skygiants | (no subject)

I really enjoyed Unspoken when it came out, so I waited until the trilogy was finished in order to zoom through a reread/first read of Untold and Unmade.

To recap, the premise: Sorry-in-the-Vale is a peaceful English town with a DARK SECRET! The Lynburns are the deeply dysfunctional local gentry who've just popped back in after twenty years abroad, possibly with SINISTER MAGIC POWERS, MURDEROUS IMPULSES and DESIRES TO RULE! Kami is the plucky teenaged journalist who is determined to EXPOSE ALL, mildly hampered by an inconvenient psychic soulbond to the youngest and most dysfunctional Lynburn! It's Sarah Rees Brennan, so everything is very quippy interspersed with periods of extremely intense emotion!

You probably know already if this is the sort of thing you like. In addition to a devotion to quips and a high level of joy in lampshading EXTREME GOTHIC TROPES, here are some other things that I like about the series:

- Kami has parents and a family, and increasingly they are involved and do things! (Kami's dad is wonderful and I have a deep emotional attachment to him. I do feel sort of bad for Kami's mom because while I appreciate her storyline I think she is literally the only person in the books who never gets to make a single clever quip. Sorry, Kami's mom!)
- families in general! lots of people having emotional arcs to do with weird complicated families that are nonetheless there for each other in important ways, mostly
- Kami's angry friend Angela whose anger is wonderful to me
- Kami's less angry friend Holly whose emotional self-confidence arc is wonderful to me
- and Kami herself, who is a nonstop bundle of terrifying energy and whom I love!
- generally a sense that the story takes place in a community where people know each other, and various people are affected by the EVIL GOINGS-ON! in different ways, and all of those people are important, not just the protagonists
- the B-plot romance is lesbians!

There is also a lot of complex love polygon soulbond-festooned relationship drama, which teetered frequently on the verge of being too much for me but usually managed to pull back into something non-annoying just in time. I kept being torn between frustration at the occasional Giant Misunderstandings and going, well, no, it's fair, because a.) the lack of effective communication sans soulbond because people aren't used to having to use their words is one of the things being examined about the relationship and b.) stupid teenagers ... and yet, and yet. SO MANY. Please note that this applies only to the Kami/Jared/Ash/Rusty/Holly/whoever het angles, I have really no complaints at all about the development of Angela and Holly's relationship, although I do agree with

saramily who pointed out that sometimes all the kids veer over a little too rapidly from COMPLETE FAILURE TO USE THEIR WORDS EFFECTIVELY to using their words SUSPICIOUSLY MATURELY AND WELL.

Also a lot of people die! I will admit I was not expecting quite so many people to die and was effectively sad about their deaths. Depending on who you are, this may be a bug or a feature. I was very sad the helpful Jewish magician died. :( :( :( I'M SORRY JEWISH MAGICIAN. You were my favorite! I'm especially sad since he didn't have a chance to do much in the story except tragically die and maybe provide a brief false love polygon angle.

But, like, the moms didn't die (well, most of the moms didn't die) and the lesbians didn't die, and the cute kids didn't die, so I don't actually have real complaints! I'm not still not sure all of them were necessary, but I'm not upset or angry about it like I was some of the deaths in the Demon's Lexicon books.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/394656.html

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From:

rymenhild

Wait, which helpful magician was Jewish?

From:

skygiants

Henry is Jewish! He mentions it during his intro when he thinks Kami and Jared are missionaries. I mean it never comes up again, BUT I LATCHED ON.

From:

thistleingrey

Yes, I remember about Henry! I was disproportionately cross that he died (we couldn't kill the obvious persons of some non-whiteness, so we killed the Jewish guy? rly??), but as you point out, quite a lot of people die.

(I finished reading last week but the post won't go till Dec because I keep them in chron order and don't have enough to dislodge them from Wednesday-only posting.)

From:

skygiants

I was super sad, but I would be crosser if I hadn't mentally gone through the whole cast list thinking of alternates and going '...well, that person's off-limits, and that one, and that one, so....' I think Ash is really the only other acceptable sympathetic target who didn't end up dead anyway. (I personally was less attached to Ash than Henry but I do grudgingly admit that his continued survival is more thematically necessary.)

(I will look forward to your post! :D)

From:

thistleingrey

Ash never quite feels real to me, but that may well be my problem, not the trilogy's!

From:

skygiants

I felt this way all through the first book; I was confused by people who were interested in or invested in Ash, because why? The eventual Ash-Jared brothersish angle gets enough weight to make him start feeling like a person for me towards the end of book 2, but it took a fair while.

From:

thistleingrey

Agreed--Jared kind of pulls him through the mirror.

OTOH, Ash's waxen quality was useful for tagging him as Not Draco. (I guess that's Rusty, this time.)

From:

sovay

I'M SORRY JEWISH MAGICIAN. You were my favorite! I'm especially sad since he didn't have a chance to do much in the story except tragically die and maybe provide a brief false love polygon angle.

Phooey.

From:

skygiants

It always startles me how disproportionately attached I get to Jewish characters in books! I never expect it to matter as much to me as it apparently does.

From:

sovay

It always startles me how disproportionately attached I get to Jewish characters in books! I never expect it to matter as much to me as it apparently does.

Nah, I have the same thing. I think it's the aftereffects of a childhood spent pouncing on whatever fragments of representation you can find, regardless of plot relevance or, in some cases, three-dimensionality. I get it with non-Jewish characters, too, and it always maps to a certain degree of otherness. I am a lot more attached to many minor characters than I suspect their creators thought they deserved.

I also note when a book kills off its outsiders, because I take it personally.

