Green, by Jay Lake

[mrissa]

Review copy provided by Tor.

So the good first: I did not want to read this book. I said to myself, "I don't have to finish it if I don't like it; I can quit whenever." And I did not quit. So that says some good things about the writing here. It also says that the thing that made me not want to read this book was not as much in evidence as I'd feared. Specifically, the marketing copy talks about the main character's courtesan skills/courtesan training, and I am really sick of the Magical Whore thing. It's an incredibly fine line to walk between treating sex workers as the magical Happy Hooker and treating them as volitionless victims, and hardly anybody manages it. Jay doesn't really either: at risk of being too spoilerific (that'll come in a minute), the main character's life path takes a fork, and it really isn't a book about a courtesan. It's a book about fragmented gods and their life and death among humans and how the humans handle it. This by me is much more interesting.

The down side: well, a lot of the book is fairly standard fantasy narrative about the main character's training. I have gotten more and more interested in books that take that sort of thing as given and move on, but the writing was smooth enough to pull me through despite it being a type of narrative I'm not usually as keen on and despite me having serious doubts that it would be my sort of thing despite the marketing copy. That part of the book is not what one might call stunningly original, but it gets the job done. I was more bothered by the dedication.

The dedication reads, "This book is dedicated to my daughter, whose story it is. Someday she may choose to reveal which parts are true and which parts were made up by her dad." Recently haddayr has described her reaction to several categories of situation that would otherwise leave her initially speechless to be looking people in the eye and saying, "That really made me uncomfortable." And I guess that's where I am with this particular dedication. it really made me uncomfortable. I know Jay from conventions and FB; while we are not close friends, I know him well enough to know that he's a loving and devoted father, and that he and his kid have a very good relationship. But for any parent to claim that a novel is their child's story...really makes me uncomfortable. There are lots of ways in which that relationship (particularly when the kid is still a minor) shapes how stories are told. I also ended up somewhat uncomfortable with some of the sexual content--which was otherwise quite well-handled, I felt: explicit where appropriate to the character and her story but in no way gratuitous--when seeing it in the light of a father claiming to be telling his daughter's story. If it had just been dedicated to his daughter, fine, no problem. And from the things Jay has said about his relationship with his daughter, I feel sure that she is aware that the book was dedicated in this fashion (I don't know whether she's read it at this age, but that's not, it turns out, actually my business), and is fine with it. I was just left feeling a bit uneasy about the specific shape of the dedication.

Comments

Wow

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. That's an unusual dedication, no matter whether the book is _The Outsiders_ or _Watership Down_.

I started out reading quite a bit of fantasy as a young adult and new college grad, but then I gravitated away from the fantasy worlds and their agendas and thinly veiled preaching ("there is no God or we are just as good as He is," "the effects of technology and socialism might not be so bad if we took it to an extreme," "let's all be super-conservatives and see what happens," or what-have-you; many fantasy series have this kind of stuff as subtext and it just isn't original and gets old, old, old to me). I gravitated towards mystery next, because it seemed to be the place you could read more about the characters' inner lives and you got a lot of character change and Real World stuff. I suppose I just got more interested in reading about the world we were actually given than in reading allegories and what-ifs about worlds we weren't. But that's just me. I still read certain fantasy novels that don't strike me as having an agenda or a message (and of course not ALL of them do--but some really DO). It's just that I like other stuff now (whereas I didn't so much before.) If I encounter something with a lot of training or many battle scenes, it just bores me and I go on to something else. But that wasn't what I wanted to say . . . I just wanted to say that I felt a bit creeped out by the sort of dedication you talk about.

The dedication on my first book, if I ever get "legitimately" published (which is doubtful), will be something like, "For you know who, and you know what, and you know why." I think that's sufficiently enigmatic and less schmaltzy than "for my parents who always believed in me" (and they didn't, so.)

Re: Wow

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

...less schmaltzy than "for my parents who always believed in me"

::Glances at my last book:: Um. Is it still schmaltzy if your parents really did believe in you?

Re: Wow

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

I don't think heartfelt dedications are ever schmaltzy, not ever.

And seriously, when did we start critiquing dedications? I know what the dedication for my first book will be and if people think it's overly sentimental or schmaltzy, tough.

Re: Wow

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know about you. I critique dedications when I find they intrude in some way on my reading of the story. They can be as sentimental as you like if they are just sitting there, but when they start referring to the story itself, they matter. They are the second thing you read about the story. If they just say, "for my dearest, my beloved, my forever love," that's not really directly about the story. But if they say, "For my love, without whom I would not have known how to tell this story," that is about the story.

Re: Wow

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

I think that we must read in totally different ways. :)

I look at a dedication as something completely separate from the book and the story. For me they are about what might inspire an author to write a particular story, or the people who supported his or her efforts. They can be a way of thanking someone who spent hours helping you hash out the fine points of a plot, who let you bounce ideas off of them, or who told you that you were completely off track in wanting Jack to marry Sara.

