Cold and conspiracies

While recovering from the NaNoWriMo madness, I checked out the third book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series, Without a Summer. This book takes place during the actual historical event of the Year Without a Summer, 1816, a period of global cold weather following the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia.

In this version of history, however, there’s magic, and so many of the less scientifically literate members of the population blame the cold on a different source: the coldmongers, a subset of glamourists with a talent for manipulating temperature rather than the usual light and sound. Coldmongering is dangerous, meaning that manipulating anything as big as the weather would be pretty fatal pretty quickly—and even regular coldmongering is dangerous enough that most coldmongers are very young, dead before thirty. Being nice people, Jane and Vincent, our protagonists—a pair of professional and highly-sought-after glamourists—get themselves involved when they rescue Chill Will, a young coldmonger who is attacked by an angry, ill-informed mob on the street.

Jane and Vincent have their own problems in addition to the civil unrest—they have gone to London to do a glamural for an Irish Catholic couple, which Jane has provincial bigoted Protestant feelings about that she has to get over (in an appropriately awkward, shame-inducing way), and Jane has brought her pretty younger sister Melody with her, since there is a dearth of eligible young men in the country after the war with Napoleon had gotten a lot of them killed. Being in London has also brought them into contact with Vincent’s family, who are as odious a lot of backstabbing, sniping, catty aristocrats as you could wish for. The central aristocat of this family is Vincent’s father, the Earl of Verbury, who is manipulative, cruel, smug, classist, racist, probably every other –ist too, power-grubbing, and never happy with anything, on principle (he LITERALLY explains that it is one of his principles to never be happy with anything, I am not kidding you)—in short, he’s the kind of asshole who takes it for granted that he’s the boss of everyone and everything, and thinks chilling the fuck out for half a second or enjoying your damn dinner are signs of weak character. He’s a huge missing stair and he should have been shunned by all humans long before we get to this story, even if he is an Earl.

Anyway, Jane and Vincent’s family issues get all tied up in the civil unrest when Melody seems to be falling for Catholic young Mr. O’Brien, who is involved in helping the coldmongers, who are planning a march on Parliament demanding a relief bill and to not be blamed for the weather, said march being probably instigated by the Earl of Verbury in order to oust the current Lord Chancellor or some callous bullshit like that. Jane has to overcome her own prejudices and misconceptions in order to navigate a thick web of lies, conspiracies, and bogus treason charges to save herself, Vincent, and the man who might become her brother-in-law—if he isn’t hanged.

I’m really liking the continued worldbuilding in this series, and the cast of characters and slate of social issues that country-bred Jane confronts in London are awesome (Jane doesn’t always appreciate how awesome they are at first, and has to learn). While the first book was sort of a domestic romance in the style of Jane Austen and the second book was more action-y, this book is mostly a plotting-and-intrigue book, with a lot of spying and telling stories and a big courtroom drama at the end. This book also gives us a lot of character development for Jane and Melody, in which they both uncomfortably discover that Jane is not as nice and Melody not as shallow as each initially seems.

I have the fourth book, which I hear involves pirates, on hold at the library. *taps foot impatiently*

This book is largely about bravery but I think I forgot that in the review

In a desperate bid to complete my Goodreads challenge this year (Why oh why did I extend it by 25 books?), I have been looking at the shortest, fastest-looking reads on my TBR shelf, and that means middle-grade. Luckily, because I have excellent taste in middle-grade fiction, this meant I finally got around to reading Niel Gaiman’s Coraline.

I’ve seen the movie, which was pretty awesome—directed by Henry Selick, who is the only stop-motion animation director worth having direct your stop-motion movie—so I mostly knew what the storyline would be, although it’s been a couple of years.

Since this is a Niel Gaiman book, and particularly one of his children’s books, it’s both cute and creepy. Coraline moves into a new flat with her parents, and is bored, feeling that her parents aren’t paying enough attention to her because they’re doing boring grown-up things, like working.
Coraline fancies herself an explorer, so she explores the flat and her upstairs neighbor and her downstairs neighbors and eventually explores her way through a door that opens into brick wall most of the time, and find herself, Alice-style, in a mirror version of her flat populated with alternate versions of her parents and neighbors. Her “other mother” seems quite nice at first, paying her lavish attention, but Coraline realizes something is up when she returns to her real flat and her parents are missing. Coraline and the other mother begin a terrifying game wherein Coraline has to get herself, her parents, and the ghosts of other trapped children out of the alternate universe and into the real world—or she’ll be stuck as the other mother’s pet forever, or at least until the other mother uses up her soul.

This story was simple, whimsical, and creepy all at the same time, with Coraline’s spare, childlike voice directing a close third person narrative that ends up feeling more than a little surrealist. It definitely makes me want to rewatch the movie, since there’s a lot of morbidly whimsical visuals in the book and I can’t remember how they were done. Overall it’s an excellent modern fairy tale, and I think I would have particularly loved it had it been around when I was eight or so.