problematic Wednesday reading

[jinian]

• What are you currently reading?

Maureen Johnson's The Name of the Star, which seems to be modern-day YA about an American girl in boarding school in London, plus supernatural Jack the Ripper recurrence. Okay. So far, so good: cute adjustment to different culture, none of the gross thriller-mystery tricks of killer POV or "let's make you care about the victim for five pages."

• What did you recently finish reading?

Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child trilogy. It was done, so I wanted to see how it turned out. It is wall-to-wall magic-geeking and natural (magical) history of plants and animals (and even mentions magical fungi!), which means that in a world where its foundational premise didn't link directly to the actual genocide of Native Americans and the erasure of their names for much of the continent around me, I would have loved these books. There are other flaws, mostly the unreasonable-seeming alternate history, but I could have gotten past all that if I hadn't been wincing every single time she called the Mississippi the Mammoth River. The magic and naturalism are pretty great if you can bring yourself to read it, but those are my biggest narrative kinks (plus there were lesbians in the last book) and I still had a hard time.

Leia Weathington's The Legend of Bold Riley is pretty comics about a lesbian adventurer from a heavily Hinduism-inspired culture. The blue, goat-herding god has a different name, though, so clearly there was no need to worry about cultural appropriation. Coming so soon on the heels of Quvenzhané Wallis' name issues around the Oscars, the thoughtless and dubiously consensual (teacher-child power dynamic) nicknaming of Rilavashana to Riley was interesting. I liked her travels, in which she was sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, and the women that she met.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Something I don't have any problems with? This seems unlikely. Scalzi's Redshirts?

Comments

[oyceter]

Oh man, re: the Wrede. I hate it when a book hits so many personal narrative kinks but also has a ton of fail; it feels like being caught between magnetic poles of "OMG YAY" and "WHY AUTHOR WHY."

[jinian]

Exactly. I can really see why she wanted to write it, that fun stuff was SUPER FUN, but OH PATRICIA WREDE NO.

[rachelmanija]

What's really strange - yeah, I read the first one - is that there was absolutely no story-related need to not have Native Americans.

You could have told the exact same story with them, either with something close to real history (colonization by Europeans, but Native Americans still at least existed) or with a better-outcome AU (either Europeans came in peace as immigrants rather than colonizers, or else the battles had already occurred in the past but had led to fair treaties or a stalemate or some other alternate situation.)

[jinian]

For the first book you're totally right, though the later ones are all about personally exploring The Frontier. I won't speculate on the author's motivations too much here, but I will say that given the way white settlement turned out to have fucked up the wild magic in the western part of the continent I think any people living there would have been in a towering rage.

[gwyneira]

Redshirts has problematic gender roles, alas. But it's sufficiently fluffy that I mostly enjoyed it anyway.

[jinian]

I guess I took those as read given the source material, since they didn't bother me at all! I really enjoyed it, much more than I expected.