Archives for August 2020

This has turned into more of a weekend maunder as we are long past mid-week.  I did want to finish, though, with the Wayward Children series and not wait until next week.  “Come Tumbling Down” by Seanan McGuire is the fifth and last (so far) of the Wayward Children books.  It is another excellent one.  This book finishes the story of Jack and Jill, the twin sisters who played the key roles in the first book and were the focus of the second book in the series.  Like all the books of the series, this one is short and tightly written.  The story opens with the sudden, unexpected return of Jack to the school in a bad state and with an awful problem.  The story follows Jack and her friends in their efforts to right the wrongs that have been done.  The characters are all familiar from the other books but the story is dominated by Jack, both in time on stage and by force of personality.  She is a complex and realistic character.  In a way, it feels like this is the completion of Jack’s character arc. When we meet her in the first book she is in that in-between teen stage; we see her more as a child in the second book, but here, although the same age as in book 1, she is grown up and handling decisions fraught with danger and risk.  The story is fairly dark with many sad aspects; this is not a happily ever after fairy tale.  It is, however, a compelling read and I highly recommend it.

So, do we call this type of book YA fiction?  I don’t know because I’m not certain I know what YA is.  Yes, the principal characters are teens.  Yes, the books are relatively short.  Yes, they deal with issues of fitting in, or not fitting in as the case may be.  They would certainly be accessible to an audience in that age group, although I have seen multiple definitions that go as young as 12 and as old as 21.  I enjoyed the books and I’m, well, a multiple of the upper end of that range.  Maybe, if you’ve seen your own children through that age range you also qualify.  I guess I’ll take good story-writing and leave it at that.

I want to mention again the Mars Society meeting that will be October 15th – 18th. Okay, this is not science fiction.  This meeting is focused on the science and engineering necessary to get us to the red planet – and to plant a colony there.  Speakers are from JPL, from NASA, from overseas, and a number of them are involved with current Mars missions.  If the science fiction you read has ever made you wish that we could go out into space (and it has done that for me from the day I started reading it), then think about attending.  We can go to Mars for real and we should.  And then we can go further.  Check out www.marssociety.org.

I went on a Seanan McGuire run a while ago (obviously). The fourth book in the Wayward Children series is “In An Absent Dream.”  This is the story of Lundy, who appears (briefly but importantly) as a secondary character in the first book. This is truly a tragedy, in that it follows the old Greek design of a character blessed with talent and promise who, as a consequence of their internal flaws, loses everything important to them.  It is, in fact, a rather sad story.  That said, the story is beautifully told.  As with all the books in this series, it is short but the character of Lundy is very well-described with all her good and not-so-good attributes. I really felt for her at the end. This book could be a complete standalone; it does not depend on any of the others (it is a “prequel” to the first book).

The upcoming new book will be titled Complicated: The Interstellar Life and Times of Saoirse Kenneally and I’m aiming to have it out at the end of this year or beginning of the next.  There’s a lot of frantic work between now and then and editing and proofing is only part of it.  A book needs a cover, for example, so cover art has to be obtained.  But to use the available digital tools to have a POD paperback, the artist has to know the thickness of the book’s spine and that depends on the final page count of the formatted pdf and that can’t be determined until we reach “pencils down” on any changes that might affect the page count.  Sometimes, life can feel like a Gantt chart …  Anyway, it is on the way and more on this in the fall.

“Beneath The Sugar Sky” is the third book in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series.  This one, I’m afraid, is not on my favorite list.  The story focuses on different characters than the first two (not all of them different, but the leads are different) and I did not feel invested in them.  The story lacked the real sense of danger that was present in the first two; it felt more like a bedtime story for a young child.  This is an adventure in a Nonsense world and while the writing is very inventive, the world did not feel substantial.  Finally, the plot device involved in success of the kids’ quest did not work for me.

On the non-fiction side, Dilip Hiro’s “The Longest August” is an history of the conflict between India and Pakistan from the end of the British Raj up to 2014.  The succession of confrontations, mis-judgements, outright wars, near nuclear war, terrorist incidents, assassinations, and coups involving these nations is a roller-coaster of events that I doubt any writer of fiction could produce – and this is real history.  The book is written in an objective and dispassionate manner that presents the events in an accessible manner.  I found this an excellent read and overview of this important history, especially for one who has not studied this area.

Been reading my way through Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series.  I don’t usually go for series, but to my mind, that’s a set of books with a small number of continuing characters who have a different adventure (or mystery) in each book but the characters don’t change (or grow) that much from book to book.  McGuire’s books are starting to feel like each is a part of a much larger story.  (Either that, or I simply like them and am finding reasons to be positive.)  Anyway, “Down Among The Sticks And Bones” is the second.  It is actually a prequel in that it gives the story of Jacqueline and Jillian (Jack and Jill) before what happens in the first book.  Jack is my favorite character in the books (so far), so I was looking forward to this one and I think it is excellent.  All of the principal characters feel real; they have virtues and flaws; they have their quirks and their motivations flow organically from who they are.  These points are conveyed well, despite the brevity of the book.  The plot carries a sense of impending doom which is handled well despite the fact that, as a prequel, we know a lot about how things turn out.  I wondered for a while whether it would be better to read this book first, but I don’t think so.  The first one is fun without knowing all the detail.

I think these books are a good illustration of the fact that you don’t need a ton of backstory or character soul-searching to create individualistic, three-dimensional characters.  As in real life, the good guys can’t be all good and the bad guys can’t be all bad (okay, there have been some real world characters with no redeeming traits whatsoever, but that’s a, thankfully, rare event).  This is particularly something to think about when penning the secondary characters in a story.  If we want the reader to believe in the story as a whole, the way the secondary characters participate is very important.  They can’t be cardboard.