Jellyn’s Collection of Curiosities

The sequel to this book just made the Tiptree honor list, as this book did the year before, so it’s a good time to be reading it.

There’s a lot to like in this book. The female characters are good, and take roles you don’t normally expect to see. They’re in the military, just like the men and boys are, and one of them is even referred to as, I believe, ‘The Butcher’… or well, it was something bloody and unpleasant. Also, two thumbs up for them being called ‘sir’. I always liked that in Star Trek and was quite mad at Voyager and Janeway for insisting otherwise.

The setting is California.. at first I thought it was a future California and the references to magic was just technology that had been half-forgotten. But then I wasn’t so sure. It may be an alternate, fantastical California. There are Houses, which are not only the families that live in them, but the houses themselves, which have an AI (or a sentient magical demonal being thing) that is also the house and part of the family. Some alien invaders, or maybe they’re not alien, but they’re bird-like creatures, have come in. And there was a war, but they’re sort of in a truce at the moment.

Flora Segunda is the second Flora born into the family, the first one having died. Her father’s got PTSD and is generally loopy. Her mother is a General and is off doing General stuff most of the time. Leaving Flora to take care of the big house by herself. Her sister’s also off in the military. She’s almost 14 and preparing for her Catorcena party where she’ll be officially an adult and can go join the military herself. But she doesn’t want to. She wants to be a ranger. Which are cooler, sort of like spies, and they can use magic, and they’re more independent, I gather.

What’s the plot though? That’s the hard part. I had trouble following the plot. Flora seems to go off randomly in several directions, so that I can’t quite tell what her goal is half the time. She finds the denizen for her house, which has been locked up by her mother. And instead of asking her mother why, she just goes along with the plan of helping him out. Which involves giving him some of her Will. She doesn’t even seem to think twice about that.

So part of the time, she’s trying to help him get stronger and free himself from her mother’s banishment and whatnot. But then part of the time she’s gone off to try to save this Dainty Pirate guy that her mother has captured and sentenced to death. And all her attempts to do that fail spectacularly. But not for any particular reason arising from her actions or the actions of an antagonist. It’s just sort of.. fate, or coincidence. Or at least certainly seems to be. A maleficial deus ex machina if you will.

And in the middle of the muddle that the plot turns into, at least in my head, Flora’s being far too trusting of people. Especially when they’re not even people. She and her sidekick, whose name has already escaped me, meet this random mermaid guy and swallow his story whole without questioning it in the least. Or even questioning him in the least.

Now, yea, okay, they’re only 13, and maybe their lives and thoughts are a muddle. But it’s not enjoyable to try to follow. And I frequently wanted to shake her.

Interesting world and interesting society. And, like I said, some good things in here. I want to know more about these creatures and halfbreeds they’re at war with. I wonder if there’s more in the short stories that preceded this book. Or if there’s more in the sequel. So I’ll read more. But I don’t know that I’d recommend it to other people. Read it if it interests you, but if you’re looking for books to read, I have others I can suggest.

Passage wasn’t quite what I was expecting.. not that I was expecting anything too specific.

This is book three, so you definitely have to have read the first two. Dag and Fawn have left the Lakewalkers and gone off on their own, with a vague plan to bridge the gap between farmers and Lakewalkers and make the world a better, safer place.

I wasn’t quite sure where Bujold would go with their story, and it’s quite open-ended at the end of the last book. But I did think one possibility was to have them wander around the world, gathering up followers. And they do do that, though not quite in the way I imagined.

What was surprising to me was that this is a river journey story. There’s no clear hint of that from the picture on the cover. You have to look closely to see the river behind them. And I don’t normally look at covers too closely before I read.

The first surprising thing they do is go back to Fawn’s family. It almost feels like the story is backtracking when they do that. But they don’t stay there long. They’re just there long enough to pick up Fawn’s brother, Whit. He’s the first person they acquire. Then they go on to the river and hire a boat. The next surprising turn is that they sit on this boat without going anywhere for a few chapters. Normally you’d think if this is a quest story or a journey story or even any other sort of story, there’d be forward movement in the form of the boat actually going somewhere.

Of course they pick up other people along the way.. most before they even really get started moving the boat. Now, naturally their little band can’t be completely made up of farmers, so Dag manages to acquire some Lakewalkers too. Now, yes, this is entirely without them doing anything consciously to get a gaggle of followers. That’s the best sort of leader, right? Well.. I don’t know about that, but it’s a common idea in some books.

This book reminded me most of Mississippi Jack which is also a river story. Some of the minor plots are even similar. And I do like Mississippi Jack, as I like all of the Jacky Faber stories, so it makes me think favorably of this book as well. Which makes it my favorite of the series thus far.

Dag learns more ‘magic’ and plays around with it and stuff, which is interesting. We have another battle, which is less interesting. All in all, it’s not bad.

Where’s the story going in the next book? Well, I picture their band growing a little bigger, and then they’ll set about changing the world and saving it from the evil malices. Using Dag’s new, special groundsensing skills, and probably beating him up quite a lot in the process. And Fawn will of course be instrumental in it. And some people will die, other than redshirts. And then they’ll live happily ever after.

It’s a shame the last book is hardcover. I tend to have a different reading experience with books if they’re paperback versus hardcover. And hardcover doesn’t usually fare as well.

But, at least, only one more book to go!

I made a list of the short story winners of the Hugo Awards. It’s over there on the right under Book Lists. This is just the short stories, not the novellas or novellettes. Those would take a lot longer to read. I’m going to see how many of them I can track down and read.

The first woman to show up on that list, btw? Le Guin in 1974.

This book came to my attention because Stan Lee is reported to be making it into a tv series or a movie (I forget which) and the quote said it was the first gay superhero, which I know was so not true. But anyway, it is a book about a gay superhero. A kid who’s just coming into his powers and facing a whole lot of angst wrapped up in being gay, but mostly wrapped up in his parents’ history as superheroes.

The writing right off the bat did not impress me. It started in the middle of a basketball game, but was riddled with backstory and flashbacks and it just was not handled well at all. Fortunately the game, and the majority of the flashbacks, ended and the writing improved from there.

The amount of typoes in the beginning really bugged me too, but fortunately they mostly disappeared at some point as well, though I still saw some here and there.

But then the writing bugged in another way. The main character is on a bus when it gets attacked by some supervillains. He (who is also narrating) says he didn’t know who those supervillains were at the time, yet he keeps calling them by their names in the narration. No, no no. Yea, okay, you can do that, but you have to handle it better. Like.. ‘I later learned their names were… Blah, Blah, and MegaBlah’. But I still think it’s preferably to refer to people by characteristics until you learn their name in the course of the story. Such as the author did do when it came to Dark Hero, who’s first known as The Man in Black. (As you wish.)

I liked the main character, and I liked the group of superheroes he got paired with. One guy’s superpower is making people sick! And one superhero is an old lady. Moore’s definitely broken out of some of the tropes in coming up with characters. But then at the same time, he annoys me by having some of the heroes be far too closely aligned with actual superheroes from comic books. By which I mostly mean the one character who is clearly a takeoff on Superman. Not only is he an alien, but his adopted parents live in freaking Kansas. It couldn’t be Ohio or something? I wish he’d changed more details there.

There were also a couple of moments where I couldn’t understand the character’s motivations.. not necessarily behind their actions, but behind their emotions. Miss Scarlett flips out a couple of times and I don’t quite know what prompted it. Yea, you can have all this pent-up rage or whatnot, but it’d be nice to have a trigger before it’s unleashed.

So, some good stuff in here, but I do wish he’d been a little better edited. If he writes another novel after this one, I’d hope to see some improvement.