Sixth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

"The thing about illegally breeding fire-breathing possums is that you gotta keep a bucket of water handy."

*Those fools! Fire-breathing possums are greasy; water will only feed the flames! Oh, if only I could tell them of my empire...*

(Context: https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/1839.html?thread=2678831#cmt2678831)

Talk fandom! Making things! Reading, writing, drawing, whatever! Miscellaneous life chatter! Meme's happy to see you again!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

May as well!

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

This is book 3 of the trilogy. Smiled at a couple of lines, but it's already pissing me off with how YA it is. "Intent doesn't matter, mum would say"... like fuck she would.

Can we please please please kill this lecturecore trend

Still, I'd like to finish the series, and am mostly praying she keeps the romance out of it because that aspect was kinda atrocious in the last book. There has already been a good plot twist. So will be hoping it's more plotty and less emotiony.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Hee, I'm in the middle of it now too after reading the first two books earlier this month. I suspect I'll end up with a different opinion (I liked the emotions in the first book and thought the second one was toothless and too plot-focused; I like the obligatory male love interest; at this point I'm mostly in it for the side characters).

I am bracing for the ending to be very YA and lecturey. El's whole deal is that she's special because she refuses to use any malia, unlike anyone else, so I anticipate we'll learn several times over how right that approach is and how wrong everyone else is. Makes me miss first book El who was wrong about a _lot_.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Hehe, this should be interesting! You're further in than me, then; I'm up to around pg 95 now where she's talking about how she can't compromise and I gotta say I relate a lot and get the reasoning, and am enjoying her respect for those who think differently. I'm reading it partly as discussion of the thinking behind ao3 and an (idealised, imo) idea of FOSS, too. In my head this book is "El intends to embark on a career as a freelance free software developer".

It has eased up a bit on the YA lectures over the last few pages though am expecting more to come, and I am reminded again and again that this is an American author utterly failing at sounding Welsh. XD The too-visible Britishisms are still all over the place. There's some US treatment of race, which I could maybe put down to US cultural influence *on* the UK, except El also mentions that characters in school usually call each other by their surnames, which really isn't as much of a thing as children's books would have you believe, so feels like an odd mashup of 1950 and 2023.

Am finding the writing style more clunky than previous books of hers but I'm not sure if it actually *is* clunkier or if I'm just more sensitive to prose style atm. I've been reading and writing more, recently, so maybe that's making it stick out.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

Did laugh my ass off though at everyone in London being SHOCKED at the idea of opening their fancy garden to tourists. Lollll like nobody would have thought of that by now and they all were just sitting around waiting for El to be their moral compass. Maybe it'll get explained in some way that isn't just "El is better than u" but as it stands that bit felt very childish. Now, if it were an Isle of Man enclave, I think she'd have a point.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

Also this is dumb but because I was just reading a book about hospice care, the mention of trading something like an eye for 20 years of life if one has cancer annoyed me because a whole bunch of people with cancer lose eyes etc and don't get 20 more years, or anything, so the calculation felt too neat/cheap. I generally like the mechanics in these books so that one stuck out a bit. I have a weird medical association with them because when I started reading the series I was at a hospital appointment for a friend getting a scan (turned out to be benign!). So probably stuck out even more to me for odd reasons.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

Man just hit the perfect example of what exasperates me with this series.

A few pages back, we get a great anecdote, where she talks about how instead of playing hide and seek, the other kids would play "hide from El" and she would go along even though she knew she was the butt of the joke because it was still better than nothing. That felt very real, and you feel a lot of sympathy.

Then a few pages later, she compares wanting something she can't have to having her face pressed up against the window of a cake shop. It's the most bland, thoughtless cliche ever. And the sentence is kinda purple, "easy sweetness I couldn't buy".

It's such an odd mix of good writing and terrible writing and I can't work out how it came out that way. It's annoying feeling like these books could have been really good, but nearly every good paragraph will have a messed up mirror somewhere. I don't understaaaaaand.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

"if she didn't help me, I'd land myself in the clink"


gjdhfjgfjdhfjs I CANNOT with this fake-British narrator. x'D Was Novick reading Dickens at the time???

