Tak! reviewed Siren Queen
Siren Queen
3 stars
This one just wasn't for me. I feel like it was one of those books that's all setting and no plot - and the setting was great, but I just couldn't engage with it.
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This one just wasn't for me. I feel like it was one of those books that's all setting and no plot - and the setting was great, but I just couldn't engage with it.
It kept very much to the themes of the original: genocide, greed, betrayal, and the sheer amount of damage a few bad-faith actors can do in a system not designed to account for them
Finished just in time for #SFFBookClub sequels month 😅
#SFFBookClub pick for April 2024
Content warning I don't think I can review this without some vague spoilers
Babel is a story of colonialism, racism, sexism, whiteness, Englishness, loss, betrayal, and despair. It's basically a modern parable grittily illustrating the causes and consequences of colonialism.
I love the translation magic mechanism, and I found the embedded etymology tidbits super interesting.
I also appreciate that the author had the courage to allow Bad Things to happen to major characters - not in a GRRM torture porn kind of way, but just as a kind of natural consequence of the world and the characters' interactions.
By the time Professor Richard Lovell found his way through Canton’s narrow alleys to the faded address in his diary, the boy was the only one in the house left alive.
— Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
A series of bleak, gritty glimpses of what's in store for us over the next few decades.
The tone is lightened a bit here and there with injections of optimism, but I think it works against itself a little when the optimism feels unwarranted.
The way that the characters from the different stories are linked reminds me a bit of Cloud Atlas (although I only saw the movie (sorry)).
Wow, the second story is bleak. Do not recommend for people with children in their lives.
The #SFFBookClub January pick is How High We Go In The Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Thank you to all who voted and/or suggested books.
I enjoyed the setting, and some of the substories were compelling, but as a whole it was too rambling and incohesive for me.
I feel like it would have worked better as a series of stories about different people from the same village or whatever instead of repeatedly being like "despite being in the middle of this incredibly urgent life crisis, the main character decides to spend six months teaching an older woman to fold laundry" or "despite having a very bad outcome two chapters ago, the main character decides to engage in exactly the same dangerous behavior with no additional precautions"
Let's see if I finish this one in time for #SFFBookClub
A touch more original than a lot of urban supernatural, and highly appropriate for the Halloween season
The #SFFBookClub selection for October 2023
Content warning premise spoilers
This another book from the #SFFBookClub backlog. I content warned this for spoilers, but it's mostly for the "clone" aspect, even as I feel like this was pretty obvious from the get go. I don't even think that this is a "twist" book, but I think the slow building reveal is also effective and I didn't want to ruin it.
This is a first person perspective story about a group of kids in an English boarding school and their lives after. They slowly learn that they are infertile clones, and that the trajectory of their lives is to be organ donors for "real" people. That said, despite being a book about the lives of clones, it isn't a book about that at all.
The reader's guide at the back of the book has a snippet from (presumably) this article which I liked a lot:
But there are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter? Most of the things that concern them concern us all, but with them it is concertinaed into this relatively short period of time.
I think this quote really helped put this book into perspective for me. This is not a story about resisting or struggling against an unfair situation. Characters largely move from states of ignorance directly to acceptance; there's no denial, there's a half attempt bargaining (for deferral, not escape), and there's barely even any anger about it--at most, Tommy screams into a field, only at the very end. There's much more anger from the non-clone teachers and guardians about how clones are treated, sadness about the harshness of this new world, and revulsion(!) about the clones themselves.
Instead, it's really a book about poignancy of life and friendships. I think it's trying to ask questions of "what's important (and why do anything), if you only have a finite amount of time to live" as if that doesn't apply to all of us (and as if we all aren't in our own unfair situation, to various degrees).
I have only read one other Ishiguro book, Klara and the Sun, which felt like a sister book to this one. Kathy and Klara both share an optimistic perspective, speak in a similar matter-of-fact tone, and don't struggle against the (horrific) limitations of their world. It's similarly a dystopia and science fiction, but these are at the margins of a personal story.
Ultimately, my feelings about this book are mixed. I think this would have worked much better as a shorter length piece. I found myself much more interested by Klara in Klara and the Sun than I did with the school friendship dance between Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. There was some good school and growing up vibes, but there wasn't enough depth to the foregrounded story to make the its metaphor stand on its on.
I read this because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.
This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.
I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The book takes this all …
I read this because it was on the #SFFBookClub backlog.
This book is about a woman in a (gender-)dystopian Finnish society that puts public health above all else. Applying eugenics, gender stereotypes, applying science like the fox domestication experiments to humans, this society divides everybody into men and women, and further into H.G. Wells-esque eloi/morlock categories, all based on childhood appearance, behavior, and health. Eloi women especially are forced into extreme feminine stereotypes. The main character has been secretly educated but pretends to be eloi.
I think the most weird and delightful part of the book for me is the focus on chili peppers and capsaicin. It's been made illegal (along with alcohol and tobacco), and so a lot of the book is focused on the main character getting her chili fix, illegal pepper drug trade, and the transcendental experiences from having too many scovilles. The book takes this all quite seriously, interspersed with mostly true facts about peppers, but it's hard not to feel some unintentional comedy about it.
Not that every book has to be fresh and unique, but I'm not quite sure what the dystopian part of this novel was getting at here that hasn't been done elsewhere. Unlike other dystopian novels, this book doesn't seem to be a musing on abortion, or capitalism, or democracy, or even really a queer story about not fitting into gender roles and questions of passing (though it could have been). Maybe I just expect a dystopia to be playing with and exaggerating a particular idea; I never got the feeling this book was going for any of that, and so the dystopian worldbuilding mostly felt tiresome and well-trodden. (Maybe I'm just tired of gender stereotypes.)
The #SFFBookClub selection for September 2023