Belated 2022 Reading
Feb. 5th, 2023 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseNona the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) (2022): It would seem I did not post a word about Harrow the Ninth, which I read and enjoyed, though I could have done with somewhat less amateur surgery mixed into kitchen activities. By the end of Alecto I suspect everyone will wish that certain characters had done rather less amateur surgery, full stop.
But Nona! (aka, "Act One of Alecto the Ninth, but it got out of hand".) I started writing up Nona, while either out of my mind on booze, sleep deprivation, or finishing Nona. Possibly all three. Enjoy my reflections on the novel, edited almost not at all.
Either you've read the previous novels, or you haven't. Before reading Nona, I'd read the prequels.
(Tangent: there's some novels I read as a teen that I liked a great deal, because they had all this backstory and prior worldbuilding! ...guess what, turned out I had picked up number N in a trilogy or long-running series.
It would be deeply interesting to drop Nona on an unsuspecting person, and see how far they made it before the weight of unarticulated prior novels threw them out of the story. Kirona Gaia just doesn't hit the same if you don't know Gideon.)
Everyone who wants to, as the kids say, "throw hands" with John after Nona, MAKE SOME NOISE in comments! What absolutely bonkers person(s) gave John & Co. a small nuclear bomb?
The murder-hookup diagram for Locked Tomb is pretty straightforward: people who have boned and people who have tried to murder each other are approaching 1:1, especially if one excludes Abigail and Magnus from the diagramming. (As far as we know. Maybe they had a vigorous courtship.) The murder-hookup-"whose soul is in whose body" diagram is getting pretty messy, though.
The meta significance of the murder-hookup connection should be explored by someone who is very keen on this fandom.
What else: Gideon's ba is in one place and her ka in another, it seems; and that leaves aside Gideon's zombiefied incorruptible body. This may or may not have something to do with lyctorship, or being the child of God. Details hazy, try again in Alecto. Alecto and John's intimate moments are certainly a thing to consider, preferably behind a wall of either top level AO3 warnings, or Author Chooses Not To Warn. I am not inclined to like Paul because I want Cam and Palamedes back, but it's an imperfect world and I will make my peace with Paul. Likewise I will have to make my peace with Nona being adorable and weird and wonderful and very, very dead, because she was always made out of other people, stitched together, whose various parts longed to return to their place of origin.
Speaking of those origins. In Greek mythology, Alecto is one of the Furies, and a spirit of vengeance is exactly what John deserves, after making Worst Eve Body Ever on/with/for what might be the spirit of Earth. I cannot wait for whatever terrible chaos erupts in Alecto the Ninth, even though I know it will be bonkers and also give me emotions.
Gideon seems to have had about as much fun hanging out with Ianthe as Harrow did, which is to say none. Coronabeth seems unfortunately unable to break out of the dysfunction that is the Third House vibe, and I'd like to find a way to pin that on John, who is terrible. ("John is terrible." "Ianthe is her own content warning." Why do I waste pixels on these tautologies?) I cannot wait to see why it's casually dropped that the River is still dead; there's the logical follow-up, and then there's the probability of a bonkers outcome of that follow-up.
The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik) (2022): Me, after The Last Graduate: "I have no doubt that Orion's going to emerge from book three alive and in a place to get his ears verbally boxed by El, but I am dying to know how this will come about. Is El gone enough on this well-meaning idiot to jump back into what's about to be 100% void and monsters? ... Clearly I cannot wait for El to bring her basketcase of a boyfriend home to mom with requests for assistance making him less of a basketcase, please mum, you can fix anything."
Called it!
I did not call the maw-mouth reveals though, which are much more plot-critical. Those guns went on the mantelpiece as far back as the first novel.
There's a lot I really enjoyed about The Golden Enclaves, and there's the parts that felt like it was about a novel and a half of stuff trying to squeeze into one novel. I wanted to spend more time with Gwen, of course. Deepthi was surprisingly (why am I surprised?) awesome in person, and I would have been happy to spend more time with the dramatic mess of the Sharma family after Deepthi's future-wrangling came to light.
I feel like there's a strain of intergenerational independence in American thought, which the Scholomance novels don't so much reject as ignore. Intergenerational ties and obligations are bedrock. What happens isn't because of just El or Orion's choices, or Liesel's or Alfie's or Liu's, but because of their parents or grandparents, or in Alfie's case several-great grandparents, made choices with consequences that are highlighted as playing out in the lives of the current-day protagonists.