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Also lol inasmuch as there are any staff at a buffet, they really won't care if you go back for 2nd, 3rd, millionth helpings; it's there to be eaten and they've seen it all. Suppose this could just be El's paranoia. But I'd assumed it was based on some real travels of Novik's so am just gonna assume she was in a loud group and mistook people's irritation at the noise as judging them for what they ate. :P

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

El is flying for the first time, in first class, eating an airline lunch.

"We ate it all anyway. We had low standards."

Lollll El's social class is about as convincing as her Welshness.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Now this book is acting like the worst thing one can possibly be is a middleaged woman with a utilitarian approach to ethics, and it's all a bit weird. Am used to women being randomly disproportionately hated but was hoping Novik would avoid that. Maybe it'll make more sense later.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

And now they've joined the mile-high club. Hope the airline bans them. Poor flight-attendants.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

"Dubai enclave, which is big and modern and firmly aboard the tolerance train"-- this comes out of nowhere and feels like some kind of protesting-too-much. She specifically mentions it tolerating differences of religion, nationality, and sexuality (UAE not exactly *famed* for its tolerance there; not the worst place out there but I'd characterise it more as "looking the other way" than "firmly aboard the tolerance train"...). I can believe that an enclave might follow different laws to the country where it's based, but this currently feels like a performative "I'm challenging stereotypes!", which serves only to reinforce them (in an odd way, because since when were enclaves expected to be moral, or governments assumed to represent the views of all their citizens?) Maybe we'll get more explanation. For now it reads strangely.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

sa

I finished the book, and although I was already braced for a disappointing read, it ended up even more disappointing than I expected.

It was longer than the previous two books but ... so little happened in it. There were a couple plot twists. (Orion's still alive! Enclaves are built upon turning tortured sacrificial victims into maw mouths whose destruction dooms the enclaves!) But there was nothing interesting about how the characters reacted or responded to anything. The final battle was boring as heck. Shanfeng was such a wasted character who needs fandom to give him some interesting interactions. Basically the only side character to get any fun moments was Liesl, but Lin and Aadhya didn't get anything interesting to do, being relegated to woman-in-fridge and warm supportive friend, respectively. I missed them! Also I like Orion but he should have stay dead after book 2 if you can't find anything interesting to do with him.

The final chapter was just insult added to injury, going "and then the story continues". Couldn't you find a way to fit that into _this_ book? It's not like a lot happened. Honestly, the politics of dealing with enclaves reacting to what they're doing could be interesting, especially because it would force El out of her messianic role. How would she react if one of the enclaves successfully assassinated one of her friends? Probably in a dramatic fashion that it would have been fun to see....


My arbitrary ratings for the books in the trilogy are 4/5, 3/5, 2/5, which is worse than Spinning Silver, so, that's a bummer. It started so well!

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

I wanted to wait until I'd finished before I read this, but your 2nd para is basically what I was expecting and hoping *this* book would be.

I much preferred Spinning Silver to all the Scholomance books, but especially this one.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Not much to share outside of this review from the first book which is somehow not a parody.

https://blackforestbasilisks.com/2020/10/13/a-deadly-educations-mishandled-treatment-of-sexual-assault/

"If I read Y as a analogy to X, then when Y doesn't match X in all respects, it's bad and harmful".

I don't understand why people with this approach even read fantasy.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

DA

Hahahaha this is great...

(odd cuts as I attempt to keep my commentary unspoilery)

> While on the surface it appears to be a bit more on the YA side, the tone and content of the novel is more akin to a dark adult fantasy

Lol okay so straight off the bat this is a person who doesn't read

> We’ve seen a great deal of controversy surrounding it these past few weeks, specifically regarding its multicultural cast

Oh, is this written by an AI? O suppose bots don't read.

> It is unexpected, jarring

I'm sorry what how is this a criticism "plz make an upsetting experience more expected and less jarring thx"

> She’s a loaner

Lol

> on the whole, I did genuinely enjoy this novel. It was around a 3.5-4 star read for me, give or take

I feel like I'm reading something written by a cat.

(Then there's a too-detailed-to-function trigger warning.)

> or perhaps frat house.

This is so specific and doesn't map to anything wut

> This description comes out of nowhere; [...] hasn’t been touched on with any sort of depth in the book prior to this moment.

