Dream with Our Eyes Open

For Hugo reading, I read Sarah Rees Brennan's In Other Lands, which hit an awful lot of sweet spots in the fashion of a piece of fanfic. It's funny, because I believe that some of the other YA not-a-Hugo nominees are better pieces of writing on a technical scale: Summer in Orcus, A Skinful of Shadows, and The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage are all more accomplished in that way. But this appealed.

Young Elliot Schafer, 13, sarcastic, prickly, Jewish (although minimally devout), and possibly a bit onto the autism/Aspberger's scale, has the ability to see magical portals and so is given a transfer from his boring boarding school to the program over the (seemingly invisible) wall. Puny Elliot is clearly not warrior material, so in Borderlands he ends up in the less prestigious Councilor track. Seemingly despite his social ineptitude, he becomes friends with the warrior elf maid Serene and the promising young fighter Luke. But many things are not as they seem, and although Elliot never does have the type of magical adventure he thinks he wants, he has a very important role to play.

The books reads like "Derkholm" Diana Wynne Jones taking on "Narnia": a great deal of the time, Elliot reads strongly as a sympathetic take on or perhaps and answer to Eustace Scrub in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair (look at their initials!). He is also a queer teenager who has both boyfriends and girlfriends by the time the story comes to an end, and although a lot of that is awkward, it's awkward because teens are awkward in this arena, not because Brennan handles it badly.

The other thing I've read this week was Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, Because Reasons. I've read it half a dozen times before, but this is the first time I can recall crying at the end: happy emotional release crying. The parts toward the end where Polly realizes that most of the authorities simply don't take the squad seriously as soldiers seemed to ring more bitterly true than usual, and so Polly's decision for action at the end, and her meeting up with the two young recruits, made the wonderful, silly last line hit very hard. When Pratchett was hot, he was on fire.

I think that next up is John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire, which will finish me up for Best Novel nominees. I love Scalzi as a blogger, but I've always been less enthusiastic about him as a fiction writer. I don't expect that this is going to change my mind, but I owe him the good college try for all the enjoyment his blog has provided.

("II" because I see that I already had a post with this title at some point.)

Bad: Hikaru no Go has ended! Yes, I should have known that, but Minekura-sensei's health and the news about Tokyopop have taken up all my manga publishing brain cells, apparently, because I didn't notice. I got the latest volume yesterday and only today noticed that it said "Final Volume!" in a little bubble on the back.

And it ended without saying anything about what really finally happened to Sai, and without having him make another appearance, although he shows up in one of the two extra stories at the end.

So ... there may be spoilers in the discussion, I guess, if anyone else is following this series.

Good: The Discworld fanworks fest - Disc Fest - is coming! I'm signing up - how about some of you other Pratchett fans? (Please?)

They'll be collecting prompts starting tomorrow (you don't have to be a participant or even a community member to suggest prompts!), claiming runs May 25 through June 1, and works are due July 20.

With a new book, I tend to read and then re-read, immediately. Wintersmith improved with the second reading. I had wanted to dismiss it as another pale imitation of the first Tiffany Aching book, the wonderful Wee Free Men ("Ach, crivens!"), but on the re-read, it revealed its own rewards. It's better than A Hat Full of Sky (the first sequel), IMO.

Tiffany is now 13, and has started yet another apprenticeship with yet another eccentric witch. At the end of one extremely hectic day with her new mistress, she makes the mistake of actively participating in a ritual that she was meant only to observe. The result is another of Pratchett's explorations of the nature of the divine, and what happens when it comes into contact with the mudane and the mortal. And Tiffany remains Tiffany throughout and at the end, which is not a trivial consideration.

Dear Wintersmith: The snowfall Saturday was very pretty, but don't you think enough is enough? Yrs respectfully, Cho.