Asakiyume mita

I'm reading too many things to do them all justice, and then interrupting them with other things, but the things I've spent most time with are

--More of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The first essay was good; I felt more at sea in the second and now the third--I can't quite follow the logic of where he goes all the time, and sometimes there are jargonish phrases that I don't get. Even so, there are moments I like very much.

This, for instance, is both serious but also amusingly expressed:

We can inhabit this planet, but we will have to do so otherwise. If we don’t take steps in this direction, it would be as if someone wanted to get to the highest peak of the Himalayas but wanted to take along their house, their fridge, their dog, their parrot, their bicycle. They’ll never arrive with heavy luggage like that. We will have to radically reconceive of ourselves to be here. And we yearn for this newness.

And this I love:

There are people who were fish, there are people who were trees before imagining themselves as human. We were all something else before becoming people.

--I also have been reading Eagle Drums, by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, a story of an Iñupiaq boy who's compelled to live with eagles to learn what they want to teach if he wants to stay alive. I got this one from the library based on what osprey_archer wrote in this entry, specifically, that it "is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction." She's right! And I'm enjoying that very much.

--I started reading C.S.E. Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter-- I love CSE Cooney's writing so much! I just hope I can maintain momentum on it, because it's long, and somehow I don't apportion as much time to reading as I could (which is a terrible thing for someone who writes to confess to).

Meanwhile, here are some things that I want to read (or have read and want to call attention to):

Aster Glenn Gray's Deck the Halls with Secret Agents. Long-time rival Soviet and US agents meet at a Christmas party! I wonder what happens next ;-)

Iona Datt Sharma's Blood Sweat Glitter --Sapphic romance around roller derby!

This one came to me as a recommendation on Mastodon, and since I follow the author on social media but have never read anything by her, I'm very excited! It's also a podcast--not sure if I will listen or read it: "The Font of Liberty" by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall.

And then there's Kerygma in Waltz Time, which I've read and would recommend to fans of story retellings, fan fiction, and falling into stories--it's by Sherwood Smith, originally published under a pseudonym in It Happened at the Ball, an anthology of ballroom stories.

Let the Torrent Dance Thee Down follows immediately on the harrowing saga of the Norsunder war. It has two parts. The first, Bridges, looks at the aftermath of the war for the various kings, queens, and assorted others we've come to know--characters whom we've seen grow up and who are still feeling out who they now are. Some have overcome terrible pasts or crippling self images; others are still in the process. Some can't grow past old injuries; others are learning to.

The second half, Torrent, focuses in tightly on one kingdom and royal family and looks at what happens when the queen is forced to make a terrible decision. It's a highly melodramatic situation, and Sherwood explores all the personal, political, emotional, and moral ramifications. Big trigger warning for the topic of sexual coercion, but as I said in my Goodreads review of an ARC, there’s nothing prurient about any of it; most of the intensity is emotional/psychological and comes from how the character navigates the stark choices she’s presented with, and how she feels. It's painful reading at times, but Sherwood is so compassionate in her portrayal of people with all their warts and strivings and occasional moments of grace, it's worth it.

As with most of Sherwood's Sartorias-deles books, I think this one is much more enjoyable if you're familiar with the world and the characters.

Once there was a bodyguard who was like a brother to the impetuous imperial prince he was sworn to protect. The prince fell for a breathtakingly beautiful but entirely unworldly-wise young aristocrat from a scholarly family, but when she rejected him, he turned vindictive and ordered the bodyguard to kill her. But the bodyguard had himself fallen in love with the young woman, and she with him, so they fled to the far ends of the empire. The prince--who became emperor--holds an undying grudge.

This is The Story, which the three children of Danno and Hanu (the bodyguard and young woman) learn when they get old enough to know the importance of guarding this secret with their lives. Another part of this story? That when Danno and Hanu wed, a phoenix feather drifted down to them--surely meaning that one of their future children would be destined for greatness.

Thus begins Sherwood Smith's Phoenix Feather quartet, which follows the adventures of those three children, as well as (later) the children of the vengeful emperor--not to mention a myriad other characters--merciless assassins, honorable gallant warriors and vicious outlaws, brave servants, scheming courtiers, gods that walk among humankind in disguise, elderly teachers, shop owners and other businesspeole (including publishers!), spies, brimstone miners, krakens, dragons... I am sure I'm leaving some out.

All four volumes are available now in paperback, ebook, and hardback. If you want to lose yourself in a superb saga, intricately plotted and inhabited by three-dimensional characters whom you will love (or hate) intensely, a saga that accurately captures the flavor of popular Chinese historical novels and has threads of the numinous woven through it, then THIS IS THE SERIES FOR YOU.

I love it unreservedly and hope many people discover it.

Time of Daughters II
Sherwood Smith



Over my holiday I finished reading Time of Daughters II, the second half of Sherwood Smith’s novel set in the martial land of Marlovan Iasca, about a century after the time of the great hero Inda (a principal character in her teratology of that name).

Structurally, the novel takes you through a series of battles as the kingdom is threatened in different ways and directions: these are all brilliant—and harrowing. People act foolishly or thoughtlessly and have to face the full consequences. Sometimes people pull off amazing feats of survival and heroism—and sometimes these are celebrated, and sometimes they’re belittled or barely acknowledged. I was all in, emotionally. Although you continue to be involved with many characters, the through thread is most definitely Prince Connar. The story’s a battle for his soul, which in other hands might be reduced to a nature/nurture conflict or a good influences/bad influences conflict, but Sherwood’s not doing that: she’s showing **all** the things that go into making a person who they are. There’s your nature, there are the things that influence you, but there’s also when things happen, and the order in which things happen; there’s how other people reflect things back to you; there’s accident.

And other people are growing and changing too, in themselves and in their relationships with others. Nursing grudges or growing out of them is a theme. Two characters whose trajectories were interesting to watch were Fish Perenth, Connar’s personal runner, who started out his time back in Volume I as a sullen and unwilling sneak but grows quite a bit, and another is Cabbage Gannon, who starts out a bully but becomes someone who earns the love of the people he’s responsible for. Lineas remains a reliable delight whose approach to interacting with people I found myself trying to model at times. Her kindness to a deeply damaged (and terrifying) person near the end of the story brought me to tears. There are some very painful character deaths, too, which you feel particularly sharply for the pain their loss causes to others.

One thing that the book gets you thinking about is what makes a good king and how we feel about heroes. Although Connar is awful in many ways, he has the charisma that people love in a leader (he also works very hard at becoming one—he’s not a “natural,” though he has stunning good looks, and that always helps). His brother Noddy, by contrast, isn’t much at all to look at and gives an impression of being slow because he takes his time with stuff, but he’s much more the type of person most civilians would like to live under.

I look forward to my friends who are Sartorias-deles fans reading this so I have people to talk to about it.
Available from Book View Cafe (ebook only) and Amazon (ebook, paperback, or hardback).

PS Reading a story set in another world when you’re in another world is weird, very Inception-esque. You rise out of the story world and look around, and you’re still not in the world you know.

The nice thing about the indie fantasy story bundle is that it's got so many different kinds of stories. sartorias's Lhind the Thief, for instance, is a straight-up great adventure story of the sort that lets you forget, oh, say, approaching blizzards and the like. We talked a bit about it:

( special powers )

( villains )

( peril )

( sequels )