Reading Wrap-Up: September 2019

[justanorthernlight]

Once again, it's mostly rereads.

The Edge of Worlds by Martha Wells (reread)- As much as I love this series, this is not my favorite installment of it. It's a lot of setup and travelogue-ing (my least favorite kind of fantasy), and pacing-wise I find it drags in a lot of spots. The part where they're trapped in the Foundation Builders' city is particularly annoying because I absolutely cannot picture any of it in my head, the visual descriptions are there but absolutely insufficient. That said, I do (mostly) like that characters other than Moon get POV sections, since Moon tends to be a bit of an Unreliable Narrator. I especially like the bit from Ember's POV when Shade arrives at Indigo Cloud.

Since one of the main worldbuilding elements is the Raksura's reversed gender roles, lets take a minute to talk about Moon, who is not like other girls Consorts:

1.) He’s a hunter/fighter, not a delicate jewelry-bedecked flower hiding away in a castle colony tree looking after his babies.

2.) He’s incredibly beautiful even when dressed in rags, doesn’t realize it and deflects about not being anybody’s ideal choice as a mate.

3.) He’s not good at the kind of emotional labor expected of his position. Conversely, Queens are expected to be aggressive and fight all the time, and need to be soothed out of violence by their Consorts.

On the last point, it kind of seems like Queens who have to come of age without their fathers/another adult consort around and close to them (mainly Jade and Celadon) have to be better at their own emotional labor than queens like Pearl or Tempest.

A lot of this stuff is pretty standard Changeling fantasy, so I'm not actually complaining, I just don't think I've seen anyone else talk about it. Also, the books do a pretty good job of showing that the traditional Consort role is useful and valuable in and of itself (one of the reasons I like Ember's scenes so much), it's just that Moon's unusual upbringing puts him in a unique position to smooth communication with groundlings, and he actually wants to be back at the colony with the babies.
 

 The Harbors of the Sun by Martha Wells (reread)- On the other hand, this book is tied with The Siren Depths as my favorite of the series because I love angst, I love whump, and I love kidnapping (in the purely fictional context, of course). I also love the stuff with the Half-Fell flight, particularly Moon & Stone's Kethel, who for some reason reminds me of Dug from the movie Up. He's hiding under your porch because he loves you. It disappoints me that there is no actual Pearl/Malachite fic on Ao3, and at some point I'm going to have to write it myself.

Murder With Puffins by Donna Andrews- The only reason I read this book is because this series is my grandma's all-time favorite and she has been pestering me to read it for several years. It's a decently amusing mainstream cozy mystery, but Nana accidentally gave me the wrong one to start with because Murder With Peacocks is actually the first one, thankfully there's not a whole lot of necessary backstory. Standard small-town murder with amateur detective, stuck on a small island tourist trap during a hurricane. Regular mystery isn't really my jam, I give it a try every couple of years but I just don't get that invested.

The titles in the rest of the series are very punny, which I can appreciate. Toucan Keep a Secret, We'll Always Have Parrots, No Nest For The Wicked, and Gone Gull, just to highlight a few.

Star Wars: Poe Dameron Volume 1: Black Squadron & Volume 2: The Gathering Storm written by Charles Soule art by Phil Noto (reread)- I've said it before but it's so nice to actually enjoy Star Wars content. I'm not going to devolve into complaining about TLJ, but this comic series is like 10 times more enjoyable. Remember when Lucasfilms threw out the old Expanded Universe and one of their justifications was that the continuity was terrible and there was basically no quality control and with the new expanded universe they were going to do better? *bitter, annoyed laughter*. Poe is a competent, smart, empathetic commander, and Terex is a competent and engaging villain. There's 5 trade paperback volumes, I read the 3rd one back before TLJ came out and I'm going to catch up before the new movie comes out.

Charles Soule also wrote the Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith comic series set immediately after RotS, which I liked a lot despite not having any strong Vader/Anakin Skywalker attachments.