Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin
Edited by Alison Hastie and Terrence Blacker
302 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 28, 2018 to January 15
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Roger Deakin is one of my all-time favorite authors, though in his lifetime he only published one book (Waterlog) and finished the manuscript for one other (Wildwood). Not long after I read Waterlog, I ordered a copy of Walnut Tree Farm, a collection of Deakin's journal entries from his later years, collated and compiled into a single "year" of entries—natural history observations, musings on pollarding and sustainable uses of common land, mixed together with rather more personal entries on Deakin's boyhood, his loneliness and horniness living alone at the namesake farm, his crabby misanthropy toward suburbanites and women out jogging who don't respond to his hellos.
I held off from reading Notes for all these years, possibly because I didn't want to read the last published words to come from his pen. Having finally read his journals, I'm left with a feeling of knowing a little bit too much about him—that maybe I didn't need my image of Deakin the sensitive and perceptive eccentric who soaked up woods and waters in all the forgotten little nooks of England to be replaced with a more grounded, less ethereal image of a cranky old goat alternating between lustful fantasies and "things will never be as good as they were when I was a boy" conservatism.
Notes is a strange document, a posthumous publication of diaries never intended to be made public. It's full of lovely observations of the natural world around Deakin's farm and the adjoining common, arranged in a seasonal cycle, ending in a lovely and sad moment of shooting stars, which could easily have been purpose-written to serve as a coda for Deakin's life. But in revealing so much of the man behind the words, Notes can only make him appear more human, more fragile and fallible.
Deakin's diaries often dwell on the topic of how people no longer appreciate the natural world and what it has to offer, contrasting the modern suburbanized state with his own idyllic recollections of childhood adventures along creeks and in copses. One might question just how attuned most English folks were to natural cycles of subsistence during Deakin's golden age, but we'll leave that aside. I find myself interested in the conservative roots of conservation. You can catch a whiff of nativism in a lot of these lovely works of English nature writing, this idea that "the old ways are the best" for conserving the health and vitality of the English natural world. "People these days" (meaning urbanized people, technocratic people, often the agents from a central government body, sometimes immigrant populations) just aren't in touch with the real life of the hedgerows and little waterways, just don't understand how to manage land in harmony with the plants and creatures that share it.
I'm reminded of how much our American, Muir-inspired "wilderness" ethos derives from the proto-fascist Rousseau, and erases millennia of Native history and land-use practices with the words "where Man himself is a visitor and does not remain."
It's a troubling ideological heritage for us to unpack. Our species and our culture need to do what we can to ameliorate the massive extinction event we're inflicting upon the world, but we have to do so together—not by excluding "people these days," however they might be coded.
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Monday, January 14, 2019
2019 read #1: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.
The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
391 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 2 to January 14
Rating: 3 out of 5
When authors approach folklore or other fantastic story elements from a literary perspective, they often show a certain reluctance to get their hands dirty. "Is this fantastic event really happening, or is it all in the mind of the protagonist?" and "Is this event really fantastic, or is there a perfectly mundane explanation?" are two of the most boring and tired cliches one could possibly use—certainly the least interesting questions one could examine with the storytelling tools the fantastic provides, close siblings of "It was all a dream." Yet while "It was all a dream" is rightly derided and nearly extinct outside of the crappier tiers of children's cartoons, these two cliches are seemingly mandatory for any lit fic writer who wants to dip a toe in the vast possibilities fantasy has to offer.
My advice, as an author who has never been published on a professional level and certainly has never been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is to embrace the fantastic. If you're going to write a novel based on a Russian folktale about a girl made out of snow, don't waste my time spinning major plot threads like "Only the old woman and her husband ever see the snow child, perhaps they are crazy with grief and isolation!" Especially when (spoilers!) such threads never turn into anything and everybody ends up seeing her after all as soon as a young man gets interested in her. Don't weave the beauty and strangeness of folktale magic into the heart of your novel, if you plan to reveal that, well actually, the ethereal snow child is an orphan who's been living in her family's abandoned homestead and this is all perfectly rational and explicable and dull.
Maybe my experiences with other literary works of fantasy have left me impatient with lit authors who hold their noses while they play with the fantastic. It isn't going to sully your perfect Pulitzer-worthy fingers to leave mundane explanations up to the tastes of the reader. Not everything has to be explained. This isn't hard sci-fi, after all.
