Between the raindrops
Mar. 8th, 2020 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12We just went out for a walk, and it almost immediately began raining, having been bright and sunny for every other part of the day. I'm now drying off, having also had to do a rescue mission for laundry left outside on the washing line.
It's been a pretty lazy weekend, with lots of reading and cooking, and watching of undemanding TV.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins is a horror-ish historical fiction novel about a Jamaican servant standing trial for murdering the upper class couple who employed her. It deals with grim subject matter: slavery, colonialism, racism and the eugenics that all too frequently passed for 'science' in the nineteenth century. I loved the narrator's voice and the vivid picture it painted of her life and times, but it's not a cheerful book.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a fairytale fantasy story which takes place in 1920s Mexico and draws on Mayan myth. I found it utterly delightful — its heroine, Casiopea, winds up on a road trip with a deposed Mayan death god, seeking mystical objects to restore him to power. This means a fabulous tour around the cities and towns of 1920s Mexico, all of which are beautifully depicted. It reminded me a bit of Naomi Novik's or Katherine Arden's fairytale/mythological fantasy novels, although obviously dealing with the myths of a totally different culture.
K.M. Szpara's Docile has been getting a lot of hype in what I think of as Tor-published professional American SFF author circles, hyperbolically described in numerous gushing reviews as similar to The Handmaid's Tale, and a gritty dystopian parable about consent, capitalism and living with intergenerational debt. What it actually is is published slavefic, with every single cliché of that particular fanfic genre. I don't have a problem with that, but I am laughing my head off at these attempts by reviewers and the Tor promotional machine — who are either not familiar with fanfic tropes, clichés and character dynamics, or are pretending not to be familiar — to position the book as some kind of serious anti-capitalist polemic. (I also noticed a lot of critical reviews on Goodreads from black readers making the very obvious point that for a book imagining the reinstitution of legal slavery in the United States, it does not at any point acknowledge the obvious historical precedent, or what black citizens in Szpara's dystopian setting feel about this state of affairs. Again, I would never expect such a thing in slavefic, but I would have expected it to be discussed in depth in the gritty, prescient dystopia that all the reviewers, and the book's promotion, seemed to promise.)
I watched one film in the cinema this week, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which Matthias summed up with two words: 'very French'. It's slow, quiet and beautiful, the story of a female painter hired to paint the portrait of a woman for her fiancé — but instead the painter and the subject of her portrait fall in love. It was lovely.
I hope you've all been having good weekends.
It's been a pretty lazy weekend, with lots of reading and cooking, and watching of undemanding TV.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins is a horror-ish historical fiction novel about a Jamaican servant standing trial for murdering the upper class couple who employed her. It deals with grim subject matter: slavery, colonialism, racism and the eugenics that all too frequently passed for 'science' in the nineteenth century. I loved the narrator's voice and the vivid picture it painted of her life and times, but it's not a cheerful book.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a fairytale fantasy story which takes place in 1920s Mexico and draws on Mayan myth. I found it utterly delightful — its heroine, Casiopea, winds up on a road trip with a deposed Mayan death god, seeking mystical objects to restore him to power. This means a fabulous tour around the cities and towns of 1920s Mexico, all of which are beautifully depicted. It reminded me a bit of Naomi Novik's or Katherine Arden's fairytale/mythological fantasy novels, although obviously dealing with the myths of a totally different culture.
K.M. Szpara's Docile has been getting a lot of hype in what I think of as Tor-published professional American SFF author circles, hyperbolically described in numerous gushing reviews as similar to The Handmaid's Tale, and a gritty dystopian parable about consent, capitalism and living with intergenerational debt. What it actually is is published slavefic, with every single cliché of that particular fanfic genre. I don't have a problem with that, but I am laughing my head off at these attempts by reviewers and the Tor promotional machine — who are either not familiar with fanfic tropes, clichés and character dynamics, or are pretending not to be familiar — to position the book as some kind of serious anti-capitalist polemic. (I also noticed a lot of critical reviews on Goodreads from black readers making the very obvious point that for a book imagining the reinstitution of legal slavery in the United States, it does not at any point acknowledge the obvious historical precedent, or what black citizens in Szpara's dystopian setting feel about this state of affairs. Again, I would never expect such a thing in slavefic, but I would have expected it to be discussed in depth in the gritty, prescient dystopia that all the reviewers, and the book's promotion, seemed to promise.)
I watched one film in the cinema this week, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which Matthias summed up with two words: 'very French'. It's slow, quiet and beautiful, the story of a female painter hired to paint the portrait of a woman for her fiancé — but instead the painter and the subject of her portrait fall in love. It was lovely.
I hope you've all been having good weekends.
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Date: 2020-03-08 07:52 pm (UTC)I haven't had any plans to read Docile - that sort of story is very much not my jam, and the vampire novelette by the author that was a Hugo nominee a couple of years back was, well, intense and visceral but in a way that made me incredibly nauseous and not well, so I can give his work a miss from now on. Anyway, I am secretly (or not so secretly, since I'm saying it here) delighted to hear it's not necessarily as excellent as the hype would have you believe.
I just saw Portrait... in cinema as well. I totally loved it, which is not surprising, since it's a well-made historical f/f romance and I've got a gaping hunger for those. And it was just so beautiful.
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Date: 2020-03-09 07:34 pm (UTC)I liked that vampire novelette by Szpara, although it was not a happy story and quite confronting to read, as you say — it was in fact that novelette which gave me higher hopes for Docile than it perhaps warranted. Docile has definitely been completely overhyped in a way that I find really hilarious, because I wonder how readers who have no experience of fanfic tropes and clichés are going to react to it when they go in thinking it's some Handmaid's Tale type of serious dystopian novel.
Beautiful is exactly the right word for Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was gorgeous, and its emotional weight crept up on me — in a good way.
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