iselima

This is part two of my book club notes on A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. Part one is here.


"The Counting of Vermillion Beads" by Aliette de Bodard

( In a historical fantasy setting, sisters are indentured to work for the imperial census. )


"The Land of the Morning Calm" by E.C. Myers

( A girl discovers that her dead mother's spirit still haunts the online game she played in life. )


"The Smile" by Aisha Saeed

( A courtesan wants for nothing, but realizes it's meaningless without her freedom. )


"Girls Who Twirl and Other Dangers" by Preeti Chhibber

( Teens at a Navrātri dance pull a prank that gets a little out of hand. )

( more fall colors [8 photos] )

Last weekend we visited the VINS nature center, where they have a bird rehab program. Birds that can't be released back to the wild are kept for educational purposes and can be admired by the adoring public.

( birds in captivity [14 photos] )

( birds in the wild [2 photos] )

( insect friends [2 photos] )

In this Lovecraftian horror game you play as a man who's been shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and separated from his daughter. While searching for her, he discovers evidence that many other people have been lured here before him and have been enticed to do the bidding of eldritch horrors. So when a mysterious voice in his head promises to help him find his daughter if he just does it a couple of quick favors, well... what could possibly go wrong!



Full disclosure: I was not able to finish this game because it gave me motion sickness. This does happen to me occasionally with first-person games, but usually only when there's flying or swimming, so I did not expect it in a game where you're just walking around. I played about half of it and watched a Let's Play for the rest.

The game certainly looks great, especially when you get out of the real world and into the eldritch realm. It's like if Cthulhu's interior decorator were H.R. Giger. Unfortunately, I found it was mostly style over substance.

( cut for length )

The Shore is on Steam for $11.99 USD, but GOG currently has it on sale for $3.49 USD. There's a VR edition too but I don't have the gear for that.

Two years ago, Angela thought things were changing for the better as she reconnected with her teenaged son and estranged husband. But then her son's sudden, unexplained suicide tore her life apart again, just as her mother's suicide had in her own childhood. Struggling with her grief, she returns to the house of her beloved, long-deceased grandmother, who was a Louisiana Creole vodou practitioner. Angela never believed in magic, but the more she discovers about her family's tragedies and the other strange events in this small town, the more it seems that her grandmother may have awakened a powerful and malevolent force that has been stalking her family for decades, and that only Angela can put it to rest.

I've read and enjoyed some of Due's short stories before but this is my first time reading one of her novels, and it didn't disappoint. Her deceptively plainspoken prose style belies its incisiveness; a hard-hitting line can sneak up and get you right in the gut. She has a great ear for dialogue and inner monologue. The book uses many POV characters to explore the plot from different angles, and every one feels like a fully realized person with their own voice. I especially appreciated her ability to write teenagers who sound like real teenagers and not an adult's idea of how a teenager thinks and feels.

It's a longer book and takes some time to set up all the moving pieces. But once it gets going, the plotting is tight and reveals happen exactly when they should, gradually building from weird events that could have a rational explanation to full-on supernatural horror that shatters Angela's beliefs about reality and herself. The scary parts of the book are scary not just because of what's happening, but because of what it means for these specific characters and their understanding of their world.

The one element that didn't hold my attention was the love triangle between Angela, her estranged husband, and her old high school boyfriend. It's not poorly written or anything, and it makes sense for the character and her arc, I'm just not the right audience for this kind of romance subplot where the lead has to choose between love interests. (Though I do think the author knew what she was doing in allowing her horror protagonist to be sexual and not punishing her for it, and was intentionally playing against sex-negative horror tropes and against stereotypes of Black women's sexualities, so in principle I appreciated what she was doing even though the way she did it wasn't my cup of tea.)

I was kind of ambivalent about the ending, which felt like punches were maybe pulled a little too much?

spoilers

Once Angela wins the battle against the evil spirit, time is turned back to before her son's death so that she can do things differently and save his life. I understand wanting to give her a happy ending after all she's been through, but I think it might be too happy and I felt it undercut the horror. We'd already established by then that Corey (the son) ended his life because he knew the baka (evil spirit) was about to force him to kill Angela, so it was actually a heroic end and an earned redemption for him, considering that his reckless attempts to use his great-grandmother's spells were how things had gotten so bad in the first place. I think it would have been enough for Angela to meet Corey's spirit when she meets her grandmother's and to get a chance to say she understands now what he did for her. Like, I'm not trying to be mean to the characters, I just felt it would have been more consistent with the themes of the book to reaffirm that sometimes the consequences of your actions can't be undone and you can't just use magic to fix everything.

But aside from that, I enjoyed the read and I'd like to check out some of her other books.