(The town really is called Sorry-in-the-Vale? The dysfunctional local gentry were that self-aware about it?)

From:

thistleingrey

I also note when a book kills off its outsiders, because I take it personally.

Yeah, this.

There's a diegetically logical set of revisions to the town's name, over time....

From:

sovay

Yeah, this.

*cough*City of Stairs*cough cough*

(That novel has a bad case of Sudden Queer Character Death Syndrome. Apparently I am still resentful about it.)

The Moon-Spinners (1962) is not Mary Stewart's best novel, but I bear it a disproportionate debt of gratitude for the character of Tony Gamble, because he is coded gay about as strongly as Stewart could get away with and nothing bad happens to him, even though he's a jewel thief and one of the novel's antagonists. He's graceful and humorous, he has faintly camp manners and the heroine thinks he moves like a dancer, but he's the jack-of-all-trades at a new hotel in Crete; it's not clear that he has any more scruples than the rest of his gang, especially when it comes to double-crossing them, but he's the one the author allows to get away, facetiously promising to send the heroine "a picture postcard from the Kara Bugaz." Her cousin thinks he never will, but I like to think that someday a postcard from somewhere arrived. I took him for granted as a child and then, as an adult re-reader, was really impressed that he's just a person.

There's a diegetically logical set of revisions to the town's name, over time....

Check. Would you recommend I read these novels, outside of the annoyance I am going to feel when the Jewish magician buys it?

From:

thistleingrey

I didn't know about The Moon-Spinners! *adds to list*

Would you recommend I read these novels, outside of the annoyance I am going to feel when the Jewish magician buys it?

Um. I personally did not enjoy the trilogy enough to recommend it to people who aren't already enthusiastically interested in this kind of book; I read them from having enjoyed SRB's Gothic-parody posts, been interested in her career previously, and skipped the Demon's Lexicon books. Perhaps someone else here who read the books for themselves can make a stronger and clearer case in their favor!

From:

skygiants

My two cents: if you like Mary Stewart and are interested in modern Gothic, I think it's worth it! The trilogy's certainly not perfect, but it's very clearly and explicitly in conversation with a lot of the earlier stuff in ways that I find interesting.

From:

sovay

My two cents: if you like Mary Stewart and are interested in modern Gothic, I think it's worth it!

I like Mary Stewart, but I'm not crazy about Gothic as a genre. I may just read people talking about all the ways it's clearly and explicitly in conversation with its forerunners. (Example?)

From:

skygiants

I think the biggest thing for me is the handling of the telepathic soulbond (a Mary Stewart classic from Touch Not the Cat) especially in the first book, which does a great job of interrogating and problematizing the idea of having Someone Who Loves You Always In Your Mind without totally rejecting it as an inane fantasy.

The author's Gothic Tuesday posts are also fun reading, and generally have interesting notes about what she was taking away from each Gothic novel and trying to respond to.

From:

skygiants

I always remember when my family was listening to Harry Potter on audiobook in the car, and Anthony Goldstein's name was mentioned in some list-off of random students, and my mom shouts "AW YES a JEWISH WIZARD!" Anthony Goldstein has no existence or personality to the best of my remembrance, but he has a name with a plausible ethnicity attached, and sometimes even that's enough.

(Not only Sorry-in-the-Vale, but the river that runs by it is the SORRIER RIVER! Sorry was just not sorry enough!)

From:

sovay

my family was listening to Harry Potter on audiobook in the car, and Anthony Goldstein's name was mentioned in some list-off of random students, and my mom shouts "AW YES a JEWISH WIZARD!"

I understand that. Because yes, obviously there would be Jewish wizards, statistically speaking if nothing else, but it still matters to have it canonical.

(Not only Sorry-in-the-Vale, but the river that runs by it is the SORRIER RIVER! Sorry was just not sorry enough!)

Damn.

From:

saramily

oh yay I'm so glad you blogged about these! I super enjoyed them, with the above-mentioned caveat, but then also sometimes teenagers are frustratingly dense and then incredibly eloquent back-to-back, so it was not that hard to get past.

(one side note - I think Holly would identify as bisexual, so the b-plot romance is actually lesbian-bisexual girl, which is EVEN RARER and given the givens, possibly important to note!)

SPOILERS FOR DEATHS

Yeah, I go back and forth on the two major named character deaths, because Henry was so great and so clearly marked for death as the character brought in from outside, and connected juuuust enough to make it hurt more than the mass sorcerer pools deaths, and also MAN. Rusty. I have a lot of feelings about that still! I… am not entirely sure what they all are!

From:

skygiants

(Yes that is true about Holly and I was kind of hoping someone would call me out for it in comments, since I didn't want to get too detailed in the post because of spoilers! I WAS SUPER HAPPY ABOUT THAT IN SPECIFIC. :D)

I think I would be less sad generally about Henry's death if he'd gotten more to do over the course of Book 2 besides being clearly marked for death! I'm sorry we barely knew you, Henry, but you deserved better. :( I ALSO have a lot of feelings about Rusty but I'm mooooostly willing to grant Sarah Rees Brennan the 'EMOTIONS ENGAGED, WELL PLAYED' victory on that one. Like, if she felt like someone really had to die there, OK, it was super effective, it did narratively what it was supposed to do. I would like to hear more about your feelings though!

From:

bookblather

HURRAY THE LESBIANS DO NOT DIE

I might go ahead and find the sequels to Unspoken, then. I really liked it but the ending hurt me.

From:

skygiants

THE LESBIANS (well, lesbian and bi girl) MAKE IT THROUGH AND ALSO MAKE OUT

The ending of Unspoken is quite dramatic! That whole thread ... does not get less dramatic, but it is not all always negatively so!