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juushikaTitle: Patience and Sarah (A Place for Us)
Author: Isabel Miller
Published: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005 (1969)
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 230
Total Page Count: 244,920
Text Number: 779
Read Because: reviewed by Rosamund, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Two women dream of escaping their Puritan community to homestead together out west. This is vibrant and joyful; the language is lovely, with flexible, ardent metaphors and transparent pathos. If some later events are more mundane and focus on (mis)communication, they only serve to explore the relationship's maturation and interactions with the public sphere. The historical setting is evocative, the romance complicated and sincere; it doesn't even feel self-published except that's about lesbian women. I believe that on rare occasion an author than exceed their native talent—can exceed, honestly, any reasonable expectation from a story. This does that. It's difficult to express my feelings about this book without sounding hyperbolic, but Patience & Sarah is emotive, invaluable, and quietly transcendent; and I loved it in every word.
Title: The House on the Strand
Author: Daphne du Maurier
Narrator: Ron Keith
Published: Hatchette Audio, 2014 (1969)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 300
Total Page Count: 245,220
Text Number: 780
Read Because: fan of the author, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: While vacationing at a friend's family home, one man slips back in time to the estate's history. This is explicitly speculative in premise, moreso and more extensively than what else I've read of du Maurier. Usually, my favorite part of her work is the meeting of tropey genre hallmarks to strong literary writing, but that combination failed to sell me here. The two halves of the narrative don't mesh particularly well: timeskips and lack of immediate consequences make the historical timeline hard to follow; the modern timeline is intentionally mundane, even petty, with an unlikable protagonist. There's potential in the cumulative effect—in the contrast between those halves, and in how the protagonist chooses between them; in the grim consequences. If I had been as invested in the historical timeline as the protagonist, this could have worked for me (and, to be fair, I listened to it on audio and perhaps failed to give it my full attention). As is, this was the first du Maurier that I didn't particularly enjoy.
Title: Provenance
Author: Ann Leckie
Published: Orbit, 2017
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 440
Total Page Count: 245,660
Text Number: 781
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The daughter of a political family, attempting to con her rival sibling out of succession, stumbles into a mess of intrigue and accident. This feels something like a comedy of errors, something like a fantasy of manners (in space!), with a rolling plot of increasing action and scale but not always intent. The protagonist retains agency, and her character growth is the book's highlight, but the sequence of events is larger than her. I appreciate that scale; Leckie has a way with space opera, simultaneously embracing and challenging its conventions, and this possess the realistically huge scale and diversity of the Imperial Radch series (and the sibling stories contextualize each other). But what stuck with me from Imperial Radch was the character- and trope-level investment, which was absent here: the supporting characters are less engaging, which means the relationships are likewise. Stronger speculative aspects and/or less predictable coming-of-age narratives may have helped enliven things, and the conversation about society and its symbols is interesting, but on the whole I found this fairly unremarkable.
Author: Isabel Miller
Published: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005 (1969)
Rating: 5 of 5
Page Count: 230
Total Page Count: 244,920
Text Number: 779
Read Because: reviewed by Rosamund, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Two women dream of escaping their Puritan community to homestead together out west. This is vibrant and joyful; the language is lovely, with flexible, ardent metaphors and transparent pathos. If some later events are more mundane and focus on (mis)communication, they only serve to explore the relationship's maturation and interactions with the public sphere. The historical setting is evocative, the romance complicated and sincere; it doesn't even feel self-published except that's about lesbian women. I believe that on rare occasion an author than exceed their native talent—can exceed, honestly, any reasonable expectation from a story. This does that. It's difficult to express my feelings about this book without sounding hyperbolic, but Patience & Sarah is emotive, invaluable, and quietly transcendent; and I loved it in every word.
Who is this cautious unhoping young woman? Where is the hero who bore such batterings for love and stood up before witnesses to ask me to be a hero too? And I am a hero now. Can't you see? We can be an army of two. We can be Plato's perfect army: lovers, who will never behave dishonorably in each other's sight, and invincible. Let the world either kill us or grow accustomed to us; here we stand.
Title: The House on the Strand
Author: Daphne du Maurier
Narrator: Ron Keith
Published: Hatchette Audio, 2014 (1969)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 300
Total Page Count: 245,220
Text Number: 780
Read Because: fan of the author, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: While vacationing at a friend's family home, one man slips back in time to the estate's history. This is explicitly speculative in premise, moreso and more extensively than what else I've read of du Maurier. Usually, my favorite part of her work is the meeting of tropey genre hallmarks to strong literary writing, but that combination failed to sell me here. The two halves of the narrative don't mesh particularly well: timeskips and lack of immediate consequences make the historical timeline hard to follow; the modern timeline is intentionally mundane, even petty, with an unlikable protagonist. There's potential in the cumulative effect—in the contrast between those halves, and in how the protagonist chooses between them; in the grim consequences. If I had been as invested in the historical timeline as the protagonist, this could have worked for me (and, to be fair, I listened to it on audio and perhaps failed to give it my full attention). As is, this was the first du Maurier that I didn't particularly enjoy.
Title: Provenance
Author: Ann Leckie
Published: Orbit, 2017
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 440
Total Page Count: 245,660
Text Number: 781
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The daughter of a political family, attempting to con her rival sibling out of succession, stumbles into a mess of intrigue and accident. This feels something like a comedy of errors, something like a fantasy of manners (in space!), with a rolling plot of increasing action and scale but not always intent. The protagonist retains agency, and her character growth is the book's highlight, but the sequence of events is larger than her. I appreciate that scale; Leckie has a way with space opera, simultaneously embracing and challenging its conventions, and this possess the realistically huge scale and diversity of the Imperial Radch series (and the sibling stories contextualize each other). But what stuck with me from Imperial Radch was the character- and trope-level investment, which was absent here: the supporting characters are less engaging, which means the relationships are likewise. Stronger speculative aspects and/or less predictable coming-of-age narratives may have helped enliven things, and the conversation about society and its symbols is interesting, but on the whole I found this fairly unremarkable.
