Episode 150

A Master of Djinn is available wherever books are sold, and you can find P. Djèlí Clark on Twitter, on Instagram, or at his website.

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Credits
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts are by Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript is coming soon!

The post Episode 150 – Interview with P. Djèlí Clark, Author of A Master of Djinn appeared first on Reading the End.

Ada and Corinne are hemopaths: Corinne can create completely believable illusions by reciting poetry, while Ada can induce strong emotions with her music. They work for the gangster Johnny Dervish of the Cast Iron club, where they perform for crowds of regs (non-hemopaths) at night, carry off cons during the day, and receive shelter from the special forces that hunt hemopaths and carry them off to Havisham Asylum. Until Johnny Dervish is murdered.

If you liked The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, I feel good about recommending Iron Cast to you. At its heart is the friendship between these two girls, the quiet, practical Ada and the fierce, stubborn Corinne. Possibly my favorite thing about Iron Cast is the absolute confidence Corinne and Ada each felt in their friendship. Though they both have love interests, the stories begins and ends with their friendship. They are also both powerful hemopaths — we don’t realize exactly how powerful right at first — and it’s so much fun to see how their trust plays into the ways that they work together to Get Shit Done.

As far as I can tell, Iron Cast is a one-and-done, but I’d love to see more in this world. Soria has a knack for character, such that I’d gladly read a book about virtually any of the supporting characters. Even when we see very little of them, the characters clearly had lives and interests of their own, from the queer shapeshifter who runs a low-budget theater to Corinne’s wealthy brother making a politically advantageous marriage. It was to the point that when I realized how fully Iron Cast was wrapping up its plot, I was kind of disappointed. I wanted sequels, dammit! But I guess companion novels would be okay too.

All in all, an extremely fun YA fantasy novel with lots of adventures and lies and female friendships for you to sink your metaphorical teeth into.

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So before I dive into talking about Judenstaat, let me say up front that I do not know much of anything about Israel and Palestine. One of these days I am going to have enough time to really dig deep into what’s going on over there, and at that time I will form an opinion, and hopefully it will be a non-stupid opinion. For now, I don’t know enough about it to speak intelligently, and I therefore cannot say anything about how (or even if, frankly) Judenstaat‘s reality speaks to that of our own world.

I also do not have more than a high-schooler’s grasp on World War II history. As I was finishing this book, there was a whole uproar on Twitter over a dude who was equating USSR treatment of Jews to Nazi treatment of Jews. Soviet anti-Semitism comes up in this book, and here again, I simply don’t have the historical background knowledge to be able to say whether Zelitch does a good job of treating real-world history in this work of alternate history. So if you have views about this in relation to Judenstaat, and you feel like popping into the comments and telling me about them, I’d love you to do that.

(Because this is fundamentally who I am as a person, I went hunting for some further background information and added some books to my intimidating nonfiction TBR list. That list is very long however. My quest to know everything will last me many years.)

That very long disclaimer is to say that I can only speak to Judenstaat insofar as it is kind of a murder mystery and very much a book about what nations permit their people to remember. And on those fronts, I think that it succeeds admirably. As Judit uncovers more footage from her country’s past, she realizes more and more that the tidy version of history in which she has always believed, the narrative of her country’s creation and the values on which it claims to be founded, is flawed and incomplete. Did I find this to be terrifyingly relevant as our country awaits the presidency of a bigoted demagogue with no experience in government who got elected anyway because white America doesn’t believe in equality nearly as much as we say we do? Yes, okay? Yes, I super did.

(I am finding all my books to be terrifyingly relevant lately. Selection bias or apophenia? YOU DECIDE.)

Zelitch sensibly doesn’t subject us to too many visits from the Exposition Fairy, which was great for the murder mystery but not so good for my poor brain as I tried to figure out Judit’s country timeline and what the official history was versus what she was discovering as she made her film. If you are planning to read Judenstaat, I recommend carving out some time to sit down and really get into it. Even knowing that I’d missed some details, though, this was a really terrific read. I kept thinking of all the countries where history that doesn’t fit tidily into a linear narrative of progress towards shared national values is discarded and discredited. Like: We shouldn’t be able to talk about our country’s founding, or the liberal idea of ourselves as “a nation of immigrants,” without addressing the fact that these ideas are predicated on the violent destruction of American Indians.