The first two books are very focused on surviving and escaping the Scholomance. The narrative might include info on what's happening outside the Scholomance's bottle, but it's treated as secondary to the business of school survival. The third novel reverses that: El et al are swept into a context where the Scholomance's bottle politics are secondary to the multigenerational politics that lead to its creation and continuation. The novel paces itself for that reversal, but doesn't leave room for the consequences. El storms into chapter 16, gets Li Shanfeng's infodump and mana reserve, un-declares the enclave war, and in chapter 17 somehow insoluble problems like "only El has the mana strength to build golden enclaves, what happens when she dies," introduced maybe halfway into the third novel, are waved into resolution. It's a double cheat, since the constraint appeared and was fixed in the same novel. I'm not sure that there's enough to unfold into a fourth novel, but there might be - Enclaves is super-packed.
I'm still thinking about how fate / balance works in Scholomance. I'm stuck on how much chaos there is in life and how much balance sounds nice and tidy, like one of those desk toys where you drop the ball on one side and the ball on the other side bounces off, or a ripple tank for demonstrating wave interference. The reality probably would be more like wave interference across the Pacific Ocean, and cause modelers to come to blows at magical academic conferences. It's balance El is prone to Evil Enchantress vibes, because her mother is so nice. It's balance El is so powerful, because Orion. It's fate El can cast the Golden Enclave sutras, because her parents wrote a blank-check spell (and doesn't that just tie into generational inheritances and Ophelia manipulating embryonic proto-Orion). In the average person's life, I'm going to guess that "balance" mostly looks like arguments about which parent or grandparent they take after.
At one point I had a lot of Orion thoughts, which have mostly evaporated into "how does being a human and also a micro-enclave foundation which is also sort of a... proxy foundation? Foundation by consumption of maw-mouths? Even work," with the usual caveat about mortality. Since Orion is pretty convinced he's a human who incidentally is really good at fighting (mana-ripping into oblivion, whatever) mals, one might assume he's going to age like a human, and die like a human, rather than existing endlessly as a maw-mouth or an enclave foundation does. At which point what happens to all those enclaves?
I've got mixed feelings about the way one maw-mouth eating another does not kill either of them, but rather seems to involve them getting absorbed or amalgamated. This is a nice setup for Orion becoming linked to however many enclaves whose maw-mouths he ate (directly or indirectly) between the end of The Last Graduate and the rescue team finding him in The Golden Enclaves, but it opens an entirely different mess if maw-mouths can destroy each other, and by proxy the enclave foundation they're linked to. Also, if a sufficiently determined wizard or circle of wizards with a reviser can redirect a maw-mouth to create or reinforce their enclave foundation, destroying the original enclave... I feel like that's the sort of exploit that a smart person could do something with.
(And hmmm, what if Patience and/or Fortitude are the maw-mouth that went into the Scholomance's construction? What a vicious loop. Create a safe haven, however many students are killed by the monster that's a key part of creating and maintaining that haven. Which is probably the thematic point, actually.)
Orion's creation is a big step in an enclave arms race, which is not at all a reflection of real life tensions, cough.
I think someone in comments atcahn's DW said Orion could have been killed and they would've been okay with that. So that says to me that the novels, especially the third one, could've used more Orion being a person (or trying to) time, complete with being good at one thing (killing mals), but it's also the thing that separates him from being a person, possibly (he's good at killing mals because he's at least part maw-mouth and is just sucking the mana / malia right out of them). I'm going to have to keep thinking about this.
The plot could've used more time with the New York enclave and associated people, too, I think. Novik did a pretty airtight job on worldbuilding this time around, and created a bunch of characters that come to life in short sketches, and would be interesting to spend more time with. But the plot really could have gone to a fourth novel, I think: cut somewhere around going back into the Scholomance for Orion, and give more space for the reader to tag along with El, getting a feel for Ophelia and Li Shanfeng's international diplomacy and brinkmanship, throw a few more options into the mix (replace the Scholomance; second Scholomance; enclave foundation theft; recruitment to strict mana and/or its difficulties; a much-needed sidebar of El and Orion's year taking a crack at the "building golden enclaves without El." Maybe bring back Clarita Acevedo-Cruz and some of the Scholomance class that graduated the year before El's, either working with or in opposition to El's group on the golden enclaves problem (and adjacent maw-mouth project). Putting two valedectorians, Liesel and Clarita, in one room? What could possibly go wrong?
