The Humming of Numbers – Joni Sensel

Aidan is a novice, nearly ready to take his vows as a monk, despite some lingering difficult with obedience. Obedience may trouble him, but he’s learned not to mention the humming of numbers—he hears numbers buzzing from everything—lest he be accused of witchcraft. People hum low numbers—anxious, unpleasant ones; steadfast, loyal threes; confident eights— while animals and objects hum higher numbers.

Abruptly brought to the monastery for punishment, Lana hums an eleven, the highest Aidan has ever heard from a person. A beautiful, energetic, playful eleven. Lana is all of those things, not to mention highly knowledgeable of the less-mundane uses of wood—what protects, what threatens, what gives knowledge— and skilled at causing trouble for Aidan.

And then the Vikings come.

The writing is nothing special. Aidan’s way of perceiving the world is interesting and well-explained. Lana’s way of seeing the world, the way she senses trees and works with them, is less unusual but at least as interesting. Lana’s life is also more interesting than Aidan’s; he was a youngest son sent to a monastery because there would be no land for him, while she was the bastard daughter of the local lord, gifted nice things periodically but rarely enough to eat, raped—and probably impregnated and led to have an abortion— gossiped about as a noble but not respected as one. Unfortunately, we see Lana only through Aidan’s eyes, and the limitations of the writing keep her from becoming thoroughly fleshed-out and realized. We know she is energetic, trusting, and playful; but we’re not given enough to see how she maintains this lightness in the face of all she’s been through. She and Aidan both seem unrealistically young, for their ages and for their existences.

(Spoiler time!)

But they are in their late teens and this is YA about a somewhat-loner guy thrown together with a somewhat-loner girl in stressful circumstances, so there must be sexual exploration. Lana's part is done well; the combination of excitement and nervousness, and the survivor's need to know that she can say stop and her partner will listen. And Aidan does stop However:

“Couldn’t we . . . couldn’t you just hold me and that’s all?” . . .

“I don’t know if I can do that, Lana.” He made the mistake of looking over his shoulder at her. Just the shape of her form in the gloom and the prospect of feeling her skin against his once more sent a tingle along his skin.

A hopeful smile flicked onto her lips, not sure it should stay. “I can slap hands that travel too far.”

Glad that the wounded creature [upset Lana] had slipped back out of sight, he replied gentle, “I’m serious. I don’t think I can. You are too overwhelming up close. Better if I stay a short distance away”¹

Sorry, kid. Holding your girlfriend without the possibility of sex when you’re really horny is likely to be exceedingly frustrating. Difficult. Possibly even painful. But you can do it. You may decide it’s not worth it, but you can. And the implication in this passage that men really can’t control their impulses, that they’ll turn into rapists if their girlfriends want hugs but not sex, is ridiculous and insulting to men. It also perpetuates an untrue idea of why rape happens: because men cannot control themselves around beautiful women. And from there it’s easy to get to the slippery slope of “she was wearing a short skirt so it’s her fault.” In reality, rape is less about sex than it is about power.

It’s bizarre to see that attitude in a book that, in other place, deals well with issues of rape and of being a survivor. It’s possible that the mediocre writing is to blame, that the author meant Aidan’s “I don’t think I can” to mean “I don’t think I can without being exceedingly uncomfortable” instead of “I don’t think I can without forcing sex on you.” As written, it comes across questionably at best.

(No more spoilers!)

Otherwise, it’s a quick, relatively fun, if unexceptional, book.

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¹p. 176-177

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The Humming of Numbers ~ Joni Sensel

 

Fire – Kristin Cashore

In the Dells live monsters, animals of all types in brilliant colors – magenta, chartreuse, blues and purples rarely found in nature (wrong climate for tree frogs. Which is probably a good thing, as I’m not sure how they’d differentiate between normal and monster tree frogs.) The monsters are so beautiful that they impair peoples’ ability to think; people can become so mesmerized that they don’t defend themselves against a monster raptor, or against monster mosquitoes, for that matter.

Fire is the last human monster. Monster beauty and human intelligence combine such that she can read and influence minds that aren’t defended by a lot of willpower. It also means that people throw themselves at her a lot – wanting to profess their undying love, wanting to rape her, wanting to kill her out of jealousy, or wanting to kill her to prevent her from becoming like her father: a monster who controlled a weak king, used his power to rape and murder for sport, and left the kingdom ripe for civil war when both he and the weak king died. Fire has lived her life in a remote village, but eventually finds herself drawn into the lives of the royal family and the war they are fighting.

Fire’s being billed as a prequel to Graceling, and it does provide an origin story for King Leck, but both it and Graceling work very well as stand-alones. I actually think the Leck parts of Fire are the weakest parts and not really necessary to the story, though there’s certainly enough seeds to see where it’ll be important come the third book, the planned Bitterblue.

The rest of Fire, on the other hand, is very strong. The writing is gripping and both the characters and the relationships are complex and satisfying. There’s Fire, of course, who has to deal with what she could be with her abilities, what she doesn’t want to do with them, the constant danger she’s in, and the knowledge of what her father did with his abilities. The other characters are nearly as impressive, wrestling with conflicting desires and knowledge, secrets, guilt, and, especially, the complicated connections between love, jealousy, sex, and trust. Family issues are also potent; Fire isn’t the only character who must wrestle with what her parent(s) did, and whether or not she will follow the same path, and the rather complicated family trees raise issues of kinship and the definition of family.

