book reviews
Nov. 7th, 2024 10:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenSome more book reviews.
Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree
[cosy fantasy, sequel to Legends and Lattes] So, I don't want to dunk on these books. Baldree is a good writer; a little overwrought for my taste, but that's just a matter of taste. The man can write a sentence. And he's not giving us anything unexpected; the books are a mixture of self-conscious cosy and epic fantasy that's so DnD-derived it might as well have dice tattooed on it. Which again not everyone will like, but the guy isn't going around telling everyone he's Tolkien. He knows what he's writing and he tells you what that is and you get what you pay for. And I respect some of the themes he's chosen, too: women's lives in moments of transition, yep, sign me up.
All of that said, though, this is not a good book. It doesn't thread the needle between fantasy and cosy smoothly - necromancers in the same chapter as book signings, and not in a clever way - and the pacing is off, and it reads almost as though it's an episodic novel that might be good if it weren't for the fact the episodes seem to be in the wrong order. The necromancer stuff fizzles at the end. The romance fizzles in the middle. Some of the characters are good, but I don't really know what's happening here.
The Wedding People, Alison Espach
[women's fiction, author's only UK pub] Right on the line between women's fiction and litfic, and interesting with it. Phoebe, the main character, wants to kill herself after a terrible divorce and years of infertility-linked depression; she decides to do it in a beautiful, expensive hotel she once saw in a magazine. When she gets there, it turns out the entire place has been booked out for a very posh week-long wedding, and the bride is furious that one room has been accidentally let to a random member of the public. Then she realises that Phoebe is the only person in the place not connected to the wedding, and thus, the only person she can talk to about her relationship anxieties. Phoebe, meanwhile, is persuaded not to kill herself at least for the duration of the event (it would be so inconvenient for the bride).
And that's it, really; Phoebe wakes up, the bride calms down. But it's compellingly, beautifully written, and propels you through it even though page-by-page not a lot happens. And it's interesting to me that even the comic characters in this have a depth to them, as though the author just can't manage one-note even if she tries. I really enjoyed it.
DallerGut Dream Department Store, Miye Lee
[fantasy, translated from Korean] This is a strange book! It's a gentle fantasy about a department store that sells dreams. The store itself seems to be within dreams, confusingly - you fall asleep, turn up there and buy whatever dream you want to dream that night, and forget about the store, but not the dream, on waking. Charmingly, the characters are the owner and employees of the store itself, not the dreamers (though we do meet a few of them) - and it's never explained how these people live. They have jobs, salaries, families, romances, but they're not real people, in the same way as the dreamers are? It's unclear, and it's meant to be - the whole thing is a strange, dreamlike experience, definitely running on vibes. There's no plot - Penny, the main character, leads us through a sequence of vignettes about various things (animal dreams, precognitive dreams, Christmas dreams, the dreams of the dying) and it's all very gentle. I enjoyed it very much.
(The one thing I'd love for this book is some translator footnotes. A lot of the names of people and places are puns, and I wish I knew what they'd been translated from. Also, the owner of the store, Mr DallerGut - surely there's a story about that name, and the capital letter in the middle.)
North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher
[short stories collected to novella length] Brilliant, masterful SF of the understated Le Guin type. It's a linked short story collection, with each story about some people somewhere on the planet of Nakharat or in orbit. And they're about culture, and love, and most of all, about collective action. The "ribbon" of the title is a hair ribbon, and this society is braided together - the welfare of one with the welfare of all. I was blown away by this.
Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree
[cosy fantasy, sequel to Legends and Lattes] So, I don't want to dunk on these books. Baldree is a good writer; a little overwrought for my taste, but that's just a matter of taste. The man can write a sentence. And he's not giving us anything unexpected; the books are a mixture of self-conscious cosy and epic fantasy that's so DnD-derived it might as well have dice tattooed on it. Which again not everyone will like, but the guy isn't going around telling everyone he's Tolkien. He knows what he's writing and he tells you what that is and you get what you pay for. And I respect some of the themes he's chosen, too: women's lives in moments of transition, yep, sign me up.
All of that said, though, this is not a good book. It doesn't thread the needle between fantasy and cosy smoothly - necromancers in the same chapter as book signings, and not in a clever way - and the pacing is off, and it reads almost as though it's an episodic novel that might be good if it weren't for the fact the episodes seem to be in the wrong order. The necromancer stuff fizzles at the end. The romance fizzles in the middle. Some of the characters are good, but I don't really know what's happening here.
The Wedding People, Alison Espach
[women's fiction, author's only UK pub] Right on the line between women's fiction and litfic, and interesting with it. Phoebe, the main character, wants to kill herself after a terrible divorce and years of infertility-linked depression; she decides to do it in a beautiful, expensive hotel she once saw in a magazine. When she gets there, it turns out the entire place has been booked out for a very posh week-long wedding, and the bride is furious that one room has been accidentally let to a random member of the public. Then she realises that Phoebe is the only person in the place not connected to the wedding, and thus, the only person she can talk to about her relationship anxieties. Phoebe, meanwhile, is persuaded not to kill herself at least for the duration of the event (it would be so inconvenient for the bride).
And that's it, really; Phoebe wakes up, the bride calms down. But it's compellingly, beautifully written, and propels you through it even though page-by-page not a lot happens. And it's interesting to me that even the comic characters in this have a depth to them, as though the author just can't manage one-note even if she tries. I really enjoyed it.
DallerGut Dream Department Store, Miye Lee
[fantasy, translated from Korean] This is a strange book! It's a gentle fantasy about a department store that sells dreams. The store itself seems to be within dreams, confusingly - you fall asleep, turn up there and buy whatever dream you want to dream that night, and forget about the store, but not the dream, on waking. Charmingly, the characters are the owner and employees of the store itself, not the dreamers (though we do meet a few of them) - and it's never explained how these people live. They have jobs, salaries, families, romances, but they're not real people, in the same way as the dreamers are? It's unclear, and it's meant to be - the whole thing is a strange, dreamlike experience, definitely running on vibes. There's no plot - Penny, the main character, leads us through a sequence of vignettes about various things (animal dreams, precognitive dreams, Christmas dreams, the dreams of the dying) and it's all very gentle. I enjoyed it very much.
(The one thing I'd love for this book is some translator footnotes. A lot of the names of people and places are puns, and I wish I knew what they'd been translated from. Also, the owner of the store, Mr DallerGut - surely there's a story about that name, and the capital letter in the middle.)
North Continent Ribbon, Ursula Whitcher
[short stories collected to novella length] Brilliant, masterful SF of the understated Le Guin type. It's a linked short story collection, with each story about some people somewhere on the planet of Nakharat or in orbit. And they're about culture, and love, and most of all, about collective action. The "ribbon" of the title is a hair ribbon, and this society is braided together - the welfare of one with the welfare of all. I was blown away by this.
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on 2024-11-08 02:11 am (UTC)That's it! That's what it was reminding me of! Thank you. Yes, it's lovely, isn't it?
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