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Jun. 27th, 2008 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseElizabeth Bear - Dust
It's often fun talking about books when I've been reading the author's own journal, including her links to reviews, good and bad. Thus I know Bear is a little bemused by the number of people who find this one of her best books.
Most accessible, certainly. It has, as she commented, an unusually straight-line narrative structure, unlike Blood and Iron, 'frinstance. The good guys are a bit easier to figure out. Although she does continue her long-running thread on the narrow difference between the good guys and the monsters - it's certainly in Carnival, Blood and Iron, and Shadow Unit, as well - there are no good guys who also commit genocide here, and the thread mainly comes out by the question of what and why the bad guys are bad.
And the two teenage girls at the heart of the story do break one's heart, and Perceval and Rien are both fabulous characters (And so far, I do like Tristen, too, although he does seem very much inside his own head, and Gavin.)
But I did find myself disappointed. Some of it was feeling like the book was, indeed, not as complex as it could or should be, though I suspect that, being very much the set-up book in a three book series, this is because the next book will introduce the yet more complexities it wants. But there also was a bit more veneer of distance here than I got in, say, A Companion to Wolves, or even Carnival. I liked Perceval and Rien, but I never felt as close to them as I could to Isolfr and his problems. (or Chaz and his though the complexities of Shadow Unit's extra structures and bonuses make that example a cheatin' one.)
Good book. Bear wins. Go ahead and read; you'll probably like.
But not my favourite.
It's often fun talking about books when I've been reading the author's own journal, including her links to reviews, good and bad. Thus I know Bear is a little bemused by the number of people who find this one of her best books.
Most accessible, certainly. It has, as she commented, an unusually straight-line narrative structure, unlike Blood and Iron, 'frinstance. The good guys are a bit easier to figure out. Although she does continue her long-running thread on the narrow difference between the good guys and the monsters - it's certainly in Carnival, Blood and Iron, and Shadow Unit, as well - there are no good guys who also commit genocide here, and the thread mainly comes out by the question of what and why the bad guys are bad.
And the two teenage girls at the heart of the story do break one's heart, and Perceval and Rien are both fabulous characters (And so far, I do like Tristen, too, although he does seem very much inside his own head, and Gavin.)
But I did find myself disappointed. Some of it was feeling like the book was, indeed, not as complex as it could or should be, though I suspect that, being very much the set-up book in a three book series, this is because the next book will introduce the yet more complexities it wants. But there also was a bit more veneer of distance here than I got in, say, A Companion to Wolves, or even Carnival. I liked Perceval and Rien, but I never felt as close to them as I could to Isolfr and his problems. (or Chaz and his though the complexities of Shadow Unit's extra structures and bonuses make that example a cheatin' one.)
Good book. Bear wins. Go ahead and read; you'll probably like.
But not my favourite.
