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Aug. 28th, 2022 10:53 pmReminded today by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aamcnamara that I should get around to writing up Uncommon Charm, the first book in Neon Hemlock's 2022 novella series, which I did indeed find extremely charming!
The narrator/heroine is Julia, a Bright Young Thing who has gotten kicked out of her 1920s' girls' school and banished back to a dreadfully dull existence with her magician mother, enlivened only by the surprise arrival of her surprise cousin Simon; Simon is a.) illegitimate b.) Jewish c.) talented and interested in magic and thus has been sent to train with Julia's mother when his initial stay with his father and aristocratic half-siblings did not turn out to be a great success.
Julia and Simon are not much alike, but they have a shared queerness as well as a shared willingness to overturn some of the less pleasant stones in their complex family history and this is enough to form a stalwart bond as well as driving the book forward -- or maybe not forward so much as around, or inward; the plot of the novella is not really about forward motion and much more about moving through and reconsidering the past and the ripples it leaves on the present. The past in this book holds some fairly dark things, which for years have been lightly and politely skated over; Julia's narrative voice is light and bright and witty also, which works in interesting tension with the scathing excavation of family ghosts (both figurative and literal) at the center of the book.
I enjoyed it a lot! It's quite short but I think the brevity works to tell a story about a specific moment in what's clearly an ongoing story -- I don't mean this in the sense that there has to be more (although I would enjoy more) but more in the sense that a number of characters make fairly brief appearances on the page and all of them give off a vibe of having rich and complete lives to get back to once they're off the page again.
While I'm at it I also read the second novella in the Neon Hemlock series, Let the Mountains Be My Grave, which did not really work for me at all. The plot was fine -- it's about gay Italian partisans using weird divine magic to fight Nazis who also have weird divine magic -- but the dialogue is often heavy-handed and the characters felt pretty one-note. For example, literally everything the communist love interest says can be more or less summed up in this poignant farewell moment:
"Fuck, Veleno," Rame whispers, "I think I've fallen for you harder than capitalism will under the proletarian revolution."
So right now we're at a 50% hit rate which honestly is not bad! Looking forward to seeing what I think of the next two!
aamcnamara that I should get around to writing up Uncommon Charm, the first book in Neon Hemlock's 2022 novella series, which I did indeed find extremely charming!The narrator/heroine is Julia, a Bright Young Thing who has gotten kicked out of her 1920s' girls' school and banished back to a dreadfully dull existence with her magician mother, enlivened only by the surprise arrival of her surprise cousin Simon; Simon is a.) illegitimate b.) Jewish c.) talented and interested in magic and thus has been sent to train with Julia's mother when his initial stay with his father and aristocratic half-siblings did not turn out to be a great success.
Julia and Simon are not much alike, but they have a shared queerness as well as a shared willingness to overturn some of the less pleasant stones in their complex family history and this is enough to form a stalwart bond as well as driving the book forward -- or maybe not forward so much as around, or inward; the plot of the novella is not really about forward motion and much more about moving through and reconsidering the past and the ripples it leaves on the present. The past in this book holds some fairly dark things, which for years have been lightly and politely skated over; Julia's narrative voice is light and bright and witty also, which works in interesting tension with the scathing excavation of family ghosts (both figurative and literal) at the center of the book.
I enjoyed it a lot! It's quite short but I think the brevity works to tell a story about a specific moment in what's clearly an ongoing story -- I don't mean this in the sense that there has to be more (although I would enjoy more) but more in the sense that a number of characters make fairly brief appearances on the page and all of them give off a vibe of having rich and complete lives to get back to once they're off the page again.
While I'm at it I also read the second novella in the Neon Hemlock series, Let the Mountains Be My Grave, which did not really work for me at all. The plot was fine -- it's about gay Italian partisans using weird divine magic to fight Nazis who also have weird divine magic -- but the dialogue is often heavy-handed and the characters felt pretty one-note. For example, literally everything the communist love interest says can be more or less summed up in this poignant farewell moment:
"Fuck, Veleno," Rame whispers, "I think I've fallen for you harder than capitalism will under the proletarian revolution."
So right now we're at a 50% hit rate which honestly is not bad! Looking forward to seeing what I think of the next two!
