skygiants | Entries tagged with karen lord

At the time that I picked it up, I did not know that Karen Lord's Unraveling was a sequel to her first book, Redemption in Indigo, and I can't decide if that was for the better or for the worse.

Unraveling is a very cool experiment of a novel that in practice doesn't quite work for me - it's a murder mystery being investigated by a couple of gods-reborn-as-human and the forensic therapist they've kidnapped from the highly social-stratified elseworld city where she lives and taken to the spirit world to help them solve the crime.

Because Karen Lord's gods don't exist in linear time, the actual crime-solving occurs in a wildly atemporal fashion that involves following various past and future threads to the solution, which all tied up with the character development of the gods in question. Unfortunately, as I last read Redemption in Indigo in 2011, I didn't remember anything about those gods or what aspect of their characters needed developing and so I spent most of the book feeling vaguely lost and unattached until a really phenomenal set piece at the very end abruptly got me to care.

Then in the hopes of making sense of things I went back to reread Redemption in Indigo, which I loved very much in 2011 and which, it turns out: I love still! It's a gorgeous book that takes a comic Senegalese folktale about the long-suffering wife of a hopeless glutton and turns it into an exploration of the value of kindness, empathy, and chaos. The cast of characters includes:

Paama, who has just left her husband Ansige and also come into possession of an incredibly powerful divine artifact
Paama's husband Ansige, who kicks off the plot and then disappears for most of the book
Paama's very beautiful sister; the clueless poet who loves her (who is real); and the wealthy suitor the poet works for (who is fake)
a spider trickster who is just a little too invested for his own good
a god of chaos theory who is supposed to be invested and unfortunately has instead gotten very burnt out by just, you know, everything?
a lesser godlet who is pretending to be a seven year old today and is not having a great time of it
a collection of stressed magical nuns who think Paama is the absolute bees' knees

A lot of Redemption in Indigo's charm is its wry narrative voice, which it uses to extreme effect; Unraveling is a very different kind of book, so it's probably just as well that I didn't reread it first, because my expectations for it would have been calibrated very differently.

On the other hand, if I did reread it first, I probably would have cared more about most of the characters in Unraveling and that would have been a significant help in maintaining focus and attention as the story bounced me back and forth through the timeline, so who knows? Hindsight is not always 20/20 and I don't really have a point here except that everyone should read Redemption in Indigo.

I 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.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/439679.html

The Best of All Possible Worlds is not quite the book I wanted it to be.

I mean, I love its themes! It's about a culture of stoic telepathic AU!Vulcans -- they're called Sadiri, but, I mean, they're basically Vulcans -- whose home planet gets destroyed, including most of the lady not!Vulcans; they settle on another planet, one that's historically and infrastructurally sympathetic to refugees, and start figuring out how they're going to maintain their culture and heritage.

Enter Our Heroine, Grace Delarua, a scientist with a hobby for linguistics who is assigned to help the new community settle in. Eventually she and a couple not!Vulcans and some other scientists end up going on a ROAD TRIP to visit a bunch of other communities descended from long-ago not!Vulcans and check out their genetic and cultural similarities. Meanwhile, Grace and her buddies repeatedly have this conversation:

BUDDY: So, you and not!Vulcan team leader are totally going to hook up, right?
GRACE: No, I mean, we're just friends!
BUDDY: You guys are going to make such cute babies.
GRACE: .....

Guess who is right on this! Spoiler: it isn't Grace. I am not actually sure this is an effective technique, either from a Watsonian or a Doylist perspective -- it got my back up a little bit both ways -- but oh well.

Anyway, it's an interesting book, but the structure of it -- essentially a set of vignettes arranged alongside each other, rather than a driving narrative -- means that there ended up being a lot of things that I wanted to see explored in more depth instead of the sort of . . . emotional glide we got. There's some serious stuff that happens -- telepathic abuse! near-death experiences! -- and we were told Grace was having a hard time dealing with it, but I'm not sure we saw that as much? Also, there were a couple things that rubbed me the wrong way about the seeking-marriage-partners aspect and the fake Vulcan gender relations stuff; Delarua gets rescued a little too often for my taste, and ( spoilers )

On the other hand, despite the things that rubbed me wrong, there were also a series of things that made me really happy. Linguistics! Cultural contrasts and interesting worldbuilding! Genderqueer character! Delarua's mom trying to seduce her friend away from her husband! The chapter where Delarua's scientific ethics conflict with her humanistic ethics! The colony whose backstory basically goes like this:

FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 1: We interpret our cultural mores differently than you and now we can't stop fighting about it!
FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 2: How will we ever resolve this conflict?
FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 1: . . . fuck it, let's just throw everything out the window and become space elves.
FAKE!VULCAN COMMUNITY 2: GREAT. LET'S BE SPACE ELVES.

And then they elect an official Fairy Queen, and she picks a space elf harem, and they spend the next couple centuries hanging around singing and strumming lutes and having fairy revels in the woods because WHY NOT. (Community 2 become DARK space elves, because they were the Goth ones, I guess.) I laughed so hard!

Also, this does not reflect on the book itself, but the cover appears to have a washed-out white palette to deliberately obscure the fact that the heroine is described as a woman of color. THANKS, DEL REY. >.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/335783.html

I picked up Karen Lord's Redemption in Indigo after reading

rachelmanija's enthusiastic review, which promised me metafictional commentary and a witty narrative voice and an awesome heroine who is temporarily given supernatural probability-altering powers but whose real talent is that she is a FABULOUS COOK.

And Redemption in Indigo does in fact have all these things, plus stressed-out and overworked junior spirits, a spider-trickster deeply embarrassed by his own occasional impulses of kindness, a set of quietly superpowered nuns, and an emphasis on small, responsible, hopeful acts of heroism, the kind that are too often overlooked by fiction at large. In short: I really, really liked it.

The plot is loosely inspired by a Senegalese folktale, and the voice is a clever storyteller's voice. The first half is full of wacky comedy-of-errors hijinks, with good spirits and evil spirits and angsty poets and our heroine's foolish ex-husband all tripping over each other. (The narrator is quite aware that the ex-husband's behavior is over-the-top, and primly explains, "I have already made it quite clear that the man has problems and we cannot expect him to act logically.") After a mid-story climax, the second half jettisons most of the hijinks and condenses down into a quiet but intense battle of two worldviews. The book as a whole is short (light, though not slight) and I don't want to say too much more about it, so instead I'll give you the storyteller's invitation:

A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily. I am willing to admit to many faults, but I will not burden my conscience with that one. All my tales are true, drawn from life, and a life story is not a tidy thing. It is a half-tamed horse that you seize on the run and ride with knees and teeth clenched, and then you regretfully slip off as gently and safely if you can, always wondering if you could have gone a few meters more.

This is definitely a horse worth riding.