Skinful of Shadows
Apr. 29th, 2018 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraContinuing my Hugo-ballot reading, Francis Hardinge's A Skinful of Shadows from the YA NotaHugo ProtoLodestar finalists. This was *so good* and I am anticipating a really difficult ranking process when it's voting time. (Maybe it's not surprising that "YA picked out by adults" is turning out to be a mostly-appealing assortment of stuff? (I think we can safely assume that the Hugo nominating demographic has very few actual Y.A.s in it, if any.) I sometimes have issues feeling too old for some YA that is more like being recced for Y.A.s than for adults, but not with these.)
So, what's so great about this one. I knew basically nothing about it going into it and couldn't predict where it was going, which is something I appreciate as an old, jaded reader, a plot original and not-obvious enough to keep me guessing! And then it ended up approaching some tropes I like from interesting angles, so that was fun. (Big spoilers behind this cut: It's sort of a lycanthropy story, without physical transformations. And sort of a multiple-personality story, without any potential ickiness of "is this sensationalizing a real-world thing". ) One thing that I think isn't too spoilery, I really enjoyed the setting at the start of the English Civil War; there was both some fun daily-life detail and a vivid sense of what that historical moment might have felt like to different groups of people. All in all I find myself back on the "I want to read more Hardinge" track again, despite having bounced so hard off of Fly By Night.
Content notes for animal harm, and also, let's say, medical abuse, that I don't have the historical knowledge to label period-typical or not? I guess for that matter the animal harm may be period-typical too, and now I'm having some incoherent thoughts about what work, exactly, "period-typical" is doing in content notes (I wouldn't say "period-typical police murders" or "period-typical transphobia" about something contemporary...). Hm.
So, what's so great about this one. I knew basically nothing about it going into it and couldn't predict where it was going, which is something I appreciate as an old, jaded reader, a plot original and not-obvious enough to keep me guessing! And then it ended up approaching some tropes I like from interesting angles, so that was fun. (Big spoilers behind this cut: It's sort of a lycanthropy story, without physical transformations. And sort of a multiple-personality story, without any potential ickiness of "is this sensationalizing a real-world thing". ) One thing that I think isn't too spoilery, I really enjoyed the setting at the start of the English Civil War; there was both some fun daily-life detail and a vivid sense of what that historical moment might have felt like to different groups of people. All in all I find myself back on the "I want to read more Hardinge" track again, despite having bounced so hard off of Fly By Night.
Content notes for animal harm, and also, let's say, medical abuse, that I don't have the historical knowledge to label period-typical or not? I guess for that matter the animal harm may be period-typical too, and now I'm having some incoherent thoughts about what work, exactly, "period-typical" is doing in content notes (I wouldn't say "period-typical police murders" or "period-typical transphobia" about something contemporary...). Hm.
