two more novellas
Mar. 13th, 2021 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraTwo more novellas, with the theme that the authors are married. Uh, to each other. Probably lots of writers are married to somebody.
Power to Yield, Bogi Takács, Clarkesworld, is a short novella, at just over 20K words. A student (I read her as roughly college-age) becomes intrigued by a still-living historical figure, and ends up changing her life to serve his project. This is an intense story about special interest and obsession, sadism and power exchange, nonsexual kink and intentional pain as transformative. And neat worldbuilding around neurotypicality and psychic powers and the work after the revolution. I really liked it, but it may not be for everyone.
The Four Profound Weaves, R.B. Lemberg. A longer novella, 175 pages. (I wish books had wordcounts! I don't really understand why that isn't routinely available information, especially now that ebooks have made the idea of a "page" somewhat meaningless! anyways.) This takes place in Lemberg's Birdverse universe; they included a note to the reader saying you don't need to have read anything else to read this book. But my advice is that if you *have* read Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds, you will want to read it again to review, because Profound Weaves is about the same characters and picks up more or less immediately afterwards, and if you only very vaguely recall Cloth of Winds it will bug you trying to remember what happened in it, and so you might as well just reread it. Or maybe that was just me.
Anyways, this is about gender and transition and liberation and grief, and it's so good. It's not perfect, I thought the writing was a little repetitive, but it also very nearly made me cry. There's a line near the end that I just keep rereading. I might have to, like, embroider it or something, not that I know how to embroider, but... something! I am not Jewish, so maybe I don't get to say this, but it also felt like a very Passover book? Like, this is the time of year when we think about freedom and deliverance, and there was a lot going on here that resonates with stuff I sometimes think about during the seder, about liberation as a cyclical process, and what it means to try to hope. And stuff that this book is maybe making me think about it a new way, about the meaning of the desert, and what it means to wait forty years for the fulfillment of something (I don't think the forty years in the book is a coincidence!). So, a good read for this time of year. I would love to hear from my Jewish friends how I am wrong, though. :)
(Also I might have to nominate it? Although I'm really not sure which one of my existing nominees I want to boot - the Cho is probably the lightest weight, but I feel like fun is also a worthy quality. I could skip nominating Ring Shout on the theory that it's a shoo-in for the ballot anyways, but I don't really love gaming my nominations like that. Gah.)
Power to Yield, Bogi Takács, Clarkesworld, is a short novella, at just over 20K words. A student (I read her as roughly college-age) becomes intrigued by a still-living historical figure, and ends up changing her life to serve his project. This is an intense story about special interest and obsession, sadism and power exchange, nonsexual kink and intentional pain as transformative. And neat worldbuilding around neurotypicality and psychic powers and the work after the revolution. I really liked it, but it may not be for everyone.
The Four Profound Weaves, R.B. Lemberg. A longer novella, 175 pages. (I wish books had wordcounts! I don't really understand why that isn't routinely available information, especially now that ebooks have made the idea of a "page" somewhat meaningless! anyways.) This takes place in Lemberg's Birdverse universe; they included a note to the reader saying you don't need to have read anything else to read this book. But my advice is that if you *have* read Grandmother-nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds, you will want to read it again to review, because Profound Weaves is about the same characters and picks up more or less immediately afterwards, and if you only very vaguely recall Cloth of Winds it will bug you trying to remember what happened in it, and so you might as well just reread it. Or maybe that was just me.
Anyways, this is about gender and transition and liberation and grief, and it's so good. It's not perfect, I thought the writing was a little repetitive, but it also very nearly made me cry. There's a line near the end that I just keep rereading. I might have to, like, embroider it or something, not that I know how to embroider, but... something! I am not Jewish, so maybe I don't get to say this, but it also felt like a very Passover book? Like, this is the time of year when we think about freedom and deliverance, and there was a lot going on here that resonates with stuff I sometimes think about during the seder, about liberation as a cyclical process, and what it means to try to hope. And stuff that this book is maybe making me think about it a new way, about the meaning of the desert, and what it means to wait forty years for the fulfillment of something (I don't think the forty years in the book is a coincidence!). So, a good read for this time of year. I would love to hear from my Jewish friends how I am wrong, though. :)
(Also I might have to nominate it? Although I'm really not sure which one of my existing nominees I want to boot - the Cho is probably the lightest weight, but I feel like fun is also a worthy quality. I could skip nominating Ring Shout on the theory that it's a shoo-in for the ballot anyways, but I don't really love gaming my nominations like that. Gah.)
