River of Teeth

[psocoptera]

River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey, Hugo-nominated novella. This didn't really hang together for me - I found the plot and action muddled and hard to follow, and I honestly spent most of it more preoccupied with why the dam was upriver of the lake rather than downriver than with what was nominally happening. But seriously, how the fuck does that work?? You dam a river and then water backs up behind the dam and creates a lake, this is basic hydraulic engineering?? How does a dam make a lake *downstream*? I kept waiting for someone in the book to as-you-know-Bob it because there had to be some kind of explanation and then THERE WAS NO EXPLANATION and my head exploded. Miiight have worked as a comic where we could just look at lots of pictures of hippos and not notice so much that nobody's character motivations made sense. (BUT WE STILL WOULD HAVE NOTICED THE RIVER PROBLEM, WHERE WAS YOUR EDITOR, GAILEY.)

ETA: Major animal harm and child harm, I meant to say that and I'm sorry I forgot.

Comments

[glynhogen]

Alas. I had been planning to get the omnibus, but I may slide that a couple notches down the priority list if these are Cheapass Games in novella form.

[glassonion]

I'm also pretty salty about the treatment of Louisiana as a made-up fantasy land with no real geography that readers would care about. Like, the only two place names she mentions are New Orleans and Lafayette, and she doesn't say much about either, including the fact that Lafayette should actually be west of her lake. The map makes it obvious how bad it is: she's plopping a massive manmade lake on the western edge of the river, and assuming that's going to have no effect on the course of the Mississippi.

I mean, that's kind of what you said about dams again, but it also kind of isn't, because Louisiana (especially easily fictionalizable romantic fantasy Louisiana) is dominated by its relationship to the Mississippi. I think anyone who knows one thing about this knows that the river would like to be flowing through the center of the state and has been prevented from doing so by the Army Corps of Engineers by to massive efforts for over 100 years. So, ignore the dam entirely, this scenario probably means there is no New Orleans because the Mississippi has merged with the Atchafalaya. Or at least that Baton Rouge is underwater.

Which, like, fine, in defense of wallpaper SF and all that. But it feels very "flyover country" to assume that none of your actual readers might be thrown out of the book by lack of treatment of the major geographical feature of the state you're writing about.