I always see them as about the people behind the scenes, not the words on the page. I think that might be in large part because I don't see the writer as being the words he or she has written either. :)

Re: Wow

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I agree that they can be about those things. They can also be about that moment in the third grade when a friendship changed your life, or about someone who really needed to hear a story the author had to tell, or dozens or hundreds of other things. While a lot of dedications are simply "for Jane" or equivalent, all that means is that the reader doesn't know what Jane has to do with the story.

When the writer makes the dedication more explicitly related to the story, though, it's hard for me to ignore that.

Re: Wow

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I am in this boat as well. The dedication is in the book, so if it's referring to other parts of that book in ways that strike me, that is...well...going to strike me.

Most dedications are highly neutral. This one would make me uncomfortable, as well.

Re: Wow

[imago1.livejournal.com]

+1 to stillnotbored's comment.

Re: Wow

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't find it the least bit schmaltzy, but my parents also really did/do believe in me, so I may be in the same boat with you.

Re: Wow

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

It's a good boat :-) I'm just sad more people aren't in it.

Re: Wow

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

If your parents were supportive and never said, "I wish you wouldn't waste your life with that stupid scribbling," or "Can't you get a real job and make money instead of sending off all those manuscripts when it's just going to disappoint you again," then you can dedicate it to them. It's still [IMO] kind of "awwwww," but you could phrase it differently. Maybe "To Mama and Daddy for never saying, 'Can't you get off that computer/typewriter and do some REAL work?'" *grin*

It's very nice that so many people's parents were tolerant of their writing. Maybe it's that they are so much more successful and talented than I am (I say, before the rest of you can)!

Re: Wow

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's astonishing the things we feel the need to preempt. If anybody had said to you, "Well, we're more successful and talented than you are," on my lj, I would be asking them pretty fast whether they had a preexisting relationship with you such that that was a standard kind of teasing, and if not, comment deleted, user probably banned. Nobody needs that kind of nastiness in their life, no matter where they are in pursuing their dreams.

Re: Wow

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

No, actually I dedicated it pretty much word for word the way you described. To my parents, for always believing in me, etc.

They didn't know about it until we got to the book launch party and they picked up a copy. My father got teary-eyed. It was the best moment of the launch, and that's saying a lot, because it was a really good event.

"It's very nice that so many people's parents were tolerant of their writing. Maybe it's that they are so much more successful and talented than I am."

If someone is supportive only when you're successful, then to me, that's not supportive. I thanked them because they were supportive when I *wasn't* successful. When I was writing utter crap and colleting rejections and doing what to many people probably looked like a pointless and futile waste of time.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I can imagine feeling comfortable with that dedication on some books, but from your description this wouldn't be one of them. Neither would something like Among Others - not much sex but it reveals so much of the MC's inner life that it would seem like an exposure. Something like, I don't know, The Little White Horse just to pick something off my shelves might not bother me with those words.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

I think I may have liked the book more than you did overall, because I remain very interested in training-stories (and also because until recently I flat out refused to read books that advertised as dealing with courtesan-training/characters, so I haven't used up my limited tolerance/goodwill regarding those lines yet), but yes. That dedication made me deeply uncomfortable.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the good words. As you might imagine, I have a rather different view of the meaning of the dedication, but like the rest of the book, the words on the page must speak for themselves.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Okay, see, other writers? This is how you respond to a review professionally if there are things you disagree with in it. Seriously. Right here.

[imago1.livejournal.com]

What, be passive aggressive? ;)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am a Minnesotan. My standards for what counts as passive aggressive are extremely high.

But seriously: other than not responding at all, which is always an option, acknowledging that while the reviewer had a different take than you did, the reviewer has to interact with what you wrote and not with what you meant seems to me to be a pretty good take on this problem. It is neither agreeing with nor denying a reading that isn't the author's intention.

[casacorona.livejournal.com]

It is always interesting to see how people read something differently than I do. It never occurred to me that the dedication of GREEN could be read in an uneasy way, simply because I know enough about the_child and her history to know why it's appropriate. And yet, now, I can see how it could be problematic! The world shifts.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, whereas what I know is 1) Jay has a kid, and 2) he seems to be a fond and reasonable father. ("Reasonable" is a quite undervalued adjective in parenting, I feel.) And I have enough of a sense of who Jay is as a person that I didn't read the back cover and the dedication and go, "Your child's story AS A COURTESAN? SERIOUSLY?" and put down the book. I knew enough to figure it was a different aspect of the story that was appropriate, but not enough to know what.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It made me wish I hadn't read "Portraits of His Children".

[horace-hamster.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about Jay or his daughter, but from the pics he's occasionally posted on his lj she appears to be Asian and he and the child's mother appear to be European-Caucasian, so I assumed she was adopted. I read the dedication as being a comment on the similarities between the Green character and his daughter, both of whom were taken out of their own Eastern culture and placed into a Western culture, where they had to learn to adapt.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I didn't make it through Green, but that's because there aren't many books I would like as much as I liked the cover image.