jd_ficathon | Member Posts

My wonderful brother bought me Uprooted by Naomi Novik, especially to fulfil my Magical Readathon prompt for June, so I could keep to my planned TBR theme for June of reading all the books he's given me that I haven't read yet...

I tried so hard, I really did - but I just couldn't do it and I DNF'd it on pg 160...

The book is a loose Beauty and the Beast retelling, whereby a wizard called The Dragon takes a 17-year-old girl from a nearby village every ten years and keeps her in his tower to be his servant, then releases her with a ton of money and picks another one. The main plot, though, is to do with the evil force in the neighbouring forest trying to take over the human realm, and our plucky protagonist, Agnieszka, teaming up with the wizard to try and defeat it.

I will say, it wasn't all bad - far from it. I struggled a bit at the start, since there are several chapters of Agnieszka being abused and assaulted by more than one man, purely because The Dragon doesn't have the decency to speak to her as if she's a human being or explain anything to her in a sensible way. And I really wasn't keen at all on the way Agnieszka made excuses for this behaviour and diminished herself in the process.

It picked up quite a bit once the training montage properly got going (with a particularly wonderful extended nature metaphor about Agnieszka's experience of learning magic), and I loved Agnieszka taking matters into her own hands repeatedly to try and do what she thinks is right. I also loved her best friend, Kasia, and the development of the relationship between them.

But - as soon as the sexual tension was brought into things, it just made me really uncomfortable - because Agnieszka is 17 and The Dragon is over 100 years old... Problematic power dynamics, much? And also - ick. And then it got explicit (way more so than I was expecting) and I just had to put it down.

It turns out, I have read it before and finished it that time, though the romance aspect also really put me off - and I apparently wasn't convinced the story as a whole was worth pushing through. The main thrust of the storyline hadn't actually even started yet when I DNF'd it, and the summary on Wikipedia suggests an awful lot happened in the last two thirds. But I just wasn't invested in it enough to get past the ick, I'm afraid.

lunabee34

1. I absolutely adore my ridiculous children. Fiona is reading War and Peace. It's the book with the most AR points, and we kept telling her that she was probably not going to like it or understand it well, which just fueled her desire to read it more. Joke's on us, I guess, because she's moving through it a pretty fair clip, and while I'm certain that a significant amount of it is going over her head, she seems to be understanding the plot well enough (we debrief what everyone is reading over dinner every evening).

2.

A Century of Poems - TLS 100 (from the pages of the TLS, 1902-2002)

A Century of Poems - TLS 100 by The Times Literary Supplement

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, this makes clear that I do not share taste in poetry with the editors of the Times Lierary Supplement, all however many of them served for the 20th century. Lol

So many war poems, which I get given the time period, but I am not a fan of most war poetry. Also so much rhyming, way more than I'd anticipated.

I did like some of the poems, but on the whole not for me.

View all my reviews

3.

( Scholomance by Naomi Novik--major spoilers )

4.

The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I kept finding myself in the pages of this book as I read it. My people are not mountain Southern, but some things about being Southern are universal. The backstory of poverty and wringing a living out of the land with backbreaking work in Bragg's memoir could easily describe many aspects of the backstory on both side of my family. Most especially, though, reflected here is that truth that no matter how poor my grandparents were or how stingy my parents were when I was growing up to avoid poverty we still ate well. Like Bragg, my family was almost self-sustaining in eating what we grew, caught, and raised, and we ate like kings. Still do.

View all my reviews

5.

The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories by Christopher Looby

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This collection of short stories is divided into four sections: queer places, queer genders, queer attachments, and queer things. Most of the stories in the queer things section don't seem to be queer to me (especially the Melville one where the protagonist is obsessed with his chimney and the Hartman story where a little waif girl drowns herself in the sea). Many of these stories are sad and/or violent, but a few of them are happy and hopeful--notably the Walt Whitman and the Mary Wilkins Freeman. The titular story of the book is incredibly fascinating.

View all my reviews

I have a PDF copy of this book, so if you'd like to read me, PM me and I'll email it to you.

magnavox_23

The Reality War icons, but just *THAT* scene because my Whovian proclivities made me. Under a cut for the next week, because *spoilers*.

( <3 <3 <3 )

2x08 The Reality War

Turns out, if you get a friend to stream Disney over Discord in Chrome and disable the graphics accelerator, it can bypass Disney's DRM *Innocent whistle*

( Thoughts on the episode... )

seshat0120

Click on the preview for the full-sized version.

mific

It's double Sunday here in NZ - Monday's a public holiday, King's Birthday. Agh, that sounds so wrong - it's been Queen's Birthday all my life and I can't get used to the change. Elizabeth I is a hero of mine and even though Elizabeth II was nothing like her, at least she had the name. Anyway, another day to do Sunday things before I have to put out the garbage and tidy my flat so Fionna, who helps me beat it into shape once a week, can see the floor to do vacuuming and get at the kitchen sink without it being full of dishes.

