Found family, lost
Apr. 12th, 2021 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Today is the last day of my holidays. I've mostly spent it keeping out of Matthias's way, as he had to go back to work (from home) and he works in the living room. Although we work for the same employer, so I know all his colleagues, I don't like the idea of sitting awkwardly in the background during his online meetings.
We woke up this morning to actual snow — snow that had settled. It's melted now, but I'm boggling at seeing it in April, especially since a week or so ago we had temperatures in the mid-twenties. Snow settled on the branches of blossoming apple trees is a really incongruous sight!
Today's book meme prompt is:
12. A book that came to you at the wrong time
I feel bad about this, but I have to go with The Red Queen, the final book in Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. For the Australians in my circle this probably needs no explanation, but for the rest of you, some context:
Carmody began working on her futuristic post-apocalyptic series when she was a teenager, and the first book was published in 1987. (Note the date: it will become important.) The premise is that the world as we know it has been destroyed by a nuclear meltdown, which caused the continents to split apart and shift, poisoned the Earth, and led to mutations which caused some human beings to develop extra-sensory powers (mindreading, communicating with animals, etc). It's later revealed that people possessed these powers prior to the catastrophe. These superpowered 'Misfits' are hated and feared by other humans, and subject to persecution. The series begins as a classic found family story, with a group of these 'Misfits' building a community together, and starting to fight back against their oppressors.
The books were immensely popular in Australia in the 1990s, especially among teenage girls of my generation. (It helps that the series is kind of a wish-fulfillment fantasy for shy, sensitive girls.)
The problem was that Carmody proved incapable of finishing the series. It was meant to be a trilogy. Then it was going to be five books. When the fourth book was published in the early 2000s she then said it was going to be seven books. And she showed no signs of wrapping things up, instead beginning several new book series (some of which are themselves still incomplete). By the time she finally completed the Obernewtyn books, it was 2015 — nearly thirty years after the first book had been published! The series' core readership was, by that stage, people in their thirties and forties, way older than the teenage protagonist and supporting characters. (Reading between the lines, there was immense pressure placed on Carmody by her publisher to finish the series, and she was very bitter about this, feeling that her creativity was being trampled by commercial concerns. This is, to be quite honest, an opinion with which I have little sympathy. Being asked to complete a sprawling series of books thirty years after its inception and four years after the penultimate book was published is hardly being rushed, and writing fiction was her job. You can treat writing as a job and write according to a publisher's schedule, or you can have a romanticised attitude about your artistic sensibilities, but you can't do both.)
All that by way of preamble to say that by the time the final book was published, it wasn't so much that I had aged out of its readership (I still happily read YA and other books with teenage protagonists), but that the political and cultural context to which the series had originally been responding no longer existed, and so the later books had to be twisted and distorted in order to fit with the ways the world had changed. And when you've been waiting for the conclusion to a story for the better part of twenty years, that conclusion needs to be spectacular. The ending of The Red Queen ... wasn't that: it undermined the points the series had been making, it undid seven books' worth of character development, and it was badly edited with loads of pointless filler.
I'm not even sure if getting the book when I was still a teenager would have improved my opinion — I think teenage!me would have hated the ending, too. But I might have been more forgiving of some of the book's other flaws.
13. A book with a premise you'd never seen before quite like that
14. A book balanced on a knife edge
15. A snuffed candle of a book
16. The one you'd take with you while you were being ferried on dark underground rivers
17. The one that taught you something about yourself
18. A book that went after its premise like an explosion
19. A book that started a pilgrimage
20. A frigid ice bath of a book
21. A book written into your psyche
22. A warm blanket of a book
23. A book that made you bleed
24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to
25. A book that answered a question you never asked
26. A book you recommend but cannot love
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by
We woke up this morning to actual snow — snow that had settled. It's melted now, but I'm boggling at seeing it in April, especially since a week or so ago we had temperatures in the mid-twenties. Snow settled on the branches of blossoming apple trees is a really incongruous sight!
Today's book meme prompt is:
12. A book that came to you at the wrong time
I feel bad about this, but I have to go with The Red Queen, the final book in Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. For the Australians in my circle this probably needs no explanation, but for the rest of you, some context:
Carmody began working on her futuristic post-apocalyptic series when she was a teenager, and the first book was published in 1987. (Note the date: it will become important.) The premise is that the world as we know it has been destroyed by a nuclear meltdown, which caused the continents to split apart and shift, poisoned the Earth, and led to mutations which caused some human beings to develop extra-sensory powers (mindreading, communicating with animals, etc). It's later revealed that people possessed these powers prior to the catastrophe. These superpowered 'Misfits' are hated and feared by other humans, and subject to persecution. The series begins as a classic found family story, with a group of these 'Misfits' building a community together, and starting to fight back against their oppressors.
The books were immensely popular in Australia in the 1990s, especially among teenage girls of my generation. (It helps that the series is kind of a wish-fulfillment fantasy for shy, sensitive girls.)
The problem was that Carmody proved incapable of finishing the series. It was meant to be a trilogy. Then it was going to be five books. When the fourth book was published in the early 2000s she then said it was going to be seven books. And she showed no signs of wrapping things up, instead beginning several new book series (some of which are themselves still incomplete). By the time she finally completed the Obernewtyn books, it was 2015 — nearly thirty years after the first book had been published! The series' core readership was, by that stage, people in their thirties and forties, way older than the teenage protagonist and supporting characters. (Reading between the lines, there was immense pressure placed on Carmody by her publisher to finish the series, and she was very bitter about this, feeling that her creativity was being trampled by commercial concerns. This is, to be quite honest, an opinion with which I have little sympathy. Being asked to complete a sprawling series of books thirty years after its inception and four years after the penultimate book was published is hardly being rushed, and writing fiction was her job. You can treat writing as a job and write according to a publisher's schedule, or you can have a romanticised attitude about your artistic sensibilities, but you can't do both.)
All that by way of preamble to say that by the time the final book was published, it wasn't so much that I had aged out of its readership (I still happily read YA and other books with teenage protagonists), but that the political and cultural context to which the series had originally been responding no longer existed, and so the later books had to be twisted and distorted in order to fit with the ways the world had changed. And when you've been waiting for the conclusion to a story for the better part of twenty years, that conclusion needs to be spectacular. The ending of The Red Queen ... wasn't that: it undermined the points the series had been making, it undid seven books' worth of character development, and it was badly edited with loads of pointless filler.
I'm not even sure if getting the book when I was still a teenager would have improved my opinion — I think teenage!me would have hated the ending, too. But I might have been more forgiving of some of the book's other flaws.
13. A book with a premise you'd never seen before quite like that
14. A book balanced on a knife edge
15. A snuffed candle of a book
16. The one you'd take with you while you were being ferried on dark underground rivers
17. The one that taught you something about yourself
18. A book that went after its premise like an explosion
19. A book that started a pilgrimage
20. A frigid ice bath of a book
21. A book written into your psyche
22. A warm blanket of a book
23. A book that made you bleed
24. A book that asked a question you've never had an answer to
25. A book that answered a question you never asked
26. A book you recommend but cannot love
27. A book you love but cannot recommend
28. A book you adore that people are surprised by
29. A book that led you home
30. A book you detest that people are surprised by
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Date: 2021-04-13 03:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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