The Candle and the Flame
Mar. 10th, 2020 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Candle and the Flame, Nafiza Azad. Early on this book felt like I had stumbled into someone's vocab assignment - I don't think of myself as someone who gets weird about "foreign" or unfamiliar words, but when the writing reads like it's been constructed to fit as many as possible in there, at the expense of the flow of the scene, that's not great. And worse, it felt like there was so much focus on hitting the vocab that major emotional turns and pieces of fantasy world-building were just sort of dropped in without any lead-up.
On the other hand, given the profound Islamophobia of our world right now, I can't help but be sympathetic to the idea that we-the-reading-public *need* to be aggressively familiarized with as many little bits of culture as anyone can cram in, and heck knows Hindi/Urdu/Arabic vocab (food, clothing, family, religion, stuff like that) is more relevant than the names of a hundred made-up elves and their elf culture or whatever. So, I don't know. I really don't want to be the person who is always saying "we need diverse books but not *this* one" - just going by the parallel to "we need a woman president but not this one", those people are assholes. I did finish the book and I did think there were some good bones to the story, but the style and voice were not for me. But I hope it's finding readers it does click with!
On the other hand, given the profound Islamophobia of our world right now, I can't help but be sympathetic to the idea that we-the-reading-public *need* to be aggressively familiarized with as many little bits of culture as anyone can cram in, and heck knows Hindi/Urdu/Arabic vocab (food, clothing, family, religion, stuff like that) is more relevant than the names of a hundred made-up elves and their elf culture or whatever. So, I don't know. I really don't want to be the person who is always saying "we need diverse books but not *this* one" - just going by the parallel to "we need a woman president but not this one", those people are assholes. I did finish the book and I did think there were some good bones to the story, but the style and voice were not for me. But I hope it's finding readers it does click with!
