61 – Jade War
Fonda Lee is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. Jade City was a five star read back in February (2023) – a rapid paced Wuxia infused story where the Godfather met Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Jade War is the second book in the trilogy, and it’s just as good – perhaps better, even – that its predecessor. It has a lot of the same addictive elements of Jade-empowered martial artists engaged in acts of spectacular violence but it also has a darker, deeper tone of family and responsibility.
Having taken over the family after his brother’s assassination, Hilo tries to guide the No Peak Clan through a series of tribulations he feels incapable of meeting. A renowned warrior, he finds it difficult to adjust to the more diplomatic skills needed of a clan’s Pillar. His sister Shae takes over as the Weather Man – a consigliere of sort – and the two tentatively navigate a complex political situation neither is really equipped for. Competition with the rival clan, the Mountain, has intensified even as it publicly seems to be dialling down. Everything has become cloak and dagger and as their opponents get ever closer to the inner circle, paranoia and betrayal starts to spill out of the pages like a poison.
What really elevates Jade War is its keen worldbuilding, which creates a geopolitical context that feels real and relatable while still being utterly alien. What we see in the action-packed close camera work of the book is a bunch of magical Yakuza kicking ten kinds of shit out of other magical Yakuza. Once the camera draws back we get to see a greater drama at play – a conflict of exploitation where the bioreactive Jade that fuels the clans is coveted by ancient enemies and illegally (although endorsed) siphoned off into military use by enemies and allies. As a Friend of the Show said in a conversation we had about the book – ‘you are literally watching a colonial war playing out. The only debate is whether Kekon should be Taiwan or Hong Kong’.
As the story moves to take into account the exile Anden, we also get to explore feelings of belonging in a society that isn’t yours – and how the diaspora of a community might struggle to retain an identity when their host nation is doing everything to destroy it. There’s a part in the book where Anden encounters the ‘Grudge Hall’ which is a location where his fellow Kekonese immigrants can connect – however distantly – with the prohibited conventions of their home country. It reminded me quite viscerally of the experience of expat Scots who have turned things like Burns Night and St Andrews Day into celebrations of national identity even when Scotland itself treats both as largely an irrelevance. People work to hold on to a connection to where they came from, even though there were presumably reasons why they left.
Yeah, some of it spoke to me quite a bit as an expat Scot in Sweden.
The Green Bone saga, which is what the trilogy is called, still has another book for me to read but I’m expecting it to hold to the quality of the first two. Which is, in case you missed it, excellent. I can’t recommend these enough.
62 – It Ends With Us
So, I read a Colleen Hoover book – she of endless TikTok and BookTube virality. It’s fair to say I won’t be reading another.
It’s not that this book is bad. It’s just… unremarkable. Despite its provocative theme of domestic violence and repeating cycles of abuse, it singularly failed to make me feel anything other than vaguely bored. And yet, her books sell millions and have an audience of truly enthusiastic readers. I have a theory as to why, and it marks me out as a dick so if that’s going to come as a surprise to anyone I can only apologise. You’ve all been here a while though, so at this point you only have yourselves to blame.
One of the things that really annoys me about literature discourse on social media is how its centre of gravity is often in young adult literature. And I get it – some YA books are fantastic. I am an unapologetic fan of the Hunger Games books, for example. Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books are technically ‘young adult’ and they’re amongst the higher echelon of my favourites. I don’t have a problem with young adult books, even if I am increasingly confused about where the boundaries are. I’ve read plenty of ‘young adult’ books that I don’t think should be read by young adults.
One of the common defining elements though is a kind of ‘simplified language’ in the writing. They avoid complex constructions or innovative phrasing. They tend to eschew subtext and nuance of interpretation. They are surface level, mostly – deeper readings don’t often uncover more than was on the surface. There are exceptions to this. ‘Unsophisticated’ might be too harsh an adjective to ascribe to Young Adult as a genre but it’s certainly applicable in a lot of cases. For those looking to ‘create content’ about books as opposed to read them, they’re a godsend. All you need to know is in the blurb on the back. Imagine if you tried to base a video on a blurb about Infinite Jest or Finegan’s Wake. You’d be laughed off the Internet. Some blurbs though are more than enough to give you everything you need to know about a book, and content creators are busy people.
