the owl and the olive tree

In the seven kingdoms of Graceling, some children develop eyes of two different colors—and those children will grow up to have extraordinary talents. Some are unparalleled cooks, some are inhumanly skilled acrobats, some can do complicated math in their heads, instantly. These people, called Gracelings, are given to the service of their country's royal family, where they use their skills to the benefit of the king.

Katsa has one blue eye and one green eye, and her Grace is killing. She is the weapon of her uncle, King Randa—and she hates it: hates being a killer, hates that he uses her to hurt and scare his people, hates that everyone looks at her with fear. So she decides, secretly, to use her power to help people instead of hurt them, which in turn embroils her in her country's politics.

My favorite thing about this book was Katsa: she is incredibly competent at some things (one of those being 'hurting and killing people,' to her dismay), but she's also incredibly not-competent at some other things, like understanding people and getting along with them. She's sharp and prickly, expects people to be afraid of her (and to some extent is afraid of them, not that they'll hurt her physically but that they'll act in ways she doesn't understand and can't control), tends towards isolation, and is kinder than she can give herself credit for. She's a good person, but not a particularly friendly one, and I liked that. I also liked that, while she has plenty of flaws and places where she's not the best ever, she gets to be super skilled at what she is super skilled at without being taken down a notch. (It also helps that, although she's supremely skilled, the challenges that the plot throws at her are appropriate for her skills. She still can't breeze through them.) And she gets more and more agency through the book, including through her romance subplot, which I liked.

I also liked her love interest, but I'll have to talk more about that behind the spoiler wall.

The Graces were a very interesting thing, too—similar to many other takes on 'magical powers granted at birth,' but with a few interesting twists. For one thing, just because you're Graced with something doesn't mean you like it. Someone Graced with cooking might very well hate cooking, just as Katsa, Graced with killing, isn't herself a sociopathic murderer. For another thing, the plot really does face the bad side of having some people born with incredible powers; when someone monstrous winds up with a strong Grace, the results are horrifying. (This is also something I liked in How To Ditch Your Fairy, which I'll write about later.) It was a nice change from books in which mages clearly could take over the world, but for some reason just... don't.

The book was not without flaws. While the prose style was very clean and readable, it fell flat in places, and sometimes seemed unpolished. (I am pleased to say that Fire is better in this regard; I think Cashore is learning as she goes, which makes sense for a first and second book.) The worldbuilding also felt generic medievalesque (heck, the countries are named Wester, Estill, Nander, Sunder, and Middluns, if that gives you an idea), with the exception of the Graces. Actually, one country -- Lienid -- gets more detail than the others, and I liked it better but I'm afraid the more detail there threw the flatter worldbuilding in the rest of the world into sharper relief. I think I am getting pickier about generic medievaloid—I don't mind medieval, as long as it has some actual flavor, rather than just horses-and-castles-okay-we're-done. But the flaws were minor enough that they didn't take away from what I loved, which was the characters.

This is a book that I think really merits from being unspoiled, so unless you've already read it or you're pretty sure you won't read the book, I'd avoid reading on.

( Spoilers have one blue eye and one green eye )

Recommended, especially if you like light-ish YA fantasy. This is one of the books that I read in one evening, and I grabbed the next book (which is actually a prequel) as soon as it came out.

First, a note: yes, I've ready many books between now and the last time I posted. Most of them were non-fiction, because I was on a fit of not reading a lot of fiction. (I do that, sometimes, when I'm brewing a story idea.) I recently got back into reading fiction, with a vengeance -- mostly YA fantasy -- and I realized that if I went back and tried to blog all the nonfiction I've read between June and now, I'll just never do it. So we'll start with this, which I read a week ago and loved, and I may backtrack to blog some particular favorites.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I heard a lot about this book and how good it was, and, short version: everyone was right. This book is very, very good.

Long version.

Katniss lives with her mother and sister in District Twelve of Panem, a nation that arose out of the ashes of post-apocalyptic North America. Seventy-five-ish years before the story, the Districts tried to rise up against the despotic Capitol -- and failed. To keep the Districts in their place, to reinforce how utterly the Capitol owned them, the Capitol instituted the Hunger Games, in which two teenagers would be drawn by lottery each year to compete. The twenty-four adolescents are set to kill one another, with only one survivor, the "winner."

This year, for District Twelve, the lot for the girl fell... to Katniss's younger sister Prim.

Katniss volunteered to take her place.

