Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Fangirl
Rainbow Rowell
2013

Rainbow Rowell is an amazing author and I really enjoyed her two previous books: Attachments is a delight and Eleanor & Park is amazing and also amazingly tense, because dear god, those kids!

Given my own love of fandom, I was particularly delighted to see her publish a book about fanfic writers, or at least a fanfic writer. And I did enjoy this book. The characters are delightful and the plot was interesting.

That said, there was just something off about the book and it took me a while to pin down exactly what. The main tension of the story is whether or not Cath (the main character) can deal with the real world or will focus herself exclusively on fandom. This is a real crisis for many college students. However, I found two main problems with the implementation of this plot, one with the timing of the plot arc and the other with the writing style interacting poorly with the tension of the story.

The writing style is almost fairy-tale like, with a focus on significant events and turning points without getting into much of the day-to-day activities of the characters. This is a writing style I often enjoy, but when the plot tension is about whether or not the main character is doing her regular day-to-day activities, then it becomes pretty important for those activities to be explicitly addressed. There’s a real question of whether or not Cath is attending her classes, and she says she is, but we only ever see her in one of her classes. In addition, there’s a major plot point about one thing that Cath doesn’t do. But since so much of what she does do isn’t described, there’s no way to tell when she doesn’t do something. That plot point comes out of nowhere when it’s finally revealed.

The timing is also problematic. Like most stories, this one is structured with the climax at the end of the book and the end of the time period being described. It certainly makes sense to structure a story like that. But the kind of crisis that Cath is dealing with isn’t one that waits until the end of the year. When I went to college, there were members of my cohort who struggled with online and fandom obsessions. I was only introduced to fandom in college, and started being active in it in my later years, after I had gotten the hang of college itself. From what I saw, though, with others, was that the crisis came early on. They made a choice in their first month of the semester, if they could balance fandom and real world or not. If they couldn’t balance the two, and if they picked fandom, then they flunked out fast. The crisis point doesn’t wait until the end of the year. At most, it might wait until the end of the first semester.

So, the end of the book focuses on this crisis of priorities, but I had actually judged the crisis point to have long passed, and I had to play catch-up a bit when the story referenced a turning point that I didn’t even notice. It was a fun book about wonderful characters, but the timing and the tension of it weren’t very well done. I still enjoyed it, but it’s definitely no Eleanor & Park.

Long Fanfictions

Mar26 by Rebecca

In preparation for writing my review of Rainbow Rowell’s most recent book, Fangirl (expect the review soon), I decided it was time to recommend a few more fanfiction stories. What makes this selection stand out from my prior recommendations is that, in honor of Rowell’s main character’s fanfiction epic, all of these are recommendations are really incredibly long.

Previously I’ve recommended short fics, because they’re intended to lure unwary readers into fandom or maybe point out a hidden jewel to someone already in fandom. The longer stories tend to be well known to those already in fandom and be a bit daunting for those outside of it.

The following stories range from 109K to 757K long. To give you some context for those numbers: A harlequin romance (one of those romance books often sold at the check-out line of grocery stores and titles things like The Billionaire’s Baby or The Tycoon’s Virgin Mistress or some such) is generally 10K words. Anyone who has completed the NaNoWriMo challenge to write a novel in the month of November, has written 50K words.

The following recommendations are a demonstration of not just the skill that some fanfiction writers have in weaving together words and worlds and characters, but also the dedication they have in continuing a story line that has gotten immensely rich and complex, and keeping at it until they can bring the story to its intended conclusion.

These stories have required a serious commitment by some fan to write. They take a reasonably serious commitment from some fan to read, too. But they’re worth it!

So, from shortest to longest:

Into the Rose Garden
by Dryad13
Fandom: Labrynth
109,232 words long
first chapter posted: June 10, 2004
last chapter posted: January 8, 2006

Summary: Sarah has good grades, a circle of friends, and a cute boyfriend. Life’s great…right? So why does she have the strange feeling that something’s missing? Fairy tales show that magic will make you or break you. Which category does she belong in?

