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recent reading
Mar. 4th, 2013 09:46 pmDodger, Terry Pratchett. Not a Discworld book. Dodger is a tosher in Victorian London, someone who makes a living scrounging coins and other valuables that have fallen into the sewers. He encounters (and inspires) Charles Dickens and various other famous Victorians. Had a few good, evocative bits, generally in the sewers, but mostly felt kind of flat and forced.
Liar & Spy, Rebecca Stead. Not as brilliant as When You Reach Me, but "not as good as her Newbery winner" still leaves a fair bit of room. Liar & Spy is a very competent, well-written middle-grade novel with some lovely vivid character detail and some powerful issue stuff that made me cry. I would happily recommend it to people who like middle-grade books. It did not have the amazingness that made me recommend When You Reach Me even to people who wouldn't normally think of reading middle-grade.
Machine of Death, anthology. Some good stuff in here. Thought-provoking. Free on the internet!
Every Day, David Levithan. Greg Egan's short story The Safe Deposit Box rewritten as a YA novel. Which is not a criticism! It's a great premise and Levithan is definitely putting his own spin on it, focusing on the emotional implications and questions of identity so genre-appropriate to YA, whereas Egan's story is more SFnal, investigative, mechanics-focused. And Levithan may have come up with the idea independently - he says in his notes that he doesn't remember what sparked the idea, so there's no way to know.
Anyways, it's mostly good! Sort of recommended with one big caveat, there's one chapter involving a fat character that was just full of fat-shaming and body hatred, which, ugh, David Levithan, why? It could have been really interesting - pretty much every other time Levithan shines a light on a way in which people get "othered", he does it with sensitivity and compassion, the gay characters, the trans guy, the drug addict, the "underage illegal maid" who is pretty clearly an undocumented immigrant, the diabetic, the variation in wealth/class/resources, there's a whole conversation you could have about race and the way Levithan shows it as a non-issue which is an interesting choice on Levithan's part (I have this whole theory that by experiencing a given racial identity for only one day at a time, A might be oblivious to being a target of prejudice except for the occasional major incident, because A wouldn't catch how individual microaggressions were actually part of a larger pattern - if that's what Levithan was going for, he needed to make it a little clearer though). But this one chapter is just so bad. But the rest is so good. So... read at your own risk, I guess.
Liar & Spy, Rebecca Stead. Not as brilliant as When You Reach Me, but "not as good as her Newbery winner" still leaves a fair bit of room. Liar & Spy is a very competent, well-written middle-grade novel with some lovely vivid character detail and some powerful issue stuff that made me cry. I would happily recommend it to people who like middle-grade books. It did not have the amazingness that made me recommend When You Reach Me even to people who wouldn't normally think of reading middle-grade.
Machine of Death, anthology. Some good stuff in here. Thought-provoking. Free on the internet!
Every Day, David Levithan. Greg Egan's short story The Safe Deposit Box rewritten as a YA novel. Which is not a criticism! It's a great premise and Levithan is definitely putting his own spin on it, focusing on the emotional implications and questions of identity so genre-appropriate to YA, whereas Egan's story is more SFnal, investigative, mechanics-focused. And Levithan may have come up with the idea independently - he says in his notes that he doesn't remember what sparked the idea, so there's no way to know.
Anyways, it's mostly good! Sort of recommended with one big caveat, there's one chapter involving a fat character that was just full of fat-shaming and body hatred, which, ugh, David Levithan, why? It could have been really interesting - pretty much every other time Levithan shines a light on a way in which people get "othered", he does it with sensitivity and compassion, the gay characters, the trans guy, the drug addict, the "underage illegal maid" who is pretty clearly an undocumented immigrant, the diabetic, the variation in wealth/class/resources, there's a whole conversation you could have about race and the way Levithan shows it as a non-issue which is an interesting choice on Levithan's part (I have this whole theory that by experiencing a given racial identity for only one day at a time, A might be oblivious to being a target of prejudice except for the occasional major incident, because A wouldn't catch how individual microaggressions were actually part of a larger pattern - if that's what Levithan was going for, he needed to make it a little clearer though). But this one chapter is just so bad. But the rest is so good. So... read at your own risk, I guess.
