Review: Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear.
Jul. 1st, 2007 01:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesThis is the second book of the three that I grabbed up when I took my giftcards and made for the bookstore. This time it's Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear.
I finished this book faster than I thought I would, but slower than usual. That's because I knew from the start I wouldn't be able take this book at the usual speed.
That being said, I give the book a borderline A-. It would get the full A if not for a few things, some small, some not so small. But it is a higher quality of fantasy than I've come across in a long time.
First off, I've read some of the criticism of this book and there seems to be a large portion of readers who were confused. In all fairness, I completely understand why they were confused. Most people who read this book will probably be confused.
I myself had to go back and very, very, very VERY carefully read and re-read several passages because I found myself making sidetrips to WTF-land more than I like.
But I don't know that the book is actually, in and of itself, confusing.
This is one of those books that makes the reader sweat a little. It also forces the reader to make assumptions and come to a working theory in order to move on, and most readers don't like that. They like to either be told what's going on or given some easily recognizable placeholder that basically says "raincheck for exposition. Will reveal all later, hang on, keep reading."
But Blood and Iron is not a polite book. It does what it damn well pleases, and if you have an issue with that, you can just eat your supper at somebody else's table, thanks much.
It's kind of, to use the internet vernacular, a tits or GTFO sort of book.
I liked that, and I was willing to invest the time/energy to go back and re-read things when I confused rather than giving up.
There are a lot of passages in this book (I won't bother quoting because I don't have the book at hand) that actually turn on a phrase or a single word. Thus, it doesn't serve the reader to skim.
In fact, the beginning scene with the Kelpie/Whiskey/Uisgebaugh threw me for a loop and I had to employ something I usually don't have to use in most novels.
Context clues.
What confuses most other people is what I most enjoyed about this book. You have to make guesses, you have to Sherlock Holmes your way through the situation.
For example, these passages:
The Mebd's pet curled on a velvet cushion beside her chair of estate. A naked human boy who appeared perhaps six, green eyes bright beneath a fetching mop of ebony curls, he fiddled idly with his golden collar. Seeker's eyes avoided him, and she'd learned to hide the sting of tears in her eyes. It had been the same egaging lad curled there for a quarter of a mortal century - longer in Faerie. (pg. 17)"
From what has previously been shown of Seeker, the reader might assume that Seeker is upset because she once stole the boy for the Mebd as she stole Hope.
That is, if the reader ignores that Seeker was much less emotional about taking Hope.
Because in this passage the reader is not told - at all - that the boy is Seeker's son. So her reaction is reasonable, but the reader has no way to assume that.
So the book here forces the reader to either make a guess and go on or to get frustrated.
And it's perfectly understandable why people would get frustrated. In a genre filled with very unsubtle 700 page tomes that spoon feed more information than anyone needs - this might come at a right angle to a fantasy reader.
Not to mention passages like the one in the following scene where she is talking to the comatose King Arthur:
Tenderly she brughed the disordered hair from his cheek. "Arthur, you son of a bitch. (pg. 19)"
Her voice came out low, snarled as neglected ribbons. "You could have been the best of all of them. I know the price. But did it have to be the babies?"
It is not until much, much later that we are informed that Arthur actually once got his King Herod on and killed all the male babies in his kingdom trying to root out a challenge to his rule, and that this is part of his fate because he's a Dragon Prince. Unless you're familiar with the most esoteric bits of the King Arthur legend, this bit of the scene will make no sense to you.
So, you, the reader have two choices. You either make a few assumptions, "Okay, Arthur must have killed some babies once, I'm sure we'll hear more about this later" and move on or you just stop.
I didn't stop.
That's to say nothing of the fact that the reader would have to be particularly sharp to put together the very thin clues that would tell you that Elaine and Keith have a son together, and that son was the one sitting by the Queen.
