shitty YA cheatsheet with Farla – more on Graceling

Farla is a blogger who makes it a thing to dissect a lot of shitty books, many of them shitty YA (insofar that such a thing as “non-shitty YA” exists, which I’m not convinced it does in any appreciable quantity). I’ve been reading her take on The Hunger Games and Graceling, both books that curiously feature emotionally broken “strong” female protagonists, both books that  (witness here a frothing fanboy defending the lack of homosexuality in The Hunger Games) feature unbelievably atrocious world-building, unbelievably idiotic names, and unbelievably terrible writing.

Even by YA standards (and those standards are so very low to begin with) Kristin Cashore can’t fucking write worth one bird dropping.

Since I’ve been reading along I thought I might as well do the meta thing and comment on the commentary. Farla has this irritating habit of equating “third-world” to places of starvation with no electricity–

The fence is supposed to be electrified, but it only rarely is because they only get a few hours of electricity a day. This is the first suggestion this is more third-world than primitive.

–and I imagine it’d blow her mind to realize that some of us have not only electricity (constantly and reliably!) but also plumbing and Internet access), and this kind of third/first-world thing comes up a whole shitting lot in her analyses.  It’s that mindless, casual thing a lot of westerners do and they don’t even think it’s offensive in any way. This is why we want to kick you in the mouths, folks, and laugh as you choke to death on your own teeth. This is also why:

This is all particularly inane given that it’s standard in Western society that you can’t actually force someone into a marriage, there has to be some nominal amount of acceptance

Non-westerners, of course, constantly rape women and marriages aren’t even about nominal amount of acceptance oh fuck you. But, unfortunately for people who like Graceling this doesn’t mean I disagree with her views on Cashore’s steaming pile, so let’s get to that.

 

BLACK BLADE BLUES – meh, JA Pitts

Sarah Beauhall has more on her plate than most twenty-somethings: day job as a blacksmith, night job as a props manager for low-budget movies, and her free time is spent fighting in a medieval re-enactment group.

And as if things weren’t surreal enough, Sarah’s girlfriend Katie breaks out the dreaded phrase… “I love you.” As her life begins to fall apart, first her relationship with Katie, then her job at the movie studio, and finally her blacksmithing career, Sarah hits rock bottom. It is at this moment, when she has lost everything she has prized, that one of the dragons makes their move.

And suddenly what was unthinkable becomes all too real…and Sarah will have to decide if she can reject what is safe and become the heroine who is needed to save her world.

Blah, blah, blah. I chopped off one paragraph from this synopsis, because fuck who cares about this pedestrian shit. “Pedestrian” is indeed the best word to apply to this book which, despite its rarity in being one of the few pro-published UF featuring a lesbian, is a giant bag of meh with some nice racefail balls to go with it.

Oh, and JA Pitts is, of course, a man using initials to obfuscate his gender from the book-buyer’s first glance. Tsk, tsk. Him and Daniel Abraham with that “MLN Hanover” schtick.

 

Saladin Ahmed’s THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON and 4000 words on why I couldn’t finish it

THIS POST IS PART OF DIVERSITY PROGRAMME WHEREIN I REVIEW A MALE WRITER WITHOUT EXPRESS PURPOSE OF THRASHING HIM, HOWEVER MALE WRITERS WILL BE EVALUATED UNDER MICROSCOPE AND SUBJECTED TO HARSH JUDGMENT JUST LIKE WOMEN WRITERS

The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, land of djenn and ghuls, holy warriors and heretics, Khalifs and killers, is at the boiling point of a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the mysterious master thief known as the Falcon Prince. In the midst of this brewing rebellion a series of brutal supernatural murders strikes at the heart of the Kingdoms. It is up to a handful of heroes to learn the truth behind these killings:

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, “The last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat,” just wants a quiet cup of tea. Three score and more years old, he has grown weary of hunting monsters and saving lives, and is more than ready to retire from his dangerous and demanding vocation. But when an old flame’s family is murdered, Adoulla is drawn back to the hunter’s path.

Raseed bas Raseed, Adoulla’s young assistant, a hidebound holy warrior whose prowess is matched only by his piety, is eager to deliver God’s justice. But even as Raseed’s sword is tested by ghuls and manjackals, his soul is tested when he and Adoulla cross paths with the tribeswoman Zamia.

Zamia Badawi, Protector of the Band, has been gifted with the near-mythical power of the Lion-Shape, but shunned by her people for daring to take up a man’s title. She lives only to avenge her father’s death. Until she learns that Adoulla and his allies also hunt her father’s killer. Until she meets Raseed.