Why I like this: This is a gorgeous story that does an incredible amount of world building regarding both magic and society, to how the Underground works and where exactly Jareth’s place is, in it and the consequences to Sarah for having defeated him.

The Least of All Possible Mistakes
by rageprufrock
Fandom: BBC’s Sherlock
118,096 words long
first chapter posted: January 31, 2012
last chapter posted: February 20, 2013

Summary: If ever a people deserved tasering, it’s Holmeses.

Why I like this: Lestrade doesn’t get much attention in the Sherlock Holmes stories and it’s a shame given how awesome she (the author decided to make Lestrade a female for this story) is. She’s not brilliant, but she is smart and, more to the point, she’s also practical and pragmatic and with enough self-confidence to know when to ask for help and when to call that help out for being an ass. And she is not at all the sort to put up with kidnappings by the mysterious older brother of her consultant (see the summary.) 😀

Divided We Stand
by KouriArashi
Fandom: MTV’s Teen Wolf
156,742 words long
first chapter posted: July 10, 2013
last chapter posted: October 4, 2013

Summary: Derek is being pressured by his family to pick a mate, and somehow stumbles into a choice that they didn’t expect and aren’t sure they approve of….

Why I like this: This uses a fairly common trope of fanfiction, but one that I enjoy immensely, and says what if this secret society is actually common knowledge? They’ve been around forever and all sorts of their cultural oddities have just been incorporated into society at large. In this case, everyone knows werewolves exist. And then we get to an immensely fun and satisfying romp of a story in which there is romantic drama and mysterious conspiracies and an eventual happy ending. It’s pretty much a perfect comfort story.

Pet Project
by Caeria
Fandom: Harry Potter
338,788 words long
first chapter posted: March 3, 2005
last chapter posted: June 9, 2013

Summary: Hermione overhears something she shouldn’t concerning Professor Snape and decides that maybe the House-elves aren’t the only ones in need of protection.

Why I like it: This is a brilliant story focused on Hermione Granger as she matures enough to realize that teachers are people, too, and starts to notice some of the complexities and tricks of the adults around her, with a focus on Severus Snape in particular, and his role as a double agent. As she begins to delve into the mystery of Severus Snape, she and the author really delve into the magic and magical culture of the Harry Potter world. (Plus, I am completely in love with the house elves of this story, even though I never much cared for that plot line in the original books. “Ears are flapping!”)

Embers
by Vathara
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
757,222 words long
first chapter posted: September 24, 2009
last chapter posted: January 18, 2014

Summary: Dragon’s fire is not so easily extinguished; when Zuko rediscovers a lost firebending technique, shifting flames can shift the world…

Why I like this: So many feelings! This is an amazing story delving into Zuko’s character as an exiled prince and abused child and doing amazing world building while also delving into the causes and repercussions of genocides and world wars and cultural clashes and children loaded with responsibilities and adults loaded with secrets.

The Elite by Kiera Cass

Feb25 by Rebecca

The Elite
by Kiera Cass
2013

I had enjoyed The Selection enough that when I returned it to the library, I picked up the sequel, The Elite. And just: urg. I will try to get through this review without swearing at the main character.

So this actually made me kind of mad. While I was expecting light and fluffy again like the first book, I would have been fine if this book had decided to just be darker and more complex than the last one. However, the way in which it did so pisses me off: it’s written the same way but our main character is revealed to be an unreliable narrator due to her immense stupidity. She just doesn’t see what’s happening around her unless she has her nose rubbed in it, and thus, as the reader I have my nose rubbed in it.

Admittedly she’s a 16-year-old with little to no education outside of the performing arts, but as a member of a highly caste-structured society, she should have a basic understanding of how power inequalities work in practice. At the very least, she should be capable of noticing oddities that she thinks nothing of but that allow the reader to get a deeper understanding of the world.

