Reviews and Comments

Finishing RJ Barker's Wyrd Wood trilogy. I confess I have some significant critiques of the series overall. The pacing is odd, and the number of times characters had magically delivered knowledge and other hand-of-the-author just-so convenient events started to strain the sense of earned success. The priority of characters also felt odd, with our first perspective character sidelined for most of the book, after a somewhat inexplicable journey in book 2. Setups and payoffs were also a bit wonky.

But.

But I still love this series. For all the issues in the details, in the big picture, the ideas are captivating. The world building was delightful and some of the reveals about the nature of the world really made me grin. It even made some of the issues I have with so many fantasy worlds (weirdly small maps treated as though their vast) make sense.

I would definitely say the Tide Child Trilogy is much more polished, but I enjoyed these books, and I enjoyed the characters even when the hand of the author was sometimes felt pushing them around a bit.

A Mercy centers primarily on a young slave woman who was shown A Mercy in her youth, taken from a plantation to have a shot at life farther north. As the young woman, Florence, tells her story to her lover in her own voice, we get, interspersed, the stories of all the other people that work on the small farm, both their back stories and their thoughts and experiences through a co-developing narrative that centers around Florence leaving and returning to the farm. Bonds grow and strain and break and rearrange as this little community from all walks of life struggles to find it's way through life. There are no wicked people, or villains within the community, but the heartbreak of the novel is that even so, they struggle to do right by each other and hold together.

This was a difficult book to follow the first time through, as might be guessed from my description. The narrative changes perspective and time with very little auditory queue, just a brief pause. On the first time through I didn't catch it the first few times and was this deeply confused. It didn't help that one of the characters was named Sorrow, which I wasn't sure was a name at first (again, a downside to listening instead of reading). By the end though, I had a general sense of who was who, and when I actually listened to the whole book again (it's only 6 hours), and the full meaning was much more legible, and the pattern in perspective shifts and time jumps became easy to follow.

This book reminded me a lot of The Vaster Wilds in theme and mood, though it's personality was still quite it's own. Not a joyful book, but a fascinating one.

This book is a collection of essays by instructors for various grade levels and a variety of subjects, including both the humanities and STEM, about the philosophies and most of all their own practical experiences with "ungrading". If you want to know "how" school could work without grades assigned by teachers, this is a great place to start.

Holy heck I love this series. Can't believe I put it down for so long. I was worried this more full-length novel might somehow spoil the charm, but it really just elevated the mystery. It felt like it was two longish books that squished together nicely. I really like A.R.T.

I'm really excited for this one. I saw someone discuss these ideas (Zoe Bee), but when I tried to explain them to my friends I found myself wanting more depth and more examples. Education reform has been a passion of mine for years.

This was an interesting read. I can see why it's stuck in the collective conscious. I think the most interesting part to me was the forward by the author disparaging his own most famous work. I can also see his perspective. There is something a bit trite about the whole thing. Vividly and dramatically told, yes, but the bones of the story are straightforward, even predictable. Given the lack of explanation for why such ultra-violence has become prevalent, Clockwork Orange doesn't have the typical political punch of most classic dystopian novels. The social observation that violent kids get "reformed" into aiding the state in perpetuating violence is there, but definitely a side-thought.

I also enjoyed the self-insert of the author writing a book called A Clockwork Orange. It was a nice bit of meta-narrative that tickled my brain.

The meta-commentary interludes were a bit distracting, but I enjoyed this book on the whole. Kay's unique blend of very real-world geography with just-slightly-off naming gives him freedom to invent scenarios inspired by history, but still not required to be a part of it.

Reading this, I kept being reminded of Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Lo and behold, not only was Susanna Clark partly inspired by some of the short stories in this collection, especially "The Library of Babel", but both she and Borges were inspired by the works of one Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an artist of twisting impossible labyrinths.

I enjoyed the first book, and I'm interested to see how I feel about the sequel. The first book definitely struggled with its complexity, but I still found it gripping overall. Lets see if that balance is maintained!