Fantasy: The Paper Magician, Charlie N. Holmberg

The Paper Magician
Charlie N. Holmberg
ISBN: 9781477823835
Read January 16, 2015
Vaguely Victorian, vaguely steampunk, world with vague characters & vague setting that all leech the interest value of a really nifty magical system.

I really wanted to like this so much more than I did.  It promised Victorian manners and magical origami, and "forbidden" necromantic magics!  Sadly, it didn't really deliver.

First off, it was a quick, easy, read.  It wasn't written poorly in a grammatical or technical sense, no typos or fragments or strange jump-cuts.  It all flowed quite well.

All of which wouldn't normally be considered an accomplishment, except that the actual story and plotting seem very much in need of an editor, or perhaps a more experienced author.

We start out great:  Ceony Twill has just graduated from magic school, and is about to get her magical material assignment - the one man-made material she'll be able to magically influence for the rest of her life.  She desperately wants to be a metalworker, but she is forced into bonding with paper due to a serious deficit in the number of active practicioners.

All of this sounds so great!  Sadly, that's about all the backstory and interest and personal character motivation we get, as everything is instantly sidetracked into a somewhat sketchy mentor-student love-affair/rescue attempt that comprises a slightly maddening flashback-ridden waltz through the secondary character's heart (thus meaning we learn more about him than we do the main character herself)  while she learns about him and what kind of man he is, and how much she's growing to love him - all inside of one short day.

Other minor missteps include a waste of a psuedo-Victorian/Edwardian English setting (please do research, even though we all speak English, we speak and behave in very different ways given different locations and time-periods!) and a villainess with absolutely no character to her at all.

Urgh. What a sad waste of a really great concept.

  

Juv Fantasy: The Castle Behind Thorns, Merrie Haskell

The Castle Behind Thorns
Merrie Haskell
ISBN: 9780062008190
A lush and leisurely re-working of Sleeping Beauty set in Brittany in 1518, with saints and magic and themes of family betrayal, friendship, trust, and forgiveness.
Read December 28, 2014

Lovely to read through, but it will be a very specific middle-grade reader to appreciate the vocabulary, dense thematic structure, and really superbly slow narrative pace.  It's fun for me as an adult, as a fast reader, and as someone who appreciates fairy-tale re-workings and historical fiction, but I think that it might easily fail to grab attention.

Sand (great name for a smith) wakes up in a fireplace, and realizes he's in the Sundered Castle, which has been hidden behind thorns since his father was a child.  The castle is still hidden behind thorns, but now they are keeping him prisoner as well.

I'll try to remain vague to avoid spoiling everything.

I loved the slow build of exploration and discovery.

I loved the focus on mending and repairing, especially how it relates to the other characters.

I loved the unapologetic hatred towards war and violence.

I loved the way that forgiveness was presented - not as a religious or civic duty, but as an act of self-preservation and personal mental/emotional health.

I loved the mending magic, the saints, and the Greek afterlife complete with Lethe, shades, and pomegranate seeds.

I loved Sand's enormous complicated blacksmithing solution.

I loved that the resolution was prosaic and mundane and that the "punishment" for the guilty was self-inflicted (although that was a little too perfectly settled, and I really feel for that priest and those poor knights).


The author has another fairy-tale re-working (12 Dancing Princesses) that I have almost picked up several times and just never felt like it grabbed me: The Princess Curse.  Now that I've read this one and have high opinions of the language and writing style, I might give that one a try even if the storyline itself doesn't seem as personally interesting.

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker

The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker.  ISBN: 9780062110831

Read July 23

 

Magical Realism?  Adult Fairy Tale?

First things first - this book is ATTRACTIVE.  The publishers really deserve mad credit for this gorgeous presentation, and I honestly think I give the insides of the book itself a bit more slack because it is so damn pretty.  The cover is lovely, a moody blue-tone image of a massive arch, with the title in a vaguely Art-Deco style in metallic gold, and more gold filigree around the corners and edges, and a rich hot sliver of a burnt-orange border underneath.  Then, if that wasn't lovely enough on it's own, the page edges themselves are dyed deep midnight blue, with a lovely barely-there bleed into the pages, so each one is trimmed in a rich dark edge.

 

That's presentation for you.  Utterly stunning.

 

Now, on to the book.  I started this book about two weeks ago, put it down for over a good while, then picked it up and finished it Tuesday night.  That is ... fairly uncommon for me, with a new book.  In fact, the last book it happened with (Gail Tsukiyama's Women of the Silk) I actually DIDN'T like that much, and found to be pedestrian, plodding, and frankly boring. 

 

This book was odd.  I was hooked right at the start because I had never considered a female Golem before.  I suppose I'm just not the imaginative type, but that created a nice solid spark of interest, because I was in totally unknown territory.  Then the interest value of an unMastered Golem (another novel idea) and the mental anguish of her wanting to meet everyone's mental needs - how amazing! 

 

Then we get the Jinn, and he was... somehow flat.  I felt for him, and I was curious, but since Jinni are so flighty and unmoored, it was hard to get a sense of the life he lost, especially since he didn't remember how he lost it.  Not even a hint of memory, and that made it really hard for me to develop an interest in him.  I think if he had perhaps remembered just a bit more - expansions like that much later twinge of recognition he had with the prostitute in the Bowery pushing her hair aside - then I would have felt more attuned to him from the start.  He grew on me, but I didn't experience anything like the frisson I had with the Golem, and that was a major disappointment to get past. 

