Big Catch-Up on Book Reactions

[labingi]

This is partly review, mostly idiosyncratic personal response. Disclaimers: I am a picky reader. My discontents often reflect more on me than the book. Summaries may contain very light spoilers.

Ancillary Justice by Ann Lecke
Book’s quality: Good
My enjoyment: So-so


Summary: In an interstellar far future of war and political intrigue, we follow the revenge quest of an android-like person who is an isolated, surviving remnant of an ancient corporate entity.

This book was recommended to me by a student who adores it as a life-changing work, and this set me up with fairly high expectations, which it didn’t quite meet. It has impressive worldbuilding, and it delves very skillfully into the idea of what it might be like to be a corporate entity. It was a “miss” for me in two respects:

1) I didn’t find the relationships between characters compelling. The lead character, plausibly, doesn’t have strong emotional connections by human standards, and this inherently dulled the emotional impact.

2) The book has scored “gender” points among readers and reviewers for creating a society where any mix of (our) gender characteristics is acceptable for any physical sex, and pronouns are neutral. For me, this was an area where the worldbuilding felt undercooked. For example, the lead keeps having difficulty navigating male/female pronouns in foreign cultures, which would be fine... except they are thousands of years old with massive amounts of knowledge. I think they’d have figured out how to read male/female gender by now. More broadly, it’s interesting that this culture is highly controlling in every way except gender roles. Why is this the exception? What’s the history behind this? The book doesn’t say, which makes it feel more like a way to score points for 2020s audiences than internally meticulous worldbuilding. (That’s a “button push” for me.) I’m glad I read it, though, for the excellent exploration of corporate entities.

Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Book’s quality: Quite good
My enjoyment: Good


Summary: A poor boy with the power to communicate with others via empathy is trained as a royal assassin while his country is subject to increasingly scary attacks. (First in the Farseer trilogy)

I know Hobb is a beloved name in fantasy and that this is her first book, so probably not her best? I definitely want to read more of her work. It is a very good book in many ways. The worldbuilding, standard medievalish “fantasy,” is internally consistent and interesting, but the highest compliment I can pay this book is that it didn’t push any of my buttons. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but it’s not. I have many buttons, and they are easily pushed. As someone who has turned to books for a lot of life lessons and often been truly psychologically wounded by them, I get painfully triggered by many tropes most just regard as a standard part of the entertainment. Hobb sidestepped all of this! In other words, her characters and relationships are non-stereotypical, eschewing standard good/evil roles and showing individuality and nuance.

Oddly, my complaint is one I don’t usually make as character-oriented reader: I don’t think the book was very well plotted. Fiction 101 teaches that a story’s main conflict should be the thing that bars the protagonist from what they want. That’s just not true here. The protagonist doesn’t have strong desires; he’s mostly just living his life. And though his country is in conflict, it’s not directly aimed at him or something he’s principally responsible for dealing with. I’m sure this changes later in the trilogy, but for this book, it made him feel just kind of there. He’s a good character; I like him, but I was left feeling like I’d read some biography about him rather than a story.

For those who have read the trilogy, do you think I’d like the next two more?

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Book’s quality: Quite good
My enjoyment: frustrated! Such a near miss.


Summary: In an oppressive fantasy kingdom, two young men are tasked with transporting a decrepit goddess across the land while being pursued the emperor’s forces.

Jimenez is very talented, and this book is well written. It frustrated me because I had hopes that I could put in on the favorite books list, sing its praises to the heavens. But I’m a character-based reader, and this book is not character based. Jimenez develops some amazing sketches of non-stereotypical people and relationships. As a reader of BL (written by and for women), I appreciated getting to read an m/m romance that felt written by a man for men: the way they bond by fighting and trying to verbally one-up each other felt very genuinely young mannish.

But there we were, with a potentially great, truly fandom-inspiring romance, and a potentially gripping father-son story too, and Jimenez chose not to do the development. For example, father and son don’t get a single scene showing their default relationship before their conflict, I mean just before—not years before in a flashback. We’re told this is the favorite of many sons, but why? What impact does that favoritism have on the son’s choosing to turn on his father? Dunno. Then, there’s the chapter where our two lovers share a moment of intimate confession and the text tells us (paraphrased), “You don’t get to know what they said.” That pretty much sums up how I feel about the book’s character and relationship work.

Good bits: This book is in love with its narrative frame, perhaps too much, but it is an interesting, creative frame: young man from the future of the main story goes to a dream theater where the whole story is reenacted, and he is eventually called to be part of the action. It’s an experimental novel, and the experiment comes off well. The worldbuilding is also well done. It’s genuinely “fantastic”: like, the moon comes down the surface. My brain kept trying to interpret this mythologically or science fictionally, but, no, the moon just came down, and I appreciate being put in that different cognitive space. I also take my hat off to Jimenez (who I’m going to take a wild guess has Hispanic heritage) in doing worldbuilding that feels vaguely Chinese without feeling (to me) appropriative: the east Asian vibe is present enough to take the story outside the tired Western frame but divergent enough to stand as its own fantasy world. Well done!

If you are reading for deep character development, you might find this book squanders some potential, but it is skillfully handled in many ways.

Comments

[sovay]

More broadly, it’s interesting that this culture is highly controlling in every way except gender roles. Why is this the exception? What’s the history behind this?

rushthatspeaks, reviewing the novel in 2014, plausibly read the agendered nature of the Radch as double-edged diegetically another expression and mechanism of that control, which then explains why the Radchaai don't learn the gender signifiers of other cultures: it is beneath them to do so, it is not civilized. This attitude is depicted as outright misgendering in the one post-Ancillary novel of Leckie's I have read, Translation State (2023), which unfortunately I did not like at all. (I did like Ancillary Justice very much and then experienced diminishing returns with the rest of the trilogy. I read Translation State because a friend was arguing with it. Then so did I.)