail my hands around and say all the things I loved about it, but most of them are somewhat spoilery! <br /><br />The book begins when eleven-year-old Triss -- an isolated, over-protected girl who's always ill -- comes back home after an accident. Her memories are foggy, her 'difficult' little sister seems to hate her more than ever, and there's some kind of awful hole in her stomach; she eats and eats and eats until her parents are terrified, but nothing fills her up ... <br /><br />That's the beginning, and for the first quarter of the story it's pure psychological horror, classic female-focused psychological horror -- complete with creepy dolls and callbacks to <i>The Yellow Wallpaper</i> and the looming threat of being committed to an asylum -- as Triss navigates the double bind of what's wrong with her <i>now</i> and what was wrong with her and her family <i>before.</i> <br /><br />Then the first set of mysteries gets solved, and it becomes clear that you're looking at a thoroughly familiar story from a completely different angle, and it's GREAT. <br /><br />And at the same time it's looking at the aftermath of WWI, and grief and recovery, and shifting cultural gender roles, and what it means to be a monster, and what it means to be family, and the three main characters are Triss and her awful, difficult, angry little sister and AN EMOTIONALLY CONSTIPATED MOTORCYCLE-RIDING FLAPPER WHO DANCES ALL NIGHT IN JAZZ CLUBS, and and and! <br /><br />And now I have that problem where I have to find something else to read and not spend all my time resenting it for not being a Frances Hardinge book.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=375191" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:317174skygiants @ 2013-01-24T15:33:002013-01-24T20:54:34Z2013-01-24T20:58:36Zpublic20It's always really hard to review Frances Hardinge books because there are always twenty things going on in them at once and all of them are REALLY GOOD. But here I am, attempting to give <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Face-Like-Glass-Frances-Hardinge/dp/0230748791/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359059628&sr=8-1&keywords=a+face+like+glass">A Face Like Glass</a> a go anyway.<br /><br />This particular exercise of Frances Hardinge's bizarrely delightful brain takes place in an underground cavern of a city that runs on craftsmanship - impossibly gourmet wines and cheese and perfumes that can make you lose memories or experience visions or alter your emotions. <br /><br />Our heroine is an apprentice cheesemaker named Neverfell, a friendly, trusting little girl with severe ADD, no memories of her life before the age of five, and a face that shows everything she's thinking (which is generally a lot of things in a very short span, because did I mention the severe ADD?)<br /><br />This is unfortunate for Neverfell, because in Caverna, babies don't learn how to make facial expressions from their parents - so everyone's facial expressions are carefully crafted by artisans and equally carefully chosen to suit any given occasion. Except the drudges, of course; they only learn about three expressions, mostly indicating polite subservience, because why would they need any more? Either way, <i>nobody's</i> face just shows what they're actually thinking! THAT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS. (And, of course, unsafe.)<br /><br />Neverfell just wants to make friends and see something of the city! Finding out some secrets of her own past would be nice, too. But to the rest of the courtiers of Caverna, she's either an intriguing novelty or a terrifying freak of nature or -- most dangerous of all -- an invaluable tool in their long-range plans. <br /><br />What the people manipulating her have in mind is a transfer of power. Add in a ruler who has literally split his brain in two, a master thief with a plan so complex that he's even keeping secrets from himself, a court-trained girl who might turn out to be Neverfell's best friend, an underclass who are ready to finally learn how to make the expression that signifies "anger," and Neverfell's discovery of her own agency and abilities, and what they might get is something like a revolution. <br /><br />Or, for a shorter summary: it's Frances Hardinge, so you already know it's really good, and it's basically fantasy of manners on LSD, and it's funny and creepy and biting and heartbreaking, and there is literally a scene in which Neverfell is repeatedly forced to choose between cake and death. <i>And it works.</i> SO THERE YOU GO.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=317174" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:312060skygiants @ 2012-12-25T11:05:002012-12-25T16:05:55Z2012-12-25T16:25:31Zpublic22YULETIDE YULETIDE YULETIDE<br /><br />. . . uh, and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! Have fun with your holiday, I'm going to be over here with my giant pile of glorious Yuletide to wade through. *____* <br /><br />I got two stories this year and they are both PERFECTION.<br /><br /><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/605442">The Marriage Masquerade</a>, <i>The Talisman Ring</i><br /><br /><i>Ludovic waved a hand. “I want nothing—the reek from that devilish carpet is sobering enough.”<br /><br />Sir Tristram exerted a super-human effort, and refrained from pointing out that this ruinously expensive carpet had been an excellent example of its kind before he and his Bedlamite wife had entered the room uninvited.</i><br /><br />Ludovic and Eugenie are having some marital problems, so obviously it's up to Tristram and Sarah to sort them out, as usual. This fic is hilarious and perfectly in-character all around, but the greatest thing about it is that it is Talisman Ring fic WITH CROSSDRESSING, like, man, guys, somebody clearly knows exactly what I want in my fiction. WELL DONE, MYSTERY AUTHOR.