![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Emily Tesh
Silver on the Wood (2019) and The Drowned Country (2020): Audiobook on one of those drives that almost touched both redwood country and Joshua tree country. Very appropriate. Silver in the Wood has very pleasant evocative descriptions and a nice little pining romance between PoV character Tobias, the long lived Wild Man of Greenhallow Wood, and Henry Silver, the new young man in the neighborhood. The character balance is a little odd, as Henry's disliked mother, Mrs. Adela Silver, appears late in the novel and proves to be much more interesting than Henry himself, at least to me.
Drowned Country completely upsets the endgame of Silver on the Woods, starting with Tobias and Henry being on the outs, and ending with Henry's apparently long term situation being resolved after a brief two years. Also, Henry is confirmed to be an idiot, which is a surprise only to Henry and Tobias. Apparently Tobias is weak for men with good features and intense self-centeredness.
The one of the highlights of Drowned Country is Maud, a young woman whose kidnapping by vampire kicks off the plot, only it turns out Maud has killed said vampire and is camping out in the ruins of his domain, doing the sort of "practical folklorist" research and work Henry and his mother Adela are involved in.
The flashback format didn't work well. It's terrifically tempting to use interleaved timelines to build tension, but usually, in my experience, one needs to ask "well, why do I need to build more tension? What about the plot and themes is not up to the heavy lifting?" The counter-example is Ancillary Justice, which could probably do an acceptable job as a straight timeline, but gets extra punch out of the interleaved timelines, and uses the death of Justice of Toren and Awn Elming at a key point to get reader buy-in on One Esk's plans to kill Anaander Mianaai.
As a character note, though, it's in line with Henry's emotional spinelessness. Dwelling on how great the past was, except for the part where he was lying to Tobias the entire time, is pure Henry.
What the novella doesn't do is 1.) convince me Henry learned a thing from getting dumped and sulking for more than a year 2.) address a question on my mind, specifically, is Henry Silver post-Summer King still Henry Silver? He did die, after all. But I'm always up for a little agonizing over the definition of self, when one has been part of a larger or other being (see also: namechecking of the Imperial Radch trilogy above). Henry is very confident he is still Henry. Tobias and Mrs. Silver are invested in Henry being still Henry. As a reader, I'm here for maximum storytelling punch.
It's not bad, but it is a little off-balance, which is a different sort of enjoyable.
Drowned Country completely upsets the endgame of Silver on the Woods, starting with Tobias and Henry being on the outs, and ending with Henry's apparently long term situation being resolved after a brief two years. Also, Henry is confirmed to be an idiot, which is a surprise only to Henry and Tobias. Apparently Tobias is weak for men with good features and intense self-centeredness.
The one of the highlights of Drowned Country is Maud, a young woman whose kidnapping by vampire kicks off the plot, only it turns out Maud has killed said vampire and is camping out in the ruins of his domain, doing the sort of "practical folklorist" research and work Henry and his mother Adela are involved in.
The flashback format didn't work well. It's terrifically tempting to use interleaved timelines to build tension, but usually, in my experience, one needs to ask "well, why do I need to build more tension? What about the plot and themes is not up to the heavy lifting?" The counter-example is Ancillary Justice, which could probably do an acceptable job as a straight timeline, but gets extra punch out of the interleaved timelines, and uses the death of Justice of Toren and Awn Elming at a key point to get reader buy-in on One Esk's plans to kill Anaander Mianaai.
As a character note, though, it's in line with Henry's emotional spinelessness. Dwelling on how great the past was, except for the part where he was lying to Tobias the entire time, is pure Henry.
What the novella doesn't do is 1.) convince me Henry learned a thing from getting dumped and sulking for more than a year 2.) address a question on my mind, specifically, is Henry Silver post-Summer King still Henry Silver? He did die, after all. But I'm always up for a little agonizing over the definition of self, when one has been part of a larger or other being (see also: namechecking of the Imperial Radch trilogy above). Henry is very confident he is still Henry. Tobias and Mrs. Silver are invested in Henry being still Henry. As a reader, I'm here for maximum storytelling punch.
It's not bad, but it is a little off-balance, which is a different sort of enjoyable.