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Dec. 11th, 2015 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsIt 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!!)
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!!)
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Date: 2015-12-14 01:13 am (UTC)Thanks, that's good to know.