cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2007-09-30 09:26 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2007-09-30 09:26 pm
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Another good book by Nancy Farmer
Sometimes the order I read books in throws up some useful comparisons and this is, in fact currently the case, but I'm in the middle of too many things to be posting the right combinations. For example, if I were organised enough to finish David Mitchell's number 9 dream before posting this I could post about how it has a similar flaw to Bad Monkeys, and if I'd finished re-reading E Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet I could put it next to the Nancy Farmer book. Oh well. As always, these things make more sense in my head.
Nhamo, a Shona girl growing up in a Mozambique village, is promised to a stranger as his junior wife, to lift the curse of cholera from her village and atone for the sins of her vanished father. Instead, encouraged by her grandmother, she runs away to look for her father’s family in Zimbabwe, a journey which becomes a lot more difficult than anticipated.
Nancy Farmer, A Girl Named Disaster. I enthused earlier about Farmer’s Sea of Trolls, which is very good (and which has a sequel – currently sitting in one of my unread piles), and this is also very good in many of the same ways; detailed without the research being intrusive, and with characters who feel like they belong in their worlds; who resist or comply in their own context, rather than that of the implied reader’s. The balancing act this involves with regard to religion/spirituality here is particularly well done, mixing the villagers’ (and Nhamo’s) beliefs and her own tendency for story-telling as well as the Catholicism of the Portuguese traders and the African Christianity of the vapostori without picking sides or, indeed, commiting to any of them being true. Nhamo herself is great as a character, strong and competent as well as being different enough to cause friction in her village without not being part of it.
Other things I liked – the interactions between traditional village life and the outside world (the soldiers of Frelimo, the scientific compound of Efifi and the town in Zimbabwe); the sheer effort involved in survival when Nhamo gets stranded on her island (and the way she breaks down when, after being alone for so long, she is approached by a baby baboon who sees her as a playmate); and the disturbing, but understated sequence, where she first crosses into Zimbabwe and is attacked by dogs, and the way this forces her into a devastating reaction later, under misleadingly similar circumstances. Dr Masuku is the standout supporting character, but they're all good, with that three-dimensional feel that makes them capable of surprising actions (as with Nhamo's grandmother drinking at the bar). I also loved the appendix at the back that describes the peoples of Zimbabwe and Mozambique by tribes, particularly the description under the subheading “The British” – “The British tribe is composed of several subgroups: the Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English. One of these, the English, has been dominant for several centuries…”.
Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys. I’ve been looking forward to this since I first heard about it – I loved Set this House in Order as well as Sewer, Gas, Electric, and Fool on the Hill is in my unread pile, and it conveniently showed up at Galaxy on the day my book vouchers (for spending too much money in their last sale) expired. I was startled, though, to see how short it was (225 pages) and, sadly, despite an intriguing beginning, I’ve ended up being glad it wasn’t any longer. The plot is twisty enough that I won’t go into it here, but it lost me by not having enough emotional connection to – or between – the characters. I ended up reading only for the twists, and they weren’t that strong.
I should re-read Sewer, Gas, Electric, because I remember not initially liking many of the characters there – but by the end of it Matt Ruff had made me fond of Ayn Rand, which was such a startling feat that I’m not sure what happened here.
A werewolf novel set in the Roman Empire, written by Anne Rice’s sister (yes, they make a point of stating this). Regeane, a distant relative of Charlemagne, turns into a wolf every night (or when the room gets dark, or, sometimes, when bad people attack inconveniently during daylight) but, despite this, is about to be married off for political reasons, and the profit of her sleazy relatives who lock her up every evening. The setting in this works quite well (a lot of evocative plant descriptions), the historical stuff is interesting but confusing, either because I know very little about this time period or because it’s never clearly established just where all these enemies are and what power they have, and the plot consists of a lot of political machinations interspersed with charging barbarians. There is also a shock twist involving a bunch of other werewolves (roaming the streets of Rome – I did find it very hard to work out the boundaries of the city, as it appears to consist of a) brothels and wineshops b) leprosariums and churches and c) the aforementioned charging barbarians) that is obvious to everyone except the main character from page 10.
