How To Talk Like A Proper American

It's so charming when a British writer writes Americans. I imagine it goes the other way, too, and I hope that someone in England is delighted by our errors, too.

Whispers Underground is the third book in the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, and it is just what I expected--a lovely audiobook, expertly read and acted by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, full of details about the magical world of London and oddball characters, especially pragmatic cop Leslie, fussy Nightingale, and our favorite scientific magician's apprentice, Peter Grant.

And as with most mystery novels (in my experience), 80% of the investigation is simultaneously red herring and the best part.  The actual murderer is someone whose name I had forgotten by the time they brought him back up.  And it's beside the point, because I was more interested in what that Nolan punk was doing with the third-rate vegetables he was peddling.

But the fun part was the American FBI agent, and Holdbrook-Smith's flat Midwestern accent.  He did a decent job, but the fun part was all on Aaronovitch.  There are small subtleties that ring wrong.  I think my favorite is "about" vs. "around."  Americans don't hang about or mess about, and I suppose English people don't hang around or mess around.  We also rarely queue up, or have a proper cup of tea--though we might learn the proper way to make a cup of tea, if you can see the distinction..

Always a charmer, and I'd listen to Kobna Holdbrook-Smith read from the phone book.  Peace out.

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo.  I'm not sure how I feel about her; I listened to Shadow and Bone, and it was fine--I liked the worldbuilding better than the plot, and certainly better than the characters.  I started the sequel, Siege and Storm, and just couldn't get into it. I wasn't invested enough in what was happening to want to go back and find out how anything ended.

But here I am listening to Six of Crows, because I just CANNOT resist a heist story.  Eccentric but super-competent people come together to do something impossible and pull one over on some version of The Man--you are in my sweet spot, with chocolate sauce.

Not very far in yet, but very much enjoying it.  It's got one big glaring flaw, which is that all the characters are 17 years old FOR NO REASON.  I mean, I guess it's so it can be a young adult book, but really it's nonsense, and they keep talking about it (don't condescend to me, we're the same age; he's young to run a gang). Each member is the best at what s/he does--the best sharpshooter in the Barrel is 17.  Not someone who's been to war and done a hundred things--this 17 year old kid.  Also the best thief--invisible, skilled, ruthless, reserved.  17.  And she was enslaved for a while and then worked for the Dregs for a while, and before that she was an acrobat with her family.  There literally aren't enough years for you to have had all these experiences.

It's ridiculous, especially with Kaz, the leader. He has all kinds of connections, long term plans, and the whole town wired.  He's 17.  And while his backstory has only been hinted at, he arrived in town just a while ago.  Practically speaking, it makes no sense.

Okay, so that's my nitpick.  Let me tell you one of my favorite things now, just to make up for it--the Dregs operate in the rough side of town, which is called the Barrel.  You get to know it--East Stave and West Stave; the Lid, down by the docks, where the rich folks come in and out to gamble away their money.  They come in costume, to disguise their identities, as characters from a famous opera.  I love this city--how it works, the flavor and feel of it.

But, as Sarah says, I just pretend they're all 35 and it's a great book. Only 17 year olds think 17 year olds know everything.

On the Veldt

When I try to understand people who say they don't really know how to read science fiction, one way for me to sympathize is to think about my relationship with mystery novels.  I've read ones I liked, even that I count among my favorite books.  But they have their own rhythms, and those are often foreign to me.  There are patterns to a mystery that are unusual in other books, and they can make it tricky for me to get my feet under me.

Malla Nunn's A Beautiful Place to Die comes highly recommended by Aarti, who glows not only about this book, but about the whole series of Detective Emmanuel Cooper novels.  Most of my favorite mysteries take place in fascinating settings, so this sounds right up my alley.  But it turns out, reading this book, that Dr. Siri Paiboun and Mma Precious Ramotswe have more in common than I realized, and Emmanuel Cooper represents a different type of mystery. And I'm still not quite sure how I feel about that.

As a mystery, as far as I can tell, this  is a great book.  Cooper is sent from Johannesburg to a small town called Jacob's Rest after a confusing phone call indicates that there's been a murder.  It turns out that the captain of the local police has been shot; really, there should be a whole squad of detectives on the case. But before he can get backup, the Security Branch shows up--and if you want scary government bullies, I think that Afrikaners in 1950s South Africa are just what you're looking for.

So, Detective Cooper unravels the secrets that Captain Pretorius has been keeping, and the small town scandals, while trying to avoid the dangerous attentions of the Security boys, who are looking for a political arrest.  Along the way, we meet dozens of characters from all walks of life--and South Africa is full of different walks of life.  There are black people, or natives, colored, or mixed-race, and whites, who are divided into English and Afrikaner, or Dutch.  It's a little confusing until you get used to it, but that's nothing to the oppression that the division bring to the people who live with them.

We meet all sorts of characters; the deceased captain had a slew of burly, angry sons; the Old Jew who runs the local general store, in spite of being a skilled surgeon; the native police officer, Shabalala, who grew up with the victim.  Cooper makes allies and enemies and tries to get closer to the truth of who Captain Pretorius was and what someone might have wanted to kill him.

