book rec and fic recs

[psocoptera]

Fanfic and profic mixing it up in the same post, oh the humanity!

The Shattering - Another excellent YA by Karen Healey, who is going on my "read whatever she writes" list. More serious than Guardian of the Dead - real-world serious - as it's about three teens whose older brothers all committed suicide. Or did they. Three things I liked: 1) smart, genre-savvy protagonists who are 2) realistically placed on a spectrum of credulous/skeptical, when the possibility of supernatural explanations comes up (I hate it in books when real-world characters are either too quick to easily accept fantastical stuff, or stay in denial when there is like a vampire right there argh, unless it's lampshaded like the Sunnydale effect). 3) There is enjoyable romance but sibling relationships and friend relationships are major plot drivers. Also it made me cry. Recommended to all YA readers. (If anyone *has* read it, I would love to discuss, I have problems with the last chapter...) (Also: she seems to read fanfic and is possibly in fandom? I know it's not cool to ask to out someone, but if anyone happened to know if there was a fanfic author whose work I might also really like if I like Karen Healey's profic, I would be interested in that...)

we were emergencies, gyzym, 37K words, Avengers, Natasha/Clint. I don't ship this pairing in canon (Natasha/"being a female character whose character arc is about something other than her relationships" all the way!) but in fanfic, anything goes, and wow, this is incredible. Post-movie, about dealing with, uh, fallout of the movie. Intense and heartbreaking and so well done. Hits my competency kink hard. And, oh, the ways these versions of them fit each other. And - I will admit that a lot of times these days I get bored with sex scenes in fanfic, I enjoy the leadup but the actual porn, it's like, okay, yes, body parts, check, but this fic has the best and best-written sex scenes I've read in ages, hot and plot-meaningful and profoundly in character.

The Sky and Everything Beneath It, jibrailis, 7K words, Avengers, Steve gen. Also post-movie, also coming to terms, although more with his personal situation than movie-plot fallout. Also heartbreaking, except also extremely funny in spots. Had me at the Toyota Corolla.

Also, Avengers question: how can he possibly be named Clint? Isn't that the name no one can have in comics, in the same way that "flick" is the action no one may narrate? Was that a deliberate flick-you to the poor letterer, or something?

Comments

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Well. . . I have read The Shattering, although I was not nearly as enthusiastic about it as you seem to be (unsurprisingly? We seem to read a lot of the same books but be looking for pretty different things in them?). It did make me cry, though. So you can feel free to discuss the last chapter, and I will do my best to respond.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yay! SPOILERS ahoy!

So... I felt kind of betrayed by the last chapter, in that I felt like it took things that were awesome about Keri's character, things that the book had used to get us to like her, and said, no, wait, actually those were bad things that need fixing. I mean, it is obviously realistic that someone whose older brother killed himself would benefit from counseling and antidepressants, and I can see why Healey wanted to make that part of Keri's story, but I feel like she went a step beyond that with the pathologizing of the planning and implication that Keri had some kind of pre-existing anxiety disorder that therapy was also helping her with. In the course of the book the planning was sometimes useful, sometimes awesome, and always sympathetic, and it never seemed like it was getting in her way - but now at the end it's "not about real things that might really happen"?

I am also curious to hear any general thoughts you would care to share - I think I would have thought you would like this one. (Did you read Guardian of the Dead, and did you like that?)

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Sorry to take so long to respond to this - I got into an OCD/not-responding-to-things mode over my holidays, but I want to respond to things before actual work starts getting in the way ;-)

I think your point about the planning is fair. It's hard for me to respond to it more than that, though, because I don't think the very ending of the book made that much of an impression on me in general? So your point makes sense to me, but I don't have much to say about it.

I have more to say about my general thoughts, although, again, I'm not sure how interesting they are. The thing is, I didn't particularly like the book, but I didn't particularly dislike it, either, which makes it hard to discuss (it's much easier to talk about things that you have passionate feelings about one way or the other). I think my reaction to it was that it felt sort of facile or artificial to me. . . hard to explain quite what I mean, though. I guess it always seemed I was reacting to it on a purely intellectual level and never felt any real emotional involvement with the characters (but. . . you cried when it turned out that Keri's brother had actually committed suicide, you protest! Yes, I say, but I cry rather easily at things that don't actually involve all that much genuine emotional involvement - sometimes I cry even when I am rather irritated at myself for being manipulated so easily). It wasn't a bad book or one that irritated me in any way, and I was engaged enough to finish it in a day, but it wasn't very moving to me. Theoretically, I might have reacted that way because I was reading it while coming down from reading something else where I was extremely engaged with the characters (that fancomic, BtSDLb, that I was really obsessed with earlier this year) (and kind of explicitly to cheer myself up when I was unhappy because sildra hadn't liked BtSDLb, so maybe it just didn't do anything for me because I was looking for a much more effectively happiness-inducing read?) But it's hard to say.

I have in fact read Guardian of the Dead. My reactions to that are similar but a bit more complex. First of all, coming in to GotD I was expecting something really overwhelmingly good. Part of that was the hype, and part, I have to admit, was the fact that I knew it featured an asexual character, which was something that really excited me. So on one level it was more of a disappointment to me than The Shattering because I had higher expectations of it. Again, I didn't really feel any engagement with or interest in the characters, and that was especially disappointing to me because I did come into it really wanting to like the asexual character, and it was sad that he didn't speak to me at all on a personal level (again, his asexuality struck me as a bit facile). On the other hand, I do think I was somewhat more engaged in the plot by the end of the book than I was in the plot of The Shattering - I think I found it somewhat less predictable, and I was really amused by the fact that the climax of the book involved a giant vagina dentata because somehow that was not what I was expecting from a YA novel ;-) Of course, it's also worth noting that I read GotD on the come-down from The Demon's Lexicon trilogy, so that might, again, help to explain why I wasn't that enthused about it? But I don't think so, because I read it at around the same time I read Split by Swati Avasthi and Ash by Malinda Lo, both of which I enjoyed significantly more than I did GotD, so in this case at least I think I have decent evidence that I just wasn't actually that enthused about the book.

[mightyinkas.livejournal.com]

I read both of those fics today, solely because you recommended 'em, and I looooved the one about Cap. The other one was just... way too long and talky, and really rather OOC. (But I absolutely agree that it was a breath of fresh air to have Natasha's arc in the movie not be about a relationship. I thought they were going there when she was talking to Loki, and then - ha! So great.)

Anyway, thanks for the rec! :)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Heh, I do like long stories (in general, but especially lately, with a small baby making it hard to do much else *but* read...). Anyways, you're welcome!