Books read, late November

[mrissa]

Melissa Bashardoust, Girl, Serpent, Thorn. Poisonous girls and Persian mythology. This was captivating and lovely.

Eileen Hunt Botting, Artificial Life After Frankenstein. Discussed elsewhere.

Hayley Chewins, The Sisters of Straygarden Place. This is a middle-grade book about a family in a magical house and the creepy and delightful things the house does and the sisters do and...how they put it all back together.

Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections. Elegant, insightful, lovely, offbeat short stories. Very excited to discover this author.

R.F. Kuang, The Burning God. The third in its series--do not start here--it is relentless in its follow-through, it is going all sorts of places that are alarming and inevitable.

Darcie Little Badger, Elatsoe. This was so much fun and so engaging. I read it all in one gulp while waiting in the car for a family member to have a medical procedure. The ghost dog is amazing! I love everybody here!

L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest. Reread. This was always my least-reread volume of this trilogy, and I can now see why: it feels more like a summary than a novel. It's as though Montgomery knew what was to happen in Emily's life in broad career and romance strokes--and as a child I was thrilled that the career part got as much focus as it did, compared to Anne--there is all sorts of stuff about sending out manuscripts and how it all worked at the time. But the little anecdotes where Emily does something funny or Cousin Jimmy says something weird or whatever (hashtag Team Cousin Jimmy 4eva) are very sparse on the ground here. And the romantic relationships are...well, Dean Priest remains incredibly odious and terrible and I hate him forever, Emily forgave him but I do not. And Teddy Kent...is a Ken doll, basically; he is a label that says "childhood artist friend," he is not a person. So when Emily achieves publishing success comparatively early in the book and her happy ending is, "hey also you get to be with this potted plant of a man," well. I hope Ilse and Perry stop by often, is what I'm saying.

Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Laughing to Keep From Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century. Discussed elsewhere.

Jan Morris, Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty, and Irony. I had only read her Hav books, so when I heard the sad news of her death, I went to see what the library had of hers. And it was this: an exceptionally small book of photos and thoughts on the topic of the subtitle. As much as Hav connected for me, this completely did not; Morris had ideas about how "we" respond to war imagery that...I don't, no, I really totally do not. Still interesting, and I'll be curious to see how much her other nonfiction is alien in a way that Hav is not, if at all. Maybe this is an outlier.

Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish. Graphic novel with fairy tale retellings tangled up in family stories in a beautiful way. Another one I read in one sitting. Just lovely.

Scott D. Seligman, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City. Discussed elsewhere.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future. Sheldrake has that "we are our own best experimental subjects" attitude that you find baked into a lot of mycologists and mycological enthusiasts, but the enthusiasm is in some ways lovely and refreshing, and reading about a lot of nice fungus in the midst of this year is not a terrible life plan. I wanted some of this to be deeper, but not any more so than with most popular science books.

Shveta Thakrar, Star Daughter. I mistook the genre of this completely and thought the girl on the cover was a starship captain. In defense of the lovely people who actually worked on marketing the book, I could not have made that mistake if I'd read any of their copy at all instead of just saying "ooh Shveta's book!" and sallying forth. Anyway this is a YA fantasy with stars and art and love and friendship, and it was a lot of fun, so go ahead and say, "Ooh, Shveta's book!" and pick it up anyway.

Django Wexler, Ashes of the Sun. I think this is the best thing Django's written. Siblings with divergent life paths, sometimes fighting at cross purposes, both stubborn and fierce and committed to their view of the right thing. Such a fun epic fantasy.

Joshua Whitehead, ed., Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. Lots of interesting work here, and the beginning of something good I think. My favorite stories were Kai Minosh Pyle's "How to Survive the Apocalypse for Native Girls" and Darcie Little Badger's "Story for a Bottle."

Comments

[pameladean]

I came to the Emily books very late -- I mean, childhood was not even in the rear view mirror -- and fell very hard for them anyway. But Dean Priest is just right up there with Amy March as far as I'm concerned. CRIMES YOU DO NOT COMMIT AGAINST WRITERS.

With Teddy, I always thought Montgomery was trying to make his art do more work than she could make it do, for whatever reason.

P.

