books, category, hotly anticipated
Nov. 7th, 2017 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraKristin Cashore's Jane, Unlimited and Ann Leckie's Provenance! Which turned out to be a nice reading pair aside from the "obviously I want to read the shiny new book by these authors" part.
I had thought Provenance was going to be a totally new universe, but it turns out it's a standalone in the Radch universe. It's about totally different people on a different planet so you could probably read it without reading the Ancillary books and just miss some references/background knowledge, but why would you, the Ancillary books are fantastic.
Some very spoilery comments about Provenance behind this cut: So I totally thought the boots were going to turn out to be the mechs like the bag had! In general I liked this a lot - fun stuff with mistaken identities with the mechs and Pahlad, I liked Ingray, it felt a lot like a Vorkosigan book in terms of the intrigue and the actiony bits and the relationships and any time you get a new Vorkosigan book, that's great, even if it's not actually a Vorkosigan book - but I wasn't blown away like I was by Ancillary Justice. Which is fine! I like the idea of seeing Leckie explore what kinds of other stories she can tell in her universe. Also, I really loved what I read as a subtle inclusion of a genderfluid character, based on Taucris's almost-throwaway line about the Geck pronouns, "They change?" Like there was SO MUCH implied characterization in that for me about the reason Taucris took so long to pick a gender, and I really liked that even in this three-gender everyone-gets-to-choose system there are still people for whom it doesn't quite work. The gender incompleteness theorem, no formal system ever fully describes or suits all participants. :)
I knew *nothing* about Jane, Unlimited when I picked it up, and I would like to strongly recommend that reading approach. I'm going to talk about it in super-spoilery detail behind this next cut but first I'm going to blather on for a bit so anyone coming in from the Provenance paragraph has the chance to bail out before they read something spoilery, blah blah, oh, I'll say one possibly useful thing which is that Jane, Unlimited has an instance of animal harm, heads up for that. Doop de doo. All ashore who are going ashore? Great.
So I think it's not too spoilery about Provenance to say that Provenance involves the topic of art forgery/art theft, given the title. I was delighted to find that Jane, Unlimited did too, yay book serendipity!
But let me back up. The thing I liked most about Jane, Unlimited, as it turned out, was the experience of reading it without any sort of genre expectations or context, such that I had absolutely no idea what kind of plot might emerge or what kind of twists it might take. The first part of the book was like being in freefall, anything could happen! This could be any kind of story! And it made me wish in some ways that I had that experience more often of boarding a ride that I had no idea what kind of ride it was going to be, and just letting the roller coaster crank blindly up that first hill. Partway through the third branch, I said, "oh, this is a gothic, we had a mystery and a thriller, I suppose we'll get fantasy and sci-fi next", and at that point some of the fun went out of it. I mean, it was still good, but it felt more like denouement from there. So for me the most interesting thing about Jane, Unlimited is the way it's sort of a metafiction about genre and the way that maybe we would benefit from reading more books under a bigger umbrella (see what I did there) instead of expecting genre conventions all the time. And also that to get the full picture of the story, you have to read multiple versions of it from multiple approaches, which is a very fanfic-era ""fanning out" is part of how we fill out and experience a fictional universe" sort of idea and it's interesting to see Cashore playing with that. Especially given the way her previous three books were all different angles on grappling with one villain. (I'm SO GLAD she's finally moved past Leck.) I thought it was really interesting that earlier drafts were actually written as second-person choose-your-own-adventures before she moved to the third-person read-in-order branched structure... I actually considered the possibility of reading parts out of order (since we have all the page numbers right there on the handy umbrella-of-contents) but did not, since it wasn't *clear* that one could, and book order seemed likely to be good. I'd be very curious whether anyone tries it, might look on goodreads.
Other than all that, I loved the umbrellas, what a neat and original motif (and the thing about lampshades! if your world didn't have umbrellas! that was maybe my favorite line of the whole book, that in a universe that doesn't have your thing, you still have your thing, just slightly different!) and I really liked the handling of the Ravi-Ivy question, and the way that the branching lets Jane go through a wide range of emotions about her aunt and her loss. I've been feeling like YA isn't as surefire for me as a genre any more - I still love a good YA but not-great YA increasingly tries my patience - but Jane, Unlimited is definitely in the high-end-of-the-age-range, possibly-actually-New-Adult zone that still really works for me. I'll be very curious to see if it gets a Norton nom.
