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Oct. 14th, 2017 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI was resigned to waiting until October 17th for A Skinful of Shadows to come out in the US. However, izilen, horrified at both the long wait after the UK publication and the clear inferiority of the US cover, acquired a copy on my behalf and mailed it over the ocean -- after first warning me it was the darkest Frances Hardinge book yet.
Having now read it, I don't know that it's actually that much creepier than the first third of Cuckoo Song, or the bits of Lie Tree where Faith in her deepest self-loathing slithers snakelike through the island purposefully destroying everything she touches. It definitely has a higher body count -- a much higher body count -- but I mean it's a book about a.) ghosts and b.) the English Civil War so maybe that's to be expected ...?
Like many of Hardinge's books, it features:
- a ferocious underestimated girl struggling to hold onto a sense of self in a world that wishes her to have no such thing
- a recognition that the people you love and who believe that they love you will sometimes betray you, sometimes for reasons they believe are good and sometimes not
- a ruthless and terrible female antagonist whom the heroine cannot help but respect and admire
- a struggling journey up out of solitude towards a coalition built of necessity with the least likely individuals
- including an undead bear
- admittedly this is the first Hardinge book to include an undead bear
- it is also the first Hardinge book about literal ghosts, a lot of ghosts, a lot of very unpleasant and sinister ghosts but also some ghosts for whom I have a very deep affection, including the very bearlike bear.
I also have a great deal of affection for Makepeace - the illegitimate scion of a very old noble family that is quite confident it will be able to chew her up and spit her out, and finds itself repeatedly mistaken. I don't think I love her yet quite as much as Trista or Faith or Mosca, but that's what I said about Faith right after I read The Lie Tree, too, and LOOK AT ME NOW.
izilen, horrified at both the long wait after the UK publication and the clear inferiority of the US cover, acquired a copy on my behalf and mailed it over the ocean -- after first warning me it was the darkest Frances Hardinge book yet. Having now read it, I don't know that it's actually that much creepier than the first third of Cuckoo Song, or the bits of Lie Tree where Faith in her deepest self-loathing slithers snakelike through the island purposefully destroying everything she touches. It definitely has a higher body count -- a much higher body count -- but I mean it's a book about a.) ghosts and b.) the English Civil War so maybe that's to be expected ...?
Like many of Hardinge's books, it features:
- a ferocious underestimated girl struggling to hold onto a sense of self in a world that wishes her to have no such thing
- a recognition that the people you love and who believe that they love you will sometimes betray you, sometimes for reasons they believe are good and sometimes not
- a ruthless and terrible female antagonist whom the heroine cannot help but respect and admire
- a struggling journey up out of solitude towards a coalition built of necessity with the least likely individuals
- including an undead bear
- admittedly this is the first Hardinge book to include an undead bear
- it is also the first Hardinge book about literal ghosts, a lot of ghosts, a lot of very unpleasant and sinister ghosts but also some ghosts for whom I have a very deep affection, including the very bearlike bear.
I also have a great deal of affection for Makepeace - the illegitimate scion of a very old noble family that is quite confident it will be able to chew her up and spit her out, and finds itself repeatedly mistaken. I don't think I love her yet quite as much as Trista or Faith or Mosca, but that's what I said about Faith right after I read The Lie Tree, too, and LOOK AT ME NOW.
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Date: 2017-10-14 08:12 pm (UTC)In return (but also because I am moving), can I send you a hardboiled noir mystery about lesbian androids in an Argentinian dome colony in Antarctica in the 1960s?
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Date: 2017-10-16 03:50 am (UTC)...and yes I will accept this trade. :D
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Date: 2017-10-14 09:42 pm (UTC)(I am going on holiday in the second half of November, and am trying to save up books to read then. It is very hard, because I have no self control.)
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Date: 2017-10-16 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-11-19 01:49 pm (UTC)Also I loved Lady Morgan, and Helen, and all the women.
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Date: 2017-10-14 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-14 10:47 pm (UTC)Oh God yes. I prefer Hardinge's UK covers to the US covers most of the time (just look at old UK vs new US prints of A Face Like Glass), but I think this book is the most extreme yet. The UK's has that gorgeously detailed deep green design and the US's...is a giant block of stone.
I don't know that it's actually that much creepier than the first third of Cuckoo Song, or the bits of Lie Tree
After reading it, I do agree that Gullstruck Island is still the darkest for me, but I think A Skinful of Shadows does set a record for "amount of terrible things to happen to a Hardinge protagonist in the first five chapters".
I found the background setting really interesting since I know next to nothing about the English Civil War, and I really want to read more about a lot of these characters (Lady Morgan and Helen! James and Hannah-the-crossdressing-soldier-ghost!) but I do miss the untethered wackiness of her earlier fantasy works. Not that this books is typical historical MG/YA adventure either, because well, undead bear.
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Date: 2017-10-16 03:57 am (UTC)It was interesting for me to compare this to Fly By Night, which is clearly based off the post-Civil War period of British history but run through the Hardinge Weird Fantasy Filter. I wonder if that's part of the reason the setting of this book felt a little more realist to me (ghosts aside) -- even in her other historicals, it almost feels to me like reading about a fantasy world because she's so good at pulling the disturbing surrealist bits out of history. But reading this book it's like 'oh, yeah, this is just what was happening [and also there's ghosts].' The strangeness feels more focused, I guess.
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Date: 2017-10-14 11:26 pm (UTC)I think I like UK better than US covers generally. Until the uniform dark background/emblem versions of Pratchett's books, the differences between the UK/US covers were awful.
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Date: 2017-10-16 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-15 04:08 am (UTC)I just finished it this morning and I do think it's the creepiest of them all. Maybe less overtly creepy than parts of some of the others, but the whole ghost possession thing just gets creepier the more one thinks about it. And in some ways the Fellmottes are the worst antagonists of all given their absolute power.
That said, while I loved the setting, it did really make me wish she'd write another Mosca/Fractured Realms book.
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Date: 2017-10-16 04:04 am (UTC)It does to me sort of fit the pattern of some of her other books, Cuckoo Song especially, where it starts out VERY bleak and then softens on its initial starkness as it goes on (especially in its perspective on post-life options for the dead, which becomes a lot kinder by the end of the book.) But the possession of Sir Thomas is certainly up there among the creepiest things I've ever read.
Spoilers!
Date: 2017-10-15 06:51 pm (UTC)Re: Spoilers!
Date: 2017-10-16 04:09 am (UTC)(Well, until the end and SURPRISE CROSS-DRESSING SOLDIER GHOST, thank you for that present just for me, Frances Hardinge.)
Bear was such a good bear! The way Makepeace loved and protected him filled my whole heart. I didn't really know what to expect from 'angry undead bear' advertised on the cover but I should have known Hardinge would do animal-like animals as well as she does everything else.
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Date: 2017-10-15 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 04:11 am (UTC)