[mrissa]

I mean, there was the Crimes You Do Not Commit Against Writers part, and also there was the "you started grooming her at age 12 to see you as the only representative of the intellectual outside world" part, and...yeah, no, yuck.

But yes, I think you're absolutely right, I think Montgomery wanted Emily to have a relationship with a fellow artist, but I'm not sure she had the faintest idea what that would look like, how to show it in actual scenes. Even in the earlier books the bits where they talk about their work are extremely vague and summarized rather than shown.

I feel like his relationship with his mother was also not nearly as fixable as she wanted it to be. "I've spent my life being staggeringly jealous of my only child loving anything including a pet, but now I'm over that" oh okay good then.

[pameladean]

It took me a while longer to understand the grooming; but Dean's general self-centeredness and self-satisfaction were certainly evident in that very first scene.

I hope Montgomery HAD some relationships with fellow artists. And I can see why she didn't make Teddy a writer. I find it easy to believe that she was very ignorant of art, but there are probably other reasons than that for her to make the choices she did. It's a pity, though.

You're entirely right about the improbability of his mother's transformation, but for some reason I bought it, I think because, while the books are not fantasy, there's a set of fantastical sensibilities present that predisposed me to believe impossible things.

P.

[mrissa]

I think it sometimes takes people awhile to process that a person can be lonely and down on themself and still utterly self-centered and self-satisfied. Lord knows it took me a minute even with that example before me from childhood.

[sovay]

CRIMES YOU DO NOT COMMIT AGAINST WRITERS.

Partly it's the fault of Michael Emerson who played the role the only time I have ever seen the play, but I have never been able to write off George Tesman in Hedda Gabler as much as I sometimes think I was supposed to because when his rival's great work of scholarship is lost—burnt, which is how I got into this thread—he doesn't take it as a boon to his career, he's so distraught over the destruction of brilliant work that he dedicates himself to reconstructing a manuscript that will almost certainly wipe out any of his own mediocre contributions to the field if he succeeds and just he doesn't care. How can you not like a person like that, even if he's a bad husband for the protagonist? He's about to make some other woman a great research partner.

[mrissa]

If only more fiction fit that last sentence, what a wonderful world this would be.

[pameladean]

I've actually never seen the play, but I did really like that aspect of Tesman when I read it. It's a very attractive set of qualities.

P.

[carbonel]

I came to them even later than you, and I hated Dean so much, and had no respect for Teddy. That's probably why I've just never been tempted to reread those books. Possibly if I'd read them earlier, I would feel fonder about them.

Though I also came to The Blue Castle late, and I love that one.

[davidgillon]

As much as Hav connected for me, this completely did not; Morris had ideas about how "we" respond to war imagery that...I don't, no, I really totally do not.

Morris's views on military iconography may well have been formed when she served as an intelligence officer in WWII, and as a war correspondent during Suez. That's a different world to the one many of us grew up with.

[mrissa]

Oh certainly, but overgeneralizing based on that experience is as perilous as based on any other.

[davidgillon]

That's a fair point.

[anne]

Wait what, she's not a star captain?? No, I didn't get beyond "Shveta's book has a gorgeous cover" either. Well, whatever, it's next after Elatsoe!

[mrissa]

No, she is a half-human, half-star musician!

[anne]

A musician! Oo!

[sovay]

(hashtag Team Cousin Jimmy 4eva)

+1.

I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about Dean Priest over the years because when I was in fifth grade and read the trilogy for the first time, he was the character I imprinted on instinctively ("he cared for nothing save books nor ever had") and his concluding arc came horribly out of left field for me and upset me a lot. With adulthood I have been able to recognize more of the possessiveness and the insecurity (and I have not for some time now been able to shake the notion that he never quite stops seeing her through the lens of her father: "he never called me Jarback"), but I still feel as though for all of his legitimate problems in the first two books, he becomes the worst possible version of himself in Emily's Quest for purposes of love triangle and first of all I hate love triangles and secondly even in fifth grade I never thought that Emily and Dean were going to get together because it was such an obviously terrible idea on both sides and I felt as betrayed by the narrative even faking out in that direction—and with such destructive fallout—as I did by Dean himself. Some years ago I noticed how much he and Barney Snaith of The Blue Castle have in common and I still haven't figured out what to do with that information, but it continues to feel somehow significant.

