Read this week: books about women with magic

[schneefink]

DD strongly recommended that I read Circe by Madeline Miller, and I enjoyed it. It has happy endings! For everyone! (Well, except Daedalus and Medea and Odysseus etc.) I did not expect that; at one point I was sure that Telegonos was going to die, but I'm very happy that I was wrong. I especially enjoyed the second half of the book, and Circe&Telegonos&Telemachus&Penelope on the island. I wish we'd gotten to see more Circe&Penelope interactions, they were great.
As for fic: I pretty much want all the PoVs we didn't already get of the second half, so Telegonos, Telemachus, and Penelope, about each other and Circe. (This could, for example, include Penelope PoV with a huge crush on Circe but Telemachus has one too and it's awkward.)

Next I read The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman. A library connecting different alternate Earths where its librarians are sent on missions! The plot was chaotic at times but fun too. The characters were a bit rough: I found it harder to connect to Irene than I expected, maybe because I didn't really get a good sense of her history and/or she starts out as such a loner. The other characters weren't really types I usually enjoy overmuch (especially Vale at first – probably BBC Sherlock oversaturation); I was prepared to like Kai even though he wasn't subtle at all, but he forfeited his starting capital of good-will when he tried to persuade Irene to sleep with him on their first night together; and she rejects him but because she doesn't want to, and not because he's barely a teenager and also her trainee and it would be a bad idea. There were some inconsistencies with the worldbuilding, but at least the ones about the library itself seem to be deliberate and I look forward to how it develops.
The other worldbuilding detail I'm very skeptical about is the order/chaos-dichotomy, where order=good and chaos=bad. Uhhh, that's not how it works, and anyone preaching that automatically makes me suspicious (remember the Auditors from Discworld?), and so do people who don't question it. Hopefully that'll be contested too at some point.

Comments

[muccamukk]

I would definitely say that the order/dragons good and chaos/fey bad thing is investigated whole heartedly.

I never do warm to Kai as much as the author wants me to.

[schneefink]

That's good! I think a large part of the reason why I didn't like Irene more is that she seems to just accept everything the Library says, at least the big things. Yeah, she grew up with it and lived there for a long time and senior librarians know much more than she does and the very few people she's somewhat close to are from there, but still, she's an adult, she's seen multiple worlds, and she's read a lot of books... Though some part of it seems to be active refusal to think about it because she doesn't want to consider what it would mean, so fear/denial rather than disinterest/passivity, which I can understand better.

[dirty_diana]

I love the Invisible Library books but yeah, charming mess in parts. The Order v Chaos thing does get explained. I like Kai a lot, and with Irene, but I guess I enjoy bratty characters? (Also, my personal impression is that we're supposed to think of Kai as young *for his species* but not that young overall? If that helps at all, idk. Librarian ages are all messed up anyway.)

[schneefink]

I don't really have a handle on Kai as a character - I don't think he's supposed to be as young as he came across to me, but I also think he's much more sheltered than he said he was. Ah well, I'm sure there'll be more in future books (fortunately my library has several of them.)

[dirty_diana]

No, you're not that off track! I think he is supposed to come across as having some not very mature personality traits, a lot of which are cultural/fish out of water based. Hopefully it will all seem clearer in the later books.

[schneefink]

I hope so too!
One of the most surprising moments to me was when he immediately thought Vale was totally untrustworthy because he's distanced himself from his family. Kai apparently could not think of a situation where leaving one's family might be the better/only option (as opposed to trying to change them from the inside, or enduring), or at least where someone who is generally a honorable person might think so. That would make sense for someone from a sheltered upbringing, but didn't he claim to have spent some time on his own already? And he spent several years in the Library, didn't he read any books?
In any case, I look forward to finding out more.

[dirty_diana]

Ha, I'm trying to think if we ever get the sense that Kai even likes books that much. He's often just here to be rebellious and have adventures. I'm not sure how much to say because I can't remember how much of his backstory has come up yet, but honestly his complete inability to fathom the behaviour of beings not of his own background is one of my favourite things about him.

[schneefink]

"Be rebellious and have adventures" does indeed seem to be a major part of his motivation for anything ^^ Books, not so much. Yeah, he was never meant to be a Librarian.