Bloodhound – Tamora Pierce

Bloodhound is Tamora Pierce’s second book about Beka Cooper, an ancestress of a character in her other books set in the world (referred to from here out as “Tortall books,” as Tortall is the central country). Beka has finished her Puppy year—a year of training to become a member of the Provost’s Guard, the police force well endowed with canine slang—and is starting her first year as a full Dog. What starts out as a bad fall in the Lower City due to a poor grain harvest becomes worse when counterfeits start showing up in the money system—lots of counterfeits. The investigation sends Beka into Port Caynn, a harbor city full of extra-corrupt Dogs and extra-bold Rats.

Tamora Pierce has been a source of comfort-reading for me since I was twelve or so. I’m not sure how many times I’ve read some of her older books, but… more times than I’ve read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. A lot. None of her books are amazing and there is some variation in quality, but they are by and large good, enjoyable stories. They feature appealing, entirely non-wimpy characters, many of them women, and there’s a decent smattering of LGBT characters and characters of color. I freely admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for Tamora Pierce, so season this review with as many grains of salt as you feel necessary. (Mmmm. Tasty salt.)

The major flaw in the Beka Cooper books comes from the narrative style she chose: journal-style. Dogs are trained to have excellent memories, so after all her adventures Beka comes home and writes them out in her journal, in great detail. Mostly this works, and the level of detail seems appropriate to a police procedural. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, she feels it necessary to throw in gimmicks. Inkblots; paw-prints where her cat walks over the page; words misspelled, crossed-out, and rewritten when Beka is tired. They distract from the story far more than they enhance it.

Fortunately, the gimmicks are widely spread through a book that is otherwise one of her best. Beka’s an appealing character, forthright and prickly. The police work is appropriately gritty and the investigation accelerates in a compelling way as they get closer to the truth. The romance is believable and enjoyable but stays secondary to the main plot and is not viewed through rose-colored glasses.

It’s particularly interesting to look at the Beka Cooper books, especially this one, in comparison to her other Tortall books. It’s set several hundred years earlier, and the difference in gender dynamics is amazing. In the books set later, women are fighting to gain equal status and rights, and to be accepted as warriors. In these, women are just starting to lose equal status, rights, and acceptance as warriors. The pendulum swings. The books from the later time period are generally set in and around the palace and nobles; not every character is a noble, but many are, and the rest interact with nobles on a daily basis. These books are set in a thoroughly lower-class part of town, with nobles showing up only occasionally. Between the gender and class differences, the attitudes among the characters toward money, family, loyalty, noblesse oblige, sex, and marriage are simultaneously quite different from her other Tortall books and yet entirely consistent with them. It’s really cool! I love it when authors put thought and effort into their worlds.

____________________
Bloodhound ~ Tamora Pierce

 

The Color of Earth – King Dong Hwa

In this graphic novel, Ehwa lives with her mother, a single parent and tavern-keeper, in a rural Korean town in an unspecified era. Over the course of the book—the first in a trilogy—Ehwa goes through puberty, slowly learning about sex, sexuality and relationships. Her education is fitful; she picks up bits and pieces from her peers, from adults’ overheard conversations, and from observing her mother develop a relationship with a traveling salesman.

The text is a bit too precious. Ehwa is both ignorant unaware of her own body, to the extent that she thinks, at age 7, that she’s deformed because two boys tell her that everyone has a penis. In contrast, she is unrealistically aware of emotions. At thirteen, she’s saying, “A few times, I’ve picked tiger lilies and left them on this bridge in case he comes by… but every time I check I see that the flowers are still here, wilted and dried up. Like Mom with her gourd flower, I left the tiger lilies here as a sign for him. But it looks like only the butterflies noticed.”¹ A little too sweet and a little to aware— of her own emotions and the emotions behind her mother’s actions— it doesn’t feel realistic. She’s incredibly conscious of herself, but without the self-consciousness that paralyzes many teenage girls. More believable, and more interesting, are the dirty, not-quite-good-natured teasing of Ehwa’s mother’s customers at the tavern and the similarly half-in-good-fun and half-mean clashes between Ehwa and her contemporaries.

The art is gorgeous and takes equal billing with the text: both propel the story. The text tries a little too hard to be poignant; the art succeeds effortlessly. The simple black-and-white drawings somehow manages to convey complex facial expression and portray Ehwa’s development and her continuing but changing curiosity and concern about her body. It’s worth it just for the art.

