skygiants | (no subject)

It took me a little while to get into Court of Fives, Kate Elliott's new YA series-starter, but about midway through it got very more-ish!

Our Heroine Jessamy is a tomboy super-athlete whose lifelong dream is to compete in American Ninja Warrior. (Well, Saroese-Efean Ninja Warrior.) Alas, though she is competent and skilled and could probably make a pretty good go of it, it would embarrass her family, since women of the Saroese culture that colonized the local Efeans a few generations back are not supposed to make with the sportsing. Saroese and Efeans are also known, with EXTREME SUBTLETY, as 'Patrons' and 'Commoners.'

Jessamy isn't exactly Patron -- her father, a high-ranking general, lives in a state of quasi-marriage with her Efean mother, and is attempting to raise his four mixed-race daughters to the point where possibly at least one of them might be able to marry into the upper class. Jes' sisters include Maraya the sensible intellectual one, Bettany the angry one, and Amaya the bratty flirty one ... and despite these INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS CLUES, only just now when reading a blog post did I realize that it is 100% and explicitly a Little Women AU, except that the Beth equivalent so far is the anti-Beth in just about every possible way. Curious to see how that one plays out, I gotta say!

...OK so I guess at this point I start over with a better description? Court of Fives is a Little Women AU in which the Jo-analogue yearns to compete in American Ninja Warrior but is prevented due to family duty and society, but then gets distracted by dramatic life-changing events, and then does some actual competing in American Ninja Warrior, and then gets distracted again by having to rescue her family from SURPRISINGLY DARK FATES. Unsurprisingly, this is the point when it gets interesting and complicated and more-ish. Along the way, she learns that politics and race relations are complex, colonialism is probably bad, history can be rewritten, lesbians exist, and sometimes it is required to be stone cold ruthless to get what you want.

The prose, especially in the beginning, feels a little clunkier than in the other Kate Elliott books I've read, which ... is pretty much just the Spiritwalker trilogy, so I don't really have a huge point of comparison actually, but there's some noticeable "AS YOU KNOW, [insert cultural explanation here]" to set the stage, and it has the slightly bland first-person present-tense thing going on that seems to be de rigueur for YA these days and of which I admit I am a little tired. It gets less clunky once some of the initial plot-bombs start going off, though. I like Jes and her sisters, and there are enough super interesting plot-bombs chucked around in the last half-to-third of the book that I'm definitely committed to reading the rest. (Because it is a YA trilogy, I fear I can see the dreaded shape of a love triangle looming on the horizon, but it's not there yet and I do have confidence that the primary emotional driving force will continue to be SIBLINGS AND FAMILY!! rather than BOYS!!)

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/430579.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

affreca

I'm glad to see some one else had a problem with the clunkiness of the beginning. Maybe I'll take another try.

From:

melitakennedy

Me too, to the point that I bogged down when her father was "picked up" by that patron and haven't finished it. I plan to try again.

OTOH, I tore through Black Wolves and highly recommend the Crossroads trilogy (to which it's a loose sequel), the Jaran series, and her Alis Rasmussen books. I couldn't get into the Crown of Stars series although I get farther each time I try!

From:

skygiants

I've been meaning to read more of her books -- my library has an e-book copy of the ENTIRE JARAN series all-in-one, and I keep eyeing it every time I'm loading up my Kindle for a vacation and then deciding I have too much else to read. I've got a weeklong vacation coming up in February, so maybe I'll grab it then.

From:

affreca

Oh, I adore Kate Elliott. I think part of my disappointment was that she's usually so good about inclueing cultural details without "as you know Bob"s.

I'm happy that my raves for Black Wolves interested a friend enough to start Crossroads (and like it).

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I would say it picked up a bit after the point mentioned below, then picked up VERY much at the halfway point when suddenly everything goes much more dramatically to hell. I would recommend overall!

From:

thistleingrey

Well, remixed Little Women sisters? The eldest is not Meg, indeed closer to Beth read straight, because of her clubfoot and her determination to be Useful to Her Community without "benefit" of marriage.

I agree with both the initial clunking-somewhat and the explosion partway through of things I enjoy reading very much.