Aside from that pet peeve, I found this book to be... fine? Adequate, somewhat moving, probably not something I'd nominate for a Pulitzer but pretty good overall. Though I certainly wanted something more magical from it, and that may have affected how I enjoyed it.
391 pages
Published 2012
Read from January 2 to January 14
Rating: 3 out of 5
When authors approach folklore or other fantastic story elements from a literary perspective, they often show a certain reluctance to get their hands dirty. "Is this fantastic event really happening, or is it all in the mind of the protagonist?" and "Is this event really fantastic, or is there a perfectly mundane explanation?" are two of the most boring and tired cliches one could possibly use—certainly the least interesting questions one could examine with the storytelling tools the fantastic provides, close siblings of "It was all a dream." Yet while "It was all a dream" is rightly derided and nearly extinct outside of the crappier tiers of children's cartoons, these two cliches are seemingly mandatory for any lit fic writer who wants to dip a toe in the vast possibilities fantasy has to offer.
My advice, as an author who has never been published on a professional level and certainly has never been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is to embrace the fantastic. If you're going to write a novel based on a Russian folktale about a girl made out of snow, don't waste my time spinning major plot threads like "Only the old woman and her husband ever see the snow child, perhaps they are crazy with grief and isolation!" Especially when (spoilers!) such threads never turn into anything and everybody ends up seeing her after all as soon as a young man gets interested in her. Don't weave the beauty and strangeness of folktale magic into the heart of your novel, if you plan to reveal that, well actually, the ethereal snow child is an orphan who's been living in her family's abandoned homestead and this is all perfectly rational and explicable and dull.
Maybe my experiences with other literary works of fantasy have left me impatient with lit authors who hold their noses while they play with the fantastic. It isn't going to sully your perfect Pulitzer-worthy fingers to leave mundane explanations up to the tastes of the reader. Not everything has to be explained. This isn't hard sci-fi, after all.
Aside from that pet peeve, I found this book to be... fine? Adequate, somewhat moving, probably not something I'd nominate for a Pulitzer but pretty good overall. Though I certainly wanted something more magical from it, and that may have affected how I enjoyed it.
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
2018 read #24: The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag.
The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag
141 pages
Published 2017
Read December 4
Rating: 4 out of 5
I hadn't known anything about Stålenhag's work aside from a vague impression formed by the covers of his books. I had a general idea that he painted vivid scenes of everyday life in bucolic settings juxtaposed with vast science-fictional machinery and mechanical horrors, but I thought his books were more or less themed coffee table works, full of artwork that would tell its story essentially without commentary. I haven't had the opportunity to handle his other two books yet, but The Electric State is very much not a wordless coffee table book.
The gruesome tale of civilization collapsing as its denizens escape into a virtual reality wouldn't be anything special on its own. Stålenhag's haunting and heartbreaking paintings, however, elevate the pedestrian cyberpunk tale of stillbirths and a nascent hive-mind in search of its organic god. Likewise, the context the words give to the paintings enhances them, filling the images with sounds and thoughts and tension. It is an effective storytelling combination, and it left me eager to seek out Stålenhag's other works.
141 pages
Published 2017
Read December 4
Rating: 4 out of 5
I hadn't known anything about Stålenhag's work aside from a vague impression formed by the covers of his books. I had a general idea that he painted vivid scenes of everyday life in bucolic settings juxtaposed with vast science-fictional machinery and mechanical horrors, but I thought his books were more or less themed coffee table works, full of artwork that would tell its story essentially without commentary. I haven't had the opportunity to handle his other two books yet, but The Electric State is very much not a wordless coffee table book.
The gruesome tale of civilization collapsing as its denizens escape into a virtual reality wouldn't be anything special on its own. Stålenhag's haunting and heartbreaking paintings, however, elevate the pedestrian cyberpunk tale of stillbirths and a nascent hive-mind in search of its organic god. Likewise, the context the words give to the paintings enhances them, filling the images with sounds and thoughts and tension. It is an effective storytelling combination, and it left me eager to seek out Stålenhag's other works.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
2018 read #23: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin.