I had a blast reading The Golden Enclaves and it hangs together, more or less, if you buy into its premise. I also am enjoying taking apart that premise and looking at it from all angles.
But Nona! (aka, "Act One of Alecto the Ninth, but it got out of hand".) I started writing up Nona, while either out of my mind on booze, sleep deprivation, or finishing Nona. Possibly all three. Enjoy my reflections on the novel, edited almost not at all.
Either you've read the previous novels, or you haven't. Before reading Nona, I'd read the prequels.
(Tangent: there's some novels I read as a teen that I liked a great deal, because they had all this backstory and prior worldbuilding! ...guess what, turned out I had picked up number N in a trilogy or long-running series.
It would be deeply interesting to drop Nona on an unsuspecting person, and see how far they made it before the weight of unarticulated prior novels threw them out of the story. Kirona Gaia just doesn't hit the same if you don't know Gideon.)
Everyone who wants to, as the kids say, "throw hands" with John after Nona, MAKE SOME NOISE in comments! What absolutely bonkers person(s) gave John & Co. a small nuclear bomb?
The murder-hookup diagram for Locked Tomb is pretty straightforward: people who have boned and people who have tried to murder each other are approaching 1:1, especially if one excludes Abigail and Magnus from the diagramming. (As far as we know. Maybe they had a vigorous courtship.) The murder-hookup-"whose soul is in whose body" diagram is getting pretty messy, though.
The meta significance of the murder-hookup connection should be explored by someone who is very keen on this fandom.
What else: Gideon's ba is in one place and her ka in another, it seems; and that leaves aside Gideon's zombiefied incorruptible body. This may or may not have something to do with lyctorship, or being the child of God. Details hazy, try again in Alecto. Alecto and John's intimate moments are certainly a thing to consider, preferably behind a wall of either top level AO3 warnings, or Author Chooses Not To Warn. I am not inclined to like Paul because I want Cam and Palamedes back, but it's an imperfect world and I will make my peace with Paul. Likewise I will have to make my peace with Nona being adorable and weird and wonderful and very, very dead, because she was always made out of other people, stitched together, whose various parts longed to return to their place of origin.
Speaking of those origins. In Greek mythology, Alecto is one of the Furies, and a spirit of vengeance is exactly what John deserves, after making Worst Eve Body Ever on/with/for what might be the spirit of Earth. I cannot wait for whatever terrible chaos erupts in Alecto the Ninth, even though I know it will be bonkers and also give me emotions.
Gideon seems to have had about as much fun hanging out with Ianthe as Harrow did, which is to say none. Coronabeth seems unfortunately unable to break out of the dysfunction that is the Third House vibe, and I'd like to find a way to pin that on John, who is terrible. ("John is terrible." "Ianthe is her own content warning." Why do I waste pixels on these tautologies?) I cannot wait to see why it's casually dropped that the River is still dead; there's the logical follow-up, and then there's the probability of a bonkers outcome of that follow-up.
The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik) (2022): Me, after The Last Graduate: "I have no doubt that Orion's going to emerge from book three alive and in a place to get his ears verbally boxed by El, but I am dying to know how this will come about. Is El gone enough on this well-meaning idiot to jump back into what's about to be 100% void and monsters? ... Clearly I cannot wait for El to bring her basketcase of a boyfriend home to mom with requests for assistance making him less of a basketcase, please mum, you can fix anything."
Called it!
I did not call the maw-mouth reveals though, which are much more plot-critical. Those guns went on the mantelpiece as far back as the first novel.
There's a lot I really enjoyed about The Golden Enclaves, and there's the parts that felt like it was about a novel and a half of stuff trying to squeeze into one novel. I wanted to spend more time with Gwen, of course. Deepthi was surprisingly (why am I surprised?) awesome in person, and I would have been happy to spend more time with the dramatic mess of the Sharma family after Deepthi's future-wrangling came to light.
I feel like there's a strain of intergenerational independence in American thought, which the Scholomance novels don't so much reject as ignore. Intergenerational ties and obligations are bedrock. What happens isn't because of just El or Orion's choices, or Liesel's or Alfie's or Liu's, but because of their parents or grandparents, or in Alfie's case several-great grandparents, made choices with consequences that are highlighted as playing out in the lives of the current-day protagonists.