Instead, she complains about how awful the caste structure is but she acts like a teenager from modern U.S. society who has simply been transplanted to this new society rather than growing up in it and yet, at the same time, taking it all for granted and not questioning it. And she takes the reader along with her, seeing and thus showing only the most obvious events.

It’s not a poorly written book, per se, it’s just super frustrating and all the things that I’m supposed to like about the main character mostly make me dislike and disrespect her. She is amazingly naive and completely incapable of subtlety. There are uneducated 16-year-olds and then there is America Singer who has managed to avoid both book learning and street smarts or even the ability to observe without leaping to conclusions.

At the end of this book, I mostly just wanted to re-read Poison Study, which follows a young woman in a similarly rigid society who finds herself physically near the center of power and realizes that there are things happening here that aren’t always obvious.

I do not expect to read the third book in this series whenever it eventually emerges.

The Selection by Kiera Cass

Feb13 by Rebecca

The Selection
by Kiera Cass
2012

I stumbled across this book on Pinterest. As you may have noticed, I enjoy fanfiction, but I also enjoy fanpics, ie, fan-created artwork and illustrations. It’s for this that I started following Book Nerd’s Pinterest boards. But s/he also has a Books too read : D board, and in that board was The Selection.

You know how you’re told not to judge a book by it’s cover? I’ve never been particularly good at following that advice–I regularly judge books by their covers. And this one is pretty much exactly what it’s cover lead me to expect. Which is good, because I really needed a bit of frivolous fun with societal angst and fancy settings. The last few weeks have been intense, and a dystopian Cinderella story for young adults was just what I needed, with the right mixture of fluff and emo, and pretty much no tension at all.

The premise reminded me of Sherwood Smith’s A Posse of Princesses, while the over-all feel of the book and the dystopian setting reminded me of Maria V. Snyder’s Poison Study. Those were also some fun relaxing reads, although quite different from each other. Alternately, it’s bit like if The Hunger Games universe featured a show like The Bachelor rather than, well, the hunger games.

The thing is, that I don’t actually have much to say about The Selection. It was enjoyable. I read it in an evening. It’s a nice balance of fairy-tale and individual empowerment, touches on a great many issues of social injustice and inequalities, but doesn’t particularly linger.

I liked it, and I’ll probably check out the second book (The Elite) and possibly even the third book (The One) when it is released. There’s not actually a whole lot of tension, though: the first chapter of the first book explains what the Selection is, at which point the titles of the other two books become spoilers. However, like any fairytale, it’s nice to just relax into a well-recognized story.

Shadows by Robin McKinley

Jan27 by Rebecca

Shadows
by Robin McKinley
2013

I have a complex relationship with Robin McKinley’s books. I love The Blue Sword and Beauty. They were wonderful. I thought she was doing something interesting with Rose Daughter, since it was a second rewrite of the story of Beauty and the Beast, and yet quite different from her first version, Beauty. And then she wrote Sunshine, which is really in contention for being the best book ever, and won her (in my mind) a life time achievement award: she was thereby a favorite author and I loved her writing.

Where it gets problematic is that I don’t actually care for many of her other books. I found Deerskin unpleasant, Chalice seemed more like a semi-written outline for a book rather than a complete book in and of itself, and I never even managed to get past the first chapter of Pegasus due to the extreme level of twee.

So I’d mostly decided that I would love her intensely and pretend that she wasn’t writing anything anymore. And yet, when her newest book came out, I checked it out from the library.

And I liked it a lot.

The first chapter or so made me wince with the over use of made-up slang and general teenage fraughtness but then it settled into the plot and I discovered that I actually really enjoyed it. The characters and the character interactions and the world they live in are all fun. However, much like how, with Rose Daughter, McKinley had apparently decided that she wanted to try a variation on Beauty, Shadows reads a like McKinley decided she wanted to try a variation on Sunshine. (Even the titles parallel each other!)