When they learn that the murders and the Falcon Prince’s brewing revolution are connected, the companions must race against time–and struggle against their own misgivings–to save the life of a vicious despot. In so doing they discover a plot for the Throne of the Crescent Moon that threatens to turn Dhamsawaat, and the world itself, into a blood-soaked ruin.

The decision to review this book germinated when Saladin Ahmed tweeted a negative review and said he felt bad, so I offered, “I could try to out-negative her if you like!”

It was a joke.

If you liked this book, stop now. If you wrote this book, really, really stop now.

 

giving up on GRACELING and why I’m done with YA

I got through 38 pages of Graceling before calling it quits. This isn’t because it’s an offensive book in any way. It’s because the writing, in two words, is intolerably shit.

Now you may tell me that it’s an excellent, pro-feminist book; you may tell me Katsa is a fantastic character with believable whatever. And you know, I believe you, really I do. I believe it’s a pro-feminist book, reviews of it have suggested it is so. I’m sure you enjoyed it and have perfectly valid reasons to love it. I recognize that a girl-positive novel is important, especially a YA one.

But to me personally and individually it isn’t enough; Feminism 101 is all well and good, but I’m not obliged to love it when it’s done up in mediocrity and generic setting by an author who as far as I can tell has no grasp on narrative structure or characterization whatsoever, and who harbors not a single original thought in her pages. If I’d felt such an obligation, I would have finished Malinda Lo’s Huntress, and if nothing else “East Asian lesbians who do stuff” is a far more interesting premise than “straight white girl who can kill with bare hands zzzz.” I’m just not that desperate. I’ve read Carter and Valente and Sedia, and just freshly I’ve come away from Helen Oyeyemi. Not only do these authors handle feminism at a more nuanced, more mature level, they can actually write–and whatever you may think of Cashore’s prose, you’ll probably agree that she doesn’t stand a chance next to Helen Oyeyemi or Nalo Hopkinson. It’s not that because Oyeyemi and Hopkinson exist Cashore doesn’t need to, it’s just that I’ve read better than Graceling. I’ve just read better, and on a personal level I find no reason to settle for something so direly third-rate when I’ve far from exhausted the first-rate stuff.

So this isn’t going to be a review. I’m just going to share my annotations on the book.

 

Brodi Ashton’s EVERNEATH or “why do I even bother with YA”

Last spring, Nikki Beckett vanished, sucked into an underworld known as the Everneath, where immortals Feed on the emotions of despairing humans. Now she’s returned- to her old life, her family, her friends- before being banished back to the underworld…this time forever. She has six months before the Everneath comes to claim her, six months for good-byes she can’t find the words for, six months to find redemption, if it exists. Nikki longs to spend these months reconnecting with her boyfriend, Jack, the one person she loves more than anything. But there’s a problem: Cole, the smoldering immortal who first enticed her to the Everneath, has followed Nikki to the mortal world. And he’ll do whatever it takes to bring her back- this time as his queen. As Nikki’s time grows short and her relationships begin slipping from her grasp, she’s forced to make the hardest decision of her life: find a way to cheat fate and remain on the Surface with Jack or return to the Everneath and become Cole’s…

If the synopsis alone is already making you perform a facepalm-groan combination, fear not: it made me groan too. It’s YA. It’s a shitty Persephone/Hades retelling with shitty, cutesy terms the author probably thinks teenagers would make up, while insisting that we take them completely seriously as part of her setting’s mythos (Everliving! The Tunnels!). It’s the kind of novel that wants you to believe teenage love is forever, the kind of novel that can’t be taken seriously if you are an adult. What more needs to be said? It’s so samey and pointless and worthless that even my review of it will be half-assed despite the length. This is the kind of book that has nothing to say, and which you can’t say anything about due to its inherent hollowness, the kind of book that could kill you by sheer ennui. In short, it’s emblematic of much of YA as a genre.

But at least the gender politics in this book are less fucked-up than usual. Huzzah!

 

TRIPTYCH lolblog p.2 – furry blue aliens and their ribcage cocks

YOU WILL SUFFER. YOU WILL ALL SUFFER.

He has chosen to be a “he.” Humans use pronouns to distinguish between individuals of specific genders. They have two genders among his people as well, of course — almost every copulating species does — but they aren’t as finicky about labelling them. They don’t dwell on sexuality and gender performance on his world…or rather, they did not. He has the reproductive organs of a male, or what the humans categorize as such, so he has decided that it is easiest to simply submit to the use of the aligned pronoun instead of insisting on the neutral.

