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seekingferretGlory in Death by J.D. Robb
Immortal in Death by J.D. Robb
Rapture in Death by J.D. Robb
Ceremony in Death by J.D. Robb
In my previous post, I claimed that I didn't actually enjoy the Eve Dallas books, and then I proceeded to read the next four over the next month, and I have book six on reserve at the library. So perhaps I need to amend that statement, even though I'm a little hard pressed to. I cannot really explain what I get out of them. The mysteries are not that compelling, the characters are not that deep, the sci-fi is not that thought-provoking, the romance is not that enjoyable, and yet... It may just be my addiction to continuity, or it may be what I suggested in said previous post, that I like that Roberts portrays a future where technology is not the answer, nor the problem, but just a fact of life. In other words, I may read the Eve Dallas books for the same reason I loved Century City.
Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett
Easily the best new SF novel I've read this year, it was just pure joy to read from beginning to end, so much so that I actually slowed down my reading of it so I could savor it. Jumping ahead a few hundred years from the events of Beckett's Dark Eden, it tells the story of the marooned colonists of a dark and lethal planet who have had to reinvent civilization from the two survivors of a spaceship crash.
In this sequel, the events of the first book have been reduced to folklore by a process that is so deliciously clever in its commentary on how folklore and history shape our civilization. They tell stories from Dark Eden as cautionary tales, and we the reader knows how different those stories are from the actual events, but we also know that we don't know the full truth ourselves- after all, we got those stories from the perspective of John and from the perspective of Tina and from the perspective of Jeff, so whose perspective was closest to the truth? The characters in Mother of Eden have those stories brought down from Jeff and from John and from David, but the people telling the stories have had their own agendas and the stories have permuted remarkably. (Tina is missing. Tina has been written out of history, and this is such a telling detail that Beckett need not mention it. Instead, he shows the process by which it happens, using Angela's Secret Story and its own permutations as exemplar.)
The political 'chess match' of life in New Earth is vividly evoked, so that one cannot possibly tell how it will turn out and who will triumph. Power and morality clash and reach an uneasy stalemate that breaks lives and never turns out how anyone would predict. All of Beckett's characters have rich backstories and meaningful motivations and nobody is truly evil or truly good, so that you're never quite sure who you want to win.
King of Shards by Matthew Kressel
I've been anticipating this one for a while, since (disclaimer) I've known Kressel for years, but also because it's a fantasy of Kabbalah and Yiddish folklore and hello, that is just a little bit up my alley.
The premise is that someone has been killing Lamed Vavniks- the mythical 36 righteous people for whose sake the universe is sustained. At his wedding, young New York activist Daniel is kidnapped by a demon (a shed), who tells him that a)he is a Lamed Vavnik and b)his fiancee is a demon who is trying to kill him.
The ensuing adventure chases all over the Jewish folk cosmosphere, from Gehinnom l'Azazel, and it remains sustainably twisty and complicated and morally and spiritually challenging the whole way through, driven by the demons, who have real aspirations and offers of genuine power, but who can always be relied upon to not be telling the complete truth.
In general, I loved it, and devoured the whole thing in a couple of days, but I will note one reservation. Kressel jumps between three perspectives through the novel- Daniel, the demon Ashmedai, and a resident of one of the klippot (the eponymous shards) with mysterious creative gifts named Rana. Rana is the book's most compelling character and Ashmedai's perspective is reliably fascinating if revoltingly impure, but Kressel clearly struggles with Daniel. How do you write a Lamed Vavnik, how do you write a character who is so righteous that their righteousness upholds the universe, but so hidden that people do not realize what he is? Until the final two chapters, the result is so incredibly boring that I spent most of Daniel's POV sections waiting for the return of Rana and her interesting character journey. In the last few chapters, we start to get a Daniel who understands enough about what he is to make his choices interesting, and so I am looking forward to seeing his journey continue in the sequel, but it took Kressel too long to get there.
What I liked most about King of Shards was that in its details it felt like an old Yiddish folktale. The settings, the riddles, the mysteriously metaphoric imagery, they all spoke to an engagement with a literary tradition that felt very, very familiar to me, and Kressel updated that tradition with great skill and sensitivity. I especially loved how life in the klippot felt allegorically broken in a way that made me think about that which is broken on Earth.
