petunia

A few months ago I read Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, which meant I finally felt I had the background to read Sarah Rees Brennan’s Tell the Wind and Fire, which I’ve been keeping around on my shelves for like ten years. The latter is a very loose, YA fantasy retelling of the former, but I like to have the proper background so I can both be sufficiently judgmental and catch fun Easter eggs.

I read this in less than a day while I was between Elena Ferrante books and it was a perfectly fine choice for that window of time. As a YA fiction book it was a very quick read, the sort that made me viscerally aware of how many more books I can get through when some of them are YA fantasies instead of, like, Middlemarch.

Anyway, this one was enjoyable while I was reading it but benefits tremendously from not stopping to think about anything too hard. It takes place in New York, of which there are now two–Light New York and Dark New York. Dark and Light are the two types of magic, which have wholesale replaced all other prejudices in American society, and essentially recreated Jim Crow but with magic types instead of skin color, down to stuff like the one-drop rule. (Don’t look for too long at how this means we now have white, blond Dark people and Black Light people or the whole premise will quickly start to feel weird.) In addition, dopplegangers exist, providing us with an actual backstory as to why Charles Evremond and Sydney Carson–I mean Ethan Stryker and Carwyn–look the same, where in Dickens it is just a Mysterious Coincidence.

Our viewpoint character is Lucie Manette, here given a lot more inner conflict and complexity and ability to do stuff other than suffer patiently than the Dickens version. This one can do Light magic and also fight with a sword and is famous, having done a media manipulation at the tender age of twelve to get her father un-imprisoned. The Dickensian heroine treatment is instead given to her boyfriend Ethan, who is unimpeachably perfect in every way, to the point where a lot of readers apparently find him boring. I find this hilarious. He is boring because he is a Dickens heroine! I enjoyed this part immensely. Poor Ethan, all he ever did was try to use his position to try to do the right thing despite being too young to have any of the actual power that comes with his rich kid privilege.

Carwyn, the doppelganger, on the other hand, is a Sarah Rees Brennan bad boy, meaning he is the funniest character in the book, although he is also genuinely an enormous douchebag for most of it.

The new protagonistified Lucie kind of reminds me of Cersei Lannister a little, in that she’s smart enough to realize that the world is a tough place and you’ve gotta be smart and manipulative to get what you want, etc., but she does actually end up being wrong at basically every critical plot point and getting herself and everyone else into enormous trouble. I don’t dislike her, I thought it was kind of fun that she seemed mostly pretty smart while you were in her head but she was just outgamed at pretty much every turn. Sometimes it’s like that, when you are fundamentally just not as much of a sneaky shithead as your opponents even when you know you should be.

Overall I would not consider this to be anywhere near the caliber of, say, The Lyburne Legacy, a trilogy I absolutely adored and which riffed off a whole genre of my favorite books instead of just one, but it was still pretty entertaining. I did enjoy being able to spot the Easter eggs, like Lucie’s school being named Nightingale-Evremonde. I’m also glad to get it off my TBR shelf.

The Monday class is finishing up our read of the four of Alan Taylor’s American Nouns series, American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873. At this point in the series I was pretty much counting on Taylor to continue the strengths of this series that set it apart from other American general histories–the "continental history” angle, meaning that it included what was going on in Mexico, Canada, and Native nations that hadn’t been absorbed into one of the settler-colonial countries yet. This is particularly valuable given that a big chunk of the book is indeed taken up with kind of just Recounting The Civil War, which is kind of a tough gig these days, as it has very much Been Done. I did still find it useful to take the survey view given that it’s been a hot minute since I’ve read anything that wasn’t just focusing on one very small part of it (I read Erik Larson’s play-by-play account of the shelling of Fort Sumter last year, for example). In addition to learning a lot of stuff I didn’t know about Canadian expansion and the successive civil wars and regime changes in Mexico, Taylor does a good job using the birds-eye view here to tie together some themes and put forth an argument about the progress of the 19th century generally. Also, he continues to find very memorable and illuminating quotes to include throughout.

April’s Discworld reread was Mort, the first in the Death series. Death features in a lot of the Discworld books–possibly all of them–but there is also a subseries about Death in which he is the main or nearly-main character and, critically, is having an existential crisis. In Mort, the main character is Mort, but Mort gets drawn into becoming a protagonist because Death is having an existential crisis, much as he will again in Reaper Man.

Mort is a particular type of awkward teenage protagonist that will crop up repeatedly in Discworld. He works perfectly well as a sort-of everyman who is just weird enough to be special and get sucked into the plot, in this case, by becoming Death’s apprentice. He then goes through a fairly rapid-fire coming-of-age arc as he accidentally fucks up reality by scything an assassin instead of the beautiful princess the assassin was aiming for, who was the one who was supposed to die. This has knock-on effects for History.

This book is also where we meet Ysabell, Death’s romantic and deeply lonely daughter. Mort and Ysabell are mostly important because they will eventually be Susan Sto Helit’s parents. In this one, they are entertainingly awkward teens who are bad at talking to each other. It’s not the most original part of Pratchett’s writing, but it’s funny enough.

The real fun stuff here is Death and how he and his dominion work. Many a fantasy author has ruined the mystery of the thing by over-explaining, but Pratchett manages not to do that. He explains enough to keep the plot moving, but we don’t waste too much time, for example, going over all the game mechanic shit about what precisely Ysabell is doing with the nodes. The stuff we do learn is all really fun imagery with great comic potential, like the biographies that write themselves in real-time and the personalized hourglasses, not to mention the black broccoli.

This is also the book where we learn how much Death likes cats. I love this for him.