Beyond Selidor

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 25: Never finished it

There aren't many books that fall into this category, because I'm generally careful about what I read, and try to pick books I'm certain I'll like. So to answer this question, I went to my 'gave up' shelf in Goodreads. In the ten years or so since I've been using the site, I've only added four books to this shelf. I normally just use Goodreads as a reading log, and the star ratings I use to write yearly roundups of the best books I've read, but several in this 'gave up' shelf have brief reviews where I noted why the books didn't work for me. These are as follows:

Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness:

It is a rare occurrence that I fail to finish a book, but I realised that I was just reading this one out of a sense of duty. The preceding book in this series, A Discovery of Witches, had made me indescribably angry (for reasons that I will probably go into in a review on my blog), and I could tell from a chapter in that Shadow of the Night was more of the same. This series promises so much, and delivers so little, and strikes me as suffering from a desire on the part of the author to try to be too many things at once. It's historical fiction, but doesn't go into enough detail to satisfy historical fiction aficionados. It's a story about academia, but is filled with glaring inaccuracies about how academic life really functions (a surprising error, considering its author is a full-time academic herself). It's a paranormal fantasy story that suffers from poor world-building. And, most damning of all, it's as if Harkness wanted to write a paranormal romance, but was too uncomfortable to actually include any romance elements. I can't remember the last time I was so deeply disappointed in a series of books.

The Copper Promise by Jen Williams:

I didn't finish reading this book. The first 150 pages read like someone's D & D campaign, and I found all the characters two-dimensional, more like collections of tropes and swords-and-sorcery stereotypes than engaging human beings. It may pick up, but I decided not to waste any more of my time on it.

I feel as if I was a meaner reader back when I took the time to note on Goodreads why I gave up on particular books. These days I just move on.

( The other days )

Thirty Day Book Meme Day 16: Can't believe more people haven't read

It seems as if there's a bit of a Kate Elliott theme emerging at the moment in my posts for this meme: my answer to today's question is another Kate Elliott series, her Crossroads. I've always thought Elliott was a criminally overlooked epic fantasy writer (she's an absolute genius at worldbuilding, giving a great deal of thought not only to epic fantasy staples of kingdoms, armies and royal intrigue, but also to how societies would feed and supply themselves, how households and marriages would work, and what invasion and societal collapse would look like on the ground), but even among those who have read her books, this series almost never comes up in discussion.

It is, on the surface, fairly standard epic fantasy fare: an exiled prince, banished from his homeland and inheritance under threat of death, builds up an army and rides to the rescue of a kingdom in collapse, women with few options make political marriages, people ride giant eagles. However, where it differs is in its subversion of these well-worn tropes. Instead of portraying its dispossessed man as the saviour of the world — or a kingdom — and thus its rightful ruler, what Elliott is doing is showing how monstrous and dictatorial that would look like from the ground. Because she spends the first two books in the series showing the delicate work her heroine, Mai, undertakes as the wife of a mercenary leader who has moved into a country in collapse — forging alliances through diplomacy, trade, and marriages between local women and her husband's mercenaries — and because we view most of the story through Mai's eyes, we think her husband is entirely in accord, coming as a migrant, not a coloniser. The slow sense that something is wrong — culminating in a spectacular betrayal, both of Mai and of the reader's assumptions — is so cleverly and so intricately done, and, in my opinion, makes the Crossroads trilogy Elliott's best work. Sadly, I seem to be the only person who thinks that.


( The other days )