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Jan. 25th, 2011 01:34 pmI found the first book of Alaya Dawn Johnson's 'Spirit Binders' trilogyRacing the Dark, intriguing but also confusing. To recap: in the first book, our heroine Lana - a nice young girl with a Destiny from from a fantasyverse Pacific Island-ish culture - goes from being a pearl diver to an immigrant in the big island city to a tragically ill waif to a witch's apprentice to a HARBINGER OF SPOILERY DOOM, all at an exceedingly rapid clip.
In the second book, The Burning City, Lana's role is much clearer! She is still a HARBINGER OF SPOILERY DOOM but she is also a RELUCTANT REVOLUTIONARY, and she helpfully stays those things throughout the whole novel, which grounds itself pretty firmly in the civil revolt that's been touched off by certain events in the first book. It is no surprise to anyone that I have a weakness for revolution stories, and Justin and Theo from the Westmark trilogy would feel very much at home in the middle of this set of barricades and moral dilemmas and political propaganda pamphlets. So already this book has a leg up for me over the previous one; there's a lot of discussion about when the personal becomes political, and whether it's really possible to care more about the abstract welfare of all than about the specific people you care about, and it's not the most nuanced thing ever but I enjoy the discussion anyway.
The other thing, though, is that a good third of the book is a completely different piece of first-person backstory - it was actually some of this that I first heard at a reading of Alaya Dawn Johnson's last year and got me reading the series. And much as I like revolution stories, I actually found the backstory, in which three orphaned and cranky rogues of different cultures meet up and fumble their way towards an OT3 and inevitable tragedy, much more compelling, even though I kept wanting to shake the characters as they spent lots of pages angsting about their OT3 that was clearly and explicitly a perfect equilateral OT3 but could not be defined as such for chapters and chapters since they were apparently having to invent the concept of OT3 from scratch, which is fair, but still frustrating. But anyway, I liked the backstory a great deal even despite this (until the choice at the end which I did not follow the logic of at all), and part of this I think is just that Alaya Dawn Johnson is very good at conveying character through first-person voice, whereas I am vaguely fond of Lana but still have no real idea who she is outside of her circumstances.
The revolution bit seems to be over as of this book; I have a vague sort of idea about the series endgame, but no idea how it will get there. I confidently expect to see at least two other fantasy subgenres touched on before we're done. Bring it, Alaya Dawn Johnson!
In the second book, The Burning City, Lana's role is much clearer! She is still a HARBINGER OF SPOILERY DOOM but she is also a RELUCTANT REVOLUTIONARY, and she helpfully stays those things throughout the whole novel, which grounds itself pretty firmly in the civil revolt that's been touched off by certain events in the first book. It is no surprise to anyone that I have a weakness for revolution stories, and Justin and Theo from the Westmark trilogy would feel very much at home in the middle of this set of barricades and moral dilemmas and political propaganda pamphlets. So already this book has a leg up for me over the previous one; there's a lot of discussion about when the personal becomes political, and whether it's really possible to care more about the abstract welfare of all than about the specific people you care about, and it's not the most nuanced thing ever but I enjoy the discussion anyway.
The other thing, though, is that a good third of the book is a completely different piece of first-person backstory - it was actually some of this that I first heard at a reading of Alaya Dawn Johnson's last year and got me reading the series. And much as I like revolution stories, I actually found the backstory, in which three orphaned and cranky rogues of different cultures meet up and fumble their way towards an OT3 and inevitable tragedy, much more compelling, even though I kept wanting to shake the characters as they spent lots of pages angsting about their OT3 that was clearly and explicitly a perfect equilateral OT3 but could not be defined as such for chapters and chapters since they were apparently having to invent the concept of OT3 from scratch, which is fair, but still frustrating. But anyway, I liked the backstory a great deal even despite this (until the choice at the end which I did not follow the logic of at all), and part of this I think is just that Alaya Dawn Johnson is very good at conveying character through first-person voice, whereas I am vaguely fond of Lana but still have no real idea who she is outside of her circumstances.
The revolution bit seems to be over as of this book; I have a vague sort of idea about the series endgame, but no idea how it will get there. I confidently expect to see at least two other fantasy subgenres touched on before we're done. Bring it, Alaya Dawn Johnson!