The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
468 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 6 to November 21
Rating: 3 out of 5 (see edit below)
As with other books that open N. K. Jemisin series, the beginning of The Fifth Season is overstuffed with worldbuilding, throwing the reader in at the deep end and overwhelming them with fantasy terminology and all the strange rules for how things work in this setting. I don't know whether The Fifth Season was more confusing than usual or if my attention span continues not to be what it used to be, but I had a hard time parsing enough about what was going on to care all that much about the characters or their end-of-the-world predicament, at least in the early going. Once the story stabilized and I got my bearings, the story itself became more grim and "shocking" than I would like, featuring murdered children and lobotomized children and children murdered so that they wouldn't be lobotomized.
468 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 6 to November 21
Rating: 3 out of 5 (see edit below)
As with other books that open N. K. Jemisin series, the beginning of The Fifth Season is overstuffed with worldbuilding, throwing the reader in at the deep end and overwhelming them with fantasy terminology and all the strange rules for how things work in this setting. I don't know whether The Fifth Season was more confusing than usual or if my attention span continues not to be what it used to be, but I had a hard time parsing enough about what was going on to care all that much about the characters or their end-of-the-world predicament, at least in the early going. Once the story stabilized and I got my bearings, the story itself became more grim and "shocking" than I would like, featuring murdered children and lobotomized children and children murdered so that they wouldn't be lobotomized.
(Edit: I happened to reread this review in 2023. I don't usually go back and edit my reviews, but I need to state for the record that the above paragraph demonstrates spectacularly bad reading comprehension on the part of my 2018 self. The shocking cruelty is one of the points of the book. As my privileged ass would only understand much later, this series was in large part an allegory for how the stolen labor and lives of enslaved African people was used to build and sustain the United States and the rest of the colonizing world. I want to go back and reread these books sometime. As it is, I'm guessing this book deserved something closer to 4 out of 5, had I actually understood Jemisin's point here.)
That said, it's a Jemisin novel, and for the most part, I enjoyed it. She builds fascinating settings, and her exploration of human (and not-quite-human) suffering and injustice in the face of environmental catastrophe is all too relevant.
That said, it's a Jemisin novel, and for the most part, I enjoyed it. She builds fascinating settings, and her exploration of human (and not-quite-human) suffering and injustice in the face of environmental catastrophe is all too relevant.
Friday, October 19, 2018
2018 read #22: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson.
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson
509 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 2 to October 19
Rating: 3 out of 5
An incident early in this book illustrates the dangers of focusing your history tome on the deeds and concerns of kings rather than on the people whose labor actually does the hard business of creating history. Mere pages after briefly acknowledging the sheer misery and life-crushing demands of being a serf in ancient Egypt—squeezed between laboring for the monuments of the elite and having to pay the king rent for the very land they farm—Wilkinson adopts a rhetorical posture rooting for the god-kings during a period of weakened authority and social turmoil: "What the state needed was another strong leader in the mold of Narmer, someone with the charisma, strength, and determination to rebuild the edifice of power before all was lost.... Ancient Egyptian civilization may never have progressed beyond its formative stage, may never have developed its distinctive pyramids, temples, and tombs, had it not been for [Khasekhem,] the last ruler of the Second Dynasty...." Khasekhem committed his land and his people to three millennia of forced labor and brutal autocracy, but hey, at least he saved the pyramids, guys!
To his credit, Wilkinson peppers his kingly narrative with scenes from the lives of the commonfolk, on those rare occasions when those scenes are preserved—usually whenever someone works their way up from the lower ranks into the inner circle of the pharaohs, maybe once a Dynasty or so. But these interludes barely intrude upon the lists of kings and temples, priests and generals, the privileged figureheads whose deeds and misdeeds comprise the bulk of Wilkinson's narrative. It is hard to give voice to the voiceless masses of history; only specialists in social history even seem inclined to try.
For what it sets out to do, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is interesting, readable, and informative. The popular concept of ancient Egypt, I discovered, mixes and matches themes and decorations from nearly three thousand years of history—the sacred cat and crocodile mummies alongside Tutankhamen, buried together in the pyramid of Khufu. It's reminiscent of the joke from Futurama when a historical reenactor portraying Ghandi says, "Let's disco dance, Hammurabi!" The bigger picture of slow growth and morphing of religious and physical culture over those millennia, responding to influxes from or expansion into Nubia, the Levant, and Libya, was a fascinating topic that Wilkinson explored at length (though usually framed by the god-state cult of pharaohnic rule).