<br /><br /><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/607426">Civilized Indecency</a>, <i>Fly By Night</i><br /><br /><i>“We must do something about these disruptive tendencies of yours, Mosca. Oh, yes, they’re endearing on a certain level, but that hardly balances the inconvenience, not to mention mortal peril, your revolutionary little heart brings upon us with stunning regularity. Can we, just this once, drop it?”</i><br /><br />Mosca encounters a corrupt legal system, proceeds to drag Clent into attempting to turn it on its head, as is her wont, and finds out things are immensely more complicated and troubling than she thought - so basically this fic like someone wrote me a new Mosca Mye novel in two thousand words AND IS PERFECTION, everyone go read it immediately! Oh Mosca, my very favorite angry little girl.<br /><br /><br />There might be actual recs later as I dive into the rest of the archive, but for right now I just have to do a special shout-out to the greatest mystery (for me) of Yuletide so far: <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/607765">Step by step on the flowers placed before you</a>, a Capital Scandal/Sungkyunkwan Scandal CROSSOVER FIC about YONG HA AND CHA SONG JOO HANGING OUT oh my god beautiful brilliance (beautiful heartbreaking brilliance)<br /><br />This was a gift for <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://shati.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://shati.dreamwidth.org/'><b>shati</b></a></span>, who for the record I sat down and forced to watch both <i>Capital Scandal</i> and <i>Sungkyunkwan Scandal</i> this summer. So when she saw the tags we had this conversation:<br /><br />SHATI: WAS IT YOU?<br />BECCA: No! It wasn't me! Was it <i>you?</i><br />SHATI: It's a gift for me, so I'm pretty sure no! Are you <i>sure</i> it wasn't you?<br />BECCA: Not unless I wrote it in my sleep! <br />SHATI: . . .<br />BECCA: . . . Debi . . .?<br /><br />But it doesn't read particularly like <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://innerbrat.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://innerbrat.dreamwidth.org/'><b>innerbrat</b></a></span>, or <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://viviolo.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://viviolo.dreamwidth.org/'><b>viviolo</b></a></span> or <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://dharmavati.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://dharmavati.dreamwidth.org/'><b>dharmavati</b></a></span> either, who would be my first range of usual suspects. If I'm wrong: CONGRATS GUYS, you totally fooled me, and also, YOU'RE AMAZING. If it's someone else I know: DITTO. If it's a stranger: HI, YOU'RE A GENIUS, LET'S BE FRIENDS.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=312060" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:265991skygiants @ 2011-11-28T09:59:002011-11-28T16:17:38Z2011-11-28T16:31:45Zpublic5Okay, so I just read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Conspiracy-Frances-Hardinge/dp/B00394DGK0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322492637&sr=8-1">The Lost Conspiracy</a> by Frances Hardinge (published in the UK as <i>Gullstruck Island</i>), and - okay, this woman has published four books, and every single one I have <a href="http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/166630.html">loved</a> <a href="http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/177644.html">to</a> <a href="http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/251703.html">pieces</a>, and this one isn't my favorite exactly, but I think it is legitimately her best.<br /><br />It's hard to describe the actual <i>plot</i> of this book, because the worldbuilding is so fantastically dense and complex and original that it would take up like a chapter of real text to give a good idea of what's going on, but I'm going to give it a shot:<br /><br />A long time ago, the Cavalcaste came to Gullstruck Island. The various ethnic groups living there reacted in various different ways -- among them the Lace, known for their jewelled teeth and creepy constant smiling. The Lace said, "hey, welcome, do anything you like but please don't settle right in between the volcanoes!" The Cavalcaste, of course, built a city right in between the volcanoes. Pretty soon, people from that city began disappearing; it turned out that the smiling Lace had been kidnapping and sacrificing them in an attempt to ward off VOLCANIC DOOM.<br /><br />Fast-forward two hundred years. The island is ruled by a combination of Cavalcaste governors and the Council of the Lost -- people born with the ability to basically astrally project their senses away from their bodies. (On a volcano-strewn island inhospitable to travellers, it is <i>really useful</i> to have people around who can go, say, check on approaching weather, or read a newspaper in the next town over without having to physically leave their house.) As for the Lace -- they're a marginalized, impoverished minority group, and their religion has been officially banned, but they're still jewelling their teeth and smiling creepily at everyone they meet. Nobody trusts the Lace. <br /><br />Of course our heroine, Hathin, is Lace. And not only that, even among the Lace, she's the invisible girl -- the shyly smiling, quiet helper of her beautiful older sister Arilou, the only Lost born among the Lace . . .