{"id":19762,"date":"2018-08-25T21:03:41","date_gmt":"2018-08-26T02:03:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=19762"},"modified":"2018-08-25T21:03:41","modified_gmt":"2018-08-26T02:03:41","slug":"books-report-a-skinful-of-shadows-fly-trap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2018\/08\/25\/books-report-a-skinful-of-shadows-fly-trap\/","title":{"rendered":"Books Report: A Skinful of Shadows, Fly Trap"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>So, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2017\/07\/20\/book-report-a-face-like-glass\">the last time I wrote about the works of Frances Hardinge<\/a>, I described her as <i>one of the greatest novelists working in YA\/specfic right now<\/i>. More recently, I have described her as my favorite writer currently working in any field. In the last couple of months, I\u2019ve read two more of her books, each absolutely terrific.\r\n<p>Before I talk about the books (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.panmacmillan.com\/authors\/frances-hardinge\/a-skinful-of-shadows\">A Skinful of Shadows<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.abramsbooks.com\/product\/fly-trap_9781419730252\/\">Fly Trap<\/a>, aka <a href=\"https:\/\/www.panmacmillan.com\/authors\/frances-hardinge\/twilight-robbery\">Twilight Robbery<\/a>) with the spoilers I tend to scatter through these notes, I will repeat my assessment of the recurring themes I picked out from reading four previous books by Ms. Hardinge:\r\n<ul><li>Do not trust any member of the hereditary aristocracy, however personally well-meaning<\/li><li>Wealth is always obtained at the expense of the impoverished, and the more invisible the impoverished are the worse their conditions will be<\/li><li>Monsters are everywhere but can be vanquished, even (sometimes) accidentally<\/li><li>Powerless people are powerful together.<\/li><\/ul>\r\n<p>These are excellent themes.\r\n<p><i>Skinful<\/i> develops the anti-aristocracy theme even further and more powerfully: the hereditary privilege is made into a metaphor, wherein the aristos are immortals who eat the souls of peasants and caretake their own ghosts. They are mad, powerful, insulated and alien, and for the first time in one of her books that I have read, our protagonist is one of them. Or at least sort of\u2014she\u2019s an illegitimate child, unaware of her bloodline, and the only way for her to inherit, in any sense, would destroy her soul and leave only her body to both possess and be possessed by the family estate. It\u2019s wonderful. It\u2019s vicious, and nasty, and clear, and I wish there were lots of other great writers of specfic who were doing as good a job eviscerating the hereditary aristocracy. Er, in the books, I mean. Fictitiously. No actual aristos were eviscerated in the writing of this novel, that I\u2019m aware of.\r\n<p>I\u2019ll add that (if for some reason you haven\u2019t read the book and are still reading this note despite the spoilers) the book isn\u2019t good <i>because<\/i> of Ms. Hardinge\u2019s hatred for the aristocracy. It\u2019s a terrific book <i>and<\/i> it\u2019s a vicious attack on a class that deserves it. Or perhaps I should say, that aspect is only one of the many terrific things about the book\u2014it\u2019s genuinely spooky in places, genuinely funny in others, unpredictable on a plot level, and contains wonderful prose and pretty good dialogue. It\u2019s also set in the English Civil War, which is a surprisingly underutilized bit of historical setting for fantasy novels, I think. So that\u2019s all right.\r\n<p>Except that, somehow, I didn\u2019t enjoy the historical setting, as well-done as it was, as much as I have enjoyed her more fantastical works. If I were to rank her novels by my preference (<i>Why? Why would I do that?<\/i>) I would put it second-to-last among the six I\u2019ve read, ahead of only <cite>The Lie Tree<\/cite>, the other one set in a historically-reasonable version of our world. They are both terrific books, mind you. But in addition to all the <i>other<\/i> stuff that I love about her novels, <cite>Fly Trap<\/cite> (as I will call it because that\u2019s what\u2019s on the cover of my copy) has absolutely magnificent, bizarre and outrageous world-building. Wacky, even. The town of Toll\u2014or, rather, the two towns of Toll-by-Day and Toll-by-Night\u2014is an achievement on the par of the underground metropolis in <cite>A Face Like Glass<\/cite>.\r\n<p>In <cite>Fly Trap<\/cite>, by the way, the hereditary aristocracy is almost entirely offstage, as Ms. Hardinge has a new metaphor, in which it is not <I>to whom<\/i> a person was born that indicates the undeserved benefits or punishments but <I>at what time of day<\/i>. It\u2019s almost nastier than the ghouls of <Cite>Skinful<\/cite>, but a lot funnier. It\u2019s got a lot of L. Frank Baum, now that I think about it. Not <cite>Skinful<\/cite>, just <cite>Fly Trap<\/cite> and the previous book in the series, <cite>Fly by Night<\/cite>. Although even in those books, the scary stuff is pretty serious, much scarier than anything in Oz or Mo.\r\n<p>One more thing about her books\u2014I found both and <cite>Skinful<\/cite> and <cite>Lie Tree<\/cite> as well as <cite>The Lost Conspiracy<\/cite> to be slow going at first. Not bad, but slowish and a bit difficult to get my teeth stuck in. Just a warning: the payoff is substantial, but not immediate. Ms. Hardinge, it seems to me, takes care to establish her protagonist\u2019s context before ripping her out of it, and that\u2019s not a bad thing for the book as a whole, but requires that the reader trust that it will be all worthwhile. So far, for me, it has been. I don\u2019t remember having trouble getting in to <cite>Fly by Night<\/cite>, when I would have had no Author Points to draw on, and <cite>Fly Trap<\/cite> is a sequel, which is something else altogether. Although, come to think of it, even there, she doesn\u2019t bring us to Toll for quite a few chapters. And I adore the introductory bit of <I>Glass<\/i>, absolutely adored it. But that's the only one I loved from chapter one; the others had to work on me more slowly.\r\n<p>Which is good, because there are those other two novels of hers that I haven't read, because I look at them and think <i>ugh, this one just isn't for me<\/i>. So I'm hoping those two are just working even more slowly. Still, I've read six books out of eight, loved four of them and liked two, which is pretty damn' good.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger really likes a writer (It's Frances Hardinge).","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19762","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\/19762","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=19762"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19765,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19762\/revisions\/19765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}