A lot of people have been working on watching through all of the old Who serials. And as it turns out, I’m one of them. It’ll probably be slow going.

An Unearthly Child
So here we meet Susan, who is supposedly 15, and her teachers, who are probably supposed to be in their late 20s or early 30s. We also meet the Doctor, who is actually a dick. Through a combination of dickishness and idiocy, the whole group ends up somewhere in the middle of a caveman ice age. The action plot is really not all that interesting. The characters are moreso. As it turns out, I hadn’t ever seen this episode so it was a first viewing for me — as will be a lot of One, Two and Three episodes. From fan speculation I had been privy to, I thought it wasn’t clear that Susan and the Doctor really are relatives, but that is not the case. The Doctor in this episode isn’t likeable at all, and seems to have very little interest in or experience with Earth and Earthlings. Susan’s presentation was interesting; an intelligent, adventurous grandson might have taken over focus eventually but the fact that she is a girl seems to put her on the same level as him as an older man.

Why is it that I feel infinitely more satisfied and as if I’ve accomplished something when I manage to catch a song I like on the radio rather than listen to it on a compilation cd I made?

The Plot
Flora Fyrdraaca is about to turn fourteen, about to be sent to the army’s training camp, and about to find herself stuck in a profession she doesn’t want. What she does want is to become a Ranger like her hero, Nini Mo, but she has no real idea how she ought to go about fulfilling this ambition. While attempting to procrastinate dealing with this increasingly pressing problem, she finds herself embroiled in one accidental near disaster after another.

My Thoughts
After I read this book, I went looking online to see what I could find out about the series — more background, future books and so forth. I soon found the author’s blog in which she noted her strong preference for reviews without spoilers. So that is what I shall provide here, more or less.

Stuff I Liked
The first thing that strikes one about the book is the writing style. I’ve been trying to come up with a way of describing it that would make sense to anyone but myself, but I’m not sure my impressions are easily conveyed. The style is what I would describe as ‘cute’, young fannish female bloggerese. (And let me clarify that these are college or post-college young fannish females, as contrasted with middle aged fannish females and female children. It was not chatspeak.) Since that is a writing style which I like and to which I occasionally aspire, I liked it very much. (Except when I didn’t, see below.)

Also very positive was the author’s excellent job at creating a character who actually thinks, behaves and reacts in a fashion entirely appropriate for her age. This is not as easy or as obvious as it sounds, as it’s remarkable the number of amateur and even professional authors who find themselves in desperate trouble as soon as they write a character younger than seventeen or eighteen.

The setting was also very intriguing to me. The city in which Flora resides seems as if it may be loosely based on San Francisco, with the wider world outside consisting of the rest of California and Mexico at the very least. As someone who hasn’t lived any further west than Minneapolis and has spent probably a grand total of about 3 weeks on the west coast, my innate knowledge of the history of the area is sorely lacking, so some of what has been pulled in for the world building may be lost on me. I can tell you why the Pilgrims at Plymouth did not get on with the Puritans in Boston but I could not tell you what the Spanish were doing in Mexico and California and when they actually left and what lasting influence they had on current Hispanic and Mexican culture. Which is my roundabout way of saying that quite a lot of stuff in Flora’s world (like the catorcena) seemed like it might be of Hispanic or Mexican origin but I am not qualified to make definitive statements on the matter. But I liked it anyway because these are not influences I often see in fantasy novels.

Stuff I Didn’t Like
As noted before, the first thing that strikes one about the book is the writing style. And though I liked it overall and became very used to it over the course of the whole story, there was a point toward the beginning where I was starting to find it overbearingly cutesy. While I can understand the reasoning behind using similar-sounding but not quite the same words to help with your world building, “sandwie” crossed the line. I didn’t realize there was a line until it was crossed, but as soon as I saw that I knew we’d gone beyond it.

I also felt very much the lack of a pronunciation guide to the names. Almost all of them were vowel soup with random squiggly accent marks to boot and I would have appreciated some guidance there. Left to my own devices I will often grow used to thinking of it being pronounced in an incorrect fashion and thus be jarred later to hear it another way.

What?
While the book had a conclusion, of sorts, there were a lot of questions which were either not answered or even raised during the course of it. Some of them are perhaps not the sort of questions Flora would have asked, but as a reader, I certainly did.

1. Where did Flora come from? Her dad did not seem to be in any particular position to be performing his husbandly duties and one can only assume he was worse years ago.
2. What happened to the Rangers?
3. What happened to Nini Mo?
4. What happened to the first Flora?
5. What happened to Poppy? Perhaps this is meant to have been answered but I cannot help but feel the explanation was inadequate.

I assume (and now know) that some of these questions will be answered elsewhere, and I can be satisfied with that. But I didn’t go into the read with the expectation or realization that this was a series effort, so to have so much left in the air at the end was a little jarring.

In Short
As I started the book, I wasn’t sure how the language and the setting would pan out. Would they grow to grate on me, or would I grow to like them? It turned out to be the latter, as I became absorbed in the story and came to like Flora and even Udo, who is not the sort of character I usually like. (It goes without saying that I also liked Hotspur, because he is exactly the sort of character I usually like.) This is again a fantasy-adventure book with a strong female protaganist which I haven’t seen getting enough publicity. It already has one sequel (which I began reading directly, then stopped because I realized it was going to answer some of the questions I had left after reading the first Flora, and I should write this review before I got the answers) and it seems more are probably on the way. More people should read it. Make sure your libraries are purchasing it.

Yesterday I had thought of something witty to put in a short blog post.

Today, I have only the memory that [Dorrie sensed I was actually trying to do something other than mindlessly surf Wikipedia, so decided to interrupt me. Did you know that Nolan Ryan holds not only the MLB record in no-hitters, but also leads in number of walks? Now you do.] such a thought crossed my mind, but not what it actually was.

