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Reading Wednesday
Sep. 7th, 2016 02:37 pmWhat did you just finish?
Burning Bright by Melissa McShane. A Regency fantasy set in a world where most people manifest some sort of magical power as a child or teen. At 21, Elinor is a young gentlewoman who seems to have no talent – until she suddenly discovers her Extraordinary Scorcher power, the ability to start and, more importantly, put out fires from a distance. This is such a rare and impressive skill that she's the only person in all of England to currently have it. Her emotionally abusive father is very pleased at Elinor's new power, but only because it will allow him to arrange a monetarily advantageous marriage for her. Unfortunately the man he chooses is a creepy date-rapist, and Elinor is on the brink of being forced into a terrible marriage.
Instead she runs away and joins the Navy. The Navy, understandably, is somewhat reluctant to take on a woman, particularly an untrained gentlewoman of the sort who really should be attended by a companion and kept separate from the regular crew, but their need for an Extraordinary Scorcher to match the ones in Napoleon's employ is such that they reluctantly agree to take her on. But first Elinor is sent to the Caribbean to deal with the "Brethren of the Coast", a band of pirates. Because this is apparently also an alt-history, and Caribbean pirates are still a major threat in the 19th century – not that I mind! As far as I am concerned, pirates are an excellent addition to any book, reasonable or not. There are other changes to real-world history (the US is still a British colony; Port Royal is still a major city, although the earthquake of 1692 turned it into an island), though I wasn't always clear on how or why these changes occurred.
Anyway. Elinor fights pirates, learns to control her power, makes friends, gains confidence, falls in love, and finally renounces her abusive father.
The premise here is pretty awesome. Unfortunately the reality did not quite live up to my expectations. I certainly expected that a book set on a Navy ship for approximately 90% of the plot would have a lot more details about the actual process of sailing. (Though to be fair, having read Patrick O'Brien probably has given me an inaccurate idea of how much about ropes and sails and knots any book "should" have.) The romance between Elinor and Captain Ramsay is bog-standard, and one page of their first meeting is enough to predict every single beat of their relationship for the rest of the book.
But these problems are fairly minor. It's a fun read, with an intriguing premise, and I want more worldbuilding. I'm definitely looking forward to the next book in the series.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
A House for Happy Mothers by Amulya Malladi. Priya and Madhu are a well-off Silicon Valley couple, Americans of Indian descent, who have mostly happy lives – except that Priya is desperate to have a child and devastated to find herself infertile. Asha and Pratap are a poor Indian couple, living in a village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh with two children. Their son, Manoj, is only five years old but already beginning to show signs of being extremely gifted intellectually; unfortunately Asha and Pratap can't afford to send him to a good school. These families come together at The House for Happy Mothers, a surrogacy clinic that connects rich foreigners to Indian women willing to rent their wombs.
The book is told through the alternating viewpoints of Priya and Asha, and is pretty much solely concerned with the surrogacy industry – its economics, the cultural attitudes toward it, and, of course, the emotional toll on both sides. The plot consists entirely of each woman having conversations with others who express their own opinions on the topic: family, friends, coworkers, spouses, Priya's message board of other infertile women, Asha's fellow surrogates at the clinic. Both women go through the whole gamut of feelings toward the other – gratitude, resentment, suspicion, hope, mistrust, anger, envy. By the end of the book, pretty much every possible attitude to the very idea of surrogacy has been expressed by at least one person (though actually, I would have liked to see some more extremes of opinion; most of the characters stayed somewhere in the middle).
It's not an entirely negative view of the surrogacy industry – Priya ends up with a baby, of course, while Asha's new-found ability to earn money grants her greater respect and independence in her relationship with her husband, as well as funding Manoj's education – but it certainly ends up falling more on the sketchy side. I did like the bittersweetness of the ending; both women benefited from the arrangement, but it's made very clear that they're not friends, and they paid for what they got.
I'm a fan of Amulya Malladi, though I've mostly read her historical fiction. It was nice to see her take on the modern day here, and it was a good book, if a bit laser-focused on one theme.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
And I've finally got my NetGalley list down to 20! I need to learn better restraint in not clicking on every book that looks vaguely interesting, or I'm never going to get it back to single digits.
