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psocopteraAndromeda Klein, Frank Portman. Painful realism about the social hell of adolescence plus dude did a LOT of tarot research plus I sort of felt like if I had been reading very carefully I might have solved a mystery going on in the far background, but I wasn't and I didn't?
Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib, David J. Schwartz. I was really hooked by the first few chapters of this, and then it sort of took an awkward turn for the epic (chapter 6, I went back and looked) and became much less compelling (to me), and we didn't get a lot of resolution on most of the threads that interested me, but I assume it's the first of a trilogy or something? I would definitely read the second one, now that the premise is well-established the rest of the series should be able to proceed without quite so much info-dumping. (That sounds more critical than I mean. The world-building is handled really well, all smoothly and fun, until the chapter 6+ stuff comes in.)
The Ships We Sail, anthology by the same people as Puzzle Box. Airships, spaceships, boats. A couple more possible file-offs, although also some that felt entirely original. The standout story for me was Off Nominal, by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ali_wildgoose, an extremely realistic Mars-expedition story that had me on the edge of my seat. And yes, by extremely realistic I mean "exciting footage of a man disengaging an equipment rack", as one of the characters puts it, this is not a story about things blowing up or discovering space monsters or whatever. This is a story for people who went to Space Camp, or dreamed of going to Space Camp, who are genuinely thrilled by the minutiae of real space exploration, who never get tired of Apollo 13, who think "on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars" is one of the most moving and memorable lines from any science fiction book. This is in many ways the movie I wish they had made instead of Europa Report, profoundly character-driven, where the tension comes from whether the actual goals of the mission will succeed, and what sacrifices have been/will need to be made, not who some stupid monster will eat next. Highly recommended for space nerds.
Watermelon Summer, Anna Hess. I read this awhile ago and have been dithering over how much I wanted to say about it. In brief, I think it was well-written but problematic.
This is a weird book to try to write about because I can't disentangle my personal knowledge of Anna from the text of the book. I think if I had picked it up off a bookshelf, it would be much easier to shrug and move on, but instead I keep thinking about it.
So the book is about an eighteen-year-old girl who decides to pass up world travel and delay/possibly skip college to try to revitalize an abandoned commune in Kentucky, which is presented as a good choice she's making for herself. And it was simply not possible for me to see it that way. And it feels very awkward to try to write about that, because Anna herself lives a very similar lifestyle on a very similar homestead, and I have nothing but respect for that (she seems really happy and I like the idea that someone I know will survive if our country collapses) but, like, for one thing, I know Anna *did* go to college, she went to college *with me*, and is very much more widely-traveled than I am, and secondly even if she hadn't done any of that she is also a grown adult. And I'm sure this earns me another check in the "approaching middle-age" column, but I just couldn't read the protagonist as an adult making a mature decision. I mean, there are some really beautiful scenes from life on the commune - "Anna is at her best when writing about nature and the experience of immersion in nature", if I wanted to go all formal-book-review-ese here - but there are also jolting reminders of reality, like when the love interest's brother has a very high fever and severe headache, and the protagonist decides to spend some of the community money on taking care of him, and this is a win for commune life, because they have $100 for antibiotics. When I'm sitting here as a parent reading the symptoms thinking, um, NO, try a spinal tap for starters, and a $10000 hospital stay for meningitis? I mean, it just felt like authorial cheating, to bring up health care at all and then dodge the real costs of these kids wanting to live off the land without things like health insurance... or later, there's a bit about what the actual worth of the land might be, if sold, and it's a really whopping number, and we're not supposed to sympathize with the person who wants to sell, but yeesh, how could you not? It feels sort of petty and weird to be bogged down in these details, when some of my favorite books are about things like fourteen-year-olds jumping off giant whale airships, and eighteen-year-olds fighting duels for the fate of the kingdom, and however the hell old Lyra is, like twelve or something, but I guess I expect a lot more realism from realistic fiction than I do from fantastic fiction? And Watermelon Summer felt to me like it wanted to be squarely realistic fiction, I mean, it didn't seem like My Side of the Mountain, big-time wish-fulfillment fantasy stuff to me.
Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib, David J. Schwartz. I was really hooked by the first few chapters of this, and then it sort of took an awkward turn for the epic (chapter 6, I went back and looked) and became much less compelling (to me), and we didn't get a lot of resolution on most of the threads that interested me, but I assume it's the first of a trilogy or something? I would definitely read the second one, now that the premise is well-established the rest of the series should be able to proceed without quite so much info-dumping. (That sounds more critical than I mean. The world-building is handled really well, all smoothly and fun, until the chapter 6+ stuff comes in.)
The Ships We Sail, anthology by the same people as Puzzle Box. Airships, spaceships, boats. A couple more possible file-offs, although also some that felt entirely original. The standout story for me was Off Nominal, by
ali_wildgoose, an extremely realistic Mars-expedition story that had me on the edge of my seat. And yes, by extremely realistic I mean "exciting footage of a man disengaging an equipment rack", as one of the characters puts it, this is not a story about things blowing up or discovering space monsters or whatever. This is a story for people who went to Space Camp, or dreamed of going to Space Camp, who are genuinely thrilled by the minutiae of real space exploration, who never get tired of Apollo 13, who think "on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars" is one of the most moving and memorable lines from any science fiction book. This is in many ways the movie I wish they had made instead of Europa Report, profoundly character-driven, where the tension comes from whether the actual goals of the mission will succeed, and what sacrifices have been/will need to be made, not who some stupid monster will eat next. Highly recommended for space nerds.Watermelon Summer, Anna Hess. I read this awhile ago and have been dithering over how much I wanted to say about it. In brief, I think it was well-written but problematic.
This is a weird book to try to write about because I can't disentangle my personal knowledge of Anna from the text of the book. I think if I had picked it up off a bookshelf, it would be much easier to shrug and move on, but instead I keep thinking about it.
So the book is about an eighteen-year-old girl who decides to pass up world travel and delay/possibly skip college to try to revitalize an abandoned commune in Kentucky, which is presented as a good choice she's making for herself. And it was simply not possible for me to see it that way. And it feels very awkward to try to write about that, because Anna herself lives a very similar lifestyle on a very similar homestead, and I have nothing but respect for that (she seems really happy and I like the idea that someone I know will survive if our country collapses) but, like, for one thing, I know Anna *did* go to college, she went to college *with me*, and is very much more widely-traveled than I am, and secondly even if she hadn't done any of that she is also a grown adult. And I'm sure this earns me another check in the "approaching middle-age" column, but I just couldn't read the protagonist as an adult making a mature decision. I mean, there are some really beautiful scenes from life on the commune - "Anna is at her best when writing about nature and the experience of immersion in nature", if I wanted to go all formal-book-review-ese here - but there are also jolting reminders of reality, like when the love interest's brother has a very high fever and severe headache, and the protagonist decides to spend some of the community money on taking care of him, and this is a win for commune life, because they have $100 for antibiotics. When I'm sitting here as a parent reading the symptoms thinking, um, NO, try a spinal tap for starters, and a $10000 hospital stay for meningitis? I mean, it just felt like authorial cheating, to bring up health care at all and then dodge the real costs of these kids wanting to live off the land without things like health insurance... or later, there's a bit about what the actual worth of the land might be, if sold, and it's a really whopping number, and we're not supposed to sympathize with the person who wants to sell, but yeesh, how could you not? It feels sort of petty and weird to be bogged down in these details, when some of my favorite books are about things like fourteen-year-olds jumping off giant whale airships, and eighteen-year-olds fighting duels for the fate of the kingdom, and however the hell old Lyra is, like twelve or something, but I guess I expect a lot more realism from realistic fiction than I do from fantastic fiction? And Watermelon Summer felt to me like it wanted to be squarely realistic fiction, I mean, it didn't seem like My Side of the Mountain, big-time wish-fulfillment fantasy stuff to me.
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no subject
Date: 2014-02-22 02:45 pm (UTC)(Also, if it's ever relevant, people can actually download a little phone-friendly ebook version of the story as a stand-alone for free here.)
I wonder if Scott has read Watermelon Summer? I'd be interested in his take on it, too, compared to yours. I haven't read it myself, but your discussion of it was really intriguing.
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Date: 2014-02-22 05:01 pm (UTC)