My favorite thing about the book was Katniss, hands down. She's strong, clever, resourceful, courageous, and calculating -- all without losing her essential humanity, despite the horrors of the Game. She's hard and tough and yet has her moments of sweetness and even vulnerability. And she's smart, and skilled -- because she lives on the edge of wilderness, she has unusual skills at hunting, foraging, and making shelter, and those skills are both effective and realistically portrayed. She's just, oh. Wonderful. And wonderful without being perfect -- flawed without her flaws being stupid or contrived. The book is worth reading just for Katniss.

The plot is straightforward but breakneck in pacing -- I read this book in two great gulps: one night I stayed up until I actually fell asleep on the book, and then the next morning I finished it before I started work. It really was a very compelling read.

( And now I need to spoiler cut to continue discussing. )

In summary: I really, really loved this, and I have already pre-ordered Catching Fire, the sequel. Highly, highly recommended.

Ghostwalk, by Rebecca Stott

This wasn't a book for me. That doesn't mean it was a bad book -- it just wasn't for me.

Shortly after her mentor Elizabeth dies by drowning, Lydia is asked by her mentor's son -- the man with whom she, not coincidentally, carried on an affair some years before -- to complete Elizabeth's magnum opus, a book about Newton's involvement with alchemy and with secretive alchemical circles. However, it rapidly becomes clear that Elizabeth's death was not an accident, but a murder, and furthermore a murder that ties into a three-hundred-year-old conspiracy.

The problem I had was twofold. One: I apparently lack the gene or acculturation or whatever that makes men who are smarmy, arrogant, lying jerks seem attractive. Lydia's lover -- Elizabeth's son -- is kind of... a jackass, and it's clear that I'm supposed to feel sympathetic to Lydia (and other female characters) for being so magnetically drawn to him, but I'm... not particularly. I mean, I feel bad for them that he lied to them and treated them badly, but then they kept going back and then acting surprised when he, you know, continued to lie to them and manipulate them for his own purposes, and I rapidly lost patience. C'mon! He's always been lying to everyone, including you! Why does this continue to be a surprise? I realize that a lot of people do find that attractive, but it didn't work for me, and in addition to meaning that I disliked the man himself (a fairly major character), it also gradually eroded my fondness for the female characters who kept coming back to be condescended to and jerked around.

Two: Some time ago, when reviewing a YA book about a roller derby girl (I think), buymeaclue coined the phrase "Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby." In this book, it was "Too much midlife crisis, not enough alchemy." I find history, the politics of historians, and the history of science and alchemy in early modern Europe really interesting! I kept feeling like I was wading through a lot of upper-middle-class moaning about Life to get to it. Again, not something that I would consider a universal bad, just... not for me.

The alchemy stuff was interesting (it's something I studied myself, once upon a time), and I don't have too many complaints about that. I mean, I think the author overdramatized some stuff (yes, early scientists spent a lot of time on alchemy, because they considered it a valid science, but that doesn't mean that they were all nuts, just that they were misinformed about some chemistry; yes, early scientists/alchemists were very secretive, but -- well, so are a lot of modern research scientists), but overdramatizing stuff for the sake of the story is fine. It felt a bit as though she was trying to rejigger an already-interesting idea to be a bit more da Vinci Code, though, which didn't help my perceptions all that much. But... yeah, if the story had been centered the history, I would have been fine. It just wasn't.

Anyway. Not a bad book, just not a book for me, because the characters were all wrong to get my sympathy and without sympathizing with the characters I don't get very far. (I probably would have put it back down fairly early on, in fact, if it weren't that it was my book club book for March.)

Running Tally:

Total Books: 20
Fiction: 7
Non-Fiction: 13
POC Author: 6

Clay's Ark, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

This was a hard book to read. It was rewarding, but oh my goodness, it was hard.

As Blake Maslin and his daughters Keira and Rane travel across the desert of California, they're stopped by armed men. This, while horrible, isn't that unusual a possibility in their dystopian future USA (the setting is some time after Mind of My Mind, but before Patternmaster): in between walled safe zones, extreme gang violence runs rampant, and traveling through those areas -- even armed, in a car -- is extremely dangerous. But the people who stopped them aren't a car family, and their goal isn't robbery, kidnapping, or murder. Instead, the kidnappers take the three back to their farmstead, where they discover what this group really is.

The farm is home to a group of people, small but growing, who were infected by an alien organism. The organism changes them -- enhances them in specifically physical ways. They're stronger and faster than normal people; they have better reflexes; they are physically tough to the point of being extraordinarily difficult to hurt; they have enhanced senses, particularly hearing and smell. But the infection also drives them to spread itself, both by infecting others and by breeding. And yet -- despite the infection that has changed their bodies and that fills them with unbearable, undeniable urges -- they're still people. They still have their consciences, and their memories, and the interests and desires they had before. Their personalities are just overlaid by a set of literally alien and very animal urges.