As much as Hav connected for me, this completely did not; Morris had ideas about how "we" respond to war imagery that...I don't, no, I really totally do not.

May I ask? I enjoyed both her Venice (1960) and Fisher's Face (1995).

[mrissa]

So this particular volume of Morris had a lot about what "we" find glorious, inspiring, and exciting, and then was contrasting that with the reality of war. But I was raised by wild Baby Boomers, and it turns out that having parents who respond readily to war as a crime and a tragedy (that is sometimes the best course available but no less criminal and tragic for all that) really can shape these responses.

I do agree that Dean Priest identified Emily very strongly with her father (incidentally, I think that's an error in your very interesting post--Dean is not 14 years older than Emily, he's 24 years older than she is. He is literally her father's age). The Blue Castle was written or at least published smack between the last two Emily books. Huh, interesting. But the power dynamic there is very much not what it would have been with her father, the way that he is asking her when she's 14 or 15 whether she's ready for him to teach her how lovemaking goes--even with the previous meaning of "lovemaking" to just mean "being affectionate, saying and doing things toward a loving relationship," that's...really alarming from someone roughly my age to someone in their mid-teens. NO, she isn't ready, Dean, you UTTER CREEP. I have lots of aunts and uncles--my identification was with Emily in so many ways--and the prospect of having one of one's dad's friends act that way was terrifying for me from the get-go.

I also hate love triangles. But I think that the Emily series is part of how I learned to hate them.

[sovay]

But I was raised by wild Baby Boomers, and it turns out that having parents who respond readily to war as a crime and a tragedy (that is sometimes the best course available but no less criminal and tragic for all that) really can shape these responses.

I also was not raised on the idea of war as a glorious and inspiring thing—I suspect a similar effect of generations—and so I can see it being very jarring to read someone who expects their audience to be disillusioned by the reality of war when the illusions themselves are actually the alien thing.

Dean is not 14 years older than Emily, he's 24 years older than she is. He is literally her father's age

Yeah, I think that was the equivalent of spelling out a numerical typo. I can actually work out the math between twelve and thirty-six.

(And she associates him at first with her father, too—the first person since her father's death who lives in her world, who understands her—which may have been one of the reasons I never expected a romance between them to get any serious traction. I get that as she grows up, she begins to notice him physically; the text keeps remarking on his interesting, never conventionally handsome looks. But it's equally textual that every now and then in her adolescence she contemplates the idea of Dean as a lover and decides consistently that she'd rather have him as a friend, so again, WTF Emily's Quest. It is such a weird third book. I suspect it would work much better if it hadn't had a romance for Emily in it at all.)

I think it's down in the comments of that post, but Montgomery did in fact write The Blue Castle between the last two Emily books, which is fascinating to me. I couldn't find any scholarship or even fannish meta on the subject at the time. I can't be the first person in a hundred years to notice the likeness.

the way that he is asking her when she's 14 or 15 whether she's ready for him to teach her how lovemaking goes--even with the previous meaning of "lovemaking" to just mean "being affectionate, saying and doing things toward a loving relationship," that's...really alarming from someone roughly my age to someone in their mid-teens.

I was thinking that their first meeting is when she says that she can write everything in a novel but the love-talk and, having just made that double-speaking remark about waiting for her, he promises to teach her someday; she's twelve at the time. I have to assume that did not read in 1921 as the complete YIKES that it does now, because so much of the rest of that sequence looks approvingly on their instantaneous friendship, but, yes, that is not something I would offer a twelve-year-old even as a joke.

I also hate love triangles. But I think that the Emily series is part of how I learned to hate them.

It's an especially egregious example! I have no idea what my first love triangle was. It might have been Arthurian. I just can't ever remember liking them.

[mrissa]

Yeah, the "I notice that he's actually pretty interesting to look at" stuff is very intellectual. There's no heat to it, and even once they're engaged, they're very clearly not making out, she is so clear that she doesn't love him in that way, that she has agreed to this incredibly detached formality of a marriage.

Which...especially when you combine it with the fact that she is not in financial desperation (there is no Oh No Aunt Laura Needs An Operation But If I Was Married To The Rich Guy...), makes it incredibly clear that the whole thing is never going to happen. He doesn't support your work, you don't have a fiery albeit loveless passion for him, you're not getting particular social support for this...where did you imagine this was going, Emily.