As with so many other ambitious history tomes, this is a worthy read, though one that lacked much in the way of social history outside the halls of power.
509 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 2 to October 19
Rating: 3 out of 5
An incident early in this book illustrates the dangers of focusing your history tome on the deeds and concerns of kings rather than on the people whose labor actually does the hard business of creating history. Mere pages after briefly acknowledging the sheer misery and life-crushing demands of being a serf in ancient Egypt—squeezed between laboring for the monuments of the elite and having to pay the king rent for the very land they farm—Wilkinson adopts a rhetorical posture rooting for the god-kings during a period of weakened authority and social turmoil: "What the state needed was another strong leader in the mold of Narmer, someone with the charisma, strength, and determination to rebuild the edifice of power before all was lost.... Ancient Egyptian civilization may never have progressed beyond its formative stage, may never have developed its distinctive pyramids, temples, and tombs, had it not been for [Khasekhem,] the last ruler of the Second Dynasty...." Khasekhem committed his land and his people to three millennia of forced labor and brutal autocracy, but hey, at least he saved the pyramids, guys!
To his credit, Wilkinson peppers his kingly narrative with scenes from the lives of the commonfolk, on those rare occasions when those scenes are preserved—usually whenever someone works their way up from the lower ranks into the inner circle of the pharaohs, maybe once a Dynasty or so. But these interludes barely intrude upon the lists of kings and temples, priests and generals, the privileged figureheads whose deeds and misdeeds comprise the bulk of Wilkinson's narrative. It is hard to give voice to the voiceless masses of history; only specialists in social history even seem inclined to try.
For what it sets out to do, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is interesting, readable, and informative. The popular concept of ancient Egypt, I discovered, mixes and matches themes and decorations from nearly three thousand years of history—the sacred cat and crocodile mummies alongside Tutankhamen, buried together in the pyramid of Khufu. It's reminiscent of the joke from Futurama when a historical reenactor portraying Ghandi says, "Let's disco dance, Hammurabi!" The bigger picture of slow growth and morphing of religious and physical culture over those millennia, responding to influxes from or expansion into Nubia, the Levant, and Libya, was a fascinating topic that Wilkinson explored at length (though usually framed by the god-state cult of pharaohnic rule).
As with so many other ambitious history tomes, this is a worthy read, though one that lacked much in the way of social history outside the halls of power.
Monday, October 8, 2018
2018 read #21: The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman.
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
331 pages
Published 2016
Read from October 7 to October 8
Rating: 3 out of 5
A rollicking but lightweight fantasy adventure seemingly conceived, designed, and executed with an eye to maximum nerd satisfaction. A secret Library existing outside of space and time opens a myriad of doors onto worlds throughout the multiverse, sending operatives out to obtain and spirit away unique works of fiction for preservation within its vast halls, its true purpose only hinted at. Eager Librarians (obsessed with books, just like YOU!) adventurously track down volumes, facing a whole Monster Manual's worth of gargoyles, hellhounds, vampires, werewolves, Fae, dragons, and zeppelins in order bring back even a single precious tome, protected and aided by their command over the linguistic underpinnings of reality itself. The main hero is snarky, her protégé is handsome and good at spin-kicks, and the plot does that thing where every chapter ends with a fresh new complication. Inevitably, there are multiple jokes about prescriptive grammar rules. It's fan-pleasing pulp in its most elemental form, and it's pretty good at achieving its modest aims.