Another example is the brownies. If you don't know a damn thing about fairies, you might for a moment (especially if you're American) imagine helpful, civically minded little girls in adorable uniforms that sell special cookies once a year. Hey, Faerie steals lots of children and maybe they really, really like Thin Mintsbecause they are THE BEST COOKIE EVAR.
Or you might imagine walking, magical baked goods that serve as chambermaids, if you're Not As Warped As I Am.
At no point are brownies ever explained, described, or dwelt upon. So, you either have to (in the absence of knowing what brownies are) assume that they're a kind of faerie thing and move on or you're sitting there with your cookie peddling prepubscents/your delicious, moist Betty Crocker and the novel ceases to make sense.
It's not a really big deal. Most intelligent people can make that sort of leap for themselves, but there are places where the leaps are MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger and harder to make. Especially because they involve the complex, ever shifting mythology of Faerie.
Sometimes you just have to say, in this novel, "I guess its a Faerie thing" and get on with it.
That whole spiel about context clues and GTFO-age aside, there were a few places/things that tried even my patience. One of those things was the constant switching of names.
Many people in this book have multiple names, for instance Whiskey/Uisgebaugh/the Kelpie. And while Whiskey and the Kelpie aren't his Name, in the world the reader inhabits, your name is basically what you're called instead of just, "Hey, you."
So, to the reader, his name is Whiskey and the Kelpie and Uisgebaugh.
Though it most irritated me with Arthur who is also Ard Ri (a term that is never really explained, and I'm not sure if it's a name, a title or a mix between the two).
While I don't mind finding out the characters have different names, I would've appreciated if the author would have picked the one she liked best and stuck with it, because it's a little irritating to see three names thrown out in a paragraph and realize they're all talking about the same person, especially if it's one of those passages where a lot of Multiple Namers are there and suddenly you've got twenty names in the conversation and only three people.
While the mythology is rich (sometimes to the point of being too rich, like an oversweet icing) and definitely a challenge, the best part of this novel was the characters. I really loved them, even though I tend to shy away from novels where everyone is a bad guy.
And yes, by our moral standards, everyone is a bad guy. There's a lot of discussion of survival, the morality of survival, wolves and lambs and so on and so forth. The moral arguments don't hold up for me, and felt flimsy and a bit self-serving.
But what made the badness/ruthlessness palatable was that it had consequences, and nobody really got to enjoy the fruits of their evil. Even the Mebd, who was as close to a supreme villian as the novel ever gets, pays for her transgressions and has thorns in her side. She's not revelling in the evil things she does.
Nobody here is having fun doing evil.
These people, especially Seeker/Keith/Matthew/Jane would probably go off and be nice, law abiding, compassionate people if they had that choice, but they don't. And that's what makes them sympathetic to me. They're doing wrong/evil because there's nothing else left.
Although, while we're speaking about things People Have To Do (geas, as the novel puts it) - there's a discussion of how the Dragon Prince story always ends the same that irked me a bit. In a world built on stories, songs, and poems that are ever changing, does it occur to NONE of these people to maybe REWRITE THEIR OWN STORY?
One thing that tires me out quickly in any book is the idea of someone Big Damn Tragic Fate. It's not necessarily because it offends my sensibilities concerning free will, but it offends my sensibilities concerning common sense, because usually it involves the characters giving into irrational angst and stupidity.
I really would have liked a concrete reason besides Big Damn Fate that Elaine and Keith couldn't have just run off to a small town in Kansas and left it all behind. Giving Harold's failed defense of England as a reason that living in a cave as a hermit won't get you out of Dragon Prince duty doesn't square with me.
Nevertheless, I really did like these characters. I like them because they were, for the most part, plausible and when they weren't plausible they were entertaining and interesting.
So, if the characters were so good and the prose was (mostly) grade A, why did I tack on a minus?
I'm glad you asked.
The novel doesn't get the full A for a handful of reasons.
