Long overdue Sharon Shinn book post
Feb. 3rd, 2006 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperThese do not count as books read this year, because I read Angelica quite some time ago and began Angel-Seeker last summer, and I have only just now finished Angel-Seeker, finally. I took so long to finish it for... well, no real good reason. I think I bailed on reading it for a while because I'd gone kind of "meh" about certain developments in the plot, and wasn't feeling inspired to get back to it.
However, I finally decided I really needed to finish it up just because having a book lying around for so long unfinished usually bugs me. So I started working on finishing it off, and once things picked up in the final quarter of the book I couldn't stop reading it on my way home.
Here are book-specific comments....
I have to admit that I'm of two minds about the Edori in all of these books. Actually, really, I'm of two minds about Shinn's depiction of all her cultures. After reading through all five Samaria books, I've begun to get a feel that she's a little too... simplistic in how she handles her various Samarian cultures. The Edori are all peaceful, communally living nomads. The Jansai are all women-abusing, Edori-enslaving bastards. The Mandaavi are all secretive merchants. Etc., etc. Except that I know that feeling isn't quite justified, because she's really good at showing us individuals out of these groups that stand out on their own and aren't just a stereotype out of their cultures. And yet when she's dealing with her groups as groups, in terms of how they behave throughout a plot, they seem just a little too cardboard.
And after five books, especially with two different heroines with ties to the Edori becoming angelica--and now, in Angel-Seeker, another one discovering that she doesn't want an angel after all, she wants an Edori--er, well. Kind of tired of the happy shiny Edori now. It wouldn't be as much of an issue if we didn't get character after character introduced to the Edori lifestyle and have the obligatory "gosh, this is fabulous! How odd and strange it is to be loved and welcomed so openly!" epiphany.
But I get a little ahead of myself. This was a bit of an odd read, because it has not one but two heroines, and the stories are mostly separate until they finally come together at the end. I liked that as an approach and mostly it did work for me. The problem, though, was that the plot thread that went along with the title of the book--Elizabeth setting out to become an angel-seeker and try to get herself pregnant with an angel's child--wasn't nearly as interesting to me as the romance between Rebekah and Obadiah. And apparently Rebekah and Obadiah were way more interesting to the cover artist as well, because they're the ones on the cover. Heh.
The whole angel-seeker concept is I suppose a tough one to write about. It's inherently self-serving, and as I write this journal entry now, I find myself also vaguely irritated by the gender aspects of it, too; there are, unless I'm not remembering references in the earlier novels, no male angel-seekers. There certainly weren't any in this book. There's no indication that men might get the same inflated sense of pride out of being the father of an angel baby as women would being an angel baby's mother.
And although Shinn did do a good job bringing the concept to life with these characters, the problem is that if you're writing about what's inherently a self-serving concept, and therefore not exactly pleasant, what you're giving your reader to read isn't exactly pleasant either. So I automatically had an inclination to not like Elizabeth when she voluntarily chose to pursue this course. It wasn't terribly surprising to see her take up with an angel who turned out to be less than a paragon, and although he was never abusive or anything of that sort, that's the part that made me go "meh" last summer when I bailed on the book for a while. I wasn't terribly interested in seeing Elizabeth arrange her meetings with a guy who clearly wasn't going to mean anything much to her.
Once I picked up the book again I wasn't terribly surprised to see her finally discover a real purpose as well as someone she could genuinely love, but again... "meh". I would have appreciated that side of the plot more if Elizabeth were genuinely likeable to me as a character, and she wasn't.
Rebekah, on the other hand, was interesting indeed. And okay, I have to admit, I got sucked right in by the "girl saves wounded guy" starting plot hook, for which I am a notorious sucker. But Rebekah proved to be clever and spirited, and it was a relief to see her not have the typical misunderstandings and arguments that seem to plague so many lovebirds in novels. To see that in a young Jansai woman especially was fun.
One of the editorial reviews for this book on Amazon actually gets the plot a little wrong regarding her, talking about Rebekah being in danger of being condemned for the crime of loving an angel. That's really misleading, because that Obadiah is an angel isn't the problem at all. It's the fact that she's having an illicit love affair in general when she's betrothed, and the Jansai are hyper-fundamentalists about the "purity" of their women. To the extent that if a woman is caught outside with her veil off and seen laughing and chatting with men, they will stone her and leave her in the desert to die. Pretty brutal right there, so it's no real surprise that the same thing happens to Rebekah when she is discovered pregnant. And her people don't even know an angel is the father until the very end.
