LRRC Week 1

Hello and welcome back to the Lightning Round Reading Challenge! Week 1 is done, and here are my promised recaps.

I'm going to try not to spoil any specific plot details, but I can't promise that you won't be able to glean information from the way I talk about certain aspects and possibly make predictions.​

#1: THE STARLESS SEA by Erin Morgenstern

I feel like I should've enjoyed this book a lot more than I did, and I can't quite put my finger on why.

Ultimately, I felt pretty similarly about The Starless Sea as I did about Morgenstern's previous book, The Night Circus, which is to say...meh? Nothing really wrong with them, just stories told in ways that didn't especially work for me. Morgenstern's writing strikes me as having a fantastical, romantic aesthetic, an almost dream-like quality, and prioritizes that above like...characterization, or plot, which are things I tend to be more interested in.

The Starless Sea is very theme-driven, which is something I generally like, and incredibly meta. A lot of the story is ABOUT stories; what makes them work, the importance of the stories we tell about/to ourselves, etc. This is something I like, in theory! I'm not sure why I didn't find it engaging in the text, but the fact that I didn't frustrates me.

If I had to guess, I'd say maybe a combination of a) I found it difficult to connect with the characters and b) I felt more than a little like I was being hit repeatedly over the head with said thematic elements. Like yes, okay, many of the characters are metaphors, I GET IT, but could they maybe also be...people?

Also, okay, there's this weird thing that kept cropping up and bugged me to the point of distraction, and it's about naming/labels. Repeatedly, we encounter characters being called names/labels that they don't identify with, and/or having their names/labels ignored.

The MC, who is gay, is early on referred to as "orientationally unavailable" by his friend, who we are informed "hates labels", apparently for other people as well as for herself! (We later learn, in a very strange way, that said friend is queer as well, but this "I'm going to ignore the labels you choose for yourself" still bothered me as a queer reader.) The person he bonds the most with in the novel (who, bafflingly, is not his love interest, who in turn feels almost superfluous to the story) calls him by his middle name rather than his first for...some reason.

The worst offence is the way a certain secondary character is treated. Nearly the first thing we learn about her is that she hates the name she was given, which is "Eleanor." She introduces herself to her love interest as "Lenore," a name we're told she likes more. Near the end of the novel, there is a line that goes something like, "A woman whose name is not and will never be Eleanor." But the narrative! keeps! calling! her! Eleanor!

It would not have been confusing to refer to her by a chosen name. Or, even, to take this weird aspect out of the book entirely! I don't know what it's adding to the novel! I can't figure out why it's here, other than to frustrate me! If you say "her name is not Eleanor" and then in the very next sentence say, "Eleanor did X", that's weird!

It's baffling and distracting and also just feels kind of shitty? Characters are allowed to be flawed and to not respect people's names/labels, but I kind of feel like the narrative, the voice of god, as it were...should? In a book that's so thematically driven, so meta, what does it say when a character is unable to change their given name, unable to choose their own path? I don't know, maybe someone who actually HAS changed/chosen their name can weigh in on this because it's slightly outside of my lane, but it didn't feel good.

Anyway, I didn't hate the book by any means, there were some things I found charming and engaging (in particular, the bees, some of the individual scenes where they were writing notes to the kitchen, and the story that kept popping up about the pirate). I just found the experience lacking in the stakes/character department, and that's probably why I latched so hard onto the weird naming thing, which is probably not what I was supposed to walk away with.

(That went a bit longer than I meant it to. Apparently I have a lot of feelings about names.)

#2: THE DISASTERS by M.K. England

Really good! I really liked this book. Short, sweet, fun little space adventure book - what more can you want?

The Disasters is only a little over 200 pages, which means it gets in, does what it needs to do, and gets out again, all extremely capably. It moves fast, it's action-packed, there's lots of really good moments of tension, and also, the characters are pretty well-established and time is still spent exploring their relationships with each other and their development.

Found family! With also care given to blood family when important! Characters trying to exist within an unfair system and finding each other! Questions about whether or not to trust each other whilst bonds are formed through danger! Non-violent action, for the most part! What more could you want in a space adventure? The Disasters is really the best version of itself, and I was here for it.

There's also a lot of cool representation stuff! The MC is bi or pan, and crushes on two of his crew members, one man (who's queer and interested back) and one woman. At least three of the five major characters are people of colour, and one of them is a Muslim woman. Another of the major characters is a trans woman, a fact which is casually revealed through dialogue like most other background info, and not treated like a "twist." Also, multiple characters have anxiety and panic attacks!

A couple very minor critiques I have are as follows: The villains are kind of forgettable, not a major presence in the story, though the villainous organization does get to have the EXTREMELY unsubtle name of "Earth First" There's a love triangle, which is meh; it's not terrible or horribly distracting, and the characters behave reasonably about it, but it's still there (it's especially funny because one side of the triangle is, in my opinion, much less developed than the other). I know I praised it for being short and sweet, but I would've liked more time with the characters! I'm hoping that England writes more in this universe, because I would love to see further adventures.

In short: fun space adventure story! Nice thing to read if you just want a break from how much the world sucks sometimes.

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So that's a wrap on week one! Join me next week for another round of books. I'm leaving town at 6am next Friday, so that may do something interesting to the schedule - stay tuned!

NEXT WEEK'S AGENDA:
#3: Witchmark by C.L. Polk
#4: Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta & Cori McCarthy