The first two books are very focused on surviving and escaping the Scholomance. The narrative might include info on what's happening outside the Scholomance's bottle, but it's treated as secondary to the business of school survival. The third novel reverses that: El et al are swept into a context where the Scholomance's bottle politics are secondary to the multigenerational politics that lead to its creation and continuation. The novel paces itself for that reversal, but doesn't leave room for the consequences. El storms into chapter 16, gets Li Shanfeng's infodump and mana reserve, un-declares the enclave war, and in chapter 17 somehow insoluble problems like "only El has the mana strength to build golden enclaves, what happens when she dies," introduced maybe halfway into the third novel, are waved into resolution. It's a double cheat, since the constraint appeared and was fixed in the same novel. I'm not sure that there's enough to unfold into a fourth novel, but there might be - Enclaves is super-packed.
I'm still thinking about how fate / balance works in Scholomance. I'm stuck on how much chaos there is in life and how much balance sounds nice and tidy, like one of those desk toys where you drop the ball on one side and the ball on the other side bounces off, or a ripple tank for demonstrating wave interference. The reality probably would be more like wave interference across the Pacific Ocean, and cause modelers to come to blows at magical academic conferences. It's balance El is prone to Evil Enchantress vibes, because her mother is so nice. It's balance El is so powerful, because Orion. It's fate El can cast the Golden Enclave sutras, because her parents wrote a blank-check spell (and doesn't that just tie into generational inheritances and Ophelia manipulating embryonic proto-Orion). In the average person's life, I'm going to guess that "balance" mostly looks like arguments about which parent or grandparent they take after.
At one point I had a lot of Orion thoughts, which have mostly evaporated into "how does being a human and also a micro-enclave foundation which is also sort of a... proxy foundation? Foundation by consumption of maw-mouths? Even work," with the usual caveat about mortality. Since Orion is pretty convinced he's a human who incidentally is really good at fighting (mana-ripping into oblivion, whatever) mals, one might assume he's going to age like a human, and die like a human, rather than existing endlessly as a maw-mouth or an enclave foundation does. At which point what happens to all those enclaves?
I've got mixed feelings about the way one maw-mouth eating another does not kill either of them, but rather seems to involve them getting absorbed or amalgamated. This is a nice setup for Orion becoming linked to however many enclaves whose maw-mouths he ate (directly or indirectly) between the end of The Last Graduate and the rescue team finding him in The Golden Enclaves, but it opens an entirely different mess if maw-mouths can destroy each other, and by proxy the enclave foundation they're linked to. Also, if a sufficiently determined wizard or circle of wizards with a reviser can redirect a maw-mouth to create or reinforce their enclave foundation, destroying the original enclave... I feel like that's the sort of exploit that a smart person could do something with.
(And hmmm, what if Patience and/or Fortitude are the maw-mouth that went into the Scholomance's construction? What a vicious loop. Create a safe haven, however many students are killed by the monster that's a key part of creating and maintaining that haven. Which is probably the thematic point, actually.)
Orion's creation is a big step in an enclave arms race, which is not at all a reflection of real life tensions, cough.
I think someone in comments at
cahn's DW said Orion could have been killed and they would've been okay with that. So that says to me that the novels, especially the third one, could've used more Orion being a person (or trying to) time, complete with being good at one thing (killing mals), but it's also the thing that separates him from being a person, possibly (he's good at killing mals because he's at least part maw-mouth and is just sucking the mana / malia right out of them). I'm going to have to keep thinking about this. The plot could've used more time with the New York enclave and associated people, too, I think. Novik did a pretty airtight job on worldbuilding this time around, and created a bunch of characters that come to life in short sketches, and would be interesting to spend more time with. But the plot really could have gone to a fourth novel, I think: cut somewhere around going back into the Scholomance for Orion, and give more space for the reader to tag along with El, getting a feel for Ophelia and Li Shanfeng's international diplomacy and brinkmanship, throw a few more options into the mix (replace the Scholomance; second Scholomance; enclave foundation theft; recruitment to strict mana and/or its difficulties; a much-needed sidebar of El and Orion's year taking a crack at the "building golden enclaves without El." Maybe bring back Clarita Acevedo-Cruz and some of the Scholomance class that graduated the year before El's, either working with or in opposition to El's group on the golden enclaves problem (and adjacent maw-mouth project). Putting two valedectorians, Liesel and Clarita, in one room? What could possibly go wrong?
I had a blast reading The Golden Enclaves and it hangs together, more or less, if you buy into its premise. I also am enjoying taking apart that premise and looking at it from all angles.