And I have to admit that I'm a bit of two minds about how the Jansai are handled in this story, too. Part of me thinks that Gabriel's edicts were right on the money, and that he totally did the right thing by ordering the Jansai to cease the practice of stoning women and leaving them in the desert to die if they do something considered "sinful". All of my modern feminist sensibilities say "yes" to that.
On the other hand, I also find myself a bit put off by what seems to be a unilateral handwaving dismissal of all the rest of Samaria of their beliefs. For all that Obadiah is supposedly dealing with the Jansai in the first place in an effort for the angels to get to better understand them, there's very little effort on the part of anyone in the rest of the cast to try to come to grips with the Jansai beliefs and why they function this way as a culture. The conflict is ultimately resolved by the Archangel proclaiming "you will do THIS now, whether you like it or not".
I don't know. I seem to be feeling like this is a conflict too big to be so easily resolved. It should have ramifications. I honestly can't remember how the Jansai developed in Jovah's Angel and The Alleluia Files, but this kind of a cultural clash isn't something that can be fixed overnight.
All in all, a pretty decent read, though with some shaky bits.
Confession time. I think it says something that I had forgotten that many of the characters we see in Angel-Seeker were from the very first book, Archangel. In fact, I had at first thought that they were out of Angelica--which is not a good sign for how well either of those other two books stayed with me. Long-term, the character I have hung onto the longest out of any of the Samaria novels is Alleluia, actually. I may need to re-read all five of the books at some point in chronological sequence, just to get a better idea of the progression of the world in general.
But to Angelica. Refreshing my memory about this book, I think I am forced to agree with what many of the reviewers on Amazon.com mentioned... that compared to her other efforts, the romance between Susannah and Gaaron was flat and kind of staid. From what I recollect, that's about the size of it, yeah. I barely remember anything about either character.
I better remember the conflict of Gaaron's mortal sister running away to join the Edori, and how she winds up becoming instrumental in saving one of the young men from the party of invaders that winds up on Samaria. A concept which, I might add, was tantalizing and intriguing and sadly never really followed up on very well--I mean, clearly the invaders were humans from elsewhere in space, and yet we never really get to find out who those people were.
See my comments above under Angel-Seeker about the Edori, though.
Meh. I must admit that while I thought this was a good read at the time, I can't say that it's really memorable. Clearly it wasn't for me, since I didn't bloody well remember it.
So all in all... again, as with Angel-Seeker, a decent enough read but with shaky bits. And not as good as the original three Samaria novels.
However, I finally decided I really needed to finish it up just because having a book lying around for so long unfinished usually bugs me. So I started working on finishing it off, and once things picked up in the final quarter of the book I couldn't stop reading it on my way home.
Here are book-specific comments....
I have to admit that I'm of two minds about the Edori in all of these books. Actually, really, I'm of two minds about Shinn's depiction of all her cultures. After reading through all five Samaria books, I've begun to get a feel that she's a little too... simplistic in how she handles her various Samarian cultures. The Edori are all peaceful, communally living nomads. The Jansai are all women-abusing, Edori-enslaving bastards. The Mandaavi are all secretive merchants. Etc., etc. Except that I know that feeling isn't quite justified, because she's really good at showing us individuals out of these groups that stand out on their own and aren't just a stereotype out of their cultures. And yet when she's dealing with her groups as groups, in terms of how they behave throughout a plot, they seem just a little too cardboard.
And after five books, especially with two different heroines with ties to the Edori becoming angelica--and now, in Angel-Seeker, another one discovering that she doesn't want an angel after all, she wants an Edori--er, well. Kind of tired of the happy shiny Edori now. It wouldn't be as much of an issue if we didn't get character after character introduced to the Edori lifestyle and have the obligatory "gosh, this is fabulous! How odd and strange it is to be loved and welcomed so openly!" epiphany.
But I get a little ahead of myself. This was a bit of an odd read, because it has not one but two heroines, and the stories are mostly separate until they finally come together at the end. I liked that as an approach and mostly it did work for me. The problem, though, was that the plot thread that went along with the title of the book--Elizabeth setting out to become an angel-seeker and try to get herself pregnant with an angel's child--wasn't nearly as interesting to me as the romance between Rebekah and Obadiah. And apparently Rebekah and Obadiah were way more interesting to the cover artist as well, because they're the ones on the cover. Heh.
The whole angel-seeker concept is I suppose a tough one to write about. It's inherently self-serving, and as I write this journal entry now, I find myself also vaguely irritated by the gender aspects of it, too; there are, unless I'm not remembering references in the earlier novels, no male angel-seekers. There certainly weren't any in this book. There's no indication that men might get the same inflated sense of pride out of being the father of an angel baby as women would being an angel baby's mother.