Recently I learned how to warn for Major Character Death. AO3 have been doing a series of explanatory posts, and this time it was on ratings and warnings. I thought I knew what MCD meant although it's a trope I hardly ever write or otherwise depict, but I hadn't thought through what "major" means. I'd assumed it meant a protagonist or leading character from canon and fandom - one of the regulars, like Rodney, John, Teyla or Ronon from SGA, Fraser and the Rays from due South. But no, it means the prominence of the character in my transformative work. So if I write a fic focussing on Chuck the Gate Room technician and I kill him off at the end (he is rather in the front line, that close to the Stargate) then I need to warn for MCD because although he didn't even get a last name in canon, in my fic he was the protagonist. If I get you invested in a character, no matter how insignificant they are in canon, I need to warn you (or use CNTW) if I end up killing them. Makes sense; I just never thought it through before. Same goes for any original characters I invent.

Over at Drawesome we've finished the Mermay challenge and the theme for June is Pride! I hope people still mobilise to support each other in the US, while the corporates abandon their empty, performative support (fuck you, google, home depot, and the rest).

drawing of a group of smiling, diverse people holding up the pride flag, and smaller asexual and bisexual pennants. Two women are kissing. Text at right says: Pride! Drawesome Challenge #71.

alobear

An author contacted me recently to ask if I'd read his first book and review it on my YouTube channel - and I thought, why not?

The Lich Before the Darkness by Timothy Stormcrow is a fun ride, set in a world very like our own, but where supernatural creatures (eg vampires, werewolves, revenants, etc) are fairly common and living in the open.

The main protagonist, Aisling, is recruited to join a government department tasked with investigating supernatural issues and helping people solve problems they're having either with being or interacting with supernatural creatures.

The book largely follows Aisling in her training and first few missions, with other sections following Maeve, a recent revenant setting up a monster-hunting business, and Eric, a young man with strange powers that have a significant impact on future events.

The writing is generally good (barring some persistent surface issues with punctuation and a few scattered typos), I liked the characters, there's a lot of really good descriptive detail and, overall, it was an entertaining read. There's some good setup for the story continuing in future volumes, and I largely enjoyed it.

It does have some worldbuilding issues, though, and the plot cohesion is a bit lacking. It takes over half the book to get to the main plot events, where the three different narrative threads converge - and then that doesn't really go anywhere and everything fractures again and goes back to largely episodic sections that don't connect.

It kept me engaged throughout, though, and I'd be interested to read more - especially since this first book ended very abruptly, almost mid-scene.

princessofgeeks

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

alobear

I picked up this book in a charity shop because I remembered the author's name - Lulu Taylor - and having enjoyed another couple of her books before.

This one is a narrative split between Veronica in the 1940s and Romy in the 'present day' (the book was published in 2024. Veronica's story is about musical theatre, Parisian high society, secret relationships, obsessive love - and a house on a Welsh island full of birds. Romy's goes to the island to research a book about Veronica, but ends up having her own unlikely adventures, torn between two men she meets who may or may not be hiding things of their own.

It's well written and compelling - though, by the halfway point, I really wasn't sure where it was going because there wasn't a particularly strong throughline to either narrative thread. And, sure enough, the massive melodrama at the end of both storylines came pretty much out of nowhere and wasn't really connected to much of the rest of what happened in the book.

Still, I was engaged throughout and it kept me guessing until the end - though there were a couple of quite ridiculous coincidences used to push the plot forwards at certain points.

The exploration of Romy's struggles with her mental health was largely well done, and I liked both female protagonists.

Lulu Taylor does know how to tell a yarn (even if it did have me rolling my eyes a few times) and I'll definitely pick up more of her books if I come across them.

alobear

This is the fourth instalment in the Elemental Blessings series by Sharon Shinn, which I have been revisiting over the last few months, in anticipation of finally getting to the last instalment, which I haven't read before.

I really like the audiobook narrator for these - and this fourth book is a lot of fun. It follows Leah, who was introduced in Book Three and was my favourite character in that one. Here, she returns to her home country to build a relationship with the five-year-old daughter she abandoned. She also gets embroiled in some grisly murders that may or may not be connected to visiting foreign dignitaries, while running a shop as an agent of the crown.

I wasn't wholly on board with the romance aspect of this book, as I thought Leah's relationship with the romantic interest in question was presented more as a father-daughter connection in the last book (which may be me misinterpreting or misremembering it) so it was very jarring for him suddenly to turn up and there be a romantic connection.

Still, overall, it was a fun listen, with lots of intrigue, lots of time with characters I'd grown to love from previous books, and a very exciting climax. Leah's agency was rather lacking during that climax - but I guess the people who did act did so because of their connections to her, so she was pivotal, if not directly.

I liked where it ended up and I'm really looking forward to getting to the next one.

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J/D Ficathon

meaning of life stuff

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Uprooted

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"But She Knows"

Magnificent Seven Wallpaper - The Collector

Update, and today I learned...

The Lich Before the Darkness

More reading

The Last Song of Winter

Unquiet Land

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August 2019

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