None of this means a Young Adult book can’t be fun, interesting, thematic or exciting. Many of them manifestly are. They just don’t really ask a lot of their readers. After all, the intended readers aren’t likely to have either a lot of life experience or a deep well of reading experience. You can’t hold being young against them. I mean, that’s true, right? I’m asking for a friend – is it okay to hate the young for their hateful youth?
But there’s a stigma, right, against reading young adult books as a grown up? I mean, look at how much of a prick I’ve been about it already. I tend to avoid books with the tag ‘young adult’ unless it’s something endorsed by a trustworthy friend. I remember back when the last couple of Harry Potter books came out and they were released in two main editions – a colourful one that matched the cover of the originals, and a darker, more ‘adult’ cover so that people could hopefully convince other people they were reading proper fiction for grown-ups. Harry Potter is fun to read, because it’s not especially challenging and you can focus on the story and not worry about the deeper meaning that has passed you by.
That’s, to me, the ecological niche Colleen Hoover has occupied. She writes Young Adult books for an adult audience. It Ends With Us asks virtually nothing of its reader other than to passively absorb its contents. That’s absolutely fine, although I would perhaps suggest that domestic abuse is a bad match for that philosophy. It’s just not for me. I think a book like this needs its readers to be more actively engaged with the text.
Since I won’t be reading any more of these, maybe this is too broad a thesis to construct around her work – but I think in the case of this specific book its virality is firmly correlated to its ‘blurbability’.
63 – Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
This is a book that has such a great premise – how do we reconcile a ‘problematic creator’ with their contribution to culture. I’m not going to get into the weeds here about who counts as a problematic creator – my own opinion has long been that the creator is distinct from their creation, and you can enjoy one without endorsing the other. Social media has flattened the nuance of that in its usual way, reverting to the pre-postmodern philosophy that you can’t disconnect the art from the artist. The most troubling aspect of that is the general collapse of ‘this person has views I disagree with’ into ‘this person is causing harm’. Seriously, a spell in the army would do most social media users a world of good, as my grandfather might have said. At the very least, it would make people a bit more wary of diluting the word ‘harm’ into uselessness.
Anyway – yes. There are people who are now considered ‘problematic’ despite having done nothing except contribute in a way to a debate that others would prefer didn’t exist. I’m thinking here obviously of JK Rowling, but also of people like Orson Scott Card who – while I find his viewpoint on homosexuality to be reprehensible – expressed that viewpoint in a respectful and thoughtful way. You know, like adults are supposed to do.
There is certainly though a tension between the views of an artist and the messages encoded in their art, and I think people should draw their own line on where the appropriate response lies. I don’t judge people for taking a well-considered position that results in them boycotting someone for their views. You do you, boo and all that. I likewise have no problem with someone that thinks over the topic and decides that it’s okay to read Mein Kampf because of its importance as a document in the historical record. It’s a genuinely interesting debate – when it’s conducted by grown-ups willing to accept the basic premise that life is complicated – and this book tackles it head on.
The problem is – it takes a long time to arrive at the conclusion, which is in essence ‘It depends on how much the art matters to you, how much you absolve the artist’. There’s no problem with it arriving at a bland conclusion – sometimes that’s the only one that’s available – but it doesn’t really illuminate the topic in the discussion either. At best what it does is talk about some controversial people, or artists who did terrible things, and then vaguely gesture as if that counts as the generation of insight. The book is tremulous, almost timid. I get that it’s because this is difficult topic and consensus is almost impossible. But also, ‘people make exceptions for the art that matters to them’ isn’t a new insight or a surprising take. Of course people make exceptions – it’s part of the tribalism at the core of the whole thing. It’s not the behaviour that is problematic, it’s the ‘us versus them’ mentality that turns opponents into enemies and disagreement into heresy.
Still though, there is something in that conclusion. If Terry Pratchett turned out to be a child-abusing misogynist I’d be devastated because his philosophy – as expressed through the Discworld books – was genuinely formative. I’ve often said I don’t fear dying largely because I’m hoping I’m met at the end of my life by the Death from Discworld. A lot of my sense of social justice comes from Pratchett, and if he turned out to be a tainted source I know that I’d still keep the Discworld books on my shelves and still read them. And yet I dropped Louis C.K. from my life because – while I still think of him as the most skilled comedian of modern times – it felt like I needed him to be a better person in order to laugh at his jokes. Otherwise it felt a bit like endorsement, y’know? If a committed feminist makes a sexist joke, it’s different from a crypto-misogynist making the same joke. One can be safely interpreted as irony, the other as looking for agreement in an audience’s laughter.
