Holiday reading
Jun. 29th, 2021 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Last week's holiday in Southwold was a fantastic time to relax and read some of the many books that had been gathering on my to-read list. These were an eclectic bunch — a couple of YA novels, two of my most highly anticipated fantasy books of the year, and a fairytale-esque fantasy novel. I enjoyed most of them immensely.
On the basis of reviews byskygiants, I discovered that there was not one, but two recent YA retellings of Twelfth Night. As someone who was a teenager in the 1990s and grew up with endless Hollywood teen movie retellings inspired by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and various other works of 'classic' literature, I am weak for this kind of thing, and was intrigued enough to pick up both books.
Where I End and You Begin by Preston Newton was probably my favourite of the two, because it leaned into its teen movie premise (the characters are literally putting on a school play of Twelfth Night, and the book is packed with references to every teen movie ever) and was as handwavy about its central scenario (two characters keep waking up and finding they've swapped bodies with each other) as any Shakespeare play. Forget about love triangles — this is a (very queer) love quadrilateral, with an ending that implies all concerned are going to end up happily polyamorous. The one sour note for me in Twelfth Night has always been the Malvolio subplot (insufferable person, but still doesn't deserve to be horrifically bullied), so I was really pleased that the way this element was reimagined treated it as something awful and horrifying.
The other Twelfth Night YA novel was The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake: a story of teen angst, mental illness recovery, shipwrecks and family secrets in a quirky tourist town in Maine. I enjoyed it well enough, but it suffered in comparison to Where I End and You Begin.
I had been looking forward to Zen Cho's new novella, Black Water Sister, pretty much since it was announced, and it did not disappoint. I've loved Zen Cho's writing since her first short stories, and it's delightful to have witnessed her career progress, because her writing has just got better and better, while still retaining all the elements that made me fall in love with it in the first place. That's certainly true of Black Water Sister: the story of Jess, who has just returned with her parents to Malaysia after a childhood and early adulthood spent in the US, and who is at a bit of a crossroads in her life. She doesn't have any clear career path laid out, she's closeted and secretly in a relationship with a woman from Singapore, and she's surrounded by well meaning relatives (and all their middle-aged friends) who want to know every detail about her life and offer 'helpful' suggestions. To make matters worse, she's just become possessed by the unquiet spirit of her very grouchy grandmother. My favourite thing about Zen Cho's books has always been her ability to talk about serious subjects (in this case, Malaysian society, controversial development projects, and the weight of familial expectation) while at the same time being very, very funny — and Black Water Sister does this to perfection.
One of my other highly anticipated books this year was P Djèlí Clark's first full-length novel in his steampunk/alternative history Cairo, A Master of Djinn. It's been my common complaint when reading any of Clark's short fiction in this universe that I loved the worldbuilding, and wanted more of it — a novel. I'm happy to say that his storytelling and imagined universe work just as well with a longer wordcount. This story sees Fatma el-Sha’arawi, investigator at Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities solving a complicated mystery that threatens to destabilise the fragile political situation in Egypt — and globally. While I figured out the identity of the eponymous master of djinn pretty early on, I was reading the book more for the worldbuilding and characters, and so I didn't mind very much. I particularly enjoyed Fatma and her fractious relationship with her new, straightlaced partner Hadia, and all the various secondary characters, while the central conceit (that the emergence of the supernatural and the adoption of supernatural powers in technology allowed countries which in our world were colonised to stave off European imperialism) is cleverly done.
The final book read over the holiday was a bit of a disappointment. I picked up For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten because it seemed to promise all the things I liked about fairytale-inspired fanasy such as Naomi Novik's Uprooted — a creepy, sentient forest, princesses being sacrificed to 'the Wolf' to protect their community, etc etc. Sadly, it was pretty disappointing: it's basically a Beauty and the Beast retelling completely lacking in bite. I need more darkness in this kind of tale, and I found that sadly lacking.
On the basis of reviews by
skygiants, I discovered that there was not one, but two recent YA retellings of Twelfth Night. As someone who was a teenager in the 1990s and grew up with endless Hollywood teen movie retellings inspired by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and various other works of 'classic' literature, I am weak for this kind of thing, and was intrigued enough to pick up both books.Where I End and You Begin by Preston Newton was probably my favourite of the two, because it leaned into its teen movie premise (the characters are literally putting on a school play of Twelfth Night, and the book is packed with references to every teen movie ever) and was as handwavy about its central scenario (two characters keep waking up and finding they've swapped bodies with each other) as any Shakespeare play. Forget about love triangles — this is a (very queer) love quadrilateral, with an ending that implies all concerned are going to end up happily polyamorous. The one sour note for me in Twelfth Night has always been the Malvolio subplot (insufferable person, but still doesn't deserve to be horrifically bullied), so I was really pleased that the way this element was reimagined treated it as something awful and horrifying.
The other Twelfth Night YA novel was The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake: a story of teen angst, mental illness recovery, shipwrecks and family secrets in a quirky tourist town in Maine. I enjoyed it well enough, but it suffered in comparison to Where I End and You Begin.
I had been looking forward to Zen Cho's new novella, Black Water Sister, pretty much since it was announced, and it did not disappoint. I've loved Zen Cho's writing since her first short stories, and it's delightful to have witnessed her career progress, because her writing has just got better and better, while still retaining all the elements that made me fall in love with it in the first place. That's certainly true of Black Water Sister: the story of Jess, who has just returned with her parents to Malaysia after a childhood and early adulthood spent in the US, and who is at a bit of a crossroads in her life. She doesn't have any clear career path laid out, she's closeted and secretly in a relationship with a woman from Singapore, and she's surrounded by well meaning relatives (and all their middle-aged friends) who want to know every detail about her life and offer 'helpful' suggestions. To make matters worse, she's just become possessed by the unquiet spirit of her very grouchy grandmother. My favourite thing about Zen Cho's books has always been her ability to talk about serious subjects (in this case, Malaysian society, controversial development projects, and the weight of familial expectation) while at the same time being very, very funny — and Black Water Sister does this to perfection.
One of my other highly anticipated books this year was P Djèlí Clark's first full-length novel in his steampunk/alternative history Cairo, A Master of Djinn. It's been my common complaint when reading any of Clark's short fiction in this universe that I loved the worldbuilding, and wanted more of it — a novel. I'm happy to say that his storytelling and imagined universe work just as well with a longer wordcount. This story sees Fatma el-Sha’arawi, investigator at Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities solving a complicated mystery that threatens to destabilise the fragile political situation in Egypt — and globally. While I figured out the identity of the eponymous master of djinn pretty early on, I was reading the book more for the worldbuilding and characters, and so I didn't mind very much. I particularly enjoyed Fatma and her fractious relationship with her new, straightlaced partner Hadia, and all the various secondary characters, while the central conceit (that the emergence of the supernatural and the adoption of supernatural powers in technology allowed countries which in our world were colonised to stave off European imperialism) is cleverly done.
The final book read over the holiday was a bit of a disappointment. I picked up For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten because it seemed to promise all the things I liked about fairytale-inspired fanasy such as Naomi Novik's Uprooted — a creepy, sentient forest, princesses being sacrificed to 'the Wolf' to protect their community, etc etc. Sadly, it was pretty disappointing: it's basically a Beauty and the Beast retelling completely lacking in bite. I need more darkness in this kind of tale, and I found that sadly lacking.