The Farthest Shore

Book Title: The Farthest Shore

Author: Ursula Le Guin

Series: The Earthsea Cycle #3

Date Started: July 24th 2022

Date Completed: August 17th 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, 

Quality Rating: Five Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

These books are just magic. Ursula Le Guin is suitably lourded and regarded, yet it seems like no one reads them these days. This series is such a moving, thoughtful and boundlessly imaginative creation of a fantasy world, so vivdly realised and explored. And one word, for this one in particular: dragons.

This is pure, classical adventure at its best: a quest that travels our heroes across many a land and sea, encountering strife, evil and beauty until they reach the last place any can go. It echoes Homer, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and others, but it is intrinsically original.

The Farthest Shore is probably the story I'm most familiar with in the series before reading, as many aspects seem to have been the foundation for the Ghibli adaptation. Goro Miyazaki's films pulls from several of the books in the series but the heroic figure of Aren, the evil Cob, and much of the travelling and exploration of cities seems to be lifted directly from this novel. That didn't make reading it any less enjoyable; I couldn't help but picture many things as they were in the animation, but my imagination could ran rampant at the points that remained only on the page.

What makes these novels most memorable and distinguishable, I think, is Ged. The wise archmage at the centre of its tales, though whose story is often explored through other protagonist's journies. I rarely feel like I relate to fictional characters but, somehow, Ged feels familiar to me in a way many characters don't.

Le Guin's afterword is especially poignant, and I recommend reading it; learning about how thought processes enriches the world massively. I've been reading from the massive illustrated omnibus version (Charles Vess' illustrations are absolutely wonderous) so the afterword might be specific to that edition, but having recently listened to a collection of Le Guin's non-fiction writings, her thoughts are always interesting and enriching to an understanding of her stories.

The Story of Silence

Book Title: The Story of Silence

Author: Alex Myers

Date Started: June 10th 2022

Date Completed: June 24th 2022

Genres: Historical, Adventure

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

I kept going for a while with this book, but ultimately stopped because it had established itself pretty solidly and wasn't going to switch anything up - which was most of the disappointment to begin with; you're retelling a classical legend in which the protagonist is born a female, but is raised as and identifies as a male. How can you not make something out of that?!

The Story of Silence is a painfully straightforward retelling of a Medieval legend, in which a girl is raised as a boy. And that's kind of it. There's no meaning put onto the situation, no commentary and no 'point'. In theory, I'm of the belief that representation can and should be normalised and not have to be the main focus of the story. And yet, in a lot of ways, it is the main focus of the story. Silence doesn't have much of a personality himself, and the whole book is placed in a framing narrative with a sleazy bard pressing Silence and a few other people for the epic story of their adventures, which boils down to him wanting to put Silence into a box of male or female. Fine as a framing narrative, but things don't develop much from there.

Silence's main narrative tensions revolve around hiding that he's anatomically a female - or at least, the tension that comes as a result of other people worrying about that. Silence himself has actually quite little agency. And this isn't mentioning yet that everything else in the book falls into sexist stereotypes and narrow-minded tropes - something that the author literally acknowledges and basically shrugs off in his introduction. I honestly couldn't help thinking what the author themselves thought of Silence and his situation, his identity and the history of a story that could hold such marvellous potential for modern audiences.

Aside from everything else, it was really boring. It almost felt academic in its style and wasn't trying to establish any sort of exciting or even thoughtful tone. For a book so ripe for the very purpose of retellings (storytelling rooted in tradition but growing vibrantly in our contemporary understanding of these stories and our own human experiences), it sure didn't try very hard to do literally anything. What's the point of doing it if you aren't going to do anything with it?

A Great and Terrible Beauty

Book Title: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Author: Libba Bray

Series: Gemma Doyle #1

Date Started: July 2nd 2022

Date Completed: July 6th 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Historical, Mystery

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Two Star

Final Rating: Two Stars

Review:

While I really love Libba Bray's Diviners series, I really wasn't feeling this. There are echoes of Evie in all these narcissistic ambitious girls, but none of her complexity and depth brought out by the other varying characters in that series. Gemma felt like she was heading that way and then decided not to bother; I'm all for girls not having to be goody goody two shoes, but I don't feel like rooting for a petty bystander either.