All that in a good, enjoyable book.

October 2009

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My review of Graceling

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Fire ~ Kristin Cashore

 

Tender Morsels – Margo Lanagan

Outside a small village in (a slightly more magical) medieval Germany, Liga lives alone with her father. Who has been raping her regularly since she was twelve or thirteen. Liga’s life improves somewhat after her father’s death and the birth of her daughter, but a violent gang-rape undoes what little contentment she’s eked out for herself. Liga’s despair and desperation somehow push her into the magical world of her heart’s desire: a well-kept cottage near a quiet village where the taverns don’t serve alcohol and there is a no money, where women like and respect her, and where men are few, keep to themselves, and never threaten. It’s a peaceful and, above all, a safe place for Liga to raise her daughters: snow-white Branza and rose-red Urdda, with only a few incursions from real-world teenage-boys-in-the-shape-of-bears

It’s a fascinating book.

Mostly told in the third person Tender Morsels follows Liga’s life and focuses on her and her daughters. The deviations are lengthy first person sections told in the voices of men – some sympathetic, some really not – liberally interspersed through the book. These help the plot move along and provide context for the events in Liga’s dreamworld, but they do more than that; allowing these men to have a voice gives the book a balance it may not have otherwise had. Men are the primary instigators of violence and invasion in the book, but they are also thinking people. Even when they’re bears.

Rather than following a typical narrative arc (exposition -> rising action -> climax -> falling action ->dénoument), it proceeds rather like life: shit happens, it’s quiet for a while, other shit happens, minor shit happens, it’s quiet for a while, there’s a major change, it’s quiet for a while… and so on. This does make the book less sticky/gripping than many; you’re walking calmly through the book, not being pulled headlong by the movement of the plot. It’s also a relief; the plot revolves around some pretty horrible things and still other disturbing things, but, as life and time facilitate healing after trauma, the lifelike pacing facilitates the reader’s processing of what’s been read.

That the book spans years also lets Lanagan illuminate the nature changeability of desire, and the limits of our foresight and imagination. They live in a world constructed out of Liga’s desires as a traumatized fifteen-year-old, but she and her daughters grow and age; and as their desires change and grow, the limits of their world become apparent. It keeps them safe, but it cannot keep them from loneliness. At the same time, the very protection it gives hampers them as they grow older and must deal with incursions from the real world. And it keeps them content but not happy.

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Tender Morsels ~ Margo Lanagan

 

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.

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Hush ~ Donna Jo Napoli

 

Eon: Dragoneye Reborn – Alison Goodman

There are two ways a book can make one miss, or nearly miss, one’s subway/train/bus stop. Most commonly, the book absorbs you such that you stop paying attention to your surrounds. Eventually you look up and realize that you’ve traveled much further than you thought. Alternately, a book grips you but allows you to see your surroundings; you see the stop before yours come and go, you see your stop approach — and you still can barely slam shut the book and get out of the train. Eon does the latter. I read it in three train rides, one lunch, and an evening of ignoring the clock as it got closer and closer to my bed time.

I first heard of Eon when I was reading the starred review it got in Publisher’s Weekly. I looked at the title¹ and cover and thought, “Ugh, that looks like standard overwrought fantasy, why are they giving it a starred review?” I read the summary part of the review and thought, “Ugh, that sounds like standard overwrought fantasy, why are they giving it a starred review?” I read the part of the review where it talked about the gender issues, and thought “Oh!” and wrote it down on my to-read list. Many months later I got around to reading it, and am now refraining from beginning my review with a summary, for fear of making you think its standard overwrought fantasy.

So what is going on? In a vaguely imperial China-esque society, Eon is in the midst of a reverse-meteoric rise from slave to crippled, inauspicious trainee, to a rank just shy of the imperial family. Eon is thrust into the midst of court intrigue and desperate power struggles, in which Eon is as much pawn as player. Oh, and Eon was born Eona and is physically female. After four years dressing as a boy, speaking as a boy, behaving as a boy, and taking part in training and studies only boys are allowed, Eona has been reduced to a tiny presence in the back of Eon’s mind; a little harder to ignore around menstruation, but pushed back and, in many ways, seen by Eon as an enemy.

To this, we add two other central characters: Lady Dela, the court lady assigned to teach Eon courtly ways, and Ryko, Lady Dela’s bodyguard. Lady Dela is a Contraire – male-to-female transgender. The Empire is vast; where Dela is from, Contraires are admired because they combine male sun power and female moon power. Sent to court as a gift, she has had to pave her own way in a setting where she is looked on as more unnatural than a force of nature. Ryko is a eunuch.

This means that many of the conversations in the book take place, ostensibly, between a woman, a man, and a boy. And the woman’s the only one with a penis. And that’s where the power of the book is found. These three characters each have complex relationships with their bodies, their self-perception, and their sexuality, and they all have different complexities. It respects the diversity in gender identity and expression while painting a disturbing but honest picture of the discrimination and violence, often sexualized violence, perpetrated against both a lesser-valued gender and against those whose gender expression breaks societal norms.

It’s a complex, powerful, at times painful book. Beware reading it on trains.

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¹ In Australia, the title is The Two Pearls of Wisdom. We always seem to get the worst titles. And in this case it’s particularly egregious, since Eon: Dragoneye Reborn in conjunction with the title of the sequel gives away something fairly major.

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Eon: Dragoneye Reborn ~