Shelter and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau
Aug. 1st, 2023 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stdesjardinsI just finished reading two books on a deadline, Shelter, Susan Palwick's second novel, which was the subject of an online book club Sunday, and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, the only Hugo finalist I hadn't already read, which was due back at the library today with no extension possible. It was not the ideal way to read either book, and when I got back from the library I was so tired I went to bed and slept seven hours straight.
A correction, I just looked up Susan Palwick on Wikipedia and Shelter (2007) was her third published novel, although apparently it took her a very long time to write and was published shortly after her second novel, The Necessary Beggar, so in terms of craft it's more akin to a second novel. And I realized that even though I have a copy of her fourth novel, Mending the Moon, I don't think I ever read it, so that is going very high on the to-read list, because I thought The Necessary Beggar and her first novel, Flying in Place, were both brilliant and wonderful.
That may sound like I don't think Shelter is brilliant and wonderful, and that impression would be correct. Shelter has elements of brilliance but I do not find it wonderful. For one thing, it was very unpleasant to read, in part because it's set during a pandemic and I am just not ready to read about that, and in part because one of the protagonists is a badly damaged person with a traumatic childhood who unintentionally causes a great deal of harm for reasons that are understandable but not sympathetic. More seriously, the treatment of adoption and mental illness was deeply problematic. I find myself wishing that this book had had a sensitivity reader, because the things that are wrong with how it handles adoption could have been easily fixed, and the issues with mental illness, well, would have involved a deeper rewrite of parts of the book, but they're fixable as well I think. And you know, a book isn't like a scale where you put the good parts in one basket and the bad parts in another basket and if the good basket is heavier it cancels out all of the bad stuff. It may be worth reading, but it is at best a mixed pleasure, and in this case there was some satisfaction and intellectual nutriment but little joy.
As for The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, the most surprising thing about it was how little in the book surprised me. It felt like the author had a plan for the book and wrote exactly that book, ticking off the boxes as she went. It is a worthy updating of a classic novel that is very much of its time and suffering from a blinkered 1896 perspective that interprets the horror of its subject through the lens of an affront against God and nature rather than a fully sympathetic understanding of the oppression of marginalized communities, but while H. G. Wells might have found this a thought-provoking challenge to his own deeply engrained prejudices, I found myself merely mentally nodding in agreement. Most interesting to me was the depiction of the physical and cultural environment of 19th century Yucatan. I found it worth reading and I would recommend it, but even if I had read it before making my Hugo nominations, I would not have even considered adding it to my shortlist of books to consider nominating.
In that respect, it feels a lot like most of the other Hugo finalists this year, which are competent well-crafted novels that are exactly what the authors set out to write. The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Spare Man are the sort of books that can be recommended with the words "If you like [John Scalzi/Mary Robinette Kowal] you'll like this". Nettle and Bone is a bit more unruly, it is full of elements which I can fully believe popped out of the author's head just as she was writing that scene, with Ursula Vernon I feel like you sort of expect to encounter unexpected elements in a very expectable way. Nona the Ninth is the only Hugo finalist that I feel is doing really unexpected things and pushing the boundaries of the genre in a way that I consider award-worthy. And, surprisingly, I feel like Legends and Lattes, which I thought was good enough for me to nominate the author for the Astounding best new writer award even though I thought it was a fun cartoonish romp that I wouldn't consider nominating in the novel category, gets second place on my ballot. Yes, elements are shallow and cartoony, but there is a deeply heartfelt philosophical core that I find more sophisticated than anything else on the ballot (Nona the Ninth included) and if you ask me which of these books I will be most likely to reread in ten years, it's the one I would pick. (Although pretty much all of them pass that test, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is the only one I probably wouldn't reread but that isn't a slam on its quality, is just that all of the others except Nona are entertaining fluff of the sort I enjoy when I am looking for something pleasant and unchallenging, and Nona is the one I would reread to get stuff out of that I missed the first time.)
A correction, I just looked up Susan Palwick on Wikipedia and Shelter (2007) was her third published novel, although apparently it took her a very long time to write and was published shortly after her second novel, The Necessary Beggar, so in terms of craft it's more akin to a second novel. And I realized that even though I have a copy of her fourth novel, Mending the Moon, I don't think I ever read it, so that is going very high on the to-read list, because I thought The Necessary Beggar and her first novel, Flying in Place, were both brilliant and wonderful.
That may sound like I don't think Shelter is brilliant and wonderful, and that impression would be correct. Shelter has elements of brilliance but I do not find it wonderful. For one thing, it was very unpleasant to read, in part because it's set during a pandemic and I am just not ready to read about that, and in part because one of the protagonists is a badly damaged person with a traumatic childhood who unintentionally causes a great deal of harm for reasons that are understandable but not sympathetic. More seriously, the treatment of adoption and mental illness was deeply problematic. I find myself wishing that this book had had a sensitivity reader, because the things that are wrong with how it handles adoption could have been easily fixed, and the issues with mental illness, well, would have involved a deeper rewrite of parts of the book, but they're fixable as well I think. And you know, a book isn't like a scale where you put the good parts in one basket and the bad parts in another basket and if the good basket is heavier it cancels out all of the bad stuff. It may be worth reading, but it is at best a mixed pleasure, and in this case there was some satisfaction and intellectual nutriment but little joy.
As for The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, the most surprising thing about it was how little in the book surprised me. It felt like the author had a plan for the book and wrote exactly that book, ticking off the boxes as she went. It is a worthy updating of a classic novel that is very much of its time and suffering from a blinkered 1896 perspective that interprets the horror of its subject through the lens of an affront against God and nature rather than a fully sympathetic understanding of the oppression of marginalized communities, but while H. G. Wells might have found this a thought-provoking challenge to his own deeply engrained prejudices, I found myself merely mentally nodding in agreement. Most interesting to me was the depiction of the physical and cultural environment of 19th century Yucatan. I found it worth reading and I would recommend it, but even if I had read it before making my Hugo nominations, I would not have even considered adding it to my shortlist of books to consider nominating.
In that respect, it feels a lot like most of the other Hugo finalists this year, