Books 2017

[schneefink]

I read quite a few books I enjoyed in 2017. Some that I liked and might even read again one day:
- Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers
- Inda series by Sherwood Smith (1+2, 3+4)
- Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner, Queen's Thief #5
- Bloodrights by N. Lee Wood
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Books I liked that I forgot to post about:
- The Harbors of the Sun by Martha Wells, Books of the Raksura #5
As in previous Raksura books, the descriptions often just didn't work for me which made some things confusing (describing part of a building as "like a flower" is not very helpful), and the pacing at the end was uneven, but apart from those details I enjoyed it a lot. I love the worldbuilding and the characters and their relationships (and this time I even liked the plot better.) Pearl and Malachite are fantastic together! Moon and Jade and Chime are great, of course, and Stone, and Frost and Bramble, and Consolation is interesting. Btw I really like how casual sex and (poly) relationships are treated.

- Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Especially in the beginning, this book so closely resembles a D&D campaign that at times I got angry at the fictional players for their character choices (mostly Harathes'), which added an interesting extra meta element ^^ The most interesting character by far is Nth/Enth, he kept things interesting until the other characters became more fleshed out than their classes. The final confrontation made me grin at the thought of how many TPKs this DM has most likely already had in this exact campaign. Post-canon has a lot of potential: Enth&Lief&Cyrene is a cool team-up, and Dion will also have a very interesting future, now that it turned out her whole religion is based on a lie.

- The Change series by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith
Stranger: I liked this a lot! The worldbuilding is great: I love the singing trees in particular, the pit mouth is a cool monster, the post-apocalyptic setting worked for me, and just overall I thought it fit together well. At the very beginning there were imo too many PoV switches, but it surprised me how quickly I began to care about the characters. I liked both the quieter character/town and the action parts.

Hostage: This one had all the good parts of the first book, with characters I already liked and more h/c and additional worldbuilding. The villain became a lot scarier, and at times I was very glad that I knew it didn't have a sad ending. The character development following the climax from the first book worked well, and the themes too.
I was surprised how happy I was Sean showed up. Man, Gold Point is messed up. Poor Luis and Santiago. I was also surprised how happy I was Kerry had at least one good moment with her mother. Great h/c, like Ross asking Luis to kill him.

Rebel: The plot didn't pull me along as much as in the other books, probably also because I wasn't that interested in Felicité and Summer. I loved Becky though, and I liked everyone else like Kerry, hearing about Yuki, Mia/Ross/Jennie etc. There was also more cool worldbuilding. This book seems to prepare several storylines for a future pay-off that I look forward to seeing.
I'm not sure why exactly I wasn't that interested in Felicité and Summer. Felicité: maybe partially because her plotline felt predictable, and I just… I don't really like her. I liked Kerry just fine, idk, there's just something about Felicité. I think I might like her better if she was a bit younger, but at 18 (iirc) I felt like she had enough chances to learn better.
Summer: I found her a bit annoying at first and didn't know what to do with her, but ended up liking her.
The xenophobia in the town is just… weird. And it was kind of a relief that outside of the town it's seen as weird as well. If one third of a population of barely over a thousand are Changed, and there's only one school, you can't live segregated lives. Especially because (almost) anyone can be Changed! The one thing that almost made me think "makes sense" was when Felicité thought about little children praying before bed not to wake up Changed. But I still expected there to be more, idk, outreach. Jennie could probably do better as a teacher in this regard as well, I hope she'll grow into it.
I thought the election storyline would be very interesting, instead it sort of fizzled, that was a shame. I hope there'll be more of that in the next book.
When Voske will come back, Henry (who now knows about the secret tunnel) will probably have gone to him, and there'll probably be another big fight.

Comments

[conuly]

If one third of a population of barely over a thousand are Changed, and there's only one school, you can't live segregated lives.

If they only have enough people for a one room school, what're the odds that you will have enough LGBT individuals for the adolescents to have at least two same-sex relationships? For that matter, isn't the entire population disproportionately adolescent?

I'm chalking all this up to the writers being unable to do math. They wanted this, that, and the other thing and they didn't consider what it does to the numbers. It happens an awful lot. Best thing is not to think about it. (Or else to overthink it and fix it all in fanfic.)

[schneefink]

Iirc the population is disproportionately not elderly, but there could be in-universe reasons for that; the dangerous environment might be enough. I don't see why there should not be enough LGBT individuals (but then I usually assume that the majority of any population is at least bi.)

