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Mar. 25th, 2016 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI really, really should have reread Karen Lord's Best Of All Possible Worlds before picking up The Galaxy Game but IN MY DEFENSE, I DID NOT KNOW ACTUALLY KNOW IT WAS A SEQUEL WHEN I PICKED IT UP.
Anyway I spent a lot of The Galaxy Game moderately confused and I don't know if it's me, or Karen Lord, or if everything would've been fine if I'd just reread Best Of All Possible Worlds first after all. Though I do feel on pretty stable ground saying that the structure did not help -- there are loads of POV characters, only one of whom speaks in first person, while everyone else gets limited third for no particular reason I could tell, and several of the stories and plots who seem set up to be quite important in the beginning have faded away by the middle of the book.
The actual protagonist (who is not the one person who speaks in first person? WHY THIS CHOICE, I'M SURE THERE'S A REASON BUT I DON'T UNDERSTAND) is Rafi Delarua, the nephew of the protagonist of Best Of All Possible Worlds, who is a kid with dangerous psychic powers that scare his family and most of the people on his planet!
...fortunately he then ends up on a completely different planet where it just so happens he can use his powers usefully, and people are like 'you should do this thing' and he's like 'oh, yeah, I guess I totally should?' and it pretty much all works out fine. It's kind of an off-kilter coming-of-age story, because it's lampshaded in the book a couple of times that Rafi doesn't really make any actual choices; things consistently happen to him, and he rolls with it, and by the end he has officially grown as a person but not really because of anything he did, mostly just because growth is a thing that Happens to you just like Life and Friends and Career Choices and Ending Up On An Alien Planet Where Karen Lord Gets To Do Lots Of Interesting And Complex Culture-Building Happen To You.
And then in the background there is all these super interesting and complicated galactic politics stuff going on! There's some fascinating fallout from the first book that, again, made me really wish I remembered the first book better -- all this stuff about diaspora communities, and the ways those different communities evolve and come into conflict with each other, and dealing with ongoing trauma and loss, and meanwhile there's also some really cool market and trade politics stuff, and then there's the offhanded reveal of Why The Planet Died To Begin With and how the people responsible for it are dealing with that, which is maybe ONE CHAPTER towards the end of the book, ONE CHAPTER, REALLY??, and OK, now that I'm writing this out it turns out I'm deeply frustrated by the backgrounding of all this REALLY FASCINATING stuff in favor of Rafi playing sportsball.
Then again, a lot of the stuff that happens in one or two offhanded chapters feels very much putting the pieces in place to have setup for a future book. And I will definitely read that future book! But, like, making sure that I have performed EXTENSIVE REVIEW first.
Anyway I spent a lot of The Galaxy Game moderately confused and I don't know if it's me, or Karen Lord, or if everything would've been fine if I'd just reread Best Of All Possible Worlds first after all. Though I do feel on pretty stable ground saying that the structure did not help -- there are loads of POV characters, only one of whom speaks in first person, while everyone else gets limited third for no particular reason I could tell, and several of the stories and plots who seem set up to be quite important in the beginning have faded away by the middle of the book.
The actual protagonist (who is not the one person who speaks in first person? WHY THIS CHOICE, I'M SURE THERE'S A REASON BUT I DON'T UNDERSTAND) is Rafi Delarua, the nephew of the protagonist of Best Of All Possible Worlds, who is a kid with dangerous psychic powers that scare his family and most of the people on his planet!
...fortunately he then ends up on a completely different planet where it just so happens he can use his powers usefully, and people are like 'you should do this thing' and he's like 'oh, yeah, I guess I totally should?' and it pretty much all works out fine. It's kind of an off-kilter coming-of-age story, because it's lampshaded in the book a couple of times that Rafi doesn't really make any actual choices; things consistently happen to him, and he rolls with it, and by the end he has officially grown as a person but not really because of anything he did, mostly just because growth is a thing that Happens to you just like Life and Friends and Career Choices and Ending Up On An Alien Planet Where Karen Lord Gets To Do Lots Of Interesting And Complex Culture-Building Happen To You.
And then in the background there is all these super interesting and complicated galactic politics stuff going on! There's some fascinating fallout from the first book that, again, made me really wish I remembered the first book better -- all this stuff about diaspora communities, and the ways those different communities evolve and come into conflict with each other, and dealing with ongoing trauma and loss, and meanwhile there's also some really cool market and trade politics stuff, and then there's the offhanded reveal of Why The Planet Died To Begin With and how the people responsible for it are dealing with that, which is maybe ONE CHAPTER towards the end of the book, ONE CHAPTER, REALLY??, and OK, now that I'm writing this out it turns out I'm deeply frustrated by the backgrounding of all this REALLY FASCINATING stuff in favor of Rafi playing sportsball.
Then again, a lot of the stuff that happens in one or two offhanded chapters feels very much putting the pieces in place to have setup for a future book. And I will definitely read that future book! But, like, making sure that I have performed EXTENSIVE REVIEW first.
