{"id":10678,"date":"2007-10-25T16:24:39","date_gmt":"2007-10-25T20:24:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/25\/10678.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:01","slug":"book-report-across-the-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/25\/book-report-across-the-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Across the Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger, having read and enjoyed Garth Nix's books, mostly, what with one thing and another, picked up a copy of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harpercollins.com\/books\/9780060747152\/Across_the_Wall\/index.aspx\">Across the Wall<\/a>, which contains a novella or some such long story set in the Abhorsen world. I was looking forward to that bit more than to the other stories in the book, which looked to be a combination of juvenalia, unpublishable crap, and filler. It turns out, though, that the book is a combination of juvenalia, unpublishable crap, filler, and good stories.<\/p>\n\n<p>The title story is a bit weak, actually. I mean, it's fine, and there are some good bits, but he starts out with a country-house setting, and instead of using the country-house, he has Our Hero first locked up in the dungeon underneath the country house, and then has a hideous monster kill everybody in the country house. And, you know, those are both good things, but there is very little of the country house about them in the story.\n\n<p>My favorite story in the collection, at the moment, is a bizarre Annie Oakley fights the Hitler-Demon thing that is much better executed than it sounds. I mean, it's still a pretty goofy concept, and I have ... political? Yes, I guess they are political ... problems with the whole Hitler-was-the-Devil thing, and this story grates on those problems the way that you could grate on problems if the metaphor worked. I mean, the blackshirts (or maybe brownshirts) are essentially <i>possessed<\/i>; when the Annie defeats the Hitler, they are <i>cured<\/i> and aren't fascist anymore. But by then Annie has killed a bunch of them, which would presumably be bad if they were unwilling (or at least non-willing) pawns of the Black King. So under the circumstances, I judge the story by how well the writer keeps me from thinking about that stuff until it's over, and by that criterion, Mr. Nix does very well indeed.\n\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Which I like a thing more than I thought I would, which is a sort of win-win situation, only it&#8217;s really only me doing the winning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18139,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10678\/revisions\/18139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}