Sunshine is so fabulously good that it can definitely support a knock off. In fact, a knock off of Sunshine is a whole lot better than many originals. But, it does add an odd quality of double vision to reading it, see how the characters, plots, and descriptions in the two books map to each other.

One useful distinction, though, is that Sunshine is intended for an adult audience, while Shadows is a teen reader. By this, I mean that the romantic relationships in the two books as well as the level of gore are variably age-appropriate. But they both look at magic and reality and perspective and hope and determination and making due with what you have.

Anyway, I definitely recommend this book, but it doesn’t do much to resolve my issues with McKinley, since now I can’t even rely on her writing books that I don’t want to read. (I also find it somewhat irritating that she really doesn’t like fanfiction and is one of those authors who has their attorneys send cease-and-desist letters. Which is particularly questionable of her given that she apparently writes AUs of her own stories.) Also, just as with Sunshine, I would love to see a sequel of Shadows, or a prequel, or anything else further exploring the world contained within.

The Fall of Ile-Rien

Jan17 by Rebecca

The Fall of Ile-Rien
by Martha Wells

The Wizard Hunters
2003

The Ships of Air
2004

The Gate of Gods
2005

So, it’s possible that I overdosed slightly on Martha Wells. After reading all three of The Books of the Raksura, I went immediately to the library and got Wheel of the Infinite, and after reading that, I went back and got all three books of The Fall of Ile-Rien. I loved each and every one of these books, but by The Gate of Gods, I was flagging a bit and needed a break.

However! It’s still really good and I want to read the prequels, The Element of Fire and Death of a Necromancer. I’m just aware that it’s probably a good thing that the library doesn’t have them and I’ll have to take a break to figure out how to get them through inter-library loan.

Anyway, this series starts off with a ludicrous mess of a plot that I wouldn’t have bothered reading by an unknown author. However, as I’ve mentioned before, Wells has an amazing ability to bring new life to old tropes and she does it extremely well here.

There’s a lot going on in these books: the kingdom of Ile-Rein is sort of like a magical version of a 1920s Europe, but is currently being attacked by (and losing to) an invading army that appears to come from nowhere. Tremaine Valiarde, our heroine, is from this world. It turns out the bad guys, though, are invading from a different world, although tracking exactly how is a main plotline for the series. Ilias is from a more agrarian society in an entirely different world. Also his society is a matriarchy, which allows Wells to be delightful in her exploration of gender norms and social expectations.

Normally, the thing that most attracts me to a book is the world building, but while the world building here is excellent, it’s really the characters who shine. Both Tremaine and Ilias are broken in their own ways, but also too strong to let that stop them. And while they’re not outcasts from their respective societies, neither of them quite fit in at home. Wells does an amazing job of showing how out of sync both of them are, even with their friends and family, and yet those same idiosyncrasies allow them to fit together in a way they don’t with anyone else.

Plus, I just really love how Wells approaches bringing them together. Some things simply appear impossible: there’s a war going on, there’s no time for relationships. Other things are so easy and without angst for much the same reason: there’s a war going on, no need for unnecessary waffling.

But for all that Tremaine is clearly set up as the central character, the real main character is the war itself. It is ever-present and affects everything that happens. There is a large cast of characters who are all struggling to do their best to achieve their goals, because the war doesn’t effect just one person and can’t be fought by just one person. There are dozens of main characters, all working, either together or in opposition, but all with the knowledge that something needs to be done and no one has the option to sit out these events.

I really liked this series a great deal. I think I might have a new favorite author, as well.

Fanfiction Selection

Jan7 by Rebecca

The last month (or two, or three) has been somewhat frenetic for me, and I haven’t really had the energy or focus to read full books. However, I couldn’t not be reading something, and what I’ve been reading is fanfiction. I’ve introduced the genre before, so I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few more short fanfics.