I'm not a massive fan of boarding school settings for exactly this reason - it's just petty bullying and whining and hardly any stakes, all justified by the amazingly basic revelation that bullies are humans and often have their own insecurities. Something which becomes even more infuriating when this is used to completely excuse their behaviour. It's not a massive surprise to me that I didn't like any of the characters and found it very hard to feel for them, even the ones being bullied who only then cared about being part of the clique and routinely become petty and spiteful to stay in the populars' good graces. I was hoping for something dramatic but was mostly expecting it to be the supernatural force after the girls. That, sadly, turned out not to be very dramatic.

The plot relies too much on convenient appearances from random characters so that the scene doesn't actually have to play out to its peak of tension. You'd like this was leading up to some massive reveal to the mystery thrown in our faces the whole way through, but alas, the mystery itself ends up feeling pretty trivial and easily solved (if you hadn't worked it out in the first couple of chapters).

All the above are honestly pet peeves of mine, but I've been known to get along with novels that feature them before. The problem with A Great and Terrible Beauty was that there felt like there were no stakes at all. Every time something creepy or mysterious happened, it was suddenly cut short or resolved immediately, with next to no build-up. And you complain all you want about how restrictive corsets were (which is factually incorrect) or women's lack of power, but for all the scandalous rule-breaking every single woman in the story seems to be a part of, no one seems to experience any consequences whatsoever. You've got scandalised unmarried women having new identities for themselves, moving into flats by themselves, with apparently no means at their disposal. (And yes, there is supposed to be a supernatural power after these girls - but who would know from how little it's in it).

Untold Night and Day

Book Title: Untold Night and Day

Author: Bae Suah

Date Started: June 22nd 2022

Date Completed: June 30th 2022

Genres: Adult, Magical Realism

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

In the note at the end, Deborah Smith who translated Suah’s novel describes it as a poetic fever dream and, having read this in chunks commuting on the London Underground in humid summer, that summed it up pretty well to me.

This is one of those stream-of-consciousness-meets-surrealist glimpses through the looking glass that I personally find more interesting from an analytical perspective than an immersive one. There are really fascinating cycles and parallels, patterns and whimsy, and distilled moments of reality that are almost uncomfortable with how close to home they hit. It’s about the worlds we build up in our heads, in our dreams, that are so close to reality sometimes maybe they are, until someone turns a light on or an alarm goes off, or we wonder how we possibly got to his place.

I would recommend reading Smith’s notes in the end if, like me, you were a little lost but also because it’s always fascinating to read about how a translator constructs a translated piece of work - and with one such as Suah’s writing which feels so distinct (this is the second story I’ve read by her) but must be so challenging to translate due to the style. It’s an engaging piece of writing, but I just wasn’t that into it.

Babel

Book Title: Babel

Author: R.F. Kuang

Date Started: May 27th 2022

Date Completed: June 22nd 2022

Genres: Historical, Fantasy, Thriller, Adventure

Quality Rating: Five Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Five Star

Final Rating: Five Stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

Writing this review is hard, for a number of reasons. One of them is that I'd need an essay to fully explain how great and clever and thoughtful and dreadful and magical it is. Another is that I want to shove you in the direction of other people's reviews and thoughts (reading reviews from different people with a variety of backgrounds, preferences and specialisms is a good thing, kids). And, really, it can all be summed up by saying R.F. Kuang is an exceptional writer, storyteller and academic.

Babel, at its heart, is a love letter to Oxford, to etymology and language and things lost in translation. It marvels at technology, at communication, at friendship, at culture. And it exposes its cracks and its shadows and the selfish people who control it, and the people who go along with it, and the people who very quietly say no. It is so well-balanced and articulated; how do you communicate the endlessly dreadful conflict of dearly loving something that comes from terrible, ignorant, colonial roots. What is our responsibility in acknowledging these things, and what is our responsibility for changing them? This isn't what Babel is wholly about - it is about so much more - but it is the thing that many people reading it may not have been confronted with before, even though we all should have been a long time ago.

Aside from all that, it's also a gripping and enchanting thriller. The characters are lovable and fantastically rounded and flawed (what else do we expect from Kuang?). I'm endlessly impressed by the author's ability to write and execute her stories just as brilliantly in different genres. The Poppy War was astounding, the complexity and fantasy and scope that was so readable that you just got absolutely lost. She's done it again with a historical thriller, a setting worlds apart and yet so close. She's writing a rom-com? I cannot wait. If she published her college thesis I would devour it. I will read everything she ever writes at this point.

