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3rdragonNone of the people I usually babble at seem to be online, so I'm going to babble about my response to Jo Walton's Farthing on lj instead.
. . . it's interesting to note that today's writer's block is about racism.
Well, that was depressing. The closer I got to the end of the book, the more strongly I suspected that I was not, in fact, going to be satisfied with the ending. I will admit that I'm fond of happy endings. Possibly I shouldn't read dystopias. Not that this was, strictly speaking, a dystopia, although it did show tendencies in that direction. It's only the first book of a trilogy, but at this point I'm wondering if the trilogy will actually end well. Not that that's going to prevent me from finding the rest of it.
I mean, they did solve the mystery. Both narrators did, actually. But solving the mystery didn't stop Lucy from having to flee the country with her husband and their newly-adopted gang of refugee kids, and it didn't change the fact that the inspector buckled under pressure and went against what he knew to be right.
It was rather a scary book, actually. Poor David. I don't think that he'll find pseudo-Orwell ("Nineteen Seventy-Four, a scientifiction thing by the man who wrote the animal book") to be very encouraging in their current situation, despite Lucy's best intentions.
I picked up this book, partly because it was written by Jo Walton, whose work I like, and partly because someone was decrying it on the internet for having laudable protagonists by giving them more enlightened, to modern standards, attitudes than their fellow characters. And I won't deny that it did. But it didn't bother me. Possibly because I decided that I liked the narrators before I realized exactly how bohemian their sympathies were.
Mostly, though, I found the book to be asking a question about whether I would have the strength of conviction to stand up for my friends -- or for strangers -- in a situation like that. I hope I would. But even more than that, I hope that I never live in a world where it's a choice I have to make.
. . . it's interesting to note that today's writer's block is about racism.
Well, that was depressing. The closer I got to the end of the book, the more strongly I suspected that I was not, in fact, going to be satisfied with the ending. I will admit that I'm fond of happy endings. Possibly I shouldn't read dystopias. Not that this was, strictly speaking, a dystopia, although it did show tendencies in that direction. It's only the first book of a trilogy, but at this point I'm wondering if the trilogy will actually end well. Not that that's going to prevent me from finding the rest of it.
I mean, they did solve the mystery. Both narrators did, actually. But solving the mystery didn't stop Lucy from having to flee the country with her husband and their newly-adopted gang of refugee kids, and it didn't change the fact that the inspector buckled under pressure and went against what he knew to be right.
It was rather a scary book, actually. Poor David. I don't think that he'll find pseudo-Orwell ("Nineteen Seventy-Four, a scientifiction thing by the man who wrote the animal book") to be very encouraging in their current situation, despite Lucy's best intentions.
I picked up this book, partly because it was written by Jo Walton, whose work I like, and partly because someone was decrying it on the internet for having laudable protagonists by giving them more enlightened, to modern standards, attitudes than their fellow characters. And I won't deny that it did. But it didn't bother me. Possibly because I decided that I liked the narrators before I realized exactly how bohemian their sympathies were.
Mostly, though, I found the book to be asking a question about whether I would have the strength of conviction to stand up for my friends -- or for strangers -- in a situation like that. I hope I would. But even more than that, I hope that I never live in a world where it's a choice I have to make.