1) On page 275 the novel shifts person-POV. And I don't mean from one character to another. I mean it goes, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PAGE, from third person to first person. We don't even get a chapter break to let us know what's up.
It knocked me out of the novel like a kid on a bike getting thrown ass over handlebars when they hit a pothole in the road.
I stopped reading, checked back and forth, skimmed further chapters to make sure it wasn't a minor editing error or something. It was the single most confusing part of the novel, and I didn't think there was any good reason for it.
I'm sure there are lots of dramatic/meta reasons for having Elaine go to first person when she gives her heart and name up to the Kelpie, but frankly, not enough to justify something so sudden that it actually scares me out of the novel.
Let me paint you a metaphor. Going from third to first like that is like shifting from Drive to Neutral while going 80 mph on the highway, in the middle of traffic. There's no reason you could give me for that.
Especially when the subsequent first person narration is much less impressive. The first person story as told by Elaine really didn't illuminate the novel or show anything that a third person POV couldn't have accomplished just as well.
2) The only character I didn't like was Carel. She felt very flat and a little annoying to me. Probably because she gave off Mary Sue vibes (for those not of the fanfic cabal, that means that sometimes she was too talented/perfect/etc for my liking). Also, any character who breaks out singing and suddenly manages to sway lots of people with her Melodious Voice sets off Mary Sue alarms.
She also did not seem to have any respect for Faerie or how dangerous, deadly, amoral, and downright evil it could be. There were too many moments of "ooh, Faerie is so pretty!" that annoyed me because I've spent the novel realizing just how dark and horrible Faerie really is.
Not only that, but the back of the book made the Merlin/Carel sound way more important than she ended up being. The back of the book made it sound like the entire plot revolved around getting Carel to help Faerie.
Uh, nope. Carel pretty much is seduced by Faerie in two chapters.
3) The Prometheus Club was woefully underdeveloped and Jane Andraste was villianized in a way that grated on my nerves, because she didn't deserve it.
I identified with and liked Jane and the Prometheus Club probably a whole lot more than I was ever supposed to. Their motives, more than anyone else's, were pure. Especially after you consider the scene where Matthew and Kadiska get into a fight over the baby.
Kadiska, rather than get caught, throws a baby. Not only does Faerie still children to save itself, but it doesn't seem to give a damn about their well being or happiness.
This is what Faerie is doing. They're taking children, a lot of them have horrible lives once they get to Faerie. They terrorize people because they have to. They hurt people because they literally don't have the capacity to love.
Stopping them is, in and of itself, a Good Thing. Deserving or not, a Faerie court of maybe a few thousand is outweighed by billions of innocent people who deserve not to be terrorized.
I got the feeling that really, the justification for keeping Faerie around was "but they're really pretty and old and they sing ballads and we have lots of stories about them."
I never thought of the Prometheus Club as the bad guys, and I wanted them to win. I wanted them to cut Faerie off. I didn't want Elaine and her bunch destroyed, but I agreed with her in the beginning. I see nothing wrong with destroying Faerie.
Although, notice how that changed when she became Queen.
4) The ballads got on my nerves. I realize they're central to the themes of the Faerie court, but they didn't justify being that central.
They were sort of ill placed, prose-wise. There were times when characters thought of or quoted ballads in ways that felt utterly awkward and distanced me from the character.
Perhaps I'm not musical enough, but I don't start thinking of song lyrics in moments of angst. Maybe it's just me, but I tend to focus on the angst. I've never just bust out with lines from 15th century ballads while meditating on the ironies of my love life. Not even once.
Most people probably don't. I'm sure people get songs stuck in their heads, but the way it's presented in the novel jars me right out.
5) Before I say this let me state, firmly: I DO NOT know what the author's intentions are. They are not mine to guess at. I make no presumptions about what the author thinks, believes, feels.
I can only say what I perceived in this novel.
And in this novel I saw a kind of whitewashing that made me cringe at some points.
