Guardian of the Dead
Jun. 3rd, 2010 19:43![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyI'm almost out of canned reviews to post. Clearly this means it's time to binge on media.
Also, yesterday I took my bird to Starbucks because I had taken him to get clipped and I wanted iced coffee, damn it (though Starbucks iced coffee is execrable, which tells you something about my level of desperation). Starbucks has no service animals only signs, so it was totally legit! And the only person who noticed was the cashier. I feel that this is an important step towards becoming a strange bird woman™ in my middle age.
Healey, Karen. Guardian of the Dead. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2010.
I read this book while I was delayed on my way to WisCon. By the end of my first flight I was doubly glad to be going to WisCon so I could tell the author just how much I liked her book at the party she was hosting for it on Friday night. And I did! Because it really is awesome (and the author herself is pretty awesome too; I hear she makes a mean midori sour).
Anyway. Guardian of the Dead tells the story of Elle (Eleanor) Spencer, a seventeen year old Paakehaa (non-Maori and/or white person) going to boarding school in Christchurch, New Zealand while her parents tour the world to celebrate her mother's cancer going in to remission. Elle is tall and emphatically anything but thin; she doesn't have many friends besides Kevin Waldrup, who is her best friend. But when she allows Kevin to volunteer her to be the fight coordinator for his friend Iris Tsang's university production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, both Elle and Kevin quickly become mixed up in an inhuman struggle out of Maori mythology, with their mysterious classmate Mark Nolan proving central to the mystery, and the fight it holds.
This summary does not convey the sheer amount of awesome that this book contains; I very much think that it would be hard to do so no matter what I said. To wit, it's impossible for me not to love Elle unconditionally; she's unapologetically not thin and not pretty, and the biting wit she's developed to cover the wounds society has dealt her for these crimes is amazing (and, well, basically my own). Elle is also good at Classics! And a first-dan black belt in tae kwon do! And she has friends who are asexual and gay and of just about every possible skin color and ethnic origin, and together they fight to save the land that is their home, New Zealand.
It's really, hmm, refreshing and in some ways even eye-opening to see the principles of social justice deployed so openly and uncompromisingly in this book. Racism, sexism and discrimination are called out explicitly, even within Elle's own skull (I loved her and Iris having a crack at mythology for its general sexism), and feminism is treated as a bedrock principle--Elle and all her friends know that no means no, and that anyone who doesn't know that is bad news, and don't hesitate to act on that knowledge. I also really appreciated that while the book is principally about a race described in the Maori cosmos, the members of that race aren't Maori, and Elle is clear on what she as a Paakehaa person and a girl doesn't and can't know about the Maori. (Also, the villains are white. That's a nice change, IJS.) Healey makes New Zealand seem like a very racially mixed place, though not by any means a paradise of equal justice; still, a country that's had more than one woman Prime Minister probably has a few things to teach the States regardless of anything else.
I also have an interest in Healey's explicit disavowal of referring to the patupaiarehe as "fairies"; as Mark says, "that's an English word," and he clearly isn't referring just to the name of the language. Trying to describe a non-English race of fair folk (and they are quite fair, both literally and figuratively) using an essentially English framework in the New Zealander context points out the colonialism inherent in the move--but is there an extent to which telling stories about "fairies" is intrinsically culturally Western? Can we insist on the difference sufficient to short-circuit all that comes with the old paradigm? Or does giving the non-Englishness of the patupaiarehe and their fellow non-fairy fair folk center stage automatically explode the paradigm? I'm not sure.
Relatedly to the above, I also liked how Elle, as someone who knows that her features are not pretty by society's standards, si really sensitive to what Ted Chiang would the kalliarchy: the fact that society at some level places such a high value on beauty (and beauty as defined by a narrow, superficial external standard) that people like beautiful people better and are more inclined to trust them simply because they're beautiful. And even Elle, who is aware of its existence, has a hard time not submitting to it.
I liked too the gender reversal in having the girl be the hero and the boy be the in-between love interest; women in general are pretty central in this book, between Elle and Iris and Reka and the goddess of death herself, to say nothing of Elle's classics teacher, who is clearly awesome (and American, and apparently in New Zealand high school is easy at elite institutions? who knew!). It's a nice demonstration of the principle of the book in action: to wit, choosing which stories you believe in and using that belief to shape your world(view). I also really loved Iris a lot; she's awesome in a way that completely invites underestimation, and makes one think hard about the toll that even conforming to society's expectations takes. (In some respects, actually, Iris reminded me strongly of Nikki Lau from Shadow Unit.) Healey sketches movingly too the psychological burdens invited by existence; Mark's story in particular is heart-breaking at times, or close to it.
In conclusion, I teared up a few times. New Zealand! Chromaticism! Feminism! Comic books! Magic! What more can you want, I ask you?
Also, yesterday I took my bird to Starbucks because I had taken him to get clipped and I wanted iced coffee, damn it (though Starbucks iced coffee is execrable, which tells you something about my level of desperation). Starbucks has no service animals only signs, so it was totally legit! And the only person who noticed was the cashier. I feel that this is an important step towards becoming a strange bird woman™ in my middle age.
Healey, Karen. Guardian of the Dead. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2010.
I read this book while I was delayed on my way to WisCon. By the end of my first flight I was doubly glad to be going to WisCon so I could tell the author just how much I liked her book at the party she was hosting for it on Friday night. And I did! Because it really is awesome (and the author herself is pretty awesome too; I hear she makes a mean midori sour).
