![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutMy friend K. recommended _Legends and Lattes_. Our tastes overlap, but have some very definite _non_overlapping areas, so I try to check things out somewhat carefully before reading something she recommends. Seanan McGuire’s recommendation helped a lot — McGuire position on some kinds of content in fiction is highly aligned with mine — so I bought it and handed it over to my daughter to read (got the audible, too, as she likes to listen along as she reads). My daughter liked it, so I figured, what the heck, let’s give this a try.
Pure bliss.
It’s a Bildungsroman, which surely someone must have already noticed altho I’m not seeing any indication that anyone has pointed that out, possibly because it’s a very D&D inspired setting with a heavy dose of Terry Pratchett humanism rounding it out. Thune could be Ankh-Morpork, but there are so many more — and better — women characters in this book than in anything I ever read by Pratchett.
Oh, you know, spoilers so please go away now.
You can find a plot summary anywhere, but orc swordswoman Viv hangs up her sword and starts a coffee shop with the aid of a maybe-luckstone that was the last thing of value she extracted from her previous life. Viv’s got shockingly good judgment, right from the start. There’s a short story at the end that shows a bit of her previous life with her previous crew and how she first experienced coffee and how she researched the Scalvert’s Stone, which makes it even clearer how good her judgment was even before she got the Stone, and also how the thing within her that pushed her to leave one life and live another was not limited to how she felt, but extended in the form of compassion to others as well. The fight with Bodkin shines a super bright light on Viv’s feelings about her life adventuring.
It’s all kinda hilarious, because the entire genre of quest adventures (and a bunch of related genres) always feels very AD(H)D, in character, in plotting, in motivation. Viv finds coffee — ha ha ha the pre-Adderall Adderall — and peace and then makes enormous changes to make that feeling central to her life. I love it all.
I now kinda want a book about the chess playing gnome, tho!
Great stuff. Highly recommended
Other recent rereading:
I reread JAK’s The Sons of Anson Salinas trilogy (_When All the Girls Have Gone_, _Promise Not to Tell_, _Untouchable_), and was really struck by how comprehensive and detailed an exploration of trauma resolution that particular trilogy is. There are a bunch of examples of intergenerational trauma (the obvious one of the fire at the cult compound, but the earlier one that leads up to the cult as well), and throughout the books there are numerous examples of the second (and third!) generation iterating on the trauma of earlier generations. Also, there’s a lot of sleep disruption, failed relationships, struggling to figure out how much of one’s backstory to share and how much to NOT share and the tradeoffs between those two approaches. I particularly like how the secrets that come out later reverberate and trigger discoveries of other, marginally related secrets, when people go looking for answers and explanations.
In _When All the Girls Have Gone_, there’s a scene that shows up in a LOT of JAK novels. For whatever reason, our protagonists are having breakfast together (in some cases, they’ve had sex, but often they have not) when the woman’s ex — who usually dumped her but may have just cartoonishly cheated on her — who has been trying to get back with her and isn’t really taking no for an answer shows up at her doorstep. She’s initially annoyed, but decides, what the heck, let’s show this guy in a way he cannot ignore that I’ve moved on. In the earliest variation of this I’ve encountered, there are actual fisticuffs, but in most of the books, the ex- is embarrassed, tries to barrel through, is truculent (I just wanted to use that word because I like it), seems to have and may actually have a dangerous ulterior motive, etc. But in this one, he kinda fizzles? And I think I like that better than all the previous ones. It’s wonderful. I don’t know if it’s especially wonderful for me because I’ve spent so many years trying to connect all these related scenes (not just this one scene, but lots of them — I’ve been mulling a monograph on reuse of material from early novels in later work specifically focused on this author but with the general thesis that that’s how commercially successful authors do their thing). I mostly just wanted to put that here so I don’t forget.
Pure bliss.
It’s a Bildungsroman, which surely someone must have already noticed altho I’m not seeing any indication that anyone has pointed that out, possibly because it’s a very D&D inspired setting with a heavy dose of Terry Pratchett humanism rounding it out. Thune could be Ankh-Morpork, but there are so many more — and better — women characters in this book than in anything I ever read by Pratchett.
Oh, you know, spoilers so please go away now.
You can find a plot summary anywhere, but orc swordswoman Viv hangs up her sword and starts a coffee shop with the aid of a maybe-luckstone that was the last thing of value she extracted from her previous life. Viv’s got shockingly good judgment, right from the start. There’s a short story at the end that shows a bit of her previous life with her previous crew and how she first experienced coffee and how she researched the Scalvert’s Stone, which makes it even clearer how good her judgment was even before she got the Stone, and also how the thing within her that pushed her to leave one life and live another was not limited to how she felt, but extended in the form of compassion to others as well. The fight with Bodkin shines a super bright light on Viv’s feelings about her life adventuring.
It’s all kinda hilarious, because the entire genre of quest adventures (and a bunch of related genres) always feels very AD(H)D, in character, in plotting, in motivation. Viv finds coffee — ha ha ha the pre-Adderall Adderall — and peace and then makes enormous changes to make that feeling central to her life. I love it all.
I now kinda want a book about the chess playing gnome, tho!
Great stuff. Highly recommended
Other recent rereading:
I reread JAK’s The Sons of Anson Salinas trilogy (_When All the Girls Have Gone_, _Promise Not to Tell_, _Untouchable_), and was really struck by how comprehensive and detailed an exploration of trauma resolution that particular trilogy is. There are a bunch of examples of intergenerational trauma (the obvious one of the fire at the cult compound, but the earlier one that leads up to the cult as well), and throughout the books there are numerous examples of the second (and third!) generation iterating on the trauma of earlier generations. Also, there’s a lot of sleep disruption, failed relationships, struggling to figure out how much of one’s backstory to share and how much to NOT share and the tradeoffs between those two approaches. I particularly like how the secrets that come out later reverberate and trigger discoveries of other, marginally related secrets, when people go looking for answers and explanations.
In _When All the Girls Have Gone_, there’s a scene that shows up in a LOT of JAK novels. For whatever reason, our protagonists are having breakfast together (in some cases, they’ve had sex, but often they have not) when the woman’s ex — who usually dumped her but may have just cartoonishly cheated on her — who has been trying to get back with her and isn’t really taking no for an answer shows up at her doorstep. She’s initially annoyed, but decides, what the heck, let’s show this guy in a way he cannot ignore that I’ve moved on. In the earliest variation of this I’ve encountered, there are actual fisticuffs, but in most of the books, the ex- is embarrassed, tries to barrel through, is truculent (I just wanted to use that word because I like it), seems to have and may actually have a dangerous ulterior motive, etc. But in this one, he kinda fizzles? And I think I like that better than all the previous ones. It’s wonderful. I don’t know if it’s especially wonderful for me because I’ve spent so many years trying to connect all these related scenes (not just this one scene, but lots of them — I’ve been mulling a monograph on reuse of material from early novels in later work specifically focused on this author but with the general thesis that that’s how commercially successful authors do their thing). I mostly just wanted to put that here so I don’t forget.