[conuly]

Current statistics indicate that about 3.5% of the population identifies as gay or bi. Even if we assume that this is a wild miscount and that Las Anclas is super into gay rights (so nobody is in the closet), the numbers still don't quite work.

Iirc the population is disproportionately not elderly, but there could be in-universe reasons for that; the dangerous environment might be enough.

But then we'd expect to see that the school is divided up into age groups, and it seems to be one class with a single teacher. It's possible to have 50+ kids of varying age with one teacher, these things happen... but then we'd expect more truancy and a lower assumed literacy rate than we see.

No, I think it's the math thing. They needed a certain number of viewpoint characters in a small age range, they wanted people around for our viewpoint characters to hang out with, and they didn't consider what that did to the demographics.

Worldwide, right now, about 25% of the global population is under the age of 15. In Europe and North America, that's more like 18%.

If Las Anclas has a population of 1,000, that's 180 - 250 children under the age of 15. That's somewhere between 12 and 17 children each year. If kids attend school full time for ~10 years, that schoolhouse should be packed.

The population, therefore, must be smaller than 1,000. Let's say 500. Now there's only somewhere between 60 - 90 kids in the school. Still a lot. I'm still doubting the quality of the education. Perhaps the age range of Las Anclas skews higher than we think? Now we're starting to find that those adolescents we've met are the entire teenage population of the town. There's, what, 20 of them? 4 same-sex relationships among 20 teens gives us a rate of 20% gay or bi - and that's assuming all the gay/bi characters are in a same-sex relationship. Logically, especially at this age, some of them have to be not in a relationship or in a opposite-sex relationship if they're bi.

Current polling doesn't support that.

But then, current science doesn't support psychic glass trees, superpowers, or social hummingbirds, so there's room for some leeway.

And to be clear, I think the representation here is great... it just doesn't mesh with real-world numbers and, given how the demographics of Las Anclas are generally screwed I think it's more "they didn't do the math" than "they made a conscious decision that a greater percentage of the population is LGBT - or at least LGB - than in the present day".

[schneefink]

You thought about this in way more detail than I did! The segregation bothered me much more than the numbers. I'll try not to think about it too hard.

[conuly]

I always overthink the numbers, lol!

[schneefink]

Have you read the Steerswoman series? I'm kind of curious what you'd think about Outskirters/Face people - I was kind of skeptical how they'd survive, especially the Face people (and how do they get vitamins, for one thing - are the goats genetically modified?), but never looked at it in more detail.

[conuly]

Haven't read it!

[merit]

I really need to try the Inda and Raksura series at one point! I have a sample of Inda so maybe that seems the best bet.

[schneefink]

Both of them are fun :)
(I'd rec both of them with slight caveats about specific aspects, tell me if you want to know more.)

[naye]

Glad you found so many books to like this year! I really have to read Thick as Thieves soon - I've been a bit worried it was going to go super dark, but maybe not?

[schneefink]

I found it overall less dark than Conspiracy of Kings, I'd say similar to an average fantasy adventure story. There are sad parts, of course, and the main character is an escaping slave, but the tragedy isn't focused on too much.

[naye]

Good to know - thanks!

[nonesensed]

I know this isn't a new post, but had to pop in and go "Yay, Books of the Raksura!" XD

Though I have to agree, Wells and environment descriptions are not friends. But I'm also in it for the worldbuilding, characters and relationships (and also simply because the book stars shapeshifting, flying, matriarchal, bisexual aromantic lizard people...) so I've been able to look past that for the most part. I'm usually bad at picturing what I read in detailed images, so usually I prefer spares descriptions, but Wells can really go over to the other side of things where it's hard to figure out even the outline of what you're supposed to be seeing in your mind (that house-like-flower description you mentioned being an excellent example).

[schneefink]

There are so many different types of flowers! Not helpful!

I usually only bother imagining the surroundings in detail when I really like a book, so it was an unpleasant surprise when that didn't work as much as I hoped, but mostly I then just decide eventually "okay it looks like this in my head no matter what the author thinks." (Or "okay this is... a building, don't think about it.")

[nonesensed]

Agreed on the flower-building thing: is it a rose? A lily?

I guess I'm so terribly bad at picturing surroundings in books, so I can stand it when the descriptions are super vague, but even I get confused at times by Wells' style. I think I like her shorter snippets best (the ones she posts over on Patreon), because they demand very little environment to follow :)