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!

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Comments

Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

[(Anonymous)]

SA

So here's my long splurge of thoughts. I was going to turn it into a nicely-written essay, but now I can't be bothered. Will probably repeat myself; still in rant-mode. :p But with any luck I'll repeat myself less than the book did.

Good:

Mechanics; balance, sacrifice. I like things based around Balance anyway, and that's been consistently good in this series. In general, I tended to like the aspects of this book that were Told, not Shown.

The descriptions of spells as "coaxed", "encouraged". etc. Living. She believes in them, which makes them real. I didn't mind this self-referential aspect because the author *did* make them feel real. The world of the scholomance is mostly cool by me.

Twists- how Orion was made, how El was made, how the enclaves were made. All good; made sense and still not immediately guessable, so I found this satisfying.

Description of London enclave graveyard, early on. I actually welled up! This was closer to the tone of the previous books, and better for it.

Idea of nearly all culture/civilisation being based on some violence and exploitation somewhere. Done awkwardly/clumsily, but it's a real feeling, and I don't see that much lit with a pov character coming to terms with that.

El is overpowered. May annoy some but I liked it, because it feels like a game mechanic. Book 2 was spent grinding and now your stats are 9999/999, you've got the ultimate weapons and it's time for the endgame.

Liesel tells El to stop being annoying a few times. I appreciated this, and reckon I would've preferred to read a book about Liesel executing her plan for revenge.

Orion as a sort of demonic perversion of a golem. Could have done more with this, but the idea is nice.

Cliffhangers with her mother's horrified reactions. Cheap but held my interest. :P

Horrifying process of creating a maw-mouth. Grisly and I liked it for that. Clashes with the rest of the book, but whatever. The image of the bricks will stick in my mind.

This book did spark ideas, that I will hopefully use. Sometimes the most useful thing to read is a not-very-good book, so you get the urge to fix it. There's a lot of good raw material here.

Bad:

(Oh, there was SO MUCH bad)

Narrative voice. Irritating. Performative. Fake. The tone's just... off. Immediately puts reader at emotional distance, because something about the way it's done means you don't feel like there's a real, vulnerable person underneath.

Golden sutras feel like they're cheating Balance. Whole bunch of ppl get eaten; most of their families don't get El-style powers out of it.

Enclavers are cartoonishly evil in their opposition to sharing, with no reason. Would've been better with more realistic politics, eg: fear of spies or sommmmething to explain it. There's a fun irony in that fans would probably claim these books had a leftwing message, but to me that was a very stereotypically rightwing characterisation of human nature, along the lines of "sharing doesn't work because people are greedy and will just steal everything; we're all evil when you get down to it". I think the less said on the politics of this book the better, really; I *wanted* this book to be alllll about enclave political intrigue, and I got exactly none. I thought we were going to see El struggling with realities of building, needing consensus, having to choose compromises... Lol.

That confused jumble of an ending, in which the whole point was that Orion was saved but the weird writing led me to think he was finally dead fo' real.

Plane sex. Romance has been consistently terrible in these books, and this wasn't quite as bad as Orion Cake in book 2 (if only because here there was less of it), but the scenes with Liesel are so bloodless and out of the blue, it reeeeeally felt like Novik was just making El have sex with a woman (gasp!) for points and so someone would give the book that "lgbtq lit" badge. The sheer clunkiness of the lesbian romance somehow made it feel like the most heterosexual book I've ever read.

The way the narration kept randomly hating on people (liesel, ophelia) based on nothing in the text. And the hated people were the most interesting.

Repetitive morality lectures. Soooo many. I'll keep it short, it's the weird stuff you're used to in YA. But I expected better of Novik. Also inconsistent. There are parallels you could draw with veganism or with trying to live a green lifestyle, but the former never comes up, and as for the latter, characters are jetting all over the place. So there's this weird combination of the text going 'we must not turn away from the sacrifices made to allow for our lifestyles' while it constantly undercuts it by letting the main characters do just that. And I wouldn't care so much if the text didn't moralise endlessly at me in the first place, but instead feels very 'do as I say, not as I do'.

The way her friends just dropped off the map. Aadhya gets nothing to do and Liu never even gets to talk about what happened to her. There characters were always flat, but this book just chucked them in the recycling to make room for pages of blanksex with Liesel. Centering the plot around the romance with Orion was a mistake, because there's no emotional depth to it, but at least that had continuity. But sucks to be Aadhya or Liu.