Nhamo, a Shona girl growing up in a Mozambique village, is promised to a stranger as his junior wife, to lift the curse of cholera from her village and atone for the sins of her vanished father. Instead, encouraged by her grandmother, she runs away to look for her father’s family in Zimbabwe, a journey which becomes a lot more difficult than anticipated.
Nancy Farmer, A Girl Named Disaster. I enthused earlier about Farmer’s Sea of Trolls, which is very good (and which has a sequel – currently sitting in one of my unread piles), and this is also very good in many of the same ways; detailed without the research being intrusive, and with characters who feel like they belong in their worlds; who resist or comply in their own context, rather than that of the implied reader’s. The balancing act this involves with regard to religion/spirituality here is particularly well done, mixing the villagers’ (and Nhamo’s) beliefs and her own tendency for story-telling as well as the Catholicism of the Portuguese traders and the African Christianity of the vapostori without picking sides or, indeed, commiting to any of them being true. Nhamo herself is great as a character, strong and competent as well as being different enough to cause friction in her village without not being part of it.
Other things I liked – the interactions between traditional village life and the outside world (the soldiers of Frelimo, the scientific compound of Efifi and the town in Zimbabwe); the sheer effort involved in survival when Nhamo gets stranded on her island (and the way she breaks down when, after being alone for so long, she is approached by a baby baboon who sees her as a playmate); and the disturbing, but understated sequence, where she first crosses into Zimbabwe and is attacked by dogs, and the way this forces her into a devastating reaction later, under misleadingly similar circumstances. Dr Masuku is the standout supporting character, but they're all good, with that three-dimensional feel that makes them capable of surprising actions (as with Nhamo's grandmother drinking at the bar). I also loved the appendix at the back that describes the peoples of Zimbabwe and Mozambique by tribes, particularly the description under the subheading “The British” – “The British tribe is composed of several subgroups: the Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English. One of these, the English, has been dominant for several centuries…”.
Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys. I’ve been looking forward to this since I first heard about it – I loved Set this House in Order as well as Sewer, Gas, Electric, and Fool on the Hill is in my unread pile, and it conveniently showed up at Galaxy on the day my book vouchers (for spending too much money in their last sale) expired. I was startled, though, to see how short it was (225 pages) and, sadly, despite an intriguing beginning, I’ve ended up being glad it wasn’t any longer. The plot is twisty enough that I won’t go into it here, but it lost me by not having enough emotional connection to – or between – the characters. I ended up reading only for the twists, and they weren’t that strong.
I should re-read Sewer, Gas, Electric, because I remember not initially liking many of the characters there – but by the end of it Matt Ruff had made me fond of Ayn Rand, which was such a startling feat that I’m not sure what happened here.
A werewolf novel set in the Roman Empire, written by Anne Rice’s sister (yes, they make a point of stating this). Regeane, a distant relative of Charlemagne, turns into a wolf every night (or when the room gets dark, or, sometimes, when bad people attack inconveniently during daylight) but, despite this, is about to be married off for political reasons, and the profit of her sleazy relatives who lock her up every evening. The setting in this works quite well (a lot of evocative plant descriptions), the historical stuff is interesting but confusing, either because I know very little about this time period or because it’s never clearly established just where all these enemies are and what power they have, and the plot consists of a lot of political machinations interspersed with charging barbarians. There is also a shock twist involving a bunch of other werewolves (roaming the streets of Rome – I did find it very hard to work out the boundaries of the city, as it appears to consist of a) brothels and wineshops b) leprosariums and churches and c) the aforementioned charging barbarians) that is obvious to everyone except the main character from page 10.
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I remember this being less of a problem with The Sea of Trolls, which is obviously a later book.