Nobody is going to resolve this debate, and this book certainly doesn’t do much to move it on. I’ll keep it on my shelves despite not really liking it all that much because – while it is a somewhat mild investigation, it’s one that takes a fair degree of courage to even discuss. And it is, as far as I am aware, the only book of its kind that at least attempts to find some common ground between the opposing battlegrounds.
64 – The Girl in the Tower
The Bear and the Nightingale was an unexpected treat when I read it back in April. (again, 2023). Tiffany Aching meets Russian folklore, threaded through with the proper darkness associated with myth and fairytale. It was great, and I have gushed about that elsewhere. The sequel is also great, although perhaps not quite as consistently good. It’s a bit slow to begin with, a little too unfocused in the middle, and a little uncertain at the dismount. However, even with all of this it’s a remarkably fun book – just one that perhaps acts best as a kind of momentum builder for what I hope will be a genuinely energetic conclusion to the trilogy.
Part of it I think is that youth comes with a degree of courage that ebbs away as we learn more about the world. When we’re young we leap from high places without knowing just how inelastic our bodies truly are. Vasya here is a bit older, and a bit wiser, and as such she’s a bit more cowed by the sociopolitical forces that dominate her culture. She’s no longer in the position of being casually insubordinate – she’s a young woman now, and young women behave a certain way or they are punished. Children can push barriers, adults – even young ones – need to learn to operate within them. That theme is more expressed here than it was the original book and it casts everything in a kind of fatalism that is almost oppressive.
And yet, Vasya is still Vasya and she is still a force of change – and the tension between her nature and her context is one that’s still being worked out. For much of the first half of the book it feels like the story is an elastic band being pulled taut, ready to be released at the end. That doesn’t quite happen, but as I say – I hope the target of the elastic band is in the third book.
I still enjoyed this a huge amount – it’s still a fantastic series full of wonderful writing, rich characters and an immersive setting. It’s just a little different in tone and energy, and I’m curious to see how that will unfold as the series concludes.
65 – Iron Widow
If Girls of Paper and Fire, which I reviewed earlier, is too passive for my liking it’s probably safe to say that Iron Widow – which shares some important themes – is the dark twin that got all the rage and anger. It’s similar in its framing to Gearbreakers, in that Iron Widow is also a book about powerful mecha fighting other powerful things – in this case, the vaguely insectoid aliens that are constantly looking to overwhelm humanity. The pilots of these mecha are men – awarded women and riches in proportion to their accomplishments – although each also works with a concubine-pilot. She, for the concubine-pilots are always women, is to serve as a kind of psychic battery for the real pilot. When he needs strength or energy to drive his mecha forward, he draws it from his concubine. She often dies in the end, when the demand is greater than the supply. The greatest male pilots go through many of these concubines who, before and after the battles (should they survive) are also expected to be bed-mates.
In Iron Widow though we meet Zetian, who is a concubine pilot with a difference – she’s so much more powerful than the male pilots that’s she’s the one that ends up bleeding them dry. She has the skill and ability to drive the mechs to ever greater heights of accomplishment, which is something that the generals can’t let stand if their existing social structures are to be maintained. And yet, she’s a pivotal war weapon and getting rid of her means losing battles, and perhaps the war.
Iron Widow is an angry book. Almost misandrist in its thesis, in fact. That’s fine – I’m a big boy and I can certainly understand why an author might encode this message in a story of this nature. I’m not such a huge fan of men myself, actually. I get it, as a group we’re pretty uniformly awful. There is real heat in this book in a way that’s absent from others. The problem is the heat isn’t applied particularly carefully. It’s a brush fire, not a flamethrower. It seem to not care what gets burnt in the process, and the list of casualties includes subtlety and nuance. Everyone in Iron Widow is awful, including the protagonist, and nobody has any texture that suggests real internal or external conflict. That’s fine for a polemic, which is what this novel is. It’s unconvincing if it’s supposed to illuminate something meaningful about the real world. I get it though – a strawman is one of the easiest things in the world to set ablaze.
I did still like the book – it’s got a lot of energy, and while it lacks much in the way of literary merit it makes up for it in gumption. I have a considerable degree of affection for a book that is prepared to set fire to itself in order to catch The Patriarchy in the blaze. It just feels like all of that heat could have been harnessed to a greater goal than the immolation of some easy targets.