The bulk of the book is about their conflict, between the undeniable impulse to spread 'their' kind and their desire to remain human, and to avoid spreading the infection to the rest of the world. And that's the most terrifying thing about it: the bearers of the disease, the agents of this change (and indeed of the kidnappings that keep it going) are so sympathetic, they're trying so hard to stay themselves. What hurts the most is watching them fight and fight for their humanity, even as it slowly erodes.

Before going into the spoiler cut, I will say: this book is very depressing, and it's also brutal in places. Horrible, violent things happen; the violence is never glorified, but it also isn't glossed over; it was very difficult going. I warn not because I think people shouldn't read this, but because I was glad of having been warned myself. I think I would have found it impossible in places if I hadn't been prepared for it.

( Spoilers below the cut. )

I'd recommend this one, too. But I lined up a comfort reread for after I finished, and I think that might not be a bad idea for others.

Running Tally:

Total Books: 16
Fiction: 5
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 5

Patternmaster, by Octavia Butler (Link goes to the "Seed to Harvest", the omnibus addition of all four books of the quartet.)

This was the first book of the Seed to Harvest quartet by publication date -- and the last one by internal chronology. I read it first for two reasons. One, unless I get a strong indication otherwise, I tend to read things by publishing order -- partly because I like to see the author develop, but also partly because there's more a guarantee that they make sense in that order, because they were presumably written to make sense to people who were reading them as they came out. (Unless they were very bad books indeed, but I don't expect that from Butler.) Two, because my general inclination was reinforced by other people, who said that they read better in publication order. And having read all four books, I think they were right, and I too would recommend that you read them in publication order rather than internal chronology.

I'm going to try to refer to each one without spoilers for the others, and then I'll post about all four of the books considered as a whole, because they stand along perfectly well but gain a lot of richness and depth when you consider them in context.

So: Patternmaster.

Patternmaster is set in... I can't actually tell how far in the future, because the changes to our world are so dramatic that it could be a hundred years or five hundred. (Indeed, I initially thought that it was set on another planet, the world was so different than the one I know.) Patternmaster is set in a future in which the human species has split into two... I was going to say "factions," but really, they're actually two new, separate species: the clayarks, people mutated by an alien microorganism, who are strong and tough and fast and make and use weapons and other technologies; and the patternists, who are psionicists of varying stripes, who use mental powers (including telepathy, telekinesis, healing/biomanipulation, and the ability to store memories in objects) instead of engineering as we know it. "Normal" humans -- people like you or me -- also exist; they're called "mutes" and are servants of the patternists. (There are no normal humans among the clayarks, because the clayark disease is extremely infectious.)

As you could probably guess from the title, Patternmaster is from the point of view of a patternist, Teray, who falls afoul of the strict rules of his traditional society and the political maneuvering therein, and becomes an "outsider" (essentially, a slave) to Coransee, an extremely powerful (politically and psionically) master of a House. The book is about his struggle to reassert his independence, and it's about the way he allies with an Independent -- a patternist who isn't subject to any House master, Amber. Amber is powerful, intelligent, and tough -- she's a healer, but she subverts the 'woman healer' stereotype by also being an extremely effective killer -- and, indeed, I think she's the strongest character in the book. The developing relationship between Teray and Amber serves as both the heart and the backbone of Patternmaster

Besides Amber, the most interesting thing about this book for me was the worldbuilding and the society, which is dystopian and yet fascinating, even for me (I'm picky about dystopian/post-apocalyptic futures). I find the nature of the 'disaster' really interesting: not one but two radical changes to humanity. (Indeed, I find it particularly cool that Butler put both the clayarks and the patternists in this world -- either idea could have spawned a series, but both together creates a richness and sense of conflict that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. The patternists and the clayarks both are extremely potent, but neither is quite strong enough to get the upper hand over the other -- and yet their very natures makes it impossible for them to stop fighting.) We see only glimpses of clayark society, because the protagonists see (indeed, for their own self-preservation, kind of have to see) the clayarks as inherently inimical, kill-or-be-killed. But patternist society is extremely interesting in its own right. Patternists live in Houses, run by powerful Masters, for their own protection against the clayarks. Within the house, there's a heriarchy: the Master on top, his apprentices beneath him, outsiders (slaves, but with psionic powers) beneath them, and mutes beneath them. (The position of women is more unclear to me: it appears that patternist women, in Houses with male Masters, are wives of varying degree of status -- it's not clear whether there are any female apprentices or outsiders who are not wives. It's also not totally clear what the status of men and women are in Houses run by women, which definitely exist.)