Okay, so let me get at the thing that bothered me most about this book, which was the women.  There were a few--Pretorius's fervidly nationalistic widow; Dr. Zweigman's nervous wife; the shy brown mouse Davida, who works for him and lives with her grandmother.  There are not many, though, and not much is going on with any of them that does not directly relate to the story; for the most part, the women don't get the great character moments that really drive a mystery.

And then there's Cooper's attitude toward them.  Aarti points out that his longing, his objectification, his wavering between lust and protectiveness, are a manifestation of how insidious the power imbalance of a society like this can be--even our hero can't help but be aware of the fact that his status as a white man gives him complete power over these women.  But I feel like this is deeper, like he just doesn't see them. I think it goes further than the power imbalance would imply.

Honestly, I would have been completely turned off the book by how I felt about the female characters, if the author had been a man.  But the author, Malla Nunn, is a woman, and that leaves me flailing a bit.  On one hand, I'm still kind of turned off, but on the other, I can't help but feel that a female author must have been doing this on purpose, making a point not just with Cooper's feelings (which I agree, can fit into his character and society in useful and relevant ways) but also with her narrative depictions.  I'm still having a really hard time reconciling how I feel about this.

(It also brings up an interesting question of whether it's fair to judge a female author differently than a male author, or to bring assumptions based on the author's gender to the table, but I'm going to save that for an upcoming post about another book whose female characters have me scratching my head; stay tuned.)

Something else that threw me off with this book--and I think this worked really well--was the sense, as you're going through, of what Cooper is fighting for.  In most novels, even if the detective is far from home with few resources, there is a sense that if he finds out the truth and gathers enough evidence, that's what's important--he can then bring these things to some sort of central authority and come down on the perpetrator with the power of the system.  But Emmanuel Cooper is part of a system that is more horrifying than even the perpetrator of the crime.  When he's on his own, running scared from murderers and madmen and politically powerful racist bastards, I couldn't see where he could turn, or how anyone could be brought to justice.

This adds an enormous layer of tension and, I think, of verisimilitude, since the fact is that the white hats don't always get to save the day.  It also makes me hate South Africa even more acutely, knowing that even a good man with the power of the law on his side can't save the world.

I highly recommend the audiobook, too.  The reader does an amazing job with the accents and voices, and that makes an enormous difference, I think, in this world where everyone is so clearly separated by status and origins.  A fascinating book.

Audio Magic

My favorite kind of audiobook is something that I would have considered fine but nothing special if it hadn't been for the performance.  I mean, a great book turned into a great audiobook is tautologically great, but I like it when a book that might not have been entirely worth my time is elevated by an excellent performance.

So I'm glad I found Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo, narrated by Lauren Fortgang.  I've been meaning to read the book for ages, but I just sort of never got around to it, and to tell you the truth, it's that kind of book--YA fantasy that entertains but doesn't stick to your ribs.  It's got a pretty great Russian-type setting, which is very nice, especially when the things like royal opulence vs. peasant misery are carried over. 

Still, though, it was mostly your standard ultra-average-girl-finds-out-she's-the-chosen-one storyline.  There are some twists and turns, some good, some heavy-handed.  It's a pretty good book. 

But what it's great at is filling my need for an audiobook.  The reader has a very matter-of-fact voice, and she brings a lot more skepticism and sarcasm than the voice in my head would have heard for Lina's voice.  I also think that her very American accent did a lot to keep any parts of the book with high fantasy pretensions grounded--I didn't get lost in Fantasy Story mode because the reader kept Lina a real person, reminding me of her flaws and feelings when the writing itself might have skated over them.

So the kingdom of Ravka is divided in half by an impenetrable desert of blackness called the Shadow Fold (note that all spellings and capitalizations are guesses on my part), which can be crossed thanks to the powers of the grisha (magic-wielders).  Ravka suffers--cut off from her ports, the Shadow Fold only crossable with heavy casualties (man-eating creatures live there in the dark), at war on all borders.

Then Lina, an orphaned apprentice cartographer in the army, is discovered to have latent magic powers--sun-summoning powers, which could help the Darkling (head of the grisha) to destroy the Shadow Fold.  She's whisked away from her life into the glamorous world of the grisha.

Now, if I'd written this review yesterday, it would have been all upbeat, but I'm closing in on the ending and I have to warn you that the climax of the story relies on something that, while not quite a deus ex machina, had me throwing up my hands in frustration.  It's a plot point, and it's kind of spoilery so I won't give any details at all, but I will say that I could let what seems like a tonal inconsistency surrounding the magical system go, but I seriously rolled my eyes when the big twist came at the very last moment for no reason.  Like, Glinda, why didn't you tell Dorothy about the shoes back in Munchkinland and save her all that walking? 

So I have to admit that that had me pretty infuriated.  And I see what the author is trying to do--to show that what seemed to be Lina's weakness is really her strength, and to paint her as genuinely flawed, because some bad decisions get made there.  But in service of that admirable goal, there are some shenanigans that took me out of the spell that the story had on me, and that was a shame.

So, I'm giving this four stars overall, but one full star of that belongs to Lauren Fortgang, as does my intent to immediately acquire the sequel.  In audiobook form of course.