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Dec. 4th, 2013 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsDecember post for the 4th, sliding in under the wire! libitina decided to make things easy on me by asking me to write about the fourth book in my booklogging queue.
What she does not know is that books approximately one through . . . six? eight? . . . are all technically going in the same post.
So as some of you may remember, a few months ago I was assigned to write for Kelley Armstrong's Darkest Powers series for the fic_corner exchange. "Great," I thought, "an excuse to reread the trilogy, that will be fun! I super enjoyed it when I read it a few years ago! I'll knock out some postcanon fic and it will be fun."
But then I remembered that there was a sequel trilogy . . . and about a dozen short stories in various collections . . . and half the stuff I was assuming worked a certain way based on canon vagueness might in fact be explained to work totally differently in other bits of canon . . . and I got pulled into THE KELLEY ARMSTRONG VORTEX.
So basically like half my write-up backlog right now is Kelley Armstrong books, because like half of what I've read over the last two or three months is Kelley Armstrong books. I'll start with talking about the Darkness Rising trilogy, the sequel to Darkest Powers.
Darkest Powers is about one genetic experiment on kids with various superpowers who go ON THE LAM; Darkness Rising is about a different genetic experiment on a different set of kids, who are spending most of their time trying earnestly to NOT BE ON THE LAM because being on the lam is deeply unpleasant.
Things I super liked about the series:
- Maya, the protagonist! Super confident, competent, and capable of taking charge; often over-confident, often judgmental; Native American, and adopted by a woman who is also Native American but from a different tribe and background; loves her adoptive parents, loves her friends, loves her community. I liked her a lot!
- also, Maya's dynamic with her birth family, when they come into play (because of course they come into play) which is interesting and complicated
- the sense of community in general; it was cool to have the group of kids be mostly people who'd grown up together, and knew each other well and cared about each other and their families
- the fact that the end goal is not about OVERTHROWING THE MAN but about finding a livable compromise
Things I did not like all that much about the series:
- I have zero interest in Maya's romances! Rafe is annoying and Daniel is . . . fine, I guess?
- the lesbian character (there is one!) is almost the only one who doesn't get paired up at the end
- a recurrence of the trope of 'teenaged girl becomes MURDEROUSLY JEALOUS of another girl over a dude, because of SOME KIND OF AMBIGUOUS CRAZY.' I love Tori from the Darkest Powers books, but I always wanted a much more thoughtful look at what drove her pretty irrational actions in Book 1 than we got. And Nicole is basically just Book 1 Tori all over again but TWICE AS MURDEROUS, without any of the effort at empathy and understanding that the narrative allowed Tori, and with the 'sympathetic mean girl' thing displaced onto Hayley instead
- speaking of Darkest Powers, while it was nice to see those kids again, the ending of Darkness Rising is not the ending I would have picked for those kids. I mean, it was fine and all, but it closed off some options I would rather have left open
- the fact that it links explicitly to the Women of the Otherworld books, because of course then I had to go read a dozen Women of the Otherworld books . . . but that will go in another post some other day because it is almost no longer December 4th!
libitina decided to make things easy on me by asking me to write about the fourth book in my booklogging queue. What she does not know is that books approximately one through . . . six? eight? . . . are all technically going in the same post.
So as some of you may remember, a few months ago I was assigned to write for Kelley Armstrong's Darkest Powers series for the fic_corner exchange. "Great," I thought, "an excuse to reread the trilogy, that will be fun! I super enjoyed it when I read it a few years ago! I'll knock out some postcanon fic and it will be fun."
But then I remembered that there was a sequel trilogy . . . and about a dozen short stories in various collections . . . and half the stuff I was assuming worked a certain way based on canon vagueness might in fact be explained to work totally differently in other bits of canon . . . and I got pulled into THE KELLEY ARMSTRONG VORTEX.
So basically like half my write-up backlog right now is Kelley Armstrong books, because like half of what I've read over the last two or three months is Kelley Armstrong books. I'll start with talking about the Darkness Rising trilogy, the sequel to Darkest Powers.
Darkest Powers is about one genetic experiment on kids with various superpowers who go ON THE LAM; Darkness Rising is about a different genetic experiment on a different set of kids, who are spending most of their time trying earnestly to NOT BE ON THE LAM because being on the lam is deeply unpleasant.
Things I super liked about the series:
- Maya, the protagonist! Super confident, competent, and capable of taking charge; often over-confident, often judgmental; Native American, and adopted by a woman who is also Native American but from a different tribe and background; loves her adoptive parents, loves her friends, loves her community. I liked her a lot!
- also, Maya's dynamic with her birth family, when they come into play (because of course they come into play) which is interesting and complicated
- the sense of community in general; it was cool to have the group of kids be mostly people who'd grown up together, and knew each other well and cared about each other and their families
- the fact that the end goal is not about OVERTHROWING THE MAN but about finding a livable compromise
Things I did not like all that much about the series:
- I have zero interest in Maya's romances! Rafe is annoying and Daniel is . . . fine, I guess?
- the lesbian character (there is one!) is almost the only one who doesn't get paired up at the end
- a recurrence of the trope of 'teenaged girl becomes MURDEROUSLY JEALOUS of another girl over a dude, because of SOME KIND OF AMBIGUOUS CRAZY.' I love Tori from the Darkest Powers books, but I always wanted a much more thoughtful look at what drove her pretty irrational actions in Book 1 than we got. And Nicole is basically just Book 1 Tori all over again but TWICE AS MURDEROUS, without any of the effort at empathy and understanding that the narrative allowed Tori, and with the 'sympathetic mean girl' thing displaced onto Hayley instead
- speaking of Darkest Powers, while it was nice to see those kids again, the ending of Darkness Rising is not the ending I would have picked for those kids. I mean, it was fine and all, but it closed off some options I would rather have left open
- the fact that it links explicitly to the Women of the Otherworld books, because of course then I had to go read a dozen Women of the Otherworld books . . . but that will go in another post some other day because it is almost no longer December 4th!
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Date: 2013-12-05 05:37 am (UTC)Still - \o/!
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Date: 2013-12-05 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-05 05:20 pm (UTC)I think the implication with Nicole was that she was a siren and that siren powers had driven her insane, sort of like Tori and the witch/sorcerer combo. But since the book never clarified, I had to read all that in, which . . . I mean I appreciate letting your audience figure things out on their own, but in this situation, I feel like clarity would have helped a lot.
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Date: 2013-12-06 02:36 am (UTC)I have really mixed feelings on Armstrong's handing of mental issues in general -- like, on the one hand, I appreciate that she has clearly done her research on stuff like schizophrenia, and puts thought and attention into stigmatization and having the kids think about living with the disease, and has this very complex and sympathetic portrait of Tori in the first book; on the other hand, I think it was kind of a huge cop-out to raise the issue and then have it all turns out to be SECRET SUPERPOWERS instead and all Tori's actions kind of waved away with "oh, I was stressed and irrational." Like, I mean, it's my personal headcanon that Tori actually is manic-depressive, and that that has nothing to do with being a witch/sorcerer. Because you can have superpowers and also have an invisible disability! The two things don't cancel each other out!
. . . ANYWAY, before I got sidetracked, what I was going to say is that as mixed as I felt about the handling of insanity in the Darkest Powers books, Darkness Rising was way worse about it and put no effort at all into thoughtful or sympathetic handling of Nicole's insanity, so.