Friends Across Borders
by MueraRashaye

To understand these stories, you need to be familiar with Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar universe.

Summary: Two long-time enemy nations can’t become meaningful allies overnight. Stories from the lives of a border-guard Herald and Sunpriest, from their first meeting to the end, and insights into just how Karse and Valdemar were able to turn around their relationship so fast.

Warning: This is a series rather than a single story. The first three stories are complete, but the forth one is still a work in progress. Each of the first three stories can absolutely stand on their own, though, so if you won’t want to take a chance on a half-completed story, it’s okay to just not start the fourth story until it’s been completed.

Why I like it: This takes a part of my childhood and makes it a tad bit more realistic, but without ever tarnishing the joy of the original. The main characters are both a delight and their mutual bewilderment regarding their developing friendship is a joy to behold. Also, one sign of a good series, in my opinion, is that the individual stories can stand on their own. So you don’t have to commit to reading the whole series to enjoy just the first story: Enemy, It’s Cold Outside.

Monster
by Laura JV (jacquez)

To understand this story, you need to be familiar with the character of Methos from Highlander and Sesame Street in general.

Summary: “Someone new moved in, Chris, next door to Gordon! Come meet him with Elmo.”

Why I like it: This is super short but it’s sort of like a John Donne poem in its own way. Without ever directly saying anything, it plays with the different meanings of the word “monster.” And, let me reiterate: it’s a Highlander/Sesame Street crossover. 😀

The Whole Truth (So Help Me God)
by Metisket

To understand this, you should be at least passingly familiar with the new Teen Wolf tv show. Although, actually, I read and enjoyed it without ever watching the show, just knowing the basic premise.

Summary: And this is a Stiles character study, so there you go. It’s multiple POV and set around “Night School.” Mostly because it will never stop being hilarious to me that Stiles punched Jackson viciously in the face and the only person who was remotely surprised was Allison. XD WHAT WERE YOU LIKE AS A CHILD, STILES?

Why I like it: First, I have to admit that I don’t watch Teen Wolf, I just really like the fandom. Fan authors can, and often are, much better than, say, MTV script writers. My pleasure in this fandom comes, in large part, from how the character of Stiles is treated, and this is just a concentrated look at how hilariously fascinating Stiles is and why the other characters wince when they have to deal with him. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be around him, but I sure like reading about him. It just makes me laugh.

A Perpendicular Expression
by leupagus

To understand what’s going on here, you should know the tv show Person of Interest.

Summary: Pissing Finch off never actually ends well; usually it ends like this, with John scaring the shit out of her at two in the morning.

Why I like it: There’s a certain joy in reading about super-competent people who just fail at being reasonable human beings. And Joss Carter is hilarious as she has to put up with them and explain basic social behaviors like not stalking your friends.

Kissable Fanatic, Unhinged Minim Artists
by Basingstoke

This fic is set in the X-Men universe, although the X-Men characters appear only briefly. If you are aware at all of the character Toad, in Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants, you know enough to read this.

Summary (provided by thefourthvine): Best FF featuring a powerful anti-drug message; namely that if we spend all our time stoned we might fail to notice critical things in our environment, like that one of our friends is actually green.

Warning: This is not family-friendly or work safe, i.e. any sort of filter at all should filter out this story. There’s drugs, profanity, and graphic homosexual sex.

Why I like it: I fought with myself over including this particular story because so far all my recommendations have been intended for a general audience (which is not necessarily common in fandom) and this one is absolutely not. This is, in fact, the first story I’ve recommended that includes a serious warning. (It’s standard policy with fanfiction to include warnings, a policy that is immensely helpful for maintaining some sanity when wandering dark corners of the internet.) However, this story is just too good to not recommend. Basingstoke takes Toad, a character that is treated as a barely 2-dimensional character in the comics, and makes him fully human (as it were). This story makes him real and that is one of the things I really love about fanfiction: that it will take minor characters the original author threw in to take up space and develop those characters into the main characters of their own lives. This story is just really, really good with that.

