Sarah Avery (
dr_pretentious) wrote2014-06-23 05:30 am
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In Which I Get The Kind Of Review I Usually Give, And Give One That Shines
I confess, I would be even happier if Martha Burns’s “Highly Recommended” verdict applied to the whole book, and not just the middle novella in Tales from Rugosa Coven. But hey, that one novella is still “worth the price of admission.” “Fun” and “insightful” sound pretty good. I’ll take it. Getting reviewed at Tangent Online is lovely. And if the praise comes with caveats, fair’s fair. I often write reviews like that of books I enjoy and admire on the whole but not in all their minute particulars.
And maybe I should have sequenced the novellas differently. I considered putting them in the order in which I wrote them, so that readers could discover the characters in something like the way I did. Instead, I put them in chronological order for the events within the stories, with the result that the novella I wrote when I knew the least about the characters is the one that gets the last word.
Burns proposes that I should have put the Ria story first, because its length allows the most relaxed, most accessible way of introducing the ensemble cast to the reader. I hadn’t considered that option. But I will say that several readers who found Jane an immensely sympathetic character when they read “Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply” alone – it was the first of these stories that I wrote — find her much less sympathetic when they read “Atlantis Cranks” right after “And Ria’s from Virgo.” It’ll be a question to return to if these novellas ever see another round of publication after the whole series is finished.
On a cheerier note, I got to review a book I unabashedly loved over at Black Gate. Sebastien de Castell’s Traitor’s Blade hit nearly all of my sweet spots. Of all the books written by people who aren’t James Enge over the past three years, this one is probably my favorite. De Castell’s novel is full of swashbuckling, and failed states fallen into warlordism, and warrior-magistrates who put me in mind of my father and his fellow officers of the JAG Corps. Okay, maybe you don’t light up when besieged heroes break into a debate about the rule of law or sing their constitution to its traditional melodies, but I do. And if you don’t, that’s okay, because the sword-fighting scenes rock, and the first-person-smartass narration is endlessly entertaining.
And maybe I should have sequenced the novellas differently. I considered putting them in the order in which I wrote them, so that readers could discover the characters in something like the way I did. Instead, I put them in chronological order for the events within the stories, with the result that the novella I wrote when I knew the least about the characters is the one that gets the last word.
Burns proposes that I should have put the Ria story first, because its length allows the most relaxed, most accessible way of introducing the ensemble cast to the reader. I hadn’t considered that option. But I will say that several readers who found Jane an immensely sympathetic character when they read “Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply” alone – it was the first of these stories that I wrote — find her much less sympathetic when they read “Atlantis Cranks” right after “And Ria’s from Virgo.” It’ll be a question to return to if these novellas ever see another round of publication after the whole series is finished.
On a cheerier note, I got to review a book I unabashedly loved over at Black Gate. Sebastien de Castell’s Traitor’s Blade hit nearly all of my sweet spots. Of all the books written by people who aren’t James Enge over the past three years, this one is probably my favorite. De Castell’s novel is full of swashbuckling, and failed states fallen into warlordism, and warrior-magistrates who put me in mind of my father and his fellow officers of the JAG Corps. Okay, maybe you don’t light up when besieged heroes break into a debate about the rule of law or sing their constitution to its traditional melodies, but I do. And if you don’t, that’s okay, because the sword-fighting scenes rock, and the first-person-smartass narration is endlessly entertaining.
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I also felt like she entirely missed the point of the third story, and completely failed to comprehend Jane as a character. That is SO not Sophie's story. I see what you mean about people who have just read Ria's tale being primed to dislike Jane when we switch to her POV, but I think those people need to go back and read it again, because they've missed the small details that are critical to understanding that dynamic. Jane and Ria don't hate each other -- quite the opposite, in fact -- they just can't co-exist in the same space, their viewpoints are too diametrically opposed to share a metaphorical house.
Her criticisms of Closing Arguments -- some of them, anyway -- may have more merit, in that I suppose it is a great many characters to introduce in a novella. But if she had offered those comments prior to publication, and you had changed the story accordingly, I have to say, I don't think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much. And is it REALLY so difficult to keep track of two different characters whose names both begin with S? "Sophie" and "Susan" just aren't that similar, especially when one of them is a child and only appears briefly. (And anyone who manages to confuse Ria with Ricki just isn't paying attention, AT ALL.) One wonders whether she was trying to watch TV and read at the same time, or something. Or perhaps she has too many cats.
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I think if the other two stories were expanded, or grown out, maybe there'd be a reason to be more sympathetic to Jane. I also think Jane didn't grow enough in the story to earn that sympathy, I mean at some point you have to suck up that there is more in life Horatio especially when it's standing right there. Ria did everything she could to help Jane when she was in dire straights, and Jane did nothing but use her as her personal chew toy.
I still love the stories though.