Anyway. Guardian of the Dead tells the story of Elle (Eleanor) Spencer, a seventeen year old Paakehaa (non-Maori and/or white person) going to boarding school in Christchurch, New Zealand while her parents tour the world to celebrate her mother's cancer going in to remission. Elle is tall and emphatically anything but thin; she doesn't have many friends besides Kevin Waldrup, who is her best friend. But when she allows Kevin to volunteer her to be the fight coordinator for his friend Iris Tsang's university production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, both Elle and Kevin quickly become mixed up in an inhuman struggle out of Maori mythology, with their mysterious classmate Mark Nolan proving central to the mystery, and the fight it holds.
This summary does not convey the sheer amount of awesome that this book contains; I very much think that it would be hard to do so no matter what I said. To wit, it's impossible for me not to love Elle unconditionally; she's unapologetically not thin and not pretty, and the biting wit she's developed to cover the wounds society has dealt her for these crimes is amazing (and, well, basically my own). Elle is also good at Classics! And a first-dan black belt in tae kwon do! And she has friends who are asexual and gay and of just about every possible skin color and ethnic origin, and together they fight to save the land that is their home, New Zealand.
It's really, hmm, refreshing and in some ways even eye-opening to see the principles of social justice deployed so openly and uncompromisingly in this book. Racism, sexism and discrimination are called out explicitly, even within Elle's own skull (I loved her and Iris having a crack at mythology for its general sexism), and feminism is treated as a bedrock principle--Elle and all her friends know that no means no, and that anyone who doesn't know that is bad news, and don't hesitate to act on that knowledge. I also really appreciated that while the book is principally about a race described in the Maori cosmos, the members of that race aren't Maori, and Elle is clear on what she as a Paakehaa person and a girl doesn't and can't know about the Maori. (Also, the villains are white. That's a nice change, IJS.) Healey makes New Zealand seem like a very racially mixed place, though not by any means a paradise of equal justice; still, a country that's had more than one woman Prime Minister probably has a few things to teach the States regardless of anything else.
I also have an interest in Healey's explicit disavowal of referring to the patupaiarehe as "fairies"; as Mark says, "that's an English word," and he clearly isn't referring just to the name of the language. Trying to describe a non-English race of fair folk (and they are quite fair, both literally and figuratively) using an essentially English framework in the New Zealander context points out the colonialism inherent in the move--but is there an extent to which telling stories about "fairies" is intrinsically culturally Western? Can we insist on the difference sufficient to short-circuit all that comes with the old paradigm? Or does giving the non-Englishness of the patupaiarehe and their fellow non-fairy fair folk center stage automatically explode the paradigm? I'm not sure.
Relatedly to the above, I also liked how Elle, as someone who knows that her features are not pretty by society's standards, si really sensitive to what Ted Chiang would the kalliarchy: the fact that society at some level places such a high value on beauty (and beauty as defined by a narrow, superficial external standard) that people like beautiful people better and are more inclined to trust them simply because they're beautiful. And even Elle, who is aware of its existence, has a hard time not submitting to it.
I liked too the gender reversal in having the girl be the hero and the boy be the in-between love interest; women in general are pretty central in this book, between Elle and Iris and Reka and the goddess of death herself, to say nothing of Elle's classics teacher, who is clearly awesome (and American, and apparently in New Zealand high school is easy at elite institutions? who knew!). It's a nice demonstration of the principle of the book in action: to wit, choosing which stories you believe in and using that belief to shape your world(view). I also really loved Iris a lot; she's awesome in a way that completely invites underestimation, and makes one think hard about the toll that even conforming to society's expectations takes. (In some respects, actually, Iris reminded me strongly of Nikki Lau from Shadow Unit.) Healey sketches movingly too the psychological burdens invited by existence; Mark's story in particular is heart-breaking at times, or close to it.
In conclusion, I teared up a few times. New Zealand! Chromaticism! Feminism! Comic books! Magic! What more can you want, I ask you?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 01:16 (UTC)(I have been thinking lately about how all kinds of stories from all over the world get labeled "fairy" stories and the beings in them "fairies", and I think I am inclined to think we shouldn't look for an umbrella term, particularly one from Western mythology.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 01:20 (UTC)Oh snap, I forgot to add in the paragraph about the kalliarchy! *goes to edit*
Also, um, READ IT. It really is that good! I was serious when I said I nearly cried, and that's a really high bar for me.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 10:58 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 17:13 (UTC)Also, um, READ IT. It really is that good! I was serious when I said I nearly cried, and that's a really high bar for me.
I will! Want to get through my little pile of library books first.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 19:10 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 14:24 (UTC)On a similar note, have you ever read anything by Hiromi Goto? I taught her short story "Stinky Girl" in Canadian Multiculturalism class, and she also deals with the "kalliarchy" issue by having a big girl with a wry wit as the heroine. That story's in the anthology Hopeful Monsters. Goto also has a YA novel out called Half-World that's one of the most consistently unsettling things I've read since Gaiman's Sandman.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 19:16 (UTC)And it's funny that you mention Hiromi Goto. I actually bought Half World and got it signed at WisCon last weekend, I'm about halfway through it. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 23:21 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 23:22 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-04 23:24 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-05 01:42 (UTC)We will be discussing this at our panel, oh, yes! ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-05 01:46 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-05 01:53 (UTC)Pssst: It's actually patupaiarehe - I mention this not to shame you, but because I think you are the laudable kind of person who would prefer getting it right to not being corrected.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-05 01:56 (UTC)Yes, I did like it. And thank you for the correction! I returned my copy to the library without double-checking the spelling, which bothered me unduly. *g*
*goes to correct*