So yeah, the "I'll teach you later" when she's 12 scene is terrible, but she clearly takes it as "I'll tell you, oh, write blah blah blah, or blickety bloo, and you'll be like, cool cool, and write it down!" Because she is 12. But then in the next book she still clearly thinks so and he leans in all, "READY NOW?" And she is in high school. She is not even close to graduating high school. Her skirts are not all the way down, her hair is not all the way up, and she is not allowed to drink real tea at home. All the signals of "this is a kid" in their culture are there, and Dean is still all ready to make out with her, and she goes inside very quickly.

Ewwwwww.

So the idea of Emily's Quest without a romance is so interesting, because as things stand you have Small Publishing Success -> Major Injury -> Recovery But Not Writing -> Writing Less Pretentious Things -> Large Publishing Success. And then you have like a third of a book left to go, of Ilse and Teddy and like that. But that's enough substance to be the book all by itself, when you factor in the self-doubt from a false friend and regaining confidence in her own aesthetic sense--frankly you don't have to have Dean motivated by jealousy, you could just have him have different aesthetics than hers, it would be healthy and also probable. Utterly confident dudes of a generation older who think that what a young woman has to offer them is being a muse, not an artist, often don't even really see what it is that the young woman artist is aiming at, much less how successfully she's achieved it. Right now it's substantially a skeleton, but it would be so much better if that aspect was actually fleshed out.

Including the interactions with her loving but not very understanding family on the subject. Yeah. That would have been great.

Sigh.

[ethelmay]

And there are also the weird random men who court her - including a Japanese prince or something? I think those are actually goofy versions of L.M Montgomery's suitors, but they are kind of bizarre. And what happens to Ilse is very odd as well. How on earth they're supposed to get past all that (short of discovering poly, and I don't see that lot making it work), I do not see. I think LMM had painted herself into a corner not letting any truly new characters be introduced. In real life Emily would have married someone she hadn't known since she was eleven.

[sovay]

In real life Emily would have married someone she hadn't known since she was eleven.

I realize I am sort of recapitulating the Greta Gerwig argument here, but I don't think she needed to marry anyone within the scope of these books at all.

[mrissa]

I do think that people were a lot more likely to marry someone they'd known since childhood in the past. People with the career and opportunities Emily had, less so, and I would have liked to see Montgomery acknowledge it, especially with what most of her other young heroines do. But Emily grew up in the very early 20th century in a rural area, so "married someone she hadn't known since she was eleven" is a rarer outcome than it is here and now.

I wish there was a good way to give kids that context, because between conservation of characters and the context of past generations the idea that you will marry someone you know in the fifth grade--or at least at eighteen--has a weight it should not have.

[sovay]

makes it incredibly clear that the whole thing is never going to happen. He doesn't support your work, you don't have a fiery albeit loveless passion for him, you're not getting particular social support for this...where did you imagine this was going, Emily.

Once I got past the stage of being merely confused and upset by it, I've never been able to read her decision as anything except passively self-destructive: her writing is gone, so what does it matter what becomes of the rest of her? She can make someone else happy when she can no longer imagine more than contentment for herself. It repays Dean for his care and companionship over that terrible, despairing pain-filled winter (for which he was indirectly responsible, as the reader knows and Emily does not, and one of the few points in his favor in this book is that he acknowledges it at last: "I won you by a lie, I think. Perhaps that is why I couldn't keep you . . . How ugly some motives look when you put them into words"). It feels very much like the sort of decision a person makes out of depression and her relatives quite rightly worry because of it and I really think she isn't thinking it through. Teddy figures in here somewhere according to Montgomery, but I have never understood how he was supposed to function as a partner except by authorial fiat, so that layer is much more opaque to me. Dean has problems as both a person and a character, but I can think about him. I'm not sure how much there is to think about Teddy. By this point in the series, he's a device.

Ewwwwww.