This is fair; iirc I thought the same.

> Given that El is not, to the reader’s knowledge...

But *this* is insane. So she should've been fine with it??? Huh?

> Where did this reference point come from for her?

Oh, right, that's what it meant. But... El's female. In our world. With all the cultural awareness that comes with that.

> in academic settings

This is defo a catbot. Anything else would have given up the attempt to stretch this so far by now.

> While I feel that there is a large grain of truth to this

(or maybe a weaselbot)

> There is value to exploring this idea and these emotions, but Novik fails to put in the work to do so.

i mean she wrote 3 books what did u do

> Rather than exploring confession as catharsis, however, Novik chooses to retraumatize El by having someone confront her about it. With this narrative choice, Novik deprives El of a character arc that allows her to regain her sense of agency

So... It's now immoral to write anything that isn't a monologue? Authors "deprive" characters now?

> her (presumable) PTSD from the earlier incident is not explored. It has zero impact

Most people would conclude that she therefore does not have PTSD.

(I do actually agree that it's a hodgepodge of grossness done for shock value and to distress El, rather than some sustained didactic metaphor-- and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. :))

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

That ptsd thing was my hilight. If I were more of a troll I would comment:

"As someone who went through a very traumatic experience and did not get PTSD, this book made me feel SEEN. But this review made me feel unsafe because it was like you were literally erasing my existence. Representation Matters, especially for those of us who could have had PTSD but didn't. So much discussion of trauma leaves us out, and it's deeply harmful to be swept under the rug like that, a dirty little secret. This is just one more example. :("

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

It's been hours and I still can't get over the ptsd thing.

"You didn't sufficiently address her PTSD"

"What but she doesn't have PTSD."

"EXACTLY"

Something that occured to me, though... I wonder if these readers react this way because they make their past suffering a cornerstone of their identity and of their career. So it's not just that they feel an author gets it wrong, it's that they read it as a judgement and feel threatened. If trauma!= PTSD != authority, where does that leave them? Must be a scary thing to contemplate when you've built up a career as a sensitivity reader despite barely being able to read. Every book is treated as a vehicle for validation, and attacked if it doesn't supply it.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

NA

I think you're on to something with that.

(Not even touching on the part where I--and admittedly, my PTSD was diagnosed by someone other than my own damn self, and I'm touchy about it--suspect that many of the people claiming PTSD in those kinds of circles do not, in fact, actually have PTSD. Not that my PTSD makes me an authority on anything but my own, but these people all act like their PTSD is exactly like movies portray it, and nothing like the complicated and fucked-up reality of it. It's like those TikToc Tourettes kids. My professionally diagnosed ex-military friends, OTOH, totally get it and, like me, try to get through it instead of sinking into it or exploiting it.)

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

> suspect that many of the people claiming PTSD in those kinds of circles do not, in fact, actually have PTSD

Agree. At this point I basically don't believe anyone on the internet about anything. =D (my current fave is when they use "dissociate" to mean "tune out" or "feel sad and get distracted", like they think everyone else is always happy and paying total attention 100% of the time.)

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

sa

(I suspect they figure that getting ptsd is the measure of how bad some experience is, so they have to have it or it means they didn't *really* suffer and thus May Not Speak. Rather than it being a bit random (or at least based on factors that aren't easy to identify).)

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

> didactic metaphor

Also gotta note that one of the things I find most annoying about this series is how often it lectures on how to treat others; so many scenes are presented as characters helping each other but are just lectures on the Right Way to comfort someone in distress etc. Makes the books feel strained. It's not unique to these books but I usually avoid YA atm, so I notice it more.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

I actually can't tell if the books are trying to be about trauma at all, or if this is entirely the reviewer's projection. I think they might be? But it's such a shallow treatment. If that was the goal the books needed to spend more time in the oven.

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt

I did think the parallel was implied, personally, but that she kept it fuzzy and she didn't want to say it was 1:1 identical.

I'm not sure any more time in the oven would have helped the series, because I think the problem is that the author is marinating in YA culture and it's toxic to literature. Whether it's 3 minutes or 30 years spent in that marinade, it isn't gonna make a tasty series. Needs some fresher ingredients.