Things I Read: Maria, Marla, Breq

[roadrunnertwice]

Imogen Binnie — Nevada

May 8

This was very good and I'm still thinking about it. It's bold and weird; a short, intensely uncomfortable book with an abrupt and inconclusive ending. (Well, sort of inconclusive. You can see where it's going.)

I got this from Brook, and her take was that the central tragedy is Maria's self-confusion and hubris, and how badly she fucked things up with James. Brook figures James is definitely trans, and could have gotten on track to figure out their gender stuff, but that Maria handled things so incompetently that she set them back, maybe decades back. Me, I felt like I was seeing the edges of a deeper, broader pessimism that I'm having trouble articulating. Like maybe the book is about doubting that self-knowledge is transferable at all, and that the project of categories is so fundamentally flawed that finding better categories just gives you new and inventive ways to cause harm.

Well, I'm painting it like a downer, and like I said I'm still thinking about it, but I enjoyed reading it all the same.

Ann Leckie — Ancillary Justice

May 9

This was pretty much as good as everyone says it is. Liked it a lot, looking forward to the sequel.

I feel like I've talked enough about it IRL that I don't have a lot more to say in a review? Lemme see what I've got.

• The Macguffin in the book's climax is a bizarrely random music history joke, so Leckie clearly has my number.
• The faceted POV stuff in the Justice of Toren scenes was really well done. Tricky shit.
• A lot of the most interesting stuff about the world comes out between the cracks of the larger stuff. Likewise with the stuff about gender; the big noisy thing is how the Radch's language doesn't mark gender in any way, and there's a narrative conceit that the story is translated from Radchii into a language that does mark gender, so Breq decides she doesn't give a fuck and just tags everyone as "she." But there's a lot of interesting nuance to unpack once you get used to that. For example, Breq isn't fully human; she's an artificial mind constructed by the Radch. Could she be worse at guessing gender than an average citizen, and might that be a purposeful part of her construction? Dunno; I haven't decided.
• I like some of the little touches that mark Breq as not quite human. Like, she doesn't get bored.

T.A. Pratt — Spell Games (Marla Mason 4)

June 7

I like these books quite a lot, and it's hard to put an exact finger on why. The prose is all right, I guess, and they're reasonably inventive for that "-and-the-kitchen-sink" brand of urban fantasy. Usually it's the characters that elevate a book like this, if it's gonna be elevated, but I think they're also hovering somewhere around "good enough" — there's a decent mix of types, but no one has a huge amount of interiority, and they mostly maintain a cartoonish sort of resolution, with bold lines and bright colors.

But after a few confused attempts to explain these to friends, I think I have it: the Marla Mason books win because they follow through on their swing. Consequences happen, are not what you expect, and persist. Shit happens, and it's highly entertaining.

T. A. Pratt — Broken Mirrors (Marla Mason 5)

June 8

And there aren't really any redshirts in the series; if Pratt needs a sacrifice, he'll prefer to burn an interesting character who's been around for three books. Or four or five of those, in this case.

This book marks a decent almost-end for the story. There are more of them, which I'll probably read at some point, but they're clearly Season Two; this closes off Season One, and I was pretty satisfied with the outcome.