I found it a little irksome that Faerie is presented as real, when Faerie only represents a small portion of the mythology of the world.
The world is a big place and Western mythos is actually quite small in the grand scheme. The idea of troublesome spirits/faeries and Big Damn Fate is not exclusively European.
Yes, there's a dragon, but the rest of the Court is ripped straight from medieval Europe. Hello, did we miss the rest of world mythology? There are plenty of equally unpronounceable names from say, China and Africa and India and the Middle East.
I think a djinn would've been nice. White Buffalo Woman, anyone? Have you heard of Anansi the spider?
It annoyed me that it seemed like the entirety of magic in the world was represented by only one culture's mythology.
Even if you don't make that assumption and you, in a moment of generosity, assume that the White Buffalo woman and Anansi are all holding court somewhere else in their own magical lands - it still very much annoys me that Faerie/the Prometheus Club are the ones who hold the world's fate in their hands. As if everyone else's mythos was impotent and unimportant.
This novel might have been better served by diversity. It wraps itself in one single set of mythology to the point of reaching into some very obscure areas that frankly don't serve the superb story and characters like they should have been served.
I say this as someone who spent an obscene amount of time studying this sort of mythology in a university setting, and even I - with my exposure and my shelf full of books on the subject - sometimes got thrown by the obscurity.
For those reasons, the novel does not win the full A grade, but it does get higher than a B for characters, for context clues, and for the way this novel doggedly did not compromise what it meant to do. This is a high intensity read, and it is not a beach book or an airplane book. You can't skim it while you're waiting for the final boarding call.
So if you want that kind of read, go check the airport gift shop. But if you want something that will flip your brain into high gear and take you to some fantastically twisty places? Get your hands on this book, stat.
There's a sequel that has a release date of July 3rd of this year, although I can tell you that Barnes & Noble and a few other places have had it in stores for a while now.
I will most definitely be picking up the sequel once I get the opportunity, and I would recommend you do the same.
I finished this book faster than I thought I would, but slower than usual. That's because I knew from the start I wouldn't be able take this book at the usual speed.
That being said, I give the book a borderline A-. It would get the full A if not for a few things, some small, some not so small. But it is a higher quality of fantasy than I've come across in a long time.
First off, I've read some of the criticism of this book and there seems to be a large portion of readers who were confused. In all fairness, I completely understand why they were confused. Most people who read this book will probably be confused.
I myself had to go back and very, very, very VERY carefully read and re-read several passages because I found myself making sidetrips to WTF-land more than I like.
But I don't know that the book is actually, in and of itself, confusing.
This is one of those books that makes the reader sweat a little. It also forces the reader to make assumptions and come to a working theory in order to move on, and most readers don't like that. They like to either be told what's going on or given some easily recognizable placeholder that basically says "raincheck for exposition. Will reveal all later, hang on, keep reading."
But Blood and Iron is not a polite book. It does what it damn well pleases, and if you have an issue with that, you can just eat your supper at somebody else's table, thanks much.
It's kind of, to use the internet vernacular, a tits or GTFO sort of book.
I liked that, and I was willing to invest the time/energy to go back and re-read things when I confused rather than giving up.
There are a lot of passages in this book (I won't bother quoting because I don't have the book at hand) that actually turn on a phrase or a single word. Thus, it doesn't serve the reader to skim.
In fact, the beginning scene with the Kelpie/Whiskey/Uisgebaugh threw me for a loop and I had to employ something I usually don't have to use in most novels.
Context clues.
What confuses most other people is what I most enjoyed about this book. You have to make guesses, you have to Sherlock Holmes your way through the situation.
For example, these passages:
The Mebd's pet curled on a velvet cushion beside her chair of estate. A naked human boy who appeared perhaps six, green eyes bright beneath a fetching mop of ebony curls, he fiddled idly with his golden collar. Seeker's eyes avoided him, and she'd learned to hide the sting of tears in her eyes. It had been the same egaging lad curled there for a quarter of a mortal century - longer in Faerie. (pg. 17)"
From what has previously been shown of Seeker, the reader might assume that Seeker is upset because she once stole the boy for the Mebd as she stole Hope.