331 pages
Published 2016
Read from October 7 to October 8
Rating: 3 out of 5
A rollicking but lightweight fantasy adventure seemingly conceived, designed, and executed with an eye to maximum nerd satisfaction. A secret Library existing outside of space and time opens a myriad of doors onto worlds throughout the multiverse, sending operatives out to obtain and spirit away unique works of fiction for preservation within its vast halls, its true purpose only hinted at. Eager Librarians (obsessed with books, just like YOU!) adventurously track down volumes, facing a whole Monster Manual's worth of gargoyles, hellhounds, vampires, werewolves, Fae, dragons, and zeppelins in order bring back even a single precious tome, protected and aided by their command over the linguistic underpinnings of reality itself. The main hero is snarky, her protégé is handsome and good at spin-kicks, and the plot does that thing where every chapter ends with a fresh new complication. Inevitably, there are multiple jokes about prescriptive grammar rules. It's fan-pleasing pulp in its most elemental form, and it's pretty good at achieving its modest aims.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
2018 read #20: Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire.
Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire
175 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 6 to October 7
Rating: 3 out of 5
CN: weight image issues, mention of eating disorders.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. A sequel to McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, returning to the Home for Wayward Children in the aftermath of events I won't spoil from that book, Sugar Sky brought back Kade, one of my favorite minor characters in the series, and introduced Cora, who had the potential to be a new favorite. Cora is a fat and athletic teen girl, traumatized by incessant bullying and societal disdain, who had found her ideal world through a doorway, a world where she was a heroic mermaid, a skillful swimmer well-insulated against the chill of the ocean. She could have been a lovely milestone for representation of fat, heroic girls. But ironically, existing as one viewpoint character among several in a brief volume, her inner life is reduced and squeezed into two dimensions. Her mental monologue dwells on being fat, on bullying, on pressure to lose weight, on eating disorders (and how lucky she was to avoid them), and on her athleticism in the swimming pool. Her entire character, while heroic and capable, is largely defined by her fatness, her entire existence used as a didactic tool by the author.
As a fat athlete myself, I was pumped when she used her knowledge of how she was perceived by others to her advantage in order defeat an evil queen, yet I also felt a tingle of tokenism, that this character was only there to be a representative and to teach a social lesson. This impression spilled out onto the other characters, including Kade, a transboy largely defined by how he was kicked out of his ideal world after discovering that he wasn't a girl, or Christopher, a Latinx boy who found his home in a Day of the Dead-themed universe of skeleton people and sugar skulls. Social lessons and didacticism are an important aspect of fiction, especially fantasy directed at the younger set; I'd rather read these characters a thousand times over than even one more generic Straight White Male Savior narrative. But it opens up complicated questions of representation vs tokenism, and who has the right to tell other people's stories in the first place.
Anyone I'd want to spend any time around would feel that fiction needs better representation, and feel even more strongly that fiction needs a broader, more diverse array of contributors. The most radical assessment is that over-represented social categories (say, straight white dudes) should voluntarily stop seeking publication, permitting under-represented demographics the opportunity to finally have a louder voice in the crowded marketplace. It's the logical extension of the argument that "The best thing an ally can do is shut up and yield the floor." I have no logical counter-argument to this, other than a sense that excluding voices to prioritize others is how we got in this mess in the first place, and it doesn't sit right with me. (The fact that I'm white and have both straight-passing and cis-passing privilege certainly feeds into my gut feeling here; I've wanted to be a published author since I was a kid, and it would be inconvenient if my political outlook was the final obstacle that meant I never got a book in print.) Less radical ideas include doing your research, creating characters with a rich inner life that involves more than "Wow, I sure am a fat teen girl!", and having members of the relevant communities read your output before you call it a day (after being fairly compensated for their time and labor, of course).
Ironically, as someone who is neither a fat teen girl, nor a transboy from Oklahoma, nor a Mexican American boy with a magic flute given to him by the Skeleton Princess, I'm not in any position to judge whether McGuire did a good job at representing these demographics in her fiction. My feeling is that these books in the Wayward Children series are just too damn short to offer both didactic social commentary and fully realized characterizations. If Cora had been permitted to have more going on in her mind than "I'm a powerful athlete but I'm fat and people only ever see me as fat," I (as a fellow "fatty-fatty-fat-fat" person) would have been more satisfied with her. I can only imagine that people of Mexican ancestry, or transboys, would feel similarly about Christopher and Kade.