Or like (if you want to look at something a bit farther away): I read Anjan Sundaram’s Bad News earlier this year, which talked about (among other things) the fact that Paul Kagame — the hero who ended the Rwandan genocide — also invaded Congo and carried out mass atrocities against Hutu refugees in that country. In Rwanda, Sundaram reports, you can never talk about that. You can talk about how Kagame saved the country. You can talk about the horrors of the genocide against the Tutsis. History that doesn’t fit into that narrative isn’t welcome.

Judenstaat teaches Judit (and reminds us) that history is never so simple. Nobody can hold power and keep their hands clean. We need to have heroes, but even more (argues the book, and I argue it, too), we need to know the truth about them. We need to speak — shout! — the truth about their failures so that we can avoid repeating them. Even saying that is probably a simplification of Zelitch’s message: She resists easy answers in this book, which offers no tidy solutions but only questions upon questions upon questions.

So. You know. My favorite kind of thing. YMMV.

The post Review: Judenstaat, Simone Zelitch appeared first on Reading the End.

The first book, Farthing, is a country house murder mystery. The so-called “Farthing set”, famed for their integral role in negotiating peace between Germany and Britain, is all together for the weekend when one of their number, high-ranking minister James Thirkie, is found dead in his bedroom. When Carmichael, the not-yet-morally-compromised-but-oh-he-will-be police inspector man, comes to investigate, he finds that suspicion is being cast upon David Kahn, the Jewish husband of Lucy Kahn (our upper-class English woman first person narrator). I loved the hell out of Farthing. I loved Carmichael and I loved Lucy and I loved the plot. Plus, Lucy? She refers to people as Athenian (which means gay), Macedonian (which means bi), and Roman (which means straight). When I discovered that she was not featured in the second book, I almost cried.

Briefly. Then I began reading Ha’Penny and found that it was interesting in its own right. In it, actress Viola Lark, one of the famous/notorious Larkin sisters (“the one who acts”) (yes, these are fictionalized Mitfords), becomes involved almost accidentally with a plot to assassinate Hitler and the Prime Minister of Britain. I won’t tell you how this works out, but I will say that Carmichael? Does not respond in a way that makes him feel good about being him. Because he’s morally compromised, yo. Morally compromised protagonists are never happy with anything they do, which is why I like them so much.

And then there was Half a Crown. Which I loved all the way through until about twenty pages from the end. I mean it’s just so grim. It’s set in 1960, and fascism has become deeply entrenched in Britain, to the point that our narrator, Elvira Royston, calls it “such fun” and eagerly attends fascist rallies. The environment in Britain is shocking to read about, because it’s so far removed from what Britain is really like, and because it’s easy to imagine it being that way if history had gone differently. This is how the best alternate history works, though, right? Moral compromising abounds! I couldn’t put the book down because everything seemed to be going all to hell, and I couldn’t imagine how things were ever going to work out. Apparently Jo Walton couldn’t either. It was a total deus ex machina ending, and it made me sad because the books deserved better.

But never mind. I will just pretend that everything ended after Elvira [REDACTED FOR SPOILER-FREE SEPTEMBER], leaving the reader to contemplate the probable collapse of Britain and ruin of every character we cared about. Because that, depressing though it would be, at least would be an ending that paid out the darkness of the rest of the books.

Oh, dear, I sound terribly grumpy. I swear, these books are worth it, even with the bad ending. The writing is wonderful, the premise feels frighteningly realistic, and the characters are a joy to read about. Just go into it with the awareness that the ending will not satisfy, and resign yourself early on to that reality, and then perhaps you will not be disappointed, as I was. Many thanks to Memory for recommending these books. I loved them! I can’t wait to read Walton’s earlier series, as well as Tooth and Claw!

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Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is all about magic coming back to England.  In the Napoleonic War times, it is widely known that there are no practical magicians in England at all, only theoretical ones who read about magic in books and don’t do any themselves.  Except that a practical magician turns up hoarding books in Yorkshire, a selfish, querulous old man called Mr. Norrell who is determined to bring magic back to England.  Good magic, which in Mr. Norrell’s opinions means nothing to do with the fairy realms and absolutely nothing to do with England’s magical, legendary king, John Uskglass.  Then a wealthy, idle young man called Jonathan Strange, in an attempt to impress the girl he wishes to marry, decides to be a magician too (and is good at it – calling him wealthy and idle gives the wrong idea about his magical abilities).  Things go on from there.  They help to defeat the French by using magic.  A slave called Stephen is helped (or persecuted) by a mysterious fairy gentleman with thistle-down hair.

