two unrelated picture books

I have perhaps been somewhat negligent in teaching my kids about the bad shit of the world - genocide, slavery, oppression, etc - and have been making small moves to try to do something about that. We just read/listened to the accompanying audio cd of Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad about Henry Box Brown, written by Ellen Levine and illustrated by Kadir Nelson, which I thought did a good job of showing certain aspects of the awfulness of American chattel slavery (Henry is separated from his mother, and then his wife and children are sold and he never sees them again) without focusing on grislier details/physical brutality (which, I mean, they should know about eventually, but I don't feel like we're there yet). And I know it's not great to *just* focus on the Underground Railroad but I guess I feel like it's an okay starting point? Also the art is beautiful. So I recommend this book, for this sort of thing. (As it happened, we listened to it in the car on the way to Philadelphia, and Brown was *also* going to Philly, from Richmond, which is a similar distance away, so we got to very concretely consider the idea of the trip taking 27 hours in a box instead of 7 hours in a comfy car. And then it turned out that he arrived on the kids' birthday, which is of course the most important day ever, so they liked that.)

Feathers: Not Just for Flying, written by Melissa Stewart and illustrated by Sarah S. Brannen, is pretty much what it says in the title: realistic art of feathers and birds, talking about feathers as insulation, camouflage, etc. I really like birds and feathers and there are some cool bird facts in here and it's just very pleasant to look at. Q really liked that there was a lineup of feathers on the first pages and then as we went through the book we found out about those different feathers - he was excited to turn back to the lineup page and find the match.

fricking faeries double feature and my Campbell NotaHugo ballot

I love a deliberate theme but this time it was just by coincidence that I ended up reading, back to back, two books about humans in faeryland that I was really unenthusiastic about at first but did eventually warm up to somewhat.

Holly Black's The Cruel Prince is the first in a new trilogy. All of her Faerie books take place in the same larger universe, and characters from some of her other books have cameos in this one, but you don't need to have read any of them to follow the story here. I loved Darkest Part of the Forest, her most recent previous Faerie book, so I was excited to read this one, but Black's main characters are hit or miss for me in whether I enjoy them and their often messed-up motivations, and I had a really hard time getting onboard with this one, a human stolen with her sisters by the fairies at a young age and now determined to make a place for herself in their world. For most of the book I just wanted to see her get *out* - there was this heartbreaking flashback early on where (spoiler) ( Read more... )

Black did eventually convince me that the protag's motivations made sense as a response to the profound trauma and abuse of her childhood but, still, one of those stories where you wish the protag could escape from the plot and get therapy instead. The romance aspect also seems to be proceeding along (spoiler) ( Read more... )

Black's court-intrigue plotting is solid, though, and by the end I was well suckered in and I'll probably read the next one. If you like both Tithe and Game of Thrones, you'll probably like this from earlier on than I did.

Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng, is about a pair of brother and sister missionaries who travel to the land of the Fae to bring Christianity to the fairies, which goes about as well as you might think. This is very slow Gothic theologypunk - seriously Gothic, in the classic "woman sits around a spooky house and waits for the plot to happen to her" sense - but does eventually hit some interestingish beats, if you can get there. In general, I find book-characters' Christianity hard to take seriously (as opposed to made-up religions that are clearly metaphysically true in the book's universe, which I often find quite powerful, as in Curse of Chalion or Kushiel's Avatar) - this is a book where characters really care about the details of transubstantiation or biblical inconsistency, and I do not. But what *Ng* cares about is both bigger/more historical (how the attitudes of Victorian Christian imperialism towards other peoples run aground on the power and incomprehensibility of the Fae) and more specific (in the main character's reactions and choices). I had picked up a spoiler somewhere for a certain aspect of the story, which added to the interest for me, but might be a no-go for others: content note for (spoiler) ( Read more... )

. People might enjoy this who like Sandman, or Gaiman's adult work in general, or A.S. Byatt's Possession. There is an excellent spoilery Q&A with Ng here that talks about some of the textual references and ideas behind the worldbuilding, definitely recommended afterwards if you read the book.

And now I'll leave a little space, and then discuss my ballot ranking for the Campbell Notahugo behind another cut.

A space!

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