Immortal in Death by J.D. Robb
Rapture in Death by J.D. Robb
Ceremony in Death by J.D. Robb
In my previous post, I claimed that I didn't actually enjoy the Eve Dallas books, and then I proceeded to read the next four over the next month, and I have book six on reserve at the library. So perhaps I need to amend that statement, even though I'm a little hard pressed to. I cannot really explain what I get out of them. The mysteries are not that compelling, the characters are not that deep, the sci-fi is not that thought-provoking, the romance is not that enjoyable, and yet... It may just be my addiction to continuity, or it may be what I suggested in said previous post, that I like that Roberts portrays a future where technology is not the answer, nor the problem, but just a fact of life. In other words, I may read the Eve Dallas books for the same reason I loved Century City.
Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett
Easily the best new SF novel I've read this year, it was just pure joy to read from beginning to end, so much so that I actually slowed down my reading of it so I could savor it. Jumping ahead a few hundred years from the events of Beckett's Dark Eden, it tells the story of the marooned colonists of a dark and lethal planet who have had to reinvent civilization from the two survivors of a spaceship crash.
In this sequel, the events of the first book have been reduced to folklore by a process that is so deliciously clever in its commentary on how folklore and history shape our civilization. They tell stories from Dark Eden as cautionary tales, and we the reader knows how different those stories are from the actual events, but we also know that we don't know the full truth ourselves- after all, we got those stories from the perspective of John and from the perspective of Tina and from the perspective of Jeff, so whose perspective was closest to the truth? The characters in Mother of Eden have those stories brought down from Jeff and from John and from David, but the people telling the stories have had their own agendas and the stories have permuted remarkably. (Tina is missing. Tina has been written out of history, and this is such a telling detail that Beckett need not mention it. Instead, he shows the process by which it happens, using Angela's Secret Story and its own permutations as exemplar.)
The political 'chess match' of life in New Earth is vividly evoked, so that one cannot possibly tell how it will turn out and who will triumph. Power and morality clash and reach an uneasy stalemate that breaks lives and never turns out how anyone would predict. All of Beckett's characters have rich backstories and meaningful motivations and nobody is truly evil or truly good, so that you're never quite sure who you want to win.
King of Shards by Matthew Kressel
I've been anticipating this one for a while, since (disclaimer) I've known Kressel for years, but also because it's a fantasy of Kabbalah and Yiddish folklore and hello, that is just a little bit up my alley.
The premise is that someone has been killing Lamed Vavniks- the mythical 36 righteous people for whose sake the universe is sustained. At his wedding, young New York activist Daniel is kidnapped by a demon (a shed), who tells him that a)he is a Lamed Vavnik and b)his fiancee is a demon who is trying to kill him.
The ensuing adventure chases all over the Jewish folk cosmosphere, from Gehinnom l'Azazel, and it remains sustainably twisty and complicated and morally and spiritually challenging the whole way through, driven by the demons, who have real aspirations and offers of genuine power, but who can always be relied upon to not be telling the complete truth.
In general, I loved it, and devoured the whole thing in a couple of days, but I will note one reservation. Kressel jumps between three perspectives through the novel- Daniel, the demon Ashmedai, and a resident of one of the klippot (the eponymous shards) with mysterious creative gifts named Rana. Rana is the book's most compelling character and Ashmedai's perspective is reliably fascinating if revoltingly impure, but Kressel clearly struggles with Daniel. How do you write a Lamed Vavnik, how do you write a character who is so righteous that their righteousness upholds the universe, but so hidden that people do not realize what he is? Until the final two chapters, the result is so incredibly boring that I spent most of Daniel's POV sections waiting for the return of Rana and her interesting character journey. In the last few chapters, we start to get a Daniel who understands enough about what he is to make his choices interesting, and so I am looking forward to seeing his journey continue in the sequel, but it took Kressel too long to get there.
What I liked most about King of Shards was that in its details it felt like an old Yiddish folktale. The settings, the riddles, the mysteriously metaphoric imagery, they all spoke to an engagement with a literary tradition that felt very, very familiar to me, and Kressel updated that tradition with great skill and sensitivity. I especially loved how life in the klippot felt allegorically broken in a way that made me think about that which is broken on Earth.