Superficial inclusion of different countries and cultures. Like that weird shit about Dubai being ultra-progressive. Left me feeling like "and if somewhere is *not*, what do you intend to do with that? Wipe it off the face of the earth?" This is one of those books which features characters from all over the world on paper, but they're all culturally North American, and from a blue state at that. I suspect I know where this originates, the idea that if fantasy is not wish-fulfilment, it's Harmful, and so should not include distressing realities, but it pisses me off that people don't see how you get straight from this mindset to either ignoring human rights abuses, or okaying colonisation, with nothing in between. We may be in real trouble if these authors discover the existence of Africa. Am probably taking it too seriously but I find it distasteful, and besides, she'd get a better book with stronger characterisation if she presented things as they were instead of as she'd like them to be.

Related, politics that are set up as serious business but are way too flimsy to bear the weight. eg: if wizards have all the money, and dubai enclave differs from dubai govt, why is that? Why don't they influence policy? Why wouldn't they *be* the government? She doesn't even show a two-tier system with haves and have-nots, living under different laws. Leads to...

It's just so... childish. Ostensibly about dealing with world as it actually is, but can't handle it in the slightest. Main character is given a cheat to get out of it. Other people lose things, not her. The book could have had a narrator who is convinced of her own morality and acts without thinking, or have had a plot that dances around anything difficult, but not both. Somewhere, I think the author needed to make El *choose*, instead of just dissing anyone who does choose and magically taking any tough choices away. Earlier books in the series were better at this, so idk why this one failed so hard. None of them are thaaat mature but this one is especially childish, and El seems to have regressed.

Nothing is lost, in general. There are no stakes. Could a person read this book and feel anything at the end?

El barely thinks about her mum. Maybe this is realism in lit by making her a selfish teen but does make her v unlikeable. And I don't buy it, tbh. Her mum is the only person she liked in the world and they've been separated for years. I don't think El would just jet off without a thought.

(Another opportunity for growth missed. Why don't we see the difference between Gwen-as-imagined and Gwen-as-she-is? If this book is suddenly about philosophies of motherhood and duties to one's child, why don't we see Gwen directly against Ophelia? What's the point in THIS story being from El's pov? )

I disagree with other nonny about the plot, in that I think loads of things happened, it's just that almost none of it *mattered*. Plot was super busy, so no emotional development to go with it. El's been locked up for 4 years, now she's flying first class every day, and she just takes it in her stride.

Freedom. That's missing. How is it missing. I think that's what this book should be *about*. Imagine you've been locked up for 4 years, unable to so much as look through a window, with no contact with your family or friends, and then you get OUT. Whatever reaction you're picturing, it's missing from this book.

Also El is from the Welsh forest, and then she goes to NY, sees some tiny back garden and is like 'that's nice', lmao no she'd been like 'WHERE ARE THE TREES'. She doesn't even go 'wtf' at how tall US buildings are. Has Novik ever been to the UK? (let alone Welsh countryside) If this was a one-off thing I wouldn't care so much, but it's like this all the way through; the main character's perspective feels implausible because her background doesn't seem to affect it at all. Back to freedom thing; she comes out of the scholomance, and she's not straight-up hugging the trees? There aren't *places* *outside* she wants to be? fjdslkfjdslfds

Narrator is judgemental in a way others can't win, and in a way that feels like you're supposed to see it as more than the narrator's personal view (because it repeats so. many. times). She's mad that enclavers just leave *others'* children to die and have a different standard for their own kids. Okay. Enter Ophelia, who's rather more fair-minded. "No, that's worse!" Eh, make up your mind.

Overarching plot good, but immediate plot is just all over the place. None of it needed to happen. Mostly just people flying all over the place and wandering around. Things I am fairly certain of from this book: Novik has had a holiday in Portugal. Other things I am absolutely certain of: Novik has never been detained against her will. The emphasis of the different events in this book is all wrong. We get three pages (maybe more) of them wandering around a garden. Some guy called Miranda shows up to recreate the famous 'you have my sword' 'and my axe' 'and my vuvuzela' scene. I get the impression Novik just wanted this project to be fucking OVER, already, which I can empathise with, but sucks for everyone who bought the third book in a trilogy. It has no emotional core, no heart. It just wanders around until it hits the wordcount and it's time for it to end.

This all made me want to read the Bartimaeus trilogy again; no idea how it's aged but I remember that was way more satisfying at the time.


And with that, enjoy the wall of whitespace! :P