And although Shinn did do a good job bringing the concept to life with these characters, the problem is that if you're writing about what's inherently a self-serving concept, and therefore not exactly pleasant, what you're giving your reader to read isn't exactly pleasant either. So I automatically had an inclination to not like Elizabeth when she voluntarily chose to pursue this course. It wasn't terribly surprising to see her take up with an angel who turned out to be less than a paragon, and although he was never abusive or anything of that sort, that's the part that made me go "meh" last summer when I bailed on the book for a while. I wasn't terribly interested in seeing Elizabeth arrange her meetings with a guy who clearly wasn't going to mean anything much to her.
Once I picked up the book again I wasn't terribly surprised to see her finally discover a real purpose as well as someone she could genuinely love, but again... "meh". I would have appreciated that side of the plot more if Elizabeth were genuinely likeable to me as a character, and she wasn't.
Rebekah, on the other hand, was interesting indeed. And okay, I have to admit, I got sucked right in by the "girl saves wounded guy" starting plot hook, for which I am a notorious sucker. But Rebekah proved to be clever and spirited, and it was a relief to see her not have the typical misunderstandings and arguments that seem to plague so many lovebirds in novels. To see that in a young Jansai woman especially was fun.
One of the editorial reviews for this book on Amazon actually gets the plot a little wrong regarding her, talking about Rebekah being in danger of being condemned for the crime of loving an angel. That's really misleading, because that Obadiah is an angel isn't the problem at all. It's the fact that she's having an illicit love affair in general when she's betrothed, and the Jansai are hyper-fundamentalists about the "purity" of their women. To the extent that if a woman is caught outside with her veil off and seen laughing and chatting with men, they will stone her and leave her in the desert to die. Pretty brutal right there, so it's no real surprise that the same thing happens to Rebekah when she is discovered pregnant. And her people don't even know an angel is the father until the very end.
And I have to admit that I'm a bit of two minds about how the Jansai are handled in this story, too. Part of me thinks that Gabriel's edicts were right on the money, and that he totally did the right thing by ordering the Jansai to cease the practice of stoning women and leaving them in the desert to die if they do something considered "sinful". All of my modern feminist sensibilities say "yes" to that.
On the other hand, I also find myself a bit put off by what seems to be a unilateral handwaving dismissal of all the rest of Samaria of their beliefs. For all that Obadiah is supposedly dealing with the Jansai in the first place in an effort for the angels to get to better understand them, there's very little effort on the part of anyone in the rest of the cast to try to come to grips with the Jansai beliefs and why they function this way as a culture. The conflict is ultimately resolved by the Archangel proclaiming "you will do THIS now, whether you like it or not".
I don't know. I seem to be feeling like this is a conflict too big to be so easily resolved. It should have ramifications. I honestly can't remember how the Jansai developed in Jovah's Angel and The Alleluia Files, but this kind of a cultural clash isn't something that can be fixed overnight.
All in all, a pretty decent read, though with some shaky bits.
Confession time. I think it says something that I had forgotten that many of the characters we see in Angel-Seeker were from the very first book, Archangel. In fact, I had at first thought that they were out of Angelica--which is not a good sign for how well either of those other two books stayed with me. Long-term, the character I have hung onto the longest out of any of the Samaria novels is Alleluia, actually. I may need to re-read all five of the books at some point in chronological sequence, just to get a better idea of the progression of the world in general.
But to Angelica. Refreshing my memory about this book, I think I am forced to agree with what many of the reviewers on Amazon.com mentioned... that compared to her other efforts, the romance between Susannah and Gaaron was flat and kind of staid. From what I recollect, that's about the size of it, yeah. I barely remember anything about either character.
I better remember the conflict of Gaaron's mortal sister running away to join the Edori, and how she winds up becoming instrumental in saving one of the young men from the party of invaders that winds up on Samaria. A concept which, I might add, was tantalizing and intriguing and sadly never really followed up on very well--I mean, clearly the invaders were humans from elsewhere in space, and yet we never really get to find out who those people were.
See my comments above under Angel-Seeker about the Edori, though.
Meh. I must admit that while I thought this was a good read at the time, I can't say that it's really memorable. Clearly it wasn't for me, since I didn't bloody well remember it.
So all in all... again, as with Angel-Seeker, a decent enough read but with shaky bits. And not as good as the original three Samaria novels.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 08:06 am (UTC)Except for Angelica. I think I checked that one out of the library when I read it.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-04 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-08 04:57 am (UTC)