Ken Schneyer

Every word a gem.

Revisado: 11-30-24

As a fan of both Arthurian tales and Nicola Griffith, I came with high expectations, and I was not disappointed.  This book was so enthralling, every word so beautiful, that I lost all sense of where I was when listening to it. Whole commutes have been erased from my mind because I was in fifth-century Britain the whole time.  This is the only time I have ever finished an audiobook and immediately restarted it, out of desire to hear that language again.

The premise that Percival was a woman is simple, and the plot of the story is not especially surprising — and honestly I don’t care. The characters fascinate me and (for the third time) the language itself held me. There is almost no person for whom the story does not have compassion, and the narrative holds dissonant realities in its mind with a grace that is humbling.

Although I have heard Griffith speak before, I didn’t know how good a reader she is. Her cadence isn’t showy, but she clearly delights in the different accents and dialects of her characters. What a pleasure!

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Form meets theme

Revisado: 09-11-22

Robinson has selected structure, point of view, and voicing that is inseparable from the novel’s theme. This is a book about everyone, about the impact of the world on everyone, and every person’s participation in its healing or destruction. By presenting us with a new voice practically every chapter, Robinson makes us feel, at a primal level, the multiplicity and interconnectedness of humanity. The only two major continuing characters are carefully selected, and their experiences and their interaction with each other mirror the larger action of the book.

Of course this is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful one. Things are bad, things are going to get worse, efforts to save ourselves will fail and fail before they succeed, and there are many of us who will fight our salvation with everything they have. Ultimately he does not seem optimistic that the world can be saved completely without resort to violence, and this clearly grieves him. He also believes that the existing social, political, economic, and cultural orders are incapable of saving the world or allowing it to be saved, such that preventing our own extinction requires altering who we are at a fundamental level.

All in all, this is another towering accomplishment by Mr. Robinson.

In the audiobook itself, the decision to use multiple actors to read the various chapters highlighted the multiplicity I mentioned earlier.

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Masterful

Revisado: 02-18-22

Probably the most delicious thing about this novel is it’s skillful use of point-of-view. The alternating protagonists have very different agendas and, at least at times, hold diametrically opposed ethical views. When the reader is in the head of any one of them, that character’s particular views seem entirely correct, and the others’ flawed.

Normally I don’t compliment worldbuilding, as I think of it as a technical exercise. But the world here is so delightfully weird, with so many horrifying, mysterious, and wacky aspects, that I couldn’t help chortling over it.

There is also love, adventure, all-too-familiar political struggle, emergence from privilege into social consciousness, the struggle between the personal and the social, exciting combat, superheroes, and even an evil quasi-Frankenstein. What a treat!

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A Gauntlet Thrown

Revisado: 11-22-19

This passionate, lyrical novel, drawn from the author’s own deep experience of live music, is a challenge thrown to those who would resist oppression in all its forms. Its controlling metaphor of the infinite ways in which human beings create and express dovetails with its serious inquiry about collaboration, capitulation, subversion, self-protection, sin, and the search for redemption.

My only quibble (which you can see did not affect my ratings) arises from my legal training. The major premise of the novel depends on a set of statutory reactions to a crisis that I am reasonably confident would not survive First Amendment challenge. I am able to believe in both the mass hysteria and the political and corporate opportunism that would seek to create and perpetuate such reactions, but I don’t think the emergency exceptions to the Peaceable Assembly clause would extend this far. Because there is so much legal and constitutional misinformation out there, I think it’s important to correct such misapprehensions where they arise. However, the average reader would not notice or care about this issue (which is part of the problem), and so it would not affect anyone’s enjoyment.

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Douglas Adams is Smiling in the Seventh Dimension

Revisado: 12-21-18

This is a love letter to science fiction in general, and to the work of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett in particular, although you'll go crazy trying to keep track of all the Easter Eggs. It is hysterically funny, lavishly written by someone who can turn on her disciplined poet and her inner toddler at will. It is also deadly serious about Big Issues in science fiction and politics. Heath Miller is a gem too, as you'd expect a gifted voice actor reading his wife's own work to be. Can't recommend this enough.

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Beautifully realized world, vivid characters; makes you think

Revisado: 03-24-18

An intelligent, exciting, thoughtful novel that teeters on the edge between science fiction and fantasy. One part The Godfather, one part Dune, one part The Left Hand of Darkness, one part John le Carre, this book is also unremitting and unsentimental in its meditation on colonialism, imperialism, and gender politics. The characters are vivid, and their complex traits, sorrows, and weaknesses are entirely believable based on their pasts. Perhaps Lee’s most impressive achievement is making the reader care about and sympathize with leaders who are essentially ritualized gangsters, ruling an entire society through violence and the threat of violence. The narration of this story is splendid as well.

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Thrilling and delightful

Revisado: 02-12-18

Although I am not much of a fan of YA novels in general, I really enjoyed this one. It is paced excitingly, its characters breathe, and it explores some family dynamics nicely.

One reason that I do not read a lot of YA literature is that I find genuine teenage behavior irritating. There is genuine teenage behavior in this novel, and yes, I did find it irritating. But there is also character development among the teenagers; they grow satisfyingly.

I also appreciated that the author did not pander to my ordinary expectations. There were things I expected to happen – that I had really been set up to expect to happen – which did not ultimately happen, and the character logic for this made perfect sense.

The author is realistic and sensitive about the emotional impact of trauma, including difficulties with intimacy.
As a medical professional, she is satisfyingly accurate about medical issues other authors gloss over or get dead wrong. It has a pleasantly diverse cast, including a female protagonist, which I appreciated.

Readers who expect every paragraph of a novel to contain strikingly original language will be disappointed in this one. As is the case with many novels aimed at young people, its use of colloquialisms and other turns of phrase is unsurprising. But I will certainly recommend it to my teenage son and his friends.

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It's the characters

Revisado: 02-11-17

Every once in a while, I run across a book I really shouldn't like, but I do. I don't go in for urban fantasy, I'm relatively bored with Los Angeles as a setting, Hollywood politics interest me not at all, and I typically close a book as soon as I see the word "fae".

But really good writing supersedes all of that. The characters in Borderline are so vivid and quirky that if one of them walked up to me and said even three words, I'd recognize him/her immediately. And this is true of *all* the characters, not just the main protagonist and antagonist; even the walk-ons breathe.

I'm sure other reviewers will comment on the fact that this is probably the first SFF novel ever to treat Borderline Personality Disorder seriously, and of course it's a gem for that reason alone. And yes, the magical world presented is clever and fun all by itself; but it seems to me that I would enjoy this novel even if it were mainstream literary fiction, and even if BPD didn't come up.

If you like living with characters who fascinate, this book is for you.

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