Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

This is a story set in the same faux-Europe as the Sarantine Mosaic series, but after Sarantium fell to the Osman Khalifate.

A mixed cast of characters from various places around the Mediterranean meet on a voyage across land and sea, but this is very much a story of people rather than the journey.

I am an incurable fan of Kay’s work. His lyricism, and his deep, seemingly endless love for humanity in all its frailty and confusion, create stories that compel every bit as much as any grand epic adventure. Fantasy does not require wizards, inhuman races, and evil empires to engage readers, for Kay understands that humanity itself is the core of every great story.

And this story is anchored indelibly in the humanity of its characters.

Throughout the various journeys in Children of Earth and Sky, we see how great things and not so great are influenced by simple human choices, but random chance, by things that no one can really explain. The characters question themselves, the world, and each other, yet still move on with the simple acts of living.

This is a novel of war without war, of human conflict and love and confusion. There is no evil empire, there is no real villain, simply people of character and conviction following the courses they have chosen, or have had chosen for them, until their ends. And the ends are the same for us all. Live goes until it goes no more.

I am not sure how to recommend a book like this, given that the basic function of fantasy seems so often to be excitement through adventure. This is not exciting, so much as it is compelling. The action is brief and mostly undescribed. There is violent conflict. There is spiritual conflict as well, and also lack of conflict altogether at times.

If an epic fantasy is sailing a great ship from origin to destination, this is a gentle float down a river. The river has its own beginning and end, but we are simply there in the middle, watching flotsam and jetsam tossed by the current.

Until the ride is over, and everything goes on without us.



View all my reviews

Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Fevre Dream by George. R. R. Martin

This book is almost as old as I am, so it seems almost silly to review it. However, I do have thoughts, so here goes.

This is a story of vampires of a sort – ageless blood drinking creatures who seem to have evolved independently of humanity, but not the traditionally supernatural type – and a riverboat captain’s complicated relationship with them around the time of the American Civil War.

It is the kind of complex story you might expect from Martin, although it does bear some signs of immaturity of thought (for example, it’s made clear that the vampires require human blood to function fully, but it also says that they evolved long before humans did. So… What did they eat?) but what really strikes me is the way it so evokes the time and place of its setting.

It is set in the American south, in the 1850s, and it confronts the evils of slavery in a way that I find somewhat uncomfortable. The parallels between vampiric preying on humanity in general, and the way a slave society preys upon the enslaved, are hammered home almost too bluntly. And there is that scene, that brutal, almost unforgivable scene, that I think might not be publishable in today’s world. I wonder about this. I wonder if perhaps the wrapping of unnatural vampirism around this story is almost a cop-out. Because I think a story that deals with slavery needs more focus on the purely human evils of that institution, instead of muddying them with the inhuman evils of Julian Damon and is ilk.

I’m not sure. I’m really not. There is no veiled whitewashing of the institution, at all, but this kind of muddy presentation of the brutal viciousness of slavery, and the inhumanity it tries to force on the enslaved, reaches deep into places that many people don’t want to reach, while at the same time giving readers an out, a chance to focus on the viciousness of the inhuman characters and ignore the evils of the human society around them.

It’s a book worth reading, and thinking critically about, at any rate.



View all my reviews

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This is the story of Meche, the woman and the girl, in Mexico city. As a women she returns for her father’s funeral and reluctantly deals with family and friends. As a girl, she struggles her awkward way through high school, ignoring homework and generally not getting along with people. Her family is dysfunctional, her friends are weird, and she learns how to do magic.

I struggled so much to like this book. It is well structured, and the writing is smooth and often very fluid. But lord, the characters are so trite and tedious. The main character, Meche, is sulky and nerdy and the same as every other math-obsessed, sulky nerd in every other teen book. The problem is, she’s the same as an adult! She’s utterly insufferable.

Her friends are the same– the poor kid who escapes toxic masculinity into books and gets called names for it. The chubby rich girl princess whose parents (gasp!) love her and don’t want her to fall in with a bad crowd.

Ugh.

It took me forever to finish this tiny book because I kept rolling my eyes and shaking my head at the stupid, stupid kids who were just as stupid and clumsy as they grew up. I liked nothing about a single character in this book, except that Meche’s father has pretty good taste in music.



View all my reviews