Beyond Selidor

Confession: I never read the Dark Is Rising series!

Oh, it's such a wonderful series of books, and so deeply tied to the seasons, and to the landscape of various parts of the UK. I love it immensely.

She's SO good at this. She has profound compassion for these women but she never lets them off the hook for the way they benefit from the system they're in.

Exactly so. She doesn't shy away from depicting the horrors of that time and place (for many people, it was basically a dystopia), and she doesn't take the easy out of having some of her white characters express views that would make them more sympathetic to a 21st-century audience (which is what a lot of authors of historical fiction do, which always feels like a cop out to me). Instead, she's much more interested in exploring the ways that people of that time found to accommodate themselves to the profound injustices of their milieu, all the little excuses and justifications and ways they looked away (as well, of course, as the various ways her black protagonist and his friends and family find to carve out spaces of joy, community, and resistance from the margins).

I got far enough for the Ammar poem and it did things to my insides!!!

I know, right? Especially given the context in which Ammar originally composed that poem: a lament for all that was about to be lost, and a howl of grief that the beauty, learning, culture, and feats of engineering of Al-Rassan were about to be forgotten — and here's his poem, centuries later, remembered!