From:

skygiants

It's been a while since I read Little Women, but I was reading the eldest as a Meg who was AU-barred from marriage -- extrapolation, what would that character plan for in such a situation? And then, like Meg, she's the prettiest one besides Amy, and the narrative quickly sets her up with a successful and sensible romance with a hard-working but respectable man with a solid work ethic, and she seems likely to have a reasonably happy domestic life going forward in the Meg vein. You're right that the invalid factor borrows from Beth, though.

From:

thistleingrey

Good point. I missed the prettiness factor entirely, and since I never liked canonical Meg's partner, I failed to line him up with the sturdy guy here. Your comparison makes sense--thanks for explicating.

From:

skygiants

To be fair, I forgot about the prettiness factor also until I went and looked up the plot of Little Women again -- I haven't read it in ten years or more. But high school study guides confirm my first impressions!

I have also forgotten pretty much everything about canonical Meg's partner except his existence, but I do like Maraya's fellow a lot, perhaps especially because Jes thinks he's boring as all heck and that deeply entertains me.

From:

musesfool

Oh wow, I was so fixated on the faux Roman-ness of it that I didn't even notice the Little Women remix!

I enjoyed it but I found some of it stretched my suspension of disbelief a little far and also, yeah, a fairly generic YA first person voice. I'll still read the next one though.

From:

skygiants

I didn't notice it either until I saw Kate Elliott explicitly describe the book somewhere as "Little Women Meets American Ninja Warrior," and then I felt totally oblivious. The American Ninja Warrior part I got!

I don't know what it is about the first-person YA present tense voice that makes it so difficult to individuate in interesting ways. I've read lots of first-person past tense voices that I found really interesting and individual and well-characterized, but I can't think of a single first-person present-tense voice that's stood out to me as having a distinct personality.

From:

davidgillon

Just zipped through the Amazon sample and wondering if there aren't elements of Sparta as well as Rome. The triumphs and games seem Roman, but the rigidity of the social order not so much. Rome had ways to become a citizen and/or move up the social classes (vide Falco), the Patron/Commoner divide seems more akin to Spartan/Helot.

Unfortunately the Little Women analogues are going right over my head. I think I have actually read Little Women (in the distant mists of childhood), but nothing seems to have stuck :(

From:

skygiants

I don't think it's Roman-Rome -- my guess would be more Hellenistic or Roman-conquered Egypt or Carthage. (I could probably find out by Googling, I think she's said somewhere, but I'm lazy.) There's definitely a major colonial aspect regardless, though. It's not just class, but very emphatically race.

It went straight over my head too before I saw it pointed out elsewhere, too! And I LITERALLY JUST READ a book by Louisa May Alcott.

From:

cofax7

Yeah, she's said it's very much Hellenistic Egypt.

From:

vass

Huh. I'd been meaning to give Kate Elliot a try, and Little Women AU in quasi-Rome does sound appealing.

Edited Date: 2015-12-12 12:44 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

It might be a good place to start, if you can wait a hundred pages or so for it to pick up!

From:

starlady

I love me some Hellenistic Egypt, and all the worldbuilding and history in the second half has me really interested to see where the next two books will go. Which reminds me, I should go buy the prequel novella!

From:

skygiants

Yes! I just found out that was out by going to Goodreads to link for this post (which is a good reason to keep using Goodreads.) I'm super curious to see where she's going to take the story; she's chucked out about a million plot coupons to cash in later. (Possessed babies! Secret labyrinths! Missing rage-monster sisters! Lesbians!)

From:

kate_nepveu

I actually found the exposition in the Spiritwalker books kind of terrible, so I'm sad to hear this is apparently a reliable feature, because I want to like her books.

From:

skygiants

I don't particularly remember being bothered by the exposition in the Spiritwalker books (though it's been a while -- mostly I just remember the HUNDRED AND FIFTY PAGE action sequence in the beginning of the second one) but in these it definitely stood out to me as a bug.

From:

kate_nepveu

I just remember a lot of as-you-know'ing, to a degree that surprised me given how experienced a writer she is.

From:

cofax7

There's much less exposition in the Crossroads books (which I happen to be rereading): I wonder if her editors asked for it, since both Spiritwalker and Court of Fives are rather more YA-ish than her other work.