I would swear there's a scene where he reminds himself that she's still a child and even when she's grown a romance between them has somewhat less than the proverbial snowball's chances—I keep forgetting these books are in the public domain and I don't have to rely on the memory of my copies which are still in storage, it's in Emily Climbs:

"They did not talk as much as usual and the silences did queer things to both of them. Dean had one or two mad impulses to throw up the trip to Egypt and stay home for the winter—go to Shrewsbury perhaps; he shrugged his shoulders and laughed at himself. This child did not need his looking after—the ladies of New Moon were competent guardians. She was only a child yet—in spite of her slim height and her unfathomable eyes. But how perfect the white line of her throat—how kissable the sweet red curve of her mouth. She would be a woman soon—but not for him—not for lame Jarback Priest of her father's generation. For the hundredth time Dean told himself that he was not going to be a fool. He must be content with what fate had given him—the friendship and affection of this exquisite, starry creature. In the years to come her love would be a wonderful thing—for some other man. No doubt, thought Dean cynically, she would waste it on some good-looking young manikin who wasn't half worthy of it."

Which still involves too much inappropriately wistful self-pity for the audience not to want to drop-kick him, but the fact that Dean himself knows on some level that his feelings for Emily are both doomed and sketchy means it should not have been compulsory to steer his trajectory quite so due creep.

So the idea of Emily's Quest without a romance is so interesting, because as things stand you have Small Publishing Success -> Major Injury -> Recovery But Not Writing -> Writing Less Pretentious Things -> Large Publishing Success.

The professional stuff is the only part of the book as it stands that works for me. It's technical; it's full of rejection slips and rewrites and trying not to believe only the negative reviews (except when the negative reviewer says something patently silly), all presented matter-of-factly and as actual work, which still strikes me as unusual for a novel about an aspiring young writer.

And then you have like a third of a book left to go, of Ilse and Teddy and like that.

Oh, right, that's the book's other love triangle, which I also hated. Ilse and Perry are the only people in this trilogy I look at and think are actually going to be just be fine.

But that's enough substance to be the book all by itself, when you factor in the self-doubt from a false friend and regaining confidence in her own aesthetic sense--frankly you don't have to have Dean motivated by jealousy, you could just have him have different aesthetics than hers, it would be healthy and also probable. Utterly confident dudes of a generation older who think that what a young woman has to offer them is being a muse, not an artist, often don't even really see what it is that the young woman artist is aiming at, much less how successfully she's achieved it.

I would not just greatly prefer but much more readily credit that interpretation. Among other things, it works in continuity with Dean's original support for her writing, which we are given no reason to doubt in Emily of New Moon and which even lasts some ways into Emily Climbs; he's not the same kind of practical mentor as Mr. Carpenter who can tell her which ten lines of poetry are worth going on with, but he's the friend who reads everything first, the one who sends her the encouraging poem about the "Alpine Path" which becomes her personal metaphor for literary growth and success. But if her path diverges from the one he envisioned or approves of—or understands—then we hit The Seller of Dreams.

Sigh.

Well, I like your AU.

[mrissa]

And that brings up one of the things that makes me the angriest about Dean Priest: he is perpetually unwilling to acknowledge to himself that Emily might not want him for himself rather than for his disability. I find that utterly true to life not just about disability--I have dealt with so many men who announced that I was probably not interested because [narrative they had about themselves] rather than acknowledging that I might be fine with them being short, bald, whatever, and not be interested for completely my own reasons. But to supposedly love Emily--not just to be someone encountering her at a convention but to be her friend for a decade and not see that she honestly doesn't care that he's disabled and he is still a bad partner for her--just. Aaaaaargh.

Also this is an entire trilogy about the toxic effects of jealousy, and it's very very weird to me how that touches being a trilogy about a young working writer, because it is not in most of the ways you might think. But the jealousy theme...Dean gets let off the hook for it substantially, because everyone keeps telling Emily the Priests are jealous people. Not that Dean is a person who makes his own choices and manages it badly, but his family is, what can you do, there it is.

And then she marries Teddy Kent, so if jealousy is a familial inheritance, out of the frying pan, into the fire, I guess. And because Teddy is such a cipher, we never have any reassurance of how he treats her work or how he handles potential jealousy. We're just supposed to take it on faith that jolly old Teddy Kent would of course never be like that. Or worse, that Emily would "never give him reason to," as if that's how it works.

I agree with you that this is Emily being self-destructive, but I feel like in the Anne books a lot of this stuff would have gotten actual scenes, we'd see it rather than surmise it. I always loved Emily more than Anne, but on this reread I think I see more clearly why Anne is the famous one.