And then there's the Pattern, a really fascinating look at the way a telepathic society would exit. All patternists are linked together by the Pattern, although for the most part, only fellow House members are closely aware of one another. People who are sympatico, who are compatible in personality and metal attitude, are said to be close together in the Pattern, something that they can feel immediately and instinctively. It's a world in which you can tell immediately whether you're likely to get along with someone -- and that immediate awareness is acknowledged, and used.

( Spoilery stuff behind the cut. )

As far as recommendations go: Patternmaster is exceptional science fiction. It's not as good as the books in the series that would follow it, which in my opinion get better and better, but it's a good entry point to the series. (And I do recommend that you use it as the entry point: working in internal-chronology order rather than publication order would, in my opinion, be a mistake.)

Running Tally:

Total Books: 14
Fiction: 3
Non-Fiction: 11
POC Author: 3

His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik

And finally, some fiction!

I admit: it took me so long to read this book in part because I'd had it recommended from all sides, and I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the hype. So I let the hype die down a little before I cracked it open -- and I'm glad I did finally read it, because this is a fun, fun book. Very enjoyable indeed.

His Majesty's Dragon begins when Napoleonic-era naval captain William Laurence captures a French ship carrying a dragon egg -- a dragon egg close to hatching. As dragons are valuable in the Aerial Corps (a kind of air force made up of dragons and their handlers) and the country is currently at war, it would be a gross waste to allow the dragon to go feral. (If a dragon doesn't accept the harness from a human hand shortly after he or she is hatched, that dragon will never voluntarily ally with humans thereafter.) The men of his ship must therefore attempt to harness the dragon, and, unfortunately for him, Laurence is the one the dragon wants. Laurence names the dragon Temeraire -- and then is snatched away from his position, the Navy, and his family, to join the mysterious Aerial Corps and fly, rather than sail, to war on behalf of England.

Because the book was billed to me as 'Napoleonic War with dragons,' I expected that the setting would make or break it for me, but that wasn't the case -- though the setting is interesting enough, it's the characters that made the book for me. Hands-down my favorite thing was the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire. It's clear from the book that, while the dragon is inclined to imprint on a particular person at hatching (much like, say, a baby duck), the imprinting isn't any kind of magical soulbond, as with other bonded-companion-animal stories. It's a friendship: a friendship predisposed to being very strong, but still, a friendship. (It has parental overtones when the dragon is new-hatched, but that fades away with time.) It takes work on the parts of both parties and yet, because of that, it is far more rewarding to me than if it had been instalove complete with rainbows and sparkles and Never Being Alone Again. (Indeed, the dragons and humans don't have any kind of telepathy or empathic bond at all, that I can see -- the dragons speak out loud, in human language, and they and their human companions bond by spending time together. And if the humans and dragons don't spend time together, their relationship gets strained and dysfunctional.) It's a really genuine, solid connection, and I love to read about strong friendships, so this just made me grin foolishly all through.

Mostly, though, I loved the book because I loved Temeraire himself. He's got a personality of his own -- smart, curious, thoughtful, sweet-tempered, a little bit elegant. He gives the impression of being very smart and dignified but also being young. He likes to read (or, well, be read to, because of the scale problem) and is fascinated by history, science, mathematics. He's just -- I love Temeraire. Really, I love that the dragon characters are characters in their own rights. The dragons Celeritas, Lily and Maximus all had distinct personalities, and while they didn't get all that much 'screen time' (all of the other characters are very much secondary to Laurence and Temeraire, who are the heart of the book), they're pretty much as well-developed as comparable human characters.

I could certainly nitpick things. It seems a bit, uh, implausible to me that the world is full of dragons, the Americas host a thriving Incan empire, and so on -- and yet those major changes haven't altered the track of history in England/France at all, such that not only is there still a Napoleonic war but all the major players seem to be the same -- and in a lot of ways Laurence is sort of too good, although he's genuinely likable enough, to me, to escape being irritating about it. But here's the thing: the book hit me in a very reading-for-fun-and-pleasure place, and though I can see the flaws, I don't want to nitpick them. I want to just spend a few hours with Laurence and Temeraire and grin at the image of Regency London with dragons flying overhead.

( Spoilers below the cut )

But yeah, this was a really good time, not deep but a quick and entertaining read. If you like fantasy, are entertained by the idea of 'Napoleonic War with dragons,' or like stories with likable characters and strong friendships, I'd recommend it. And now I have to go read the sequels!