 

Then, it was just slow rolling through local community and history of the community members, and community politics, and the histories of those politics, and while the characters were interesting, here was where I really felt the dispassion of that distant narrator - everything is he said she said they did he thought she wanted...   I would have killed for an I AM or an I WILL in there somewhere.  By the Syrian wedding, I had had it.  That's where I stopped for a good while.  After slogging through all that, I really wasn't interested in picking back up.

 

Of course I had stopped right before the Sophia plotline, and that made the Jinn much more interesting.  Starting from there on Tuesday, the remainder kept my attention much better, and I read through at more my usual pace. 

 

On to specific points:

 

The Sophia and Saleh subplots somehow felt like they were missing something.  Between poor Sophia and poor Saleh (let's not even talk about Fadwa), Jinn interactions are dangerous for people, and I really do wonder if the Jinn never actually learned to care about that.  He didn't seem to.  The Golem would have cared, but I don't think she ever realized what was going on, and she didn't ask (which is odd, given her specifically-created curiousity).

 

And that leads to another point.  The thrust of the novel seems to be that each of these creatures is bound by their natures, created to be a certain way, and it's foolish and naive of them to expect that they'll do anything differently, regardless of their opinions on the matter and their own intellectual desires.  BUT - they do spend the whole novel taking little steps outside their natures, and those are celebrated, until the end where their natures constrain them totally again and they have to be rescued by a "real" person (who, incidentally, was able to be that rescuer by the actions of the very man he then destroyed... natures in conflict again).

 

It's interesting.  The question of the book as I read it is whether to accept as much of your nature as possible, and fight only against the bad parts (the Golem's approach) or to rage against your restrictions and refuse to be placated by your current state in the interests of maintaining your passion to fight for your ideal state (the Jinn's approach).  The funny thing is, with the peculiar "solution" of the climax, neither approach produces the desired results for the characters.

 

Very odd.  Between the slow pacing in the mid-section, and the oddness of the plot culmination, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it.  A sort of distant fairy-tale or mythological sensibility that I wasn't expecting.

The Technologists, Matthew Pearl

The Technologists
Author: Matthew Pearl
American Historical Fiction - 1868
Random House, 2012
ISBN: 9781400066575
This was an interesting read.

I first picked this one up over a year ago when it first came out, but never got around to reading it (yay grad school!) until now.

I'm actually a bit pleased with how that worked out, because if the book hadn't echoed some of the circumstances of my own life, I don't know that I would feel as charitable towards it as I do.

I've not read any of Matthew Pearl's other work, and I picked this one up mainly because it was advertised to me as being a little bit "alternate history science fiction."  First off, gotta say that was very much overemphasized.  I didn't see much of anything that would make me put this into anything other than historical fiction.

That said, I did find it interesting.

Gist: The first graduating class of MIT (1868) in the months leading up to their graduation have to overcome challenges caused by their different backgrounds and personality types, the financial difficulties facing their Institution, a growing rivalry with Harvard, and a madman's attempts to destroy Boston with scientific discoveries put to nefarious purpose.

The good:
The story deals with the feelings and worries of the students as they prepare to graduate, work their butts off in their last school assignments, and worry about their futures.  Really hit home for me as I graduate in 2 weeks myself.  I very much identified with Marcus and his fears especially. 

I've not read anything before about the beginnings of MIT, and I staunchly support science and "tech" schools.  I found the origin story to be really fascinating, especially that both the "gentlemen" of Harvard and Boston and the "laborers" of the factories disliked the technologists and feared that they would upend society.  (Smart people - they were right!)

Many of the characters in the book were actually real, and essentially all of the graduating seniors were actual people.  That always makes for an interesting thought.  I was especially thrilled to learn that Ellen Swallow was a real person, and a real student at the time.  Very brave of her.


The bad:
After finishing the book, I read that a hallmark of Pearl's is to include lots of red-herrings.  I don't particularly like that technique, and found that instead of being tantalizing leads, they were a bit heavy-handed, and therefore suspicious. 

I was expecting there to be more "steampunk" or "alternate" science.  To be fair, that was more because of the specific recommendation I got, and less to do with the book itself, although I do think it would have been much better if he had been more descriptive of the science-y parts - either wholeheartedly embraced the psuedoscience involved and just blithely made descriptive shit up, or talk to a real chemist and work out a way to achieve the results in real life and then describe the process/remnants that way.  I thought the half-hearted descriptions did the plot a major disservice.

I didn't like the casual inclusion of viewpoint characters just for them to be killed off.

I didn't like how little time was spent dealing with the motivations of the bad guy.  While trying to avoid spoilers, let me just say that it should be entirely possible for those motivations to have merited more than two short flashback segments out of the entirety of the book.  In addition, the racial issue was a little bit distasteful.  I know it shouldn't matter, but it does to me.

Overall it wasn't amazing.  I am glad I read it, I enjoyed most of it.  I would recommend it to MIT students, historical (or Americana) readers, or people who like a good twisty thrillerish mystery.