_____________________
¹ P. 114-115

____________________
The Color of Earth

 

Looking for Alaska – John Green

Miles goes off to boarding school in Alabama looking for the Great Perhaps: adventure, meaning, real friends. He finds the usual assortment of oddballs, including Alaska: hot, confident, exceedingly smart, emotionally scarred, she’s an amazing friend one minute and a selfish bitch the next.

For the first half of the book, sections are labeled “___ days before,” (and in the second half, “___ days after,”) such that we know that Something Bad is going to happen in the general vicinity of Christmas or New Years. Before: booze, cigarettes, pranks, and the study of precalc and religion. After: booze, cigarettes, pranks, and the study of precalc and religion. Also after: trying to figure out what happened, trying to make sense of it, trying to explain it.

It’s not the type of book I usually read, but it came highly recommended , and it’s worth it. Much of the time, when I read books that really throw me into a teenage boy’s head, I feel that I just don’t get it. Excellent books that I enjoy and get a lot out of, but there’s a disconnect. This was just as much in a teenage boy’s head, but it still made sense. A lot of that’s the excellent writing and characterization. I think it’s also partly because so much of Miles’s experience that year involves Alaska; because a girl is so central to everything that’s going on, even the boys’ interactions with each other, it’s grounded in something I do (somewhat) understand.

____________________
Looking for Alaska ~ John Green

 

Nation – Terry Pratchett

In the 1870s, a tidal wave sweeps through the South Pacific. Mau is the only person left alive of his island Nation, and Daphne is the only person left alive on a British ship, conveniently wrecked on the same island. The two must stay alive, deal with their traumas, figure out what the Rules — of life, or society — are when no one else is alive to obey them, and, eventually, hold together the group of survivors that coalesces as, one by one, those who survived the wave find the ocean.

I haven’t read much Pratchett, but Nation adds fodder to my suspicion that I like his books when they’re silly and am frustrated by them when they’re dealing with serious issues. Nation is dealing with serious issues: grief, trauma, adulthood/life transitions/coming of age, independence, the existence of evil and the crisis of faith that can come after a disaster. This last is probably the main focus of the book, and probably my largest frustration. I felt like I was being hit over the head with Mau’s lost faith. To be fair, Mau probably felt like he was being hit over the head by his sudden disbelief in the gods, or at least their goodness, but it still made me want to skim instead of read. Worse, Mau has supernatural experiences and makes no attempt to reconcile them with his belief or disbelief in the gods. There is no questioning of these experiences, no looking at them in relationship to the existence or nonexistence of gods (or vice versa). Mau’s personality and his ability to doubt the gods is explained by a childhood inquisitiveness, a habit of asking difficult questions, and yet he inexplicably stops asking those questions.

“But wait! You mentioned another main character,” I hear you say. “What about this Daphne?” What about her? She seems to exist to prompt events more than to be a character. Actually, most of the women fit that description; they’re there, they occasionally do important stuff, but really, it’s about men trying to define and control their world. Plot-wise, I can partly excuse this as a reflection of both nineteenth-century British society and the Nation’s society; both are largely homosocial and patriarchal. Characterization-wise, it’s hard to excuse.

And the epilogue has one of the worst cases of Profundity Syndrome I’ve ever seen.

____________________
Nation (Google Books) ~ Nation (Wikipedia)

 

Hush – Donna Jo Napoli

In a Norse saga, there’s a mention of an Irishwoman captured and sold as a slave, Melorka. In Hush, Donna Jo Napoli takes Melkorka and gives her a book of her own.

Melkorka’s a spoiled teenager, firmly convinced of her royal superiority over the ordinary people and slaves, firm in her hatred of Vikings, and not very good at thinking before she speaks. Then comes her kidnapping, and her enslavement. Remembering her sister and her mother, she refuses to speak to her captors; listening to a fellow slave, she resolves to not speak to anyone. Her silence, flimsy though it is, becomes the only power she has.

It’s told in a first-person, present-tense narrative that works. Melkorka’s inner monologue reveals what she doesn’t say and lets us watch her adjust to her situation – and adjust again when it changes again. We see the helplessness of slaver, but also how the slave comes to have more strength than the princess ever did. It’s surprisingly gentle for a slave narrative, I think in part because it’s present-tense, but that gentleness is actually quite revealing. When Melkorka is experiencing something she can’t deal with, she thinks about it only obliquely, and that sideways experience is what we’re given.

The end is rushed and trite. Looking back on it, the beginning seems tacked-on, not really part of the story. But in many ways that’s part of Melkorka’s story; the experiences she has make her no longer the person she was. It’s a powerful book, which makes no excuses for the cruelties of the world but gives us a woman who can’t escape them, but can survive them.

____________________
Hush ~ Donna Jo Napoli