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As I read Jane, she loves Ria very much -- she just doesn't trust her at all, because she thinks she's crazy. And she can't shake her tendency to criticize, any more than Ria could shake her tendency to say the entirely wrong thing and thereby fail to communicate what she intended to communicate, or Bob can shake his tendency to be overprotective of Sophie. Which is to say, she can, but it takes a while to get there and is like slogging through mud sometimes. :-)
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What's really informative to me about the review is that Theosophy, which was in its prime when Yeats was a boy and whose practitioners don't identify as Pagan, looks to non-Pagans indistinguishable from forms of Neo-Paganism that came to the fore a century or more later.
I could lament that Theosophy really did borrow a lot of elements from Hinduism, including Yoga, but it was my job as the writer to present the historical weirdness of that in a way that wasn't confusing. Because Blavatsky is such a sensational historical figure, and has been written about by so many mainstream scholars, I thought she might be a familiar baseline, a context to put less-familiar Wiccan practices in, for non-Pagan readers. Not non-Pagans generally -- I've taught too many college freshman to think the general public remembers much -- but non-Pagan readers.
And what this review tells me is that I've underestimated my own eccentricity and mistaken some historical details I had to research for my dissertation for common knowledge. This is a Good and Useful Thing to Note. And you and I have enough experience with coven dynamics to recognize a relationship like Jane and Ria's, between people who care about each other and want to interact in perfect love and perfect trust, but just haven't got it together yet. Most people haven't seen that work out, or at least not in this kind of context.
I agree that "Atlantis Cranks" is not Sophie's story, that it's deliberately a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the paranormal romance genre's Hamlet. A person who particularly loves or hates paranormal romance might not groove on that.
Mostly, I'm just happy to have scored a "Highly Recommended" on a review site that has a real readership.
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But, I discover just now, there doesn't seem to be a comment function for that review blog or a way to contact the reviewer directly, so I'm left with dropping an email to the editor. I bcc'd you.
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I had the same thought. "The word you are reaching for is 'occultist'," I found myself wanting to say. And also "you have used the word 'deity' inappropriately, it is quite clear that Menetnashte is not a deity. Try 'spirit'."
But I don't actually need to say any of that, at least not to Ms. Burns.
Yay, good review! :-)
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It now reads: "Sophie find a merman, has riotous sex with him (which will surprise no one who has read the series or, for that matter, the rest of the coven) and then things get even stranger."
MUCH better! :-)
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I'm pretty sure people who enjoy reading are likely to remember names of at least the major Mediterranean and Norse Gods, and they have probably read at least parts of the Odyssey, at least in a children's version. Beyond that I don't think you can count on anything, not even their knowing who Madame Blavatsky is - if I were anyone but my own, rather unusual Father's daughter, I wouldn't. I do think a person who really enjoys reading is more likely to at least google and try to figure something out, but I don't know that they are going to know much going in.
The reviewer mentions the variety of forms of Paganism and compares it to the number of Protestant forms as if that is very odd. I had not thought about this at all, nor had I drawn any line between "New Age" and "Pagan" in my mind before I read these stories. I was in total sympathy with Jane when I read her story first - and it is her story, not Sophie's, that was totally clear to me - and while she does come across a little differently after reading Ria's story, you can't ignore that Ria really hid a lot of things from the rest of them. They can't act on what they don't know.
Bob's story is delicious in way many ways... far beyond the post-it-notes. I could possibly have done with it being longer, although I had no problem following it - I wouldn't have wanted it shorter, and I had no problem at all keeping track of the characters, but I had read Atlantis Cranks first. I don't really know if that made a difference.
As for the third story (which I was kind of confused to find in the middle, having turned immediately to the end of the book to read "the new one I've been waiting for"), it does give a more sympathetic view of Ria, in large part for me because she is able to see that she needs help, and actively seek it and take it where she can. The only think that bothered me in the least does not seem to be noticeable to anyone else - that walk-on character of the woman who won the contest - I couldn't see quite what the point of her being there was. It seemed like she was flown in on purpose, but I couldn't really see why. I got the sense I might be missing something totally. It's not exactly a major problem to the story - I really felt is was probably more my problem.
I realize this is not a particularly "literary" commentary and probably makes me sound like an idiot but this is the third draft and I'm running out of steam. I just thought I'd write something as that "non-pagan reader" you might not have a huge stable of right here in this venue...
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It would have been lovely to give Bob's story more breathing room. When I prepared that for its first publisher, Drollerie Press, it was important to them to bring the final version in at not more than 30,000 words. I don't remember any of the things I cut, except that none of them was essential to the story. I can well believe, though, that compressing the work overall sped up the pace of new information, which is not always a good thing. Sprawl can be a virtue.
Ria's right in the end about how big a problem her deceptions and concealments are. Her part of the coven's dysfunction-on-the-way-to-resolution isn't her woo-woo worldview, but the fact that she wasn't willing to share her actual self.
By the woman who won the contest, do you mean the Asatru character who won the axe-throwing competition, or the Lakota shaman character who was named after a real person who had bid in a charity auction? It sounds like you mean the latter, but I'm not sure.
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I meant the shaman character. I understood that this was a character based on a woman who won a contest, and I thought she was an interesting character- I was waiting for them to need her for something, since she seemed to be important and had come a long way, but if they did, I missed what they needed her for - possibly my meandering brain - possibly my not knowing what shamans do in particular at this sort of event.