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psocoptera[Uh, preemptive note for animal harm in this whole post.]
Darkbeast, Morgan Keyes, middlegrade from 2012. Telepathic companion animals with mood-regulating powers, except the kids have to kill them when they turn 12 as a rite of passage (except our hero inevitably decides to spare hers and has to flee to a life of hiding and the threat of persecution). Hell of a premise, but I didn't get much out of the execution of it. I wanted an adult treatment of it rather than a middlegrade treatment, which I obviously wasn't going to get in a middlegrade book. What does it actually do to a society if everyone commits a murder at 12? What do the adults think inside their heads about this, as opposed to what they say about it? Even little bits of more nuanced worldbuilding, like, what happens if a kid dies in childhood, does someone kill their darkbeast or does it go free, what happens if someone else kills a darkbeast before the kid was supposed to, how does this society's construction of what is supposed to be left behind in childhood with the darkbeast change how they view troublesome or deviant adults. Instead there's middlegrade social stuff and a theater troupe being punished for daring to innovate and I didn't much care.
If anyone decides to go looking for this, by the way, it apparently got republished as "Rebel Flight" under the name of Mindy Klasky, which I think is the author's usual name for her other writing. Also apparently it's the first book of a trilogy (which I believe, it doesn't end in a very satisfying place) of which the second book got written but the third never did and I suspect never will.
Darkbeast, Morgan Keyes, middlegrade from 2012. Telepathic companion animals with mood-regulating powers, except the kids have to kill them when they turn 12 as a rite of passage (except our hero inevitably decides to spare hers and has to flee to a life of hiding and the threat of persecution). Hell of a premise, but I didn't get much out of the execution of it. I wanted an adult treatment of it rather than a middlegrade treatment, which I obviously wasn't going to get in a middlegrade book. What does it actually do to a society if everyone commits a murder at 12? What do the adults think inside their heads about this, as opposed to what they say about it? Even little bits of more nuanced worldbuilding, like, what happens if a kid dies in childhood, does someone kill their darkbeast or does it go free, what happens if someone else kills a darkbeast before the kid was supposed to, how does this society's construction of what is supposed to be left behind in childhood with the darkbeast change how they view troublesome or deviant adults. Instead there's middlegrade social stuff and a theater troupe being punished for daring to innovate and I didn't much care.
If anyone decides to go looking for this, by the way, it apparently got republished as "Rebel Flight" under the name of Mindy Klasky, which I think is the author's usual name for her other writing. Also apparently it's the first book of a trilogy (which I believe, it doesn't end in a very satisfying place) of which the second book got written but the third never did and I suspect never will.
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Date: 2019-07-07 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-08 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 02:20 am (UTC)