The brevity of the book also contributes to how undercooked it can seem. To hopelessly mix the metaphor, the authorial scaffolding is far too obvious; the main band of characters spend far too much time asking questions whose sole purpose is to let McGuire dole out some backstory or world-building. Brevity has been a frustration of mine since the beginning of the series. Every Heart a Doorway probably would have been one of my favorite fantasy novels of the last few years had it only been double the length, whereas Beneath the Sugar Sky could have used a few more drafts as well as some space to let its characters breathe and be more than the author's teachable moments.
175 pages
Published 2017
Read from October 6 to October 7
Rating: 3 out of 5
CN: weight image issues, mention of eating disorders.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. A sequel to McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, returning to the Home for Wayward Children in the aftermath of events I won't spoil from that book, Sugar Sky brought back Kade, one of my favorite minor characters in the series, and introduced Cora, who had the potential to be a new favorite. Cora is a fat and athletic teen girl, traumatized by incessant bullying and societal disdain, who had found her ideal world through a doorway, a world where she was a heroic mermaid, a skillful swimmer well-insulated against the chill of the ocean. She could have been a lovely milestone for representation of fat, heroic girls. But ironically, existing as one viewpoint character among several in a brief volume, her inner life is reduced and squeezed into two dimensions. Her mental monologue dwells on being fat, on bullying, on pressure to lose weight, on eating disorders (and how lucky she was to avoid them), and on her athleticism in the swimming pool. Her entire character, while heroic and capable, is largely defined by her fatness, her entire existence used as a didactic tool by the author.
As a fat athlete myself, I was pumped when she used her knowledge of how she was perceived by others to her advantage in order defeat an evil queen, yet I also felt a tingle of tokenism, that this character was only there to be a representative and to teach a social lesson. This impression spilled out onto the other characters, including Kade, a transboy largely defined by how he was kicked out of his ideal world after discovering that he wasn't a girl, or Christopher, a Latinx boy who found his home in a Day of the Dead-themed universe of skeleton people and sugar skulls. Social lessons and didacticism are an important aspect of fiction, especially fantasy directed at the younger set; I'd rather read these characters a thousand times over than even one more generic Straight White Male Savior narrative. But it opens up complicated questions of representation vs tokenism, and who has the right to tell other people's stories in the first place.
Anyone I'd want to spend any time around would feel that fiction needs better representation, and feel even more strongly that fiction needs a broader, more diverse array of contributors. The most radical assessment is that over-represented social categories (say, straight white dudes) should voluntarily stop seeking publication, permitting under-represented demographics the opportunity to finally have a louder voice in the crowded marketplace. It's the logical extension of the argument that "The best thing an ally can do is shut up and yield the floor." I have no logical counter-argument to this, other than a sense that excluding voices to prioritize others is how we got in this mess in the first place, and it doesn't sit right with me. (The fact that I'm white and have both straight-passing and cis-passing privilege certainly feeds into my gut feeling here; I've wanted to be a published author since I was a kid, and it would be inconvenient if my political outlook was the final obstacle that meant I never got a book in print.) Less radical ideas include doing your research, creating characters with a rich inner life that involves more than "Wow, I sure am a fat teen girl!", and having members of the relevant communities read your output before you call it a day (after being fairly compensated for their time and labor, of course).
Ironically, as someone who is neither a fat teen girl, nor a transboy from Oklahoma, nor a Mexican American boy with a magic flute given to him by the Skeleton Princess, I'm not in any position to judge whether McGuire did a good job at representing these demographics in her fiction. My feeling is that these books in the Wayward Children series are just too damn short to offer both didactic social commentary and fully realized characterizations. If Cora had been permitted to have more going on in her mind than "I'm a powerful athlete but I'm fat and people only ever see me as fat," I (as a fellow "fatty-fatty-fat-fat" person) would have been more satisfied with her. I can only imagine that people of Mexican ancestry, or transboys, would feel similarly about Christopher and Kade.
The brevity of the book also contributes to how undercooked it can seem. To hopelessly mix the metaphor, the authorial scaffolding is far too obvious; the main band of characters spend far too much time asking questions whose sole purpose is to let McGuire dole out some backstory or world-building. Brevity has been a frustration of mine since the beginning of the series. Every Heart a Doorway probably would have been one of my favorite fantasy novels of the last few years had it only been double the length, whereas Beneath the Sugar Sky could have used a few more drafts as well as some space to let its characters breathe and be more than the author's teachable moments.
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