Book Reviews: In Other Lands, Brennan; As You Like It, Shakespeare; Persepolis, Satrapi
Title: In Other Lands
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan
Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies
Published: Tantor Audio, 2018 (2014)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 440
Total Page Count: 320,695
Text Number: 1124
Read Because: personal enjoyment, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A prickly 13-year-old attends a border training camp at the edge of portal fantasy territory, and forms an unlikely bond with a pair of unusual students. (N.B. Hidden bits obliquely spoil the romantic pairings.) Somewhere around the 30% mark I said aloud to an empty room, "oh no, I'm emotionally invested"—this has a sardonic tone, a long view of the protagonist and his clumsy education in intimacy, and a refreshing emotional and sexual honestly; it avoids the usual poor communication and drama I expect in YA and substitutes instead more realistic and complicated issues of emotional maturity and emotional needs. And the central trio is engaging wish-fulfillment, and given the way this book rejects genre formulas I felt and hoped for ( spoiler ).
What it does instead is ( spoiler ), and the way the book depicts and discusses sexual orientation is fantastic; and it's not the book's fault that it doesn't fulfill my particular hopes (and, unlike some similar disappointments, it doesn't bait). Nonetheless by the 60% mark most of my investment had worn out. All the strengths overstay their welcome: the humor grows thin, that intimate long view makes the end drag, and the heightened romance tropes grate against a frankly ridiculous number of public conversations about sex. And the romance and sex, and constant navel-gazing over romance and sex, overwhelm the erstwhile plot and a portal fantasy premise which is almost entirely without magic but focuses instead on the increasingly common meta-portal fantasy theme of choosing a world. It's not bad!—well-intended, engaging; never bad. But that initial spark dies, which disappoints me because I thought I was finally glimpsing that intense emotional investment that some readers have in YA novels.
Title: As You Like It
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1623
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 320,795
Text Number: 1125
Read Because: Shakespeare reading project*
Review: It would be disingenuous to call this a dry-run for Twelfth Night, despite the shared conceit which in Twelfth Night is better realized and even more queer, and that Twelfth Night has stronger and more diverse subplots—because As You Like It is strong in its own right: the transformative forest, always a pleasure in Shakespeare and here at its purest and most literal; the tension between the freedoms of the forest and the pressures of external reality, and the parallel interrogation of romance. For me this is most interesting in conjunction with other Shakespeare plays and isn't on its own a personal favorite, but it's an absolute pleasure.
* ( Cut for dead-dad talk. )
Title: The Complete Persepolis
Author: Marjane Satrapi
Translator: Mattias Ripa, Blake Ferris, Anjali Singh
Published: Pantheon Books, 2007 (2000, 2004)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 340
Total Page Count: 321,135
Text Number: 1126
Read Because: personal enjoyment
Review: A graphic memoir of a woman growing up during the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq war. The art does nothing for me—it's consistent and inoffensive, but the blocky lines and simplistic faces contribute nothing, and the style falls apart in the more complex panels. The narrative leaves me more ambivalent. It provides a personal view of intensely complex issues, and effective evokes that singular response, particularly the way vast political issues are expressed in local, interpersonal strife—but those interpersonal issues aren't always interesting. Satrapi makes an effort to provide historical/political context, but the infodumps are disjointed; I discovered just how much I didn't know, but what I learned mostly came after from internet searches. A positive experience on the whole, but not an exemplary one.
Author: Sarah Rees Brennan
Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies
Published: Tantor Audio, 2018 (2014)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 440
Total Page Count: 320,695
Text Number: 1124
Read Because: personal enjoyment, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A prickly 13-year-old attends a border training camp at the edge of portal fantasy territory, and forms an unlikely bond with a pair of unusual students. (N.B. Hidden bits obliquely spoil the romantic pairings.) Somewhere around the 30% mark I said aloud to an empty room, "oh no, I'm emotionally invested"—this has a sardonic tone, a long view of the protagonist and his clumsy education in intimacy, and a refreshing emotional and sexual honestly; it avoids the usual poor communication and drama I expect in YA and substitutes instead more realistic and complicated issues of emotional maturity and emotional needs. And the central trio is engaging wish-fulfillment, and given the way this book rejects genre formulas I felt and hoped for ( spoiler ).
What it does instead is ( spoiler ), and the way the book depicts and discusses sexual orientation is fantastic; and it's not the book's fault that it doesn't fulfill my particular hopes (and, unlike some similar disappointments, it doesn't bait). Nonetheless by the 60% mark most of my investment had worn out. All the strengths overstay their welcome: the humor grows thin, that intimate long view makes the end drag, and the heightened romance tropes grate against a frankly ridiculous number of public conversations about sex. And the romance and sex, and constant navel-gazing over romance and sex, overwhelm the erstwhile plot and a portal fantasy premise which is almost entirely without magic but focuses instead on the increasingly common meta-portal fantasy theme of choosing a world. It's not bad!—well-intended, engaging; never bad. But that initial spark dies, which disappoints me because I thought I was finally glimpsing that intense emotional investment that some readers have in YA novels.
Title: As You Like It
Author: William Shakespeare
Published: 1623
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 100
Total Page Count: 320,795
Text Number: 1125
Read Because: Shakespeare reading project*
Review: It would be disingenuous to call this a dry-run for Twelfth Night, despite the shared conceit which in Twelfth Night is better realized and even more queer, and that Twelfth Night has stronger and more diverse subplots—because As You Like It is strong in its own right: the transformative forest, always a pleasure in Shakespeare and here at its purest and most literal; the tension between the freedoms of the forest and the pressures of external reality, and the parallel interrogation of romance. For me this is most interesting in conjunction with other Shakespeare plays and isn't on its own a personal favorite, but it's an absolute pleasure.
* ( Cut for dead-dad talk. )
Title: The Complete Persepolis
Author: Marjane Satrapi
Translator: Mattias Ripa, Blake Ferris, Anjali Singh
Published: Pantheon Books, 2007 (2000, 2004)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 340
Total Page Count: 321,135
Text Number: 1126
Read Because: personal enjoyment
Review: A graphic memoir of a woman growing up during the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq war. The art does nothing for me—it's consistent and inoffensive, but the blocky lines and simplistic faces contribute nothing, and the style falls apart in the more complex panels. The narrative leaves me more ambivalent. It provides a personal view of intensely complex issues, and effective evokes that singular response, particularly the way vast political issues are expressed in local, interpersonal strife—but those interpersonal issues aren't always interesting. Satrapi makes an effort to provide historical/political context, but the infodumps are disjointed; I discovered just how much I didn't know, but what I learned mostly came after from internet searches. A positive experience on the whole, but not an exemplary one.