DO YOU SEEEEEEEEE. Then the “males everywhere don’t know how to deal with an upset female” moment and toilet seats come up and all is lost.

 

TRIPTYCH lolblog p. 1 – on singing kumbaya and time travel

Since I read most of my books electronically now I’ve developed a habit I’ve scientifically termed “highlight the fuck out of everything!” Normally these annotations amount to nothing: I only use a quote or two in the actual review. But by the time I was done with JM Frey’s Triptych I discovered I had made 179 annotations. In a book with 223 pages. That would mean only about 44 pages have no marks or notes that go along the line of “oh for fuck’s sake.”

Gentle readers, you will suffer as I have suffered.

 

JM Frey’s TRIPTYCH – alas, friends, Ursula le Guin did it better

“You know…” she said slowly, and almost so softly that Evvie didn’t hear it.”You know those movies where the aliens come to Earth, and they… I dunno, they try to steal our natural resources, or create a nuclear winter so they can turn the Earth into slag, or they melt the polar ice caps and New York is under fathoms of water, or they clone us for slaves, or create terrifying bioweapons and wipe us all out and use our cities for farmland, or…all that stuff?” Gwen looked up. “It was nothing like that.”

Part District 9, part Lost in Translation, part Stranger in a Strange Land, Triptych is a poignant, character-driven science fiction story about tolerance, love and loss.

You know, if all I ever read of this book was the sample chapter, I would never have read any further. Why? Because the first chapter contains the kind of writing that I can only describe as buttock-clenchingly awful. It’s so embarrassing to read that your buttocks just go a-clenching and there’s no help for it. So by second chapter, you’d expect, you’d be getting constipation and that’s just not something you’d ever want to inflict on yourself, goodness no.

It gets better. But not by much. And I’d like to have said that this book has its heart in the right place–except its heart is of the “bleeding-heart liberal singing kumbaya” variety. What could possibly be more loathsome?

 

Lyda Morehouse’s ARCHANGEL PROTOCOL

First the LINK-an interactive, implanted computer-transformed society. Then came the angels-cybernetic manifestations that claimed to be working God’s will…

But former cop Deidre McMannus has had her LINK implant removed-for a crime she didn’t commit. And she has never believed in the angels.

All that will change when a man named Michael appears at her door.

This is a book I had some hope for. It falls neatly into the domain of “leather-clad chick fights and fucks supernatural shit,” a subgenre I’ve always had great contempt for due to its endless reiterations of the exact same chick (white, straight, American) fucking the exact same thing (werewolf, vampire, angel, fairy; sometimes a combination of all four) while going through the exact same plot (caught up in a great supernatural conflict). But Archangel Protocol differentiates itself by playing footsie with cyberpunk, setting up the tried and tiresome tropes in a futuristic America overrun by religious zealotry, Internet addiction and hackers. The protagonist, whose name I actually no longer remember because she’s very much like other such protagonists, is an ex-cop kicked off the force due to her role in testifying to the guilt of her partner, who shot the Pope stone dead. Amidst this is a socio-political climate controlled, or soon to be controlled, by a politician credited with bringing “angels” into the web: entities half digital, intensely supernatural, that can bring rapture and ecstasy.

Morehouse wastes all this potential within about the first five pages.

 

NK Jemisin’s KINGDOM OF GODS, also of incest

Trigger warning: mention of rape in quotations. 

My first impulse was to simply refer to Kingdom of Gods–the third and thankfully last of the Inheritance Cycle Trilogy–as “Kingdom of Incest” but I realized that’d be misleading. There’s a good reason for this impulse, though, and it isn’t just to be mean-spirited. You will see.

I make no secret of the fact that I’ve always thought the trilogy rather rubbish what with all the shiny divine semen and whale sex, but it’s only on reading the third book that I realized the whole thing very much falls under the domain of “people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.” That’s to say it often reads like fanfiction–something that panders to the fandom’s dominant ship, favorite tropes, and that will attract thousands of adoring reviews on the strength of said ship and said tropes. If you aren’t into that ship or those tropes it’s not going to work for you, chiefly because there isn’t much else in the fanfic, or in this case Jemisin’s trilogy, that can offer any sort of engagement. In that way it’s functional, straightforward, and a little like reading tie-in fiction where provided there is enough of the kind of tropes you like it doesn’t much matter if the writing is amazing, decent, or downright subpar. Again, a comparison with Anne Bishop is in order–and people who liked one not infrequently loved the other (although, obviously, Jemisin’s stuff isn’t so replete in misogyny nor reliance on rape).