troisoiseaux (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
troisoiseaux) wrote2024-11-30 07:51 pm
troisoiseaux) wrote2024-11-30 07:51 pm
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Recent reading
Read I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, which starts with a musician on a probably futile quest to reunite with his dead wife on a possibly supernatural archipelago in Lake Superior – it's not a retelling of Orpheus & Eurydice, but it's got the family nose, as it were; the blurb describes the main character, Rainy, as "an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator" – and then wanders off to become a different story entirely halfway through. I keep wanting to describe this as "gently dystopian," which is slightly misleading; the dystopian aspects of its near-future setting are certainly not gentle, but it's a world of communities doing their best to keep going post-collapse of society as we know it as much as it is one of indentured servitude and the powerful squashing the weak, on however petty a scale that power comes. Would pair well with Catherine Leroux's The Future, I think.
Read The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, which was a fascinating book in ways I don't want to spoil for anyone who hasn't read it: for the first half, the narrator is an amnesiac ghost trying to figure out who she is and why she's there by observing her (very screwed-up) family (based off DWJ's own, which is just... oof) and piecing together the clues; in the second half, it turns out that seven years have passed, the ghost is the now grown-up version of one of the four sisters she'd been haunting - although she still can't figure out which one - and just had a near-death experience that allowed her to go back in time seven years (as a "ghost") to try to undo the deal she'd made as a teenager with the ancient goddess who the sisters assumed they'd made up, but hadn't??
...I am explaining this badly, but this book is narratively doing really interesting things, and also feels like the opposite of Fire & Hemlock in a way I can't quite put my finger on...?
Read The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, which was a fascinating book in ways I don't want to spoil for anyone who hasn't read it: for the first half, the narrator is an amnesiac ghost trying to figure out who she is and why she's there by observing her (very screwed-up) family (based off DWJ's own, which is just... oof) and piecing together the clues; in the second half, it turns out that seven years have passed, the ghost is the now grown-up version of one of the four sisters she'd been haunting - although she still can't figure out which one - and just had a near-death experience that allowed her to go back in time seven years (as a "ghost") to try to undo the deal she'd made as a teenager with the ancient goddess who the sisters assumed they'd made up, but hadn't??
...I am explaining this badly, but this book is narratively doing really interesting things, and also feels like the opposite of Fire & Hemlock in a way I can't quite put my finger on...?
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