Back up and running

Those of you who live in the area know this already, of course. But for those of you who might not, we had a hell of a windstorm in Cascadia over the weekend. It tapdanced all over us from Portland clear up to Vancouver. At the Murkworks, we lost power around 2:30pm on Saturday afternoon and were out until Sunday morning. It took until Sunday night for us to get our Internet, cable, and phone line back–our phone was out, too, since our Comcast service runs everything digitally now.

Cell connectivity got a little wonky too–probably because of cell towers being impacted by the storm. So all in all it’s a damned good thing we didn’t have to deal with any emergency situations on Saturday night!

Roundup of news reports I saw over the weekend and today:

Storm toll: 2 dead, 4 hurt, 450,000 lose power from the Seattle P-I

Vancouver Zoo evacuated; wind breaks grizzly bear enclosure from Globalnews.ca, in which it gets all Jurassic-Park-y at the Vancouver Zoo

(I told Paul about this story as I read about it, and he leaped immediately to imagining that this of course was a Canadian bear. So clearly it’d be all “Uh, hello? Hey! This fence is broken! Somebody should come fix this! I’m gonna be over here eating fish, don’t let me get in your way, okay?”)

Thousands without power as winds pick up in Portland area, from OregonLive.com on Saturday

So yeah, it got pretty lively all over Cascadia. Saturday night Dara and Shanti and I attended a Tricky Pixie concert at the Kenmore Community Center anyway, power outage or no–because of course the enterprising sound crew showed up with a generator. So there was light and music and the band didn’t even have to go acoustic. It was awesome.

Not so awesome were the fallen trees and power lines that actually closed Bothell Way on Sunday morning–Dara reported running into that on her way to PAX yesterday! By the time I made it down to the Farmers’ Market Sunday afternoon, there were still a lot of utility trucks down there as well as Comcast Xfinity trucks, and traffic cops redirecting cars to detours around the Lake Forest Park Town Center. Where, I might add, several of the shops were still closed due to the outage, and due to not being able to serve food to customers due to the refrigeration units for their stock being out.

As of this morning things are more or less back to normal, thankfully! I hope to be able to resume regular posting this week of various blog post series in progress. Stand by.

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Book review: La Rivière des morts, by Esther Rochon

La Rivière des morts by Esther Rochon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It’s tough for me to review this novel properly. My French isn’t good enough yet to have truly understood the majority of what I read here–and it didn’t help either that certain aspects of Mme. Rochon’s style here made it difficult for me to follow the action.

One, I did at least figure out that the book’s divided into a section involving protagonist Laura Fraser as a young girl, and a section involving her as an older woman (post-menopausal? Again, my French isn’t that solid yet, so I wasn’t able to nail that down for sure). It baffled me that the book changed tenses between these two sections, from first person in the earlier part to third in the latter. That was a baffling decision, one beyond my meager French to properly understand; it may well have made much more sense to Quebecois SF/F readers, I don’t know.

Two, in both sections, there was a certain distinct detachment to the action. In the first part, Laura tells the reader a lot of her history, along the lines of “this happened to me” and “I felt such-and-such a way”, with very little of what was going on actually played out directly. The same held true in the second part, although at least there, there were a few more scenes of direct interaction between Laura and other characters, notably Valtar and Sirwala. This made it a lot harder for me to feel engaged by any of the characters.

Three, instead of getting much in the way of action and character dialogue played out directly, we get a lot of lengthy paragraphs of Laura being introspective about assorted things that trouble her as a girl (mostly “the French speakers think I’m weird because I have an English name, and the English speakers think I’m weird because I speak with a French accent, and I HATE ALL OF THEM and I’m going to go dream about being a spider now”), and later, assorted things that trouble her as an adult. Later, when she does actually have direct interaction with other characters (mostly Valtar), each paragraph of dialogue is likewise very long. On the one hand, I regret that my French was not up to the task of following much of this, because I’m certain I’d have engaged with Laura as a character much more if I could actually understand most of what the text was saying. On the other hand, even as an Anglophone reader who’s barely able to dip her toes into Quebecois SF/F so far, I kept feeling like the lengthy, expository nature of the dialogue was forced. I’d be really curious to know if it reads that way to Quebecois readers as well, or if this is just a matter of my being a beginner at French.

So far, the one other Quebecois SF/F novel I’ve successfully read was significantly different stylistically, and targeted for younger readers as well–so it was much easier for me to follow. This one, I’ll straight-up admit, was a hard slog. So for now I’m going to have to give it two stars. But I’ll want to try it again later, as my French improves, and see whether my reading experience is different.

View all my reviews

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.