That is, if the reader ignores that Seeker was much less emotional about taking Hope.
Because in this passage the reader is not told - at all - that the boy is Seeker's son. So her reaction is reasonable, but the reader has no way to assume that.
So the book here forces the reader to either make a guess and go on or to get frustrated.
And it's perfectly understandable why people would get frustrated. In a genre filled with very unsubtle 700 page tomes that spoon feed more information than anyone needs - this might come at a right angle to a fantasy reader.
Not to mention passages like the one in the following scene where she is talking to the comatose King Arthur:
Tenderly she brughed the disordered hair from his cheek. "Arthur, you son of a bitch. (pg. 19)"
Her voice came out low, snarled as neglected ribbons. "You could have been the best of all of them. I know the price. But did it have to be the babies?"
It is not until much, much later that we are informed that Arthur actually once got his King Herod on and killed all the male babies in his kingdom trying to root out a challenge to his rule, and that this is part of his fate because he's a Dragon Prince. Unless you're familiar with the most esoteric bits of the King Arthur legend, this bit of the scene will make no sense to you.
So, you, the reader have two choices. You either make a few assumptions, "Okay, Arthur must have killed some babies once, I'm sure we'll hear more about this later" and move on or you just stop.
I didn't stop.
That's to say nothing of the fact that the reader would have to be particularly sharp to put together the very thin clues that would tell you that Elaine and Keith have a son together, and that son was the one sitting by the Queen.
Another example is the brownies. If you don't know a damn thing about fairies, you might for a moment (especially if you're American) imagine helpful, civically minded little girls in adorable uniforms that sell special cookies once a year. Hey, Faerie steals lots of children and maybe they really, really like Thin Mints
Or you might imagine walking, magical baked goods that serve as chambermaids, if you're Not As Warped As I Am.
At no point are brownies ever explained, described, or dwelt upon. So, you either have to (in the absence of knowing what brownies are) assume that they're a kind of faerie thing and move on or you're sitting there with your cookie peddling prepubscents/your delicious, moist Betty Crocker and the novel ceases to make sense.
It's not a really big deal. Most intelligent people can make that sort of leap for themselves, but there are places where the leaps are MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger and harder to make. Especially because they involve the complex, ever shifting mythology of Faerie.
Sometimes you just have to say, in this novel, "I guess its a Faerie thing" and get on with it.
That whole spiel about context clues and GTFO-age aside, there were a few places/things that tried even my patience. One of those things was the constant switching of names.
Many people in this book have multiple names, for instance Whiskey/Uisgebaugh/the Kelpie. And while Whiskey and the Kelpie aren't his Name, in the world the reader inhabits, your name is basically what you're called instead of just, "Hey, you."
So, to the reader, his name is Whiskey and the Kelpie and Uisgebaugh.
Though it most irritated me with Arthur who is also Ard Ri (a term that is never really explained, and I'm not sure if it's a name, a title or a mix between the two).
While I don't mind finding out the characters have different names, I would've appreciated if the author would have picked the one she liked best and stuck with it, because it's a little irritating to see three names thrown out in a paragraph and realize they're all talking about the same person, especially if it's one of those passages where a lot of Multiple Namers are there and suddenly you've got twenty names in the conversation and only three people.
While the mythology is rich (sometimes to the point of being too rich, like an oversweet icing) and definitely a challenge, the best part of this novel was the characters. I really loved them, even though I tend to shy away from novels where everyone is a bad guy.
And yes, by our moral standards, everyone is a bad guy. There's a lot of discussion of survival, the morality of survival, wolves and lambs and so on and so forth. The moral arguments don't hold up for me, and felt flimsy and a bit self-serving.