Christmas Present from Ilona Andrews

Dec29 by Rebecca

For those of you crazy people out there who don’t obsessively check in on their favorite author’s websites, we at Bibliotherapy here for you!

Ilona Andrews is one of my favorite authors currently writing and she has quite an active website, in which she posts regular snippets of stories, and, more to the point, posts Christmas presents to her fans.

Her Kate Daniels series is all told from the point of view of Kate Daniels, but has Curran, the Lord of the Beasts and Kate’s love interest, as another main character. The Christmas present is a collection of short snippets retelling pivotal moments in the Kate Daniels books from Curran’s point of view. It’s quite fun and while I recognize several of the snippets from having been posted individually on prior occasions, other snippets I don’t recognize at all.

So, if you enjoy the Kate Daniels’ series: here’s a “Merry Christmas!” from Ilona Andrews.

Wheel of the Infinite

Dec1 by Rebecca

Wheel of the Infinite
by Martha Wells
2000

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells, and going through a bit of withdrawal from reaching the end of the series, I checked out an older book of hers and am extremely glad I did so.

I love stories that involve gods and godlike powers and the difficulties faced by both the people who struggle against those powers with just human strength and the gods who struggle to avoid unintended consequences. (Some of my all-time favorite books deal with these issues: Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny, Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, Nameless Magery by Delia Marshall Turner.)

The world-building here is amazing particularly as it comes to the rules of magic and religion, and we get it from two perspectives:

Maskelle is The Voice of the Adversary, a highly ranked priestess, but she was exiled (rightly so) for murder and treason some years back. She has been summoned back to the Imperial and religious center of the land by the request of the Celestial One to help regarding a problem with the Hundred Year Rite, in which the Wheel of the Infinite recreates the world. (A problem with the re-creation of the world is, rather obviously, quite a problem.) But she approaches the people and the magic with deep familiarity and deep discomfort given her past.

Rian is a bodyguard from a far distant land who ran away from an unpleasant situation, and manages to fall in with Maskelle on her return trip, and sees the political and religious situation with fresh eyes.

And that is the premise. From there, stuff happens: after all, there’s a problem with the ritual that recreates the world. Stuff. Happens. I love the exploration of the world that is inherent in our main characters’ investigation of what has happened.

In addition to the amazing world-building, I also just love the characters. Rian’s culture shock is somewhat hilarious (especially as it mirrors the reader’s own shock at this culture). And Maskelle’s deadpan practicality, even as she struggles with her own issues, is a delight.

Another thing I appreciated about this book was that Maskelle was middle-aged and black. The book is high fantasy, in an entirely different world, so clearly she’s not African or African-American, but she and her whole culture are dark-skinned and her hair is in braids. Scifi and fantasy, for all their alien species, tends toward the homogenous white humans, in both writers and characters. (The one exception to this that I can think of off hand is Octavia Butler, but her books tend to be both excellent and extremely hard hitting. Wheel of the Infinite is readable purely for fun.)

The first chapter of Wheel of the Infinite is available online, so you can get a taste. I highly recommend this book.

Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman

Nov17 by Rebecca

This is going to be a super brief post, because it’s essentially a single link out to someone else’s article:

I got linked this article some time back, and I have no idea why I didn’t post a link here immediately, but I happened to mention it this afternoon to Anna and she assured me that it needed to go up, pronto. Thus, I give you:

Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman
by Mallory Ortberg
the-toast.net
September 17, 2013

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

You are either the kind of person to whom this matters a great deal, or the kind of person to whom it matters not at all. To the latter I say: yours is the narrow road and the straight, and I extend to you a hearty and fulsome handshake, as well as my sincerest wishes for your continued good health. To the former I say: Want to hear about the time Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (probably) hooked up??

(For more, click the link that is the whole excerpt, and it will take you to the original article.)

Biblio-therapy

Author Archives: Rebecca