The Plot
After seeing the ocean, Dag and Fawn head for their next destination, a Lakewalker camp rumored to house a Healer who might be able to answer some of Dag’s concerns and questions. Arkady Waterbirch, the Healer, turns out to have quite a lot of answers, and much of Dag’s worry is relieved. After some trouble with the southern Lakewalker camp, which, though not quite as cut off as the northern camps, is still not very accepting of change and new ideas, the group (Fawn, Dag, Barr and Arkady) join a farmer wagon train heading north. Along the way Dag continues his ‘apprenticeship’ with Arkady and finally makes some real headway on solving the problem of farmer/Lakewalker relations: he invents a shield that can prevent farmers from being mind-controlled by malices. This is tested during an unexpected malice attack where the farmers save the day.

My Thoughts
After the nice interlude on the river, we’re thrown back into the thick of things back on land. Dag’s anxiety over what happened with Crane has grown to a fever pitch, and he feels as if he may be losing control of himself. It’s just so easy to abuse power, especially when it seems to be for the right reasons. Fawn is worried too, and has been canvassing the local poplulation for the name of the best Lakewalker healer around, someone with enough talent they might be able to help guide Dag.

The group is consistently given the name Arkady Waterbirch, and they travel to the camp where he lives. This provides our first introduction to the Southern Lakewalker clans. The South, as we’re told, has been pretty much cleared of malices, and both the farmers and the Lakewalkers have ceased to view them as an immediate threat. The Lakewalkers especially are finding it difficult to maintain the Spartan lifestyle adopted by the northerners: they have started building houses and permanent buildings and mixing far more freely with the farmers in the area. This slow erosion of their supposedly superior culture is a source of great anxiety to the Lakewalkers themselves, and it seems like most of their reactions are informed by their guilt at succombing to farmer ways (and that, deep down, they probably don’t really want to go back.)

Our band of travellers lodge with Arkady while Dag begins learning to control his new abilities. I was pleased that we didn’t have to deal with Dag’s angsting for very long: he calmed down directly he saw Arkady had the same ability to project ground as he did. We then get a glimpse of what might have been back at Hickory Lake camp, had Hoharie agreed to Dag’s suggestion that Fawn be allowed to be his Healing assistant. Though Dag naively assumes the other Lakewalkers are getting used to Fawn and becoming more accepting of her, it’s pretty clear to the reader (and later made starkly clear to Dag) that the Lakewalkers are only humoring the whim of a skilled Healer they hope to retain. They tolerate her, it’s true, but it’s not enough on her own merit that they would ever consider associating with her without him. And so, in case the reader didn’t agree with his decision to light out on his own, we are shown that it never could have worked out any other way.

The group is soon on the move again, heading north with Arkady in tow, after a disagreement with the camp leaders generates an ultimatum and a bluff which Dag calls. And while the necessity of heading north again is clear (without malices, the need for immediate farmer/Lakewalker cooperation is less pressing and seems to be evolving naturally at its own pace), this second half of the book was much weaker than the first. Dag, Arkady, Barr and Fawn join a farmer wagon train heading north, and we’re suddenly introduced to a whole pile of new characters who are not really very distinctive and who, for me, blend together in a confusing mass. The proliferation of characters only increases when we rejoin the other half of the previous travelling group, Fawn’s brother Whit, his new wife Berry and their assorted entourage. Then still more people arrive: a small band sent out from the southern camp to try and entice Dag’s party back, an ignorant farmer family stuck on the road, and Dag’s niece Sumac and another patroller she was with.

The small army travelling along makes it hard to maintain focus. There is a reason to limit a quest group to under ten people: it’s too hard to remember and keep track of where everyone is. I have read books in the past where characters will disappear for chapters at a time (often missing conversations and actions they should certainly have been involved with) only to suddenly pop up again when the author remembers they were there. Bujold does an admirable job of not forgetting characters, but the effort of keeping track of so many different people and made this whole section less effective than the rest. It felt shallow. There was too much going on, and in a series which has made a point of being introspective and “small” in its focus, I felt like suddenly we were doing something else altogether.

The crazy amount of new characters aside, it’s in this part of the book that Dag finally makes progress at solving the problem he has pinpointed as the largest obstacle to farmer/Lakewalker cooperation: the farmers’ vulnerability to Beguilement by both Lakewalkers and Malices. He had made a small attempt at a shield earlier, but it’s only after his work with Arkady that he is competant to actually create one and make it stick. This is a good and reasonable solution to what was a seemingly intractable problem set up in the prior books, and I was pleased at the resolution.

And now a few random observations:
1. The real villain of this book was the Lakewalker Neeta rather than the malices, and I was once again very very glad not to have the plot become embroiled by some sort of stupid jealousy/misunderstanding business where someone sees something that was really innocent and overreacts. I cannot really recall any instances of this in any of the books in this series, and for that I am grateful.

2. That said, we came precipitously near to a cringe-worthy turn of events toward the end of the book where Dag is restrained by the farmers because they think he’s lost it. It was similar in feel to the scene in Legacy which I also disliked, and that is why I preferred Beguilement and Passage which had none such.

3. And finally, I end with a question: Throughout the series we’ve seen that farmers are generally named after real things: plants, animals and the like. Lakewalker given names are more fanciful and seem to have no particular origin in the real world. So what in the hell is going on with Sumac?

In Short
This was a good conclusion for the series, leaving open the possibility of further adventures but tying up all of the main plotlines in a satisfying way. After the very strong third book, I found some parts of this book a bit of a let down, but it was never bad and there was much to like.