But what made the badness/ruthlessness palatable was that it had consequences, and nobody really got to enjoy the fruits of their evil. Even the Mebd, who was as close to a supreme villian as the novel ever gets, pays for her transgressions and has thorns in her side. She's not revelling in the evil things she does.
Nobody here is having fun doing evil.
These people, especially Seeker/Keith/Matthew/Jane would probably go off and be nice, law abiding, compassionate people if they had that choice, but they don't. And that's what makes them sympathetic to me. They're doing wrong/evil because there's nothing else left.
Although, while we're speaking about things People Have To Do (geas, as the novel puts it) - there's a discussion of how the Dragon Prince story always ends the same that irked me a bit. In a world built on stories, songs, and poems that are ever changing, does it occur to NONE of these people to maybe REWRITE THEIR OWN STORY?
One thing that tires me out quickly in any book is the idea of someone Big Damn Tragic Fate. It's not necessarily because it offends my sensibilities concerning free will, but it offends my sensibilities concerning common sense, because usually it involves the characters giving into irrational angst and stupidity.
I really would have liked a concrete reason besides Big Damn Fate that Elaine and Keith couldn't have just run off to a small town in Kansas and left it all behind. Giving Harold's failed defense of England as a reason that living in a cave as a hermit won't get you out of Dragon Prince duty doesn't square with me.
Nevertheless, I really did like these characters. I like them because they were, for the most part, plausible and when they weren't plausible they were entertaining and interesting.
So, if the characters were so good and the prose was (mostly) grade A, why did I tack on a minus?
I'm glad you asked.
The novel doesn't get the full A for a handful of reasons.
1) On page 275 the novel shifts person-POV. And I don't mean from one character to another. I mean it goes, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PAGE, from third person to first person. We don't even get a chapter break to let us know what's up.
It knocked me out of the novel like a kid on a bike getting thrown ass over handlebars when they hit a pothole in the road.
I stopped reading, checked back and forth, skimmed further chapters to make sure it wasn't a minor editing error or something. It was the single most confusing part of the novel, and I didn't think there was any good reason for it.
I'm sure there are lots of dramatic/meta reasons for having Elaine go to first person when she gives her heart and name up to the Kelpie, but frankly, not enough to justify something so sudden that it actually scares me out of the novel.
Let me paint you a metaphor. Going from third to first like that is like shifting from Drive to Neutral while going 80 mph on the highway, in the middle of traffic. There's no reason you could give me for that.
Especially when the subsequent first person narration is much less impressive. The first person story as told by Elaine really didn't illuminate the novel or show anything that a third person POV couldn't have accomplished just as well.
2) The only character I didn't like was Carel. She felt very flat and a little annoying to me. Probably because she gave off Mary Sue vibes (for those not of the fanfic cabal, that means that sometimes she was too talented/perfect/etc for my liking). Also, any character who breaks out singing and suddenly manages to sway lots of people with her Melodious Voice sets off Mary Sue alarms.
She also did not seem to have any respect for Faerie or how dangerous, deadly, amoral, and downright evil it could be. There were too many moments of "ooh, Faerie is so pretty!" that annoyed me because I've spent the novel realizing just how dark and horrible Faerie really is.
Not only that, but the back of the book made the Merlin/Carel sound way more important than she ended up being. The back of the book made it sound like the entire plot revolved around getting Carel to help Faerie.
Uh, nope. Carel pretty much is seduced by Faerie in two chapters.
3) The Prometheus Club was woefully underdeveloped and Jane Andraste was villianized in a way that grated on my nerves, because she didn't deserve it.
I identified with and liked Jane and the Prometheus Club probably a whole lot more than I was ever supposed to. Their motives, more than anyone else's, were pure. Especially after you consider the scene where Matthew and Kadiska get into a fight over the baby.
Kadiska, rather than get caught, throws a baby. Not only does Faerie still children to save itself, but it doesn't seem to give a damn about their well being or happiness.