What are you currently reading?
Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire by Shane White.
Burning Bright by Melissa McShane. A Regency fantasy set in a world where most people manifest some sort of magical power as a child or teen. At 21, Elinor is a young gentlewoman who seems to have no talent – until she suddenly discovers her Extraordinary Scorcher power, the ability to start and, more importantly, put out fires from a distance. This is such a rare and impressive skill that she's the only person in all of England to currently have it. Her emotionally abusive father is very pleased at Elinor's new power, but only because it will allow him to arrange a monetarily advantageous marriage for her. Unfortunately the man he chooses is a creepy date-rapist, and Elinor is on the brink of being forced into a terrible marriage.
Instead she runs away and joins the Navy. The Navy, understandably, is somewhat reluctant to take on a woman, particularly an untrained gentlewoman of the sort who really should be attended by a companion and kept separate from the regular crew, but their need for an Extraordinary Scorcher to match the ones in Napoleon's employ is such that they reluctantly agree to take her on. But first Elinor is sent to the Caribbean to deal with the "Brethren of the Coast", a band of pirates. Because this is apparently also an alt-history, and Caribbean pirates are still a major threat in the 19th century – not that I mind! As far as I am concerned, pirates are an excellent addition to any book, reasonable or not. There are other changes to real-world history (the US is still a British colony; Port Royal is still a major city, although the earthquake of 1692 turned it into an island), though I wasn't always clear on how or why these changes occurred.
Anyway. Elinor fights pirates, learns to control her power, makes friends, gains confidence, falls in love, and finally renounces her abusive father.
The premise here is pretty awesome. Unfortunately the reality did not quite live up to my expectations. I certainly expected that a book set on a Navy ship for approximately 90% of the plot would have a lot more details about the actual process of sailing. (Though to be fair, having read Patrick O'Brien probably has given me an inaccurate idea of how much about ropes and sails and knots any book "should" have.) The romance between Elinor and Captain Ramsay is bog-standard, and one page of their first meeting is enough to predict every single beat of their relationship for the rest of the book.
But these problems are fairly minor. It's a fun read, with an intriguing premise, and I want more worldbuilding. I'm definitely looking forward to the next book in the series.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
A House for Happy Mothers by Amulya Malladi. Priya and Madhu are a well-off Silicon Valley couple, Americans of Indian descent, who have mostly happy lives – except that Priya is desperate to have a child and devastated to find herself infertile. Asha and Pratap are a poor Indian couple, living in a village in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh with two children. Their son, Manoj, is only five years old but already beginning to show signs of being extremely gifted intellectually; unfortunately Asha and Pratap can't afford to send him to a good school. These families come together at The House for Happy Mothers, a surrogacy clinic that connects rich foreigners to Indian women willing to rent their wombs.
The book is told through the alternating viewpoints of Priya and Asha, and is pretty much solely concerned with the surrogacy industry – its economics, the cultural attitudes toward it, and, of course, the emotional toll on both sides. The plot consists entirely of each woman having conversations with others who express their own opinions on the topic: family, friends, coworkers, spouses, Priya's message board of other infertile women, Asha's fellow surrogates at the clinic. Both women go through the whole gamut of feelings toward the other – gratitude, resentment, suspicion, hope, mistrust, anger, envy. By the end of the book, pretty much every possible attitude to the very idea of surrogacy has been expressed by at least one person (though actually, I would have liked to see some more extremes of opinion; most of the characters stayed somewhere in the middle).
It's not an entirely negative view of the surrogacy industry – Priya ends up with a baby, of course, while Asha's new-found ability to earn money grants her greater respect and independence in her relationship with her husband, as well as funding Manoj's education – but it certainly ends up falling more on the sketchy side. I did like the bittersweetness of the ending; both women benefited from the arrangement, but it's made very clear that they're not friends, and they paid for what they got.
I'm a fan of Amulya Malladi, though I've mostly read her historical fiction. It was nice to see her take on the modern day here, and it was a good book, if a bit laser-focused on one theme.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
And I've finally got my NetGalley list down to 20! I need to learn better restraint in not clicking on every book that looks vaguely interesting, or I'm never going to get it back to single digits.
What are you currently reading?
Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street's First Black Millionaire by Shane White.