I had thought Provenance was going to be a totally new universe, but it turns out it's a standalone in the Radch universe. It's about totally different people on a different planet so you could probably read it without reading the Ancillary books and just miss some references/background knowledge, but why would you, the Ancillary books are fantastic.
Some very spoilery comments about Provenance behind this cut: So I totally thought the boots were going to turn out to be the mechs like the bag had! In general I liked this a lot - fun stuff with mistaken identities with the mechs and Pahlad, I liked Ingray, it felt a lot like a Vorkosigan book in terms of the intrigue and the actiony bits and the relationships and any time you get a new Vorkosigan book, that's great, even if it's not actually a Vorkosigan book - but I wasn't blown away like I was by Ancillary Justice. Which is fine! I like the idea of seeing Leckie explore what kinds of other stories she can tell in her universe. Also, I really loved what I read as a subtle inclusion of a genderfluid character, based on Taucris's almost-throwaway line about the Geck pronouns, "They change?" Like there was SO MUCH implied characterization in that for me about the reason Taucris took so long to pick a gender, and I really liked that even in this three-gender everyone-gets-to-choose system there are still people for whom it doesn't quite work. The gender incompleteness theorem, no formal system ever fully describes or suits all participants. :)
I knew *nothing* about Jane, Unlimited when I picked it up, and I would like to strongly recommend that reading approach. I'm going to talk about it in super-spoilery detail behind this next cut but first I'm going to blather on for a bit so anyone coming in from the Provenance paragraph has the chance to bail out before they read something spoilery, blah blah, oh, I'll say one possibly useful thing which is that Jane, Unlimited has an instance of animal harm, heads up for that. Doop de doo. All ashore who are going ashore? Great.
So I think it's not too spoilery about Provenance to say that Provenance involves the topic of art forgery/art theft, given the title. I was delighted to find that Jane, Unlimited did too, yay book serendipity!
But let me back up. The thing I liked most about Jane, Unlimited, as it turned out, was the experience of reading it without any sort of genre expectations or context, such that I had absolutely no idea what kind of plot might emerge or what kind of twists it might take. The first part of the book was like being in freefall, anything could happen! This could be any kind of story! And it made me wish in some ways that I had that experience more often of boarding a ride that I had no idea what kind of ride it was going to be, and just letting the roller coaster crank blindly up that first hill. Partway through the third branch, I said, "oh, this is a gothic, we had a mystery and a thriller, I suppose we'll get fantasy and sci-fi next", and at that point some of the fun went out of it. I mean, it was still good, but it felt more like denouement from there. So for me the most interesting thing about Jane, Unlimited is the way it's sort of a metafiction about genre and the way that maybe we would benefit from reading more books under a bigger umbrella (see what I did there) instead of expecting genre conventions all the time. And also that to get the full picture of the story, you have to read multiple versions of it from multiple approaches, which is a very fanfic-era ""fanning out" is part of how we fill out and experience a fictional universe" sort of idea and it's interesting to see Cashore playing with that. Especially given the way her previous three books were all different angles on grappling with one villain. (I'm SO GLAD she's finally moved past Leck.) I thought it was really interesting that earlier drafts were actually written as second-person choose-your-own-adventures before she moved to the third-person read-in-order branched structure... I actually considered the possibility of reading parts out of order (since we have all the page numbers right there on the handy umbrella-of-contents) but did not, since it wasn't *clear* that one could, and book order seemed likely to be good. I'd be very curious whether anyone tries it, might look on goodreads.
Other than all that, I loved the umbrellas, what a neat and original motif (and the thing about lampshades! if your world didn't have umbrellas! that was maybe my favorite line of the whole book, that in a universe that doesn't have your thing, you still have your thing, just slightly different!) and I really liked the handling of the Ravi-Ivy question, and the way that the branching lets Jane go through a wide range of emotions about her aunt and her loss. I've been feeling like YA isn't as surefire for me as a genre any more - I still love a good YA but not-great YA increasingly tries my patience - but Jane, Unlimited is definitely in the high-end-of-the-age-range, possibly-actually-New-Adult zone that still really works for me. I'll be very curious to see if it gets a Norton nom.
