Trouble the Saints
May. 1st, 2022 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraTrouble the Saints, Alaya Dawn Johnson. I have Definitely Been Finally Reading This Book This Month for over a year, while Hugo deadlines and bookclubs and library queues have always made something else the actual next thing. But now I really finally have!
I have the utmost respect for Johnson as an author - Summer Prince is one of the best works of YA science fiction I've ever read (here is my initial review; I reread it for book club this past winter and loved it all over again), and Love is the Drug is forever memorable to me as the first time I really *got* the near-future US as dystopia (review here). Like, not my first US-set dystopia at all, I had already read pretty much all of the dystopia classics, but I think I always thought of them as science fiction or alternate history, some other fork of the timeline or provoking what-if, and then here's Johnson, like, no, maybe the actual US you recognize is something people need to escape.
So I had high hopes for whatever interesting and unexpected thing Johnson might hit me with in her latest novel! Unfortunately I did not get this book at all. I mean, I feel like usually I can tell what an author is trying to do whether it's working for me or not - did they have a cool worldbuilding idea, were they drawn to the pathos or humor of some situation, am I supposed to be getting a romance zing or a vindication zing or a heist zing, are they trying to dissect some particular character trait or write something that has the nuance and ultraspecificity of "real life". But here I feel like I don't even know what book Johnson thinks she wrote. I guess it's noir? So, like, the inevitable playing out of circumstances? Stark, heightened, bleak? Do I mean tragedy? It is very much a book about no-longer-young people who are confronting their past choices and their failure to have done better, and, I don't know, that seems like a theoretically relevant topic to me, but in practice I just felt like nothing was actually happening or no one was actually doing anything. The stuff about passing, and the choices and consequences thereof, was strong, but it didn't quite form an arc. Near the end I felt like she was maybe getting somewhere interesting when the perspective zoomed back a bit to talk about "the hands" as a post-Reconstruction phenomenon, but then it didn't quite land anywhere for me. I don't know, I hope it did land for someone, and I hope it sold well enough that we get to see Johnson's next book. "This book was actually great and I was just too dumb to get it" would be an excellent outcome here! I am mostly pleased that I can finally stop meaning to read it.
(I guess I have not said in this particular forum but I have been in covid at-home isolation for ten days. Hopefully testing negative and getting to go downstairs this evening. It has been fantastic for my productivity in the very specific area of closing open browser tabs - I haven't been keeping exact count but I would guess I've closed more than four dozen tabs. Things I was meaning to read that I finally read, and things I was meaning to read that I gave myself the gift of not reading, and things I was meaning to do something about that it was too late to do something about that I admitted and let go, and even a few things I could actually do the thing about. I still have a lot of tabs open (again, I don't have an exact count, there probably is a way to get that but I've never done it) but I think I've cut the total something like in half. And I've managed to do a few other things in a similar spirit, working on my inbox and some similar low-key to-do-list items. I don't know how different this will make anything when I get out. But maybe a little.)
I have the utmost respect for Johnson as an author - Summer Prince is one of the best works of YA science fiction I've ever read (here is my initial review; I reread it for book club this past winter and loved it all over again), and Love is the Drug is forever memorable to me as the first time I really *got* the near-future US as dystopia (review here). Like, not my first US-set dystopia at all, I had already read pretty much all of the dystopia classics, but I think I always thought of them as science fiction or alternate history, some other fork of the timeline or provoking what-if, and then here's Johnson, like, no, maybe the actual US you recognize is something people need to escape.
So I had high hopes for whatever interesting and unexpected thing Johnson might hit me with in her latest novel! Unfortunately I did not get this book at all. I mean, I feel like usually I can tell what an author is trying to do whether it's working for me or not - did they have a cool worldbuilding idea, were they drawn to the pathos or humor of some situation, am I supposed to be getting a romance zing or a vindication zing or a heist zing, are they trying to dissect some particular character trait or write something that has the nuance and ultraspecificity of "real life". But here I feel like I don't even know what book Johnson thinks she wrote. I guess it's noir? So, like, the inevitable playing out of circumstances? Stark, heightened, bleak? Do I mean tragedy? It is very much a book about no-longer-young people who are confronting their past choices and their failure to have done better, and, I don't know, that seems like a theoretically relevant topic to me, but in practice I just felt like nothing was actually happening or no one was actually doing anything. The stuff about passing, and the choices and consequences thereof, was strong, but it didn't quite form an arc. Near the end I felt like she was maybe getting somewhere interesting when the perspective zoomed back a bit to talk about "the hands" as a post-Reconstruction phenomenon, but then it didn't quite land anywhere for me. I don't know, I hope it did land for someone, and I hope it sold well enough that we get to see Johnson's next book. "This book was actually great and I was just too dumb to get it" would be an excellent outcome here! I am mostly pleased that I can finally stop meaning to read it.
(I guess I have not said in this particular forum but I have been in covid at-home isolation for ten days. Hopefully testing negative and getting to go downstairs this evening. It has been fantastic for my productivity in the very specific area of closing open browser tabs - I haven't been keeping exact count but I would guess I've closed more than four dozen tabs. Things I was meaning to read that I finally read, and things I was meaning to read that I gave myself the gift of not reading, and things I was meaning to do something about that it was too late to do something about that I admitted and let go, and even a few things I could actually do the thing about. I still have a lot of tabs open (again, I don't have an exact count, there probably is a way to get that but I've never done it) but I think I've cut the total something like in half. And I've managed to do a few other things in a similar spirit, working on my inbox and some similar low-key to-do-list items. I don't know how different this will make anything when I get out. But maybe a little.)
no subject
Date: 2022-05-03 11:30 am (UTC)