This is what Faerie is doing. They're taking children, a lot of them have horrible lives once they get to Faerie. They terrorize people because they have to. They hurt people because they literally don't have the capacity to love.
Stopping them is, in and of itself, a Good Thing. Deserving or not, a Faerie court of maybe a few thousand is outweighed by billions of innocent people who deserve not to be terrorized.
I got the feeling that really, the justification for keeping Faerie around was "but they're really pretty and old and they sing ballads and we have lots of stories about them."
I never thought of the Prometheus Club as the bad guys, and I wanted them to win. I wanted them to cut Faerie off. I didn't want Elaine and her bunch destroyed, but I agreed with her in the beginning. I see nothing wrong with destroying Faerie.
Although, notice how that changed when she became Queen.
4) The ballads got on my nerves. I realize they're central to the themes of the Faerie court, but they didn't justify being that central.
They were sort of ill placed, prose-wise. There were times when characters thought of or quoted ballads in ways that felt utterly awkward and distanced me from the character.
Perhaps I'm not musical enough, but I don't start thinking of song lyrics in moments of angst. Maybe it's just me, but I tend to focus on the angst. I've never just bust out with lines from 15th century ballads while meditating on the ironies of my love life. Not even once.
Most people probably don't. I'm sure people get songs stuck in their heads, but the way it's presented in the novel jars me right out.
5) Before I say this let me state, firmly: I DO NOT know what the author's intentions are. They are not mine to guess at. I make no presumptions about what the author thinks, believes, feels.
I can only say what I perceived in this novel.
And in this novel I saw a kind of whitewashing that made me cringe at some points.
I found it a little irksome that Faerie is presented as real, when Faerie only represents a small portion of the mythology of the world.
The world is a big place and Western mythos is actually quite small in the grand scheme. The idea of troublesome spirits/faeries and Big Damn Fate is not exclusively European.
Yes, there's a dragon, but the rest of the Court is ripped straight from medieval Europe. Hello, did we miss the rest of world mythology? There are plenty of equally unpronounceable names from say, China and Africa and India and the Middle East.
I think a djinn would've been nice. White Buffalo Woman, anyone? Have you heard of Anansi the spider?
It annoyed me that it seemed like the entirety of magic in the world was represented by only one culture's mythology.
Even if you don't make that assumption and you, in a moment of generosity, assume that the White Buffalo woman and Anansi are all holding court somewhere else in their own magical lands - it still very much annoys me that Faerie/the Prometheus Club are the ones who hold the world's fate in their hands. As if everyone else's mythos was impotent and unimportant.
This novel might have been better served by diversity. It wraps itself in one single set of mythology to the point of reaching into some very obscure areas that frankly don't serve the superb story and characters like they should have been served.
I say this as someone who spent an obscene amount of time studying this sort of mythology in a university setting, and even I - with my exposure and my shelf full of books on the subject - sometimes got thrown by the obscurity.
For those reasons, the novel does not win the full A grade, but it does get higher than a B for characters, for context clues, and for the way this novel doggedly did not compromise what it meant to do. This is a high intensity read, and it is not a beach book or an airplane book. You can't skim it while you're waiting for the final boarding call.
So if you want that kind of read, go check the airport gift shop. But if you want something that will flip your brain into high gear and take you to some fantastically twisty places? Get your hands on this book, stat.
There's a sequel that has a release date of July 3rd of this year, although I can tell you that Barnes & Noble and a few other places have had it in stores for a while now.
I will most definitely be picking up the sequel once I get the opportunity, and I would recommend you do the same.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 05:25 pm (UTC)Hee! Cute.
And...wow. I would love to see a wide-ranging Faerie Court. That's a fabulous idea.
Uh. Mind if I gank it, possibly, somewhere down the line?
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 05:33 pm (UTC)Even though I'm not sure it's even my idea. But yeah, I'd love to see it done!