Kuang also knows how to write endings that fit the stories she's telling. I don't think it's unfair to say that the majority of stories we process have endings that might be pleasing, or nice - bittersweet even - but few of them align the themes of their story so perfectly that it is seamlessly right for the story being told. Often because, as human are fallible and flawed and problematic, these endings aren't necessarily perfectly happy, or they might even in some way seem hopeless. The dragon isn't slain, never to return; he lives on. But Kuang hangs her endings perfectly in the balance of reality and resolution, and they are so endlessly satisfying as a result. And somehow, by acknowledging the hopelessness, it can, just maybe, feel hopeful. The dragon wasn't slain - but now maybe we know that it can't always kill us either.

Stone Blind

 Book Title: Stone Blind

Author: Natalie Haynes

Date Started: May 10th 2022

Date Completed: May 24th 2022

Genres: Historical, Fantasy

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this eBook copy for review ◆

I was very, very excited for this book, and it was good! It was good, I promise. But it was not amazing in my opinion and it was not what I was hoping for.

I felt like everyone was written with a teenager's voice (or, rather, with the token 'YA' voice coined for not actually being like how anyone anywhere talks or thinks). And, hey, don't get me wrong; the Greek Olympians were absolutely little children having tantrums, but the power dynamics so intrinsic to Greek mythology between immortals and mortals don't come across when all the other characters sound exactly the same too.

There was also effort put into humanising the Greek gods at times - in some twisted way of explaining why they treated mortals so appallingly - and those fragments were such slivers of brilliance. But the fact that these moments existed made it all the more of a shame that the dynamics outside of the Greek gods' bickering couldn't be vivid, they just felt like a shallow interpretation of how we imagine teenagers might act up.

The story itself isn't very subtle - and it doesn't have to be. It's a story about a girl (well, several actually) being raped because someone else was bored, or had a point to prove to someone outside of the situation, and the ripples that has on other people's vengeance and pride. There's a lot of value in telling this story from that angle (it, shockingly, hasn't really be done quite like this before).

But, in a lot of ways, it's not really Medusa's story (ironically). Her narrative (of which she has very little agency in) acts as the glue holding together a whole host of other myths in this novel (something that in itself is always awesome to see, and well sewn together by Haynes here), but she's honestly in very little of it. Again, does it matter? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, I think it is symbolically and thematically well-realised in the message it's putting forward. But from a narrative perspective, it's pretty unsatisfying. And hey, I guess that's sort of the point - it's not fair. None of these myths are 'fair' to their characters (well, the female ones anyway). But does it make a well-rounded story? Should it? I don't have the answers, but I do know I felt a little let down.

I love Haynes' writing and I love her teaching - I think Pandora's Jar should be required reading on Classics courses, not just because it would mean students had to actually think about the humanity of the women in these myths, but also because Haynes is a fantastically realised academic and storyteller. Her voice (as becomes very obvious if you've listen to her speak, whether on audiobooks, podcasts, events etc) is so distinct, and very present here. I'm just not 100% sure it works for me in novelisations.

Until the End

Book Title: Until the End

Author: Derek Landy

Series: Skulduggery Pleasant #15

Date Started: April 18th 2022

Date Completed: May 10th 2022

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery, Adventure, Action, Horror, Comedy

Quality Rating: Four Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Four Star

Final Rating: Four Stars

Review:

I love this series - I adore it. But even I have to admit that there is a lot going on at this point. Amazingly, I can still follow most references and a lot of names, but there are some moments where I have to scan my brain. Regardless, these books are just so enjoyable to read. How many books do I get to read that just make me feel happy, make me laugh, and make me proud?

The politics is always so good in Derek's books, especially since he upped the audience's age with this sequel series. And not just the parallels to our own world, but also the empowerment of characters in smaller ways and their own agency within situations that are largely outside of their control. It's nice to know I made good choices as a young reader, and it was an honour to get to grow from a child, to a teenager, to an adult with these books.

Of course, with this being a Derek Landy book, some of the twists are satisfying. But I do want to say I'm not a fan of the trope where everyone is ultimately related to each other - I much prefer when people have their own agency to get themselves into trouble. I don't think it completely strips the characters of their own identities in Until the End, as often happens when this is used, but it was a moment where I just had to have a little sigh before I carried on. That being said, there was also another certain trope at the end and the way Derek pulled it off is the only time I've come across it done well.

Until the End seems to have tied up a lot of threads of the series ahead of what I believe is the final book. That's actually very, very clever; the last one won't need to be obsessed with finishing all these storylines and instead get to tell its own narrative focused on completing the characters' arcs rather than cleaning up in-jokes and mysteries. I'm sure it will be just as epic as we've grown to expect, and are never disappointed by.