Mid-April media: novella edition
Apr. 26th, 2017 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironic
Today I started reading the e-book of Every Heart a Doorway that Tor.com is offering for free until midnight Eastern. I hadn't read anything by Seanan McGuire before, despite many of your rave reviews, and the blurbs I'd seen for this book hadn't grabbed me. Well, it turns out that all anyone needed to have said was LAND OF THE DEAD and I'd've been on this much faster!
Pomegranates and Persephone references! The Lord of the Dead's stroking fingers turning a dance partner's black hair white! A young woman's yearning to go back to the Underworld after being sent away! *cough* Up my alley, even though it's only a small part of the story.
I'm enjoying the ace/not aro layer to the protag, the matter-of-fact presentation of Kade's trans identity, the Gothic horror AU and the general misfits stuff too, and I empathize with the tension a physically still, introverted character feels in a motion-filled, privacy-free school environment. The prose could be tighter, but I guess it's YA? Whatever: it's working, because I'm already two-thirds of the way through.
For me it's the happy medium between the grotesquerie of Catherynne Valente's Deathless and the -- what's the word for when you need more tension? -- uneventful, I guess, utopia of Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; but that's a subject for a more intensive post that I do not have the brain cells to write these days.
ETA: thoughts on the ending.
Pomegranates and Persephone references! The Lord of the Dead's stroking fingers turning a dance partner's black hair white! A young woman's yearning to go back to the Underworld after being sent away! *cough* Up my alley, even though it's only a small part of the story.
I'm enjoying the ace/not aro layer to the protag, the matter-of-fact presentation of Kade's trans identity, the Gothic horror AU and the general misfits stuff too, and I empathize with the tension a physically still, introverted character feels in a motion-filled, privacy-free school environment. The prose could be tighter, but I guess it's YA? Whatever: it's working, because I'm already two-thirds of the way through.
For me it's the happy medium between the grotesquerie of Catherynne Valente's Deathless and the -- what's the word for when you need more tension? -- uneventful, I guess, utopia of Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; but that's a subject for a more intensive post that I do not have the brain cells to write these days.
ETA: thoughts on the ending.
no subject
Date: Apr. 27th, 2017 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Apr. 28th, 2017 02:28 am (UTC)Basically if her characters/the feel of her writing works for you, it might be worth poking around to see if any of her other series sound appealing. Each of her worlds focuses on different sorts of things, and among my friends who're also fans there's a HUGE range of opinion on which series is her best/their favorite. (Plus her Mira Grant books, which include my personal favorite series, are much different from the Seanan McGuire books.)
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