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Then we will be a different sort of friends
So first I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor and somehow it was two in the morning. Then there were two kittens asleep on my chest and somehow it was after three. It's after four now. I managed to displace the kittens. I am going to shower.
Some of the reasons I like Maia Drazhar are the reasons I imprinted on Robert Graves' Claudius in tenth grade and liked the historical George VI before he looked to most people like Colin Firth. Some are his own. The worldbuilding of the Ethuveraz is very nice, ditto what we see of Barizhan, and I'd like to see those friends of Vedero's in about a generation. This is the first of Monette's novels I have really enjoyed; I love Kyle Murchison Booth, but he exists only in short stories and I bounced off The Doctrine of Labyrinths with a resounding spang. I started reading this one around midnight and see previous paragraph. It will not surprise anyone who has spent much time around me that I liked Thara Celehar as soon as he appeared; he had a different ending than I expected and I was glad of it. I hope someone other than me wants the stories about Shaleän the sea captain and her wife in Solunee-over-the-water, because seriously.
Anything else should probably go on hold until I've slept, which means it has an even chance of not being written up at all, the way time and pain are going lately. I found it very rare to read a novel which was as much about intrigue and politics as trust and learning; it is not grimdark and it is not a book in which everything is solved by hugging people, either, although sometimes a letter or an informal pronoun is just as good. It has airships and steam-powered bridges and is not our nineteenth century, or anyone else's. Occasional echoes of Gormenghast, although that might just be the density of daily ritual and architecture. If I read more about royal courts of our history, I might draw other comparisons. The style is incisive, graceful, and often dryly, extremely funny. Occasionally horrifying. It is amazing what a kind novel this is, while pulling few of its punches.
I understand there will be no sequels; it says so in the FAQ. Nonetheless, more like this, please?
Some of the reasons I like Maia Drazhar are the reasons I imprinted on Robert Graves' Claudius in tenth grade and liked the historical George VI before he looked to most people like Colin Firth. Some are his own. The worldbuilding of the Ethuveraz is very nice, ditto what we see of Barizhan, and I'd like to see those friends of Vedero's in about a generation. This is the first of Monette's novels I have really enjoyed; I love Kyle Murchison Booth, but he exists only in short stories and I bounced off The Doctrine of Labyrinths with a resounding spang. I started reading this one around midnight and see previous paragraph. It will not surprise anyone who has spent much time around me that I liked Thara Celehar as soon as he appeared; he had a different ending than I expected and I was glad of it. I hope someone other than me wants the stories about Shaleän the sea captain and her wife in Solunee-over-the-water, because seriously.
Anything else should probably go on hold until I've slept, which means it has an even chance of not being written up at all, the way time and pain are going lately. I found it very rare to read a novel which was as much about intrigue and politics as trust and learning; it is not grimdark and it is not a book in which everything is solved by hugging people, either, although sometimes a letter or an informal pronoun is just as good. It has airships and steam-powered bridges and is not our nineteenth century, or anyone else's. Occasional echoes of Gormenghast, although that might just be the density of daily ritual and architecture. If I read more about royal courts of our history, I might draw other comparisons. The style is incisive, graceful, and often dryly, extremely funny. Occasionally horrifying. It is amazing what a kind novel this is, while pulling few of its punches.
I understand there will be no sequels; it says so in the FAQ. Nonetheless, more like this, please?
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And it may just be that I'm sick of
fairieselves. I hope that's not it. I know I'm not sick of magic! But . . . I don't know. I'll circle around it a while.no subject
These ones are pretty, but the second-generation Tolkien feel is more like third or fourth generation, and the steampunk aspect helps in some way I can't quite articulate.
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It's not versus in the Tolkien sense, although it is clear that Tolkien is where the tradition in which Monette is working started and the reason she made the color choices she did. There's no Ring-war in the history of Barizhan and the Ethuveraz. (There's a lot of complicated economics.) It's not that the racial and cultural issues are nonexistent, but they are always—as in life—working on more than one axis. Maia is the son of his father's fourth marriage, a strictly arranged affair of state binding the two countries together. Chenelo Sevraseched was the only legitimate, marriageable daughter of the Great Avar of Barizhan, barely of legal age as she was. The match was pressed on the middle-aged Varenechibel IV while he was still grieving the loss of his beloved third wife in childbirth, the child along with her. He resented Chenelo for being a necessity of international trade, for not being the Empress Pazhiro; he resented her even more for producing an unwanted, living heir from their sole loveless coupling, like a mockery of the much-wanted child that died. His relegation of an ailing woman and her infant son to the exile that eventually killed her and left her son in the hands of a man who hated him was cruel—and nothing in the novel even attempts to apologize for it—but its motivations are messier than his distaste for her goblin looks and customs. He set aside his first wife for barrenness, just as cruelly, and her family was as impeccably elvish as his own.
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It is not a simplistic book, about either kindness or cruelty. Or meditation, or industry, or friendship.
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Little details of worldbuilding. That everyone can convey expressions with their ears, and all the characters note ear position as a part of recognising body language and emotion as a perfectly normal thing. That economic interaction of kingdoms is part of what leads everyday life to be the shape it is. Nothing is ever cardboard-cutout.
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