![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Sep. 18th, 2019 08:53 pmAt the time that I picked it up, I did not know that Karen Lord's Unraveling was a sequel to her first book, Redemption in Indigo, and I can't decide if that was for the better or for the worse.
Unraveling is a very cool experiment of a novel that in practice doesn't quite work for me - it's a murder mystery being investigated by a couple of gods-reborn-as-human and the forensic therapist they've kidnapped from the highly social-stratified elseworld city where she lives and taken to the spirit world to help them solve the crime.
Because Karen Lord's gods don't exist in linear time, the actual crime-solving occurs in a wildly atemporal fashion that involves following various past and future threads to the solution, which all tied up with the character development of the gods in question. Unfortunately, as I last read Redemption in Indigo in 2011, I didn't remember anything about those gods or what aspect of their characters needed developing and so I spent most of the book feeling vaguely lost and unattached until a really phenomenal set piece at the very end abruptly got me to care.
Then in the hopes of making sense of things I went back to reread Redemption in Indigo, which I loved very much in 2011 and which, it turns out: I love still! It's a gorgeous book that takes a comic Senegalese folktale about the long-suffering wife of a hopeless glutton and turns it into an exploration of the value of kindness, empathy, and chaos. The cast of characters includes:
Paama, who has just left her husband Ansige and also come into possession of an incredibly powerful divine artifact
Paama's husband Ansige, who kicks off the plot and then disappears for most of the book
Paama's very beautiful sister; the clueless poet who loves her (who is real); and the wealthy suitor the poet works for (who is fake)
a spider trickster who is just a little too invested for his own good
a god of chaos theory who is supposed to be invested and unfortunately has instead gotten very burnt out by just, you know, everything?
a lesser godlet who is pretending to be a seven year old today and is not having a great time of it
a collection of stressed magical nuns who think Paama is the absolute bees' knees
A lot of Redemption in Indigo's charm is its wry narrative voice, which it uses to extreme effect; Unraveling is a very different kind of book, so it's probably just as well that I didn't reread it first, because my expectations for it would have been calibrated very differently.
On the other hand, if I did reread it first, I probably would have cared more about most of the characters in Unraveling and that would have been a significant help in maintaining focus and attention as the story bounced me back and forth through the timeline, so who knows? Hindsight is not always 20/20 and I don't really have a point here except that everyone should read Redemption in Indigo.
Unraveling is a very cool experiment of a novel that in practice doesn't quite work for me - it's a murder mystery being investigated by a couple of gods-reborn-as-human and the forensic therapist they've kidnapped from the highly social-stratified elseworld city where she lives and taken to the spirit world to help them solve the crime.
Because Karen Lord's gods don't exist in linear time, the actual crime-solving occurs in a wildly atemporal fashion that involves following various past and future threads to the solution, which all tied up with the character development of the gods in question. Unfortunately, as I last read Redemption in Indigo in 2011, I didn't remember anything about those gods or what aspect of their characters needed developing and so I spent most of the book feeling vaguely lost and unattached until a really phenomenal set piece at the very end abruptly got me to care.
Then in the hopes of making sense of things I went back to reread Redemption in Indigo, which I loved very much in 2011 and which, it turns out: I love still! It's a gorgeous book that takes a comic Senegalese folktale about the long-suffering wife of a hopeless glutton and turns it into an exploration of the value of kindness, empathy, and chaos. The cast of characters includes:
Paama, who has just left her husband Ansige and also come into possession of an incredibly powerful divine artifact
Paama's husband Ansige, who kicks off the plot and then disappears for most of the book
Paama's very beautiful sister; the clueless poet who loves her (who is real); and the wealthy suitor the poet works for (who is fake)
a spider trickster who is just a little too invested for his own good
a god of chaos theory who is supposed to be invested and unfortunately has instead gotten very burnt out by just, you know, everything?
a lesser godlet who is pretending to be a seven year old today and is not having a great time of it
a collection of stressed magical nuns who think Paama is the absolute bees' knees
A lot of Redemption in Indigo's charm is its wry narrative voice, which it uses to extreme effect; Unraveling is a very different kind of book, so it's probably just as well that I didn't reread it first, because my expectations for it would have been calibrated very differently.
On the other hand, if I did reread it first, I probably would have cared more about most of the characters in Unraveling and that would have been a significant help in maintaining focus and attention as the story bounced me back and forth through the timeline, so who knows? Hindsight is not always 20/20 and I don't really have a point here except that everyone should read Redemption in Indigo.
