Creatures of Will and Temper
Jun. 4th, 2019 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraCreatures of Will and Temper, Molly Tanzer, 2017. A remix of Picture of Dorian Gray - no, wait, come back, it was really good! (Am officially joining the chorus of people telling you to read it, sorry Chaos.) This book has fencing, demonic possession, moral nuance, and lesbians, what's not to like. Also I read Dorian Gray about 25 years ago and honestly don't remember much beyond the barest outline but I still enjoyed the ways Tanzer reinterpreted elements (at least the ones I caught). I plan to read the next one too although my understanding is that it's set in the same world but in a different time/place and with a completely new set of characters.
A few more spoilery thoughts and questions behind the cut; I do want to mention that the book deals with addiction and overdose in case that's relevant for anyone.
I liked the trope subversion of Evadne actually ending up with life-changing consequences from her big action-adventure-magic sequence (and also that hitting someone in the head hard enough for them to go unconscious can kill them) - I mean, I loved her and I loved that she got to be the big hero but it made the story feel more weighty to have it end like that. I also liked both couples, and Evadne's possession was *so* cinematic, with the wallpaper seeming animated, and the vivid fighting stunts. And I thought the whole thing was well-paced and nicely put together - genuine ambiguity and non-obviousness of what was really going on and how we should feel about it.
The one thing I really didn't get - there's the whole thing where people and things touched by the aesthete demon feel greasy and unclean to Evadne, while Cantrell and Trawless feel good, but then that pretty much gets dropped in the final sequence and never really explained or picked up again. Unless I missed something?
A few more spoilery thoughts and questions behind the cut; I do want to mention that the book deals with addiction and overdose in case that's relevant for anyone.
I liked the trope subversion of Evadne actually ending up with life-changing consequences from her big action-adventure-magic sequence (and also that hitting someone in the head hard enough for them to go unconscious can kill them) - I mean, I loved her and I loved that she got to be the big hero but it made the story feel more weighty to have it end like that. I also liked both couples, and Evadne's possession was *so* cinematic, with the wallpaper seeming animated, and the vivid fighting stunts. And I thought the whole thing was well-paced and nicely put together - genuine ambiguity and non-obviousness of what was really going on and how we should feel about it.
The one thing I really didn't get - there's the whole thing where people and things touched by the aesthete demon feel greasy and unclean to Evadne, while Cantrell and Trawless feel good, but then that pretty much gets dropped in the final sequence and never really explained or picked up again. Unless I missed something?