The nice thing about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is it’s long?   But you don’t have to feel daunted by it, because you can probably tell in about five chapters whether it’s your sort of book or not; if not, you can stop reading; if it is, then hooray, there’s tons of it ahead!  The first five chapters – the first chapter by itself, really – gives you an excellent idea of how the book is going to go.  Some drastic things happen, but not without a lot of explanation; there are a lot of footnotes; the writing is amusing but probably won’t make you laugh out loud.  I knew straight away I was going to love it.  The footnotes don’t tend to be germane to the story, but they’re full of backstory and – I don’t know, sidestory? – and tidbits from the history of this alternate England.

I read this in early 2006, and since then I managed to forget nearly every significant plot point.  I remembered Jonathan Strange going off and becoming Wellington’s useful magician; I remembered the business with Lady Pole’s finger; I remembered whole sentences verbatim that the gentleman with the thistle-down hair says to Stephen Black.  But I had it in my mind that Childermass was the Raven King all along, and that Mr. Norrell ended up going to live with the King of England, and I’d completely forgotten whole plotlines (like the Greysteels – they showed up and I was all, who are these fools?).  Reading it again was like reading it for the first time.  A perfect book for the holidays.

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They are all about a girl called Jenna who lives in a Hame, a place for women – often abandoned as children – who believe in the goddess Alta.  Jenna, who has had three mothers and been orphaned thrice, is believed by some to be the prophesied queen, the Anna, who will bring about some unspecified but very important change.  Jenna is not in love with this idea.  It makes her life harder, poor little sausage.  But she carries on, defeating the appropriate foes as the prophecy suggests, and falling madly in love with a king’s son, and calling forth her dark sister, Skada, who appears at her side in the night-time, only when there is light to cast a shadow.

Anyway I just reread them, to see, and these are still quite good books.  Jane Yolen does a thing that I love, which is that she has the story itself, and then she quotes bits from the Book of Alta, and then she has bits that are legends, and you can see how these folk tales have grown out of different parts of Jenna’s story, and then she has excerpts from what she calls “The History”, which is a scholarly study of the events of the book, from a distance of many years, and it gets everything completely wrong and makes fun of the scholar Magon who is coming close to getting things right.  This is fun.  Oh, and she has songs also, which like the folk tales have grown out of the events of the story we’re reading.

In bits maybe it takes itself a smidge too seriously?  But mainly it’s an excellent story.  Jenna’s world, particularly the bits with the sisters in the Hames, is very well imagined, with lots of good details around the dark sisters and just the way the Hames function generally.  I wouldn’t have minded having more bits set in the Hames, seeing how the sisters get on with their everyday lives after they are adults, but that’s just my preference.

Also, I miss Maine.  We used to go on vacation there every summer when I was a kid, and there was (still is!) this bookshop in Wells, where we stayed, called Annie’s Book Stop, and it was great.  That’s where I got my copies of Sister Light, Sister Dark, and White Jenna.  It was a damn exciting day.  And I miss Maine.  All with the bookshops we would go to that were used, and Fun-O-Rama, and we would go to this excellent restaurant called Allison’s in Kennebunkport and we would sing “Alice’s Restaurant” only we’d call it “Allison’s Restaurant”, and the beach was all nice and the water was all cold.  That was nice.

Let me know if you’ve read these and I will link to you! 

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Yes, at this point she has abandoned real history in favor of stuff that’s more fun, which, hey, I’m completely fine with.  It would be silly to accept dragons and then complain that Napoleon had invaded London, so I have no complaints about Napoleon invading London.  Unless he starts tearing down things that I like, or doing something wicked on the area that will someday grow into the South Bank, my favorite bit of the world.

I enjoyed this book nearly as much as I did the first one.  Temeraire’s a point-of-view character now, off and on, which was fun given how cute Temeraire has always been.  He’s a mighty community organizer dragon these days, organizing the breeding ground dragons into a bunch of fighters for fighting off the wicked French armies.  It was refreshing to have everybody winning battles and having clever ideas, instead of all systems devolving into chaos, as has been the case so much in the last few books.

As much as I was looking forward to seeing Iskierska in this book, I thought she was wasted.  You saw a good bit of her, but she wasn’t really doing that much – or no, I guess what I would say is that I wanted to see her grow up and become useful and clever and do cunning things, and she really didn’t.  She was just a nuisance, requiring to be watched and rescued, and I wanted her to be a mighty fightin’ power!  Maybe in the next one.  I like her and I want her to come into her own at some point.

The books continue to be entertaining.  I continue to like them enough to reserve them at the library but not enough to actually purchase them at the store.

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