![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksUnrelatedly, I made custard bao for dinner and OMG so good. The trick with the filling is to hard-boil some eggs and pound their yolks with salt, and then mix that into the custard just after it has thickened.
Also unrelatedly, we all just went outside to watch the International Space Station go by in low orbit, visible to the naked eye. It moves fast! If you're anywhere near this region (central Texas), there are a couple of other times coming up when you might be able to see it, mostly very early in the mornings.
It's been a very good day for a whole lot of excellent reasons.
Now for the book, which I read on September fifteenth. It was recommended to me bytrifles.
This is one of those books that is in a clever disguise as a generic fantasy novel. The cover is fairly generic, the back-cover text is entirely infodump, and there's a whole front-slew of things like maps and character lists and a calendar and oh who even cares? Except in very limited circumstances, I dislike it when fantasy novels have maps in the front, because either the protagonist is going to be flung willy-nilly through every single named place on the map (the Jacqueline Carey effect, oh the lowering of my heart when I saw a map of China in one of hers), or I am going to spend longer than I would like trying to figure out where the protagonist is on said map, which detracts from my enjoyment of the book. You can almost always figure out where people are from the text without referring to the map and it's a bit of a problem if you can't, isn't it? Now if your map is a puzzle, or of something specifically described as a maze, or it has some character's handwriting or drawings on it, I can get more behind that sort of thing.
The disguise of genericness continued, unusually, for more than half the book. In fact, I put the book down slightly more than halfway in and had no intention of returning to it, as it was seeming both predictable and pointlessly depressing. However, in the following hours (I was on a plane) I found that I kept thinking about it, and eventually I opened it up again.
It is predictable. I'm not saying it isn't. This is a story about a princess disguised as a prince by very black magic, and the vengeful ghost of her twin, and the way that murder works on everyone even when it is a carefully maintained secret. Nothing happened in it that I do not think follows obviously from the premise. However, that's not entirely a complaint. What I turned out to enjoy very much is the atmosphere, a very particular, carefully maintained sort of darkness that is laughing at the sort of book this book is so well-disguised as. It points out that hiding a secret heir usually makes the guardians into terrible people, that a mask maintained from birth is actually a face, that growing up in mysterious and haunted circumstances does not make you into a good ruler, and that divine guidance isn't good for much if your god is a right bastard. I knew all that, but it was really nice to see a book know it that is so close to being the sort of book that doesn't usually know it. So I liked this much, much better than I initially thought I would, and would recommend it to people who have been encountering too much of the other sort of book. It worked as an antidote for several years of bad fantasy that I had as a teenager.
It inevitably has sequels, but it would take a lot of convincing to get me to read them, because you can actively deduce what ought to happen in the future to a very precise degree from this book, and it was pretty cool, and if that isn't what happens I don't want to know about it. (Specifically, my theory about what ought to happen with that bowl the wizards keep hauling about makes me happy.)
Better than it ought to be, and doesn't come across as gother-than-thou. I could wish it a little more ambitious, but I'm glad it exists.
Also unrelatedly, we all just went outside to watch the International Space Station go by in low orbit, visible to the naked eye. It moves fast! If you're anywhere near this region (central Texas), there are a couple of other times coming up when you might be able to see it, mostly very early in the mornings.
It's been a very good day for a whole lot of excellent reasons.
Now for the book, which I read on September fifteenth. It was recommended to me by
trifles.This is one of those books that is in a clever disguise as a generic fantasy novel. The cover is fairly generic, the back-cover text is entirely infodump, and there's a whole front-slew of things like maps and character lists and a calendar and oh who even cares? Except in very limited circumstances, I dislike it when fantasy novels have maps in the front, because either the protagonist is going to be flung willy-nilly through every single named place on the map (the Jacqueline Carey effect, oh the lowering of my heart when I saw a map of China in one of hers), or I am going to spend longer than I would like trying to figure out where the protagonist is on said map, which detracts from my enjoyment of the book. You can almost always figure out where people are from the text without referring to the map and it's a bit of a problem if you can't, isn't it? Now if your map is a puzzle, or of something specifically described as a maze, or it has some character's handwriting or drawings on it, I can get more behind that sort of thing.
The disguise of genericness continued, unusually, for more than half the book. In fact, I put the book down slightly more than halfway in and had no intention of returning to it, as it was seeming both predictable and pointlessly depressing. However, in the following hours (I was on a plane) I found that I kept thinking about it, and eventually I opened it up again.
It is predictable. I'm not saying it isn't. This is a story about a princess disguised as a prince by very black magic, and the vengeful ghost of her twin, and the way that murder works on everyone even when it is a carefully maintained secret. Nothing happened in it that I do not think follows obviously from the premise. However, that's not entirely a complaint. What I turned out to enjoy very much is the atmosphere, a very particular, carefully maintained sort of darkness that is laughing at the sort of book this book is so well-disguised as. It points out that hiding a secret heir usually makes the guardians into terrible people, that a mask maintained from birth is actually a face, that growing up in mysterious and haunted circumstances does not make you into a good ruler, and that divine guidance isn't good for much if your god is a right bastard. I knew all that, but it was really nice to see a book know it that is so close to being the sort of book that doesn't usually know it. So I liked this much, much better than I initially thought I would, and would recommend it to people who have been encountering too much of the other sort of book. It worked as an antidote for several years of bad fantasy that I had as a teenager.
It inevitably has sequels, but it would take a lot of convincing to get me to read them, because you can actively deduce what ought to happen in the future to a very precise degree from this book, and it was pretty cool, and if that isn't what happens I don't want to know about it. (Specifically, my theory about what ought to happen with that bowl the wizards keep hauling about makes me happy.)
Better than it ought to be, and doesn't come across as gother-than-thou. I could wish it a little more ambitious, but I'm glad it exists.