<br /><br />. . . maybe. Because the thing about kids who are sometimes not all there is that child development looks a little bit different than it does with kids who are grounded in their own bodies, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a kid who's a Lost and a kid who's just . . . not all there. Arilou rarely shows signs of responding to the people around her and has never spoken a coherent word -- but the Lace village desperately needs the status and privilege conferred by having the local Lost, and over the years the hope that she is a Lost has gradually turned into a village-wide conspiracy to cover up the <i>what if she isn't</i>. When a senior examiner shows up to test Arilou's Lost abilities, the responsibility of maintaining that conspiracy falls on Hathin's shoulders.<br /><br />That covers maybe the first fifty pages of plot. <br /><br />What happens next involves mass murder, and a love triangle between three volcanoes, and cities of the dead, and obsessive assassins, and a secret group of desperate sworn revengers living in the forest, and a crowd-witch who plays the mob like a harp, and a perky teenaged boy madly in love with a giant, broody, battle-scarred middle-aged woman with loads of backstory angst (this is the only thing that even approaches a romance in the book -- uh, unless you count the volcanic love triangle) and epic standoffs with pet birds and wooden fish, and a perfect storm of prejudice and miscommunication, and the astoundingly evil things people are willing to do for a concept of the greater good. <br /><br />This is a book about colonialism and culture clash and the undeath of history. It's about the family you have, and the love and resentment you feel towards someone who needs you, and whose existence overshadows yours, and whose mind is so alien that you don't even know if you can reach it. It's about the family you don't have, and the ways broken people can and can't rely on each other -- there's a subplot that I love, about Hathin and a boy who has lost his family and calls her his little sister, because Hathin knows she <i>isn't</i> his little sister, that broken pieces don't fit together that easily. And the thing is, it would be a great book that treated any one of these things with the complexity that it deserves, but Frances Hardinge manages to do <i>all of these things at once</i>, <i>and</i> still have time for incredible worldbuilding, <i>and</i> even to be very funny on occasion, and I just closed the last page with a sense of awe.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=265991" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-01:142944:247376skygiants @ 2011-07-19T11:06:002011-07-19T15:38:09Z2011-07-19T15:47:51Zpublic4Frances Hardinge's <a href="http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/166630.html">Fly-by-Night</a> was one of my absolute favorite books that I read last year. Since I just reread it, it is <i>also</i> one of my absolute favorite books that I read <i>this</i> year, and so is the sequel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fly-Trap-Frances-Hardinge/dp/0060880449/ref=pd_sim_b_3">Fly Trap.</a><br /><br />Overall, <i>Fly Trap</i> is probably not quite as good a book as <i>Fly-by-Night</i>. <i>Fly Trap</i> brings our heroine Mosca Mye to the locked city of Toll, which literally separates its citizens into those who were born under benevolent gods, and therefore have "day" names, and those who were born under gods classified as more suspicious and have "night" names. Toll-by-Day is pretty but hollow; Toll-by-Night is pure Dickensian Underworld. As a look at privilege, this is effective (and Frances Hardinge is definitely a good enough writer to sell it) but not super subtle. <br /><br />Also there is no sequence quite as glorious as The One Where Saracen the Homicidal Goose Beats Up Everyone on a Floating Coffeehouse, although The Unfortunate Collision of Heists Involving Imposter Skeletal Horses does come close, and Mosca giving a would-be-revolutionary lessons in radicalism because she's offended by his misquoting is nothing short of glorious. ("Bring a notebook. We'll 'ave you lopping kings' 'eads off before you can say fraternity.") <br /><br />Anyway, I say all this, but actually I love the book totally uncritically, because a.) I love Hardinge's writing beyond words and b.) I am SO INVESTED in the main dynamic of the book I don't even have words. Mosca and her companion (the one who is not a homicidal goose) have a dynamic that I think is really rare between a child-protagonist and an adult character, and not in any way pseudo-parental. It's an uneasy alliance growing inch by painful inch by inch into a partnership between two clever, suspicious, self-interested and untrustworthy individuals, in which every bit of confidence and loyalty has to be slowly and painfully earned - and therefore means ten times more than it would if it were any easier. I love it to a ridiculous extent and to sum up why I will give you <span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/247376.html#cutid1">a quote that does in fact name Mosca's companion and therefore somewhat spoils the end of Fly-by-Night.</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br />So, question for you guys: what are your favorite fictional partnership dynamics between kids and adults? <span style='white-space: nowrap;'><a href='https://batyatoon.dreamwidth.org/profile'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png' alt='[personal profile] ' width='17' height='17' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='https://batyatoon.dreamwidth.org/'><b>batyatoon</b></a></span> and I were trying to brainstorm some the other day and we couldn't think of many (though it did lead to us watching the first few episodes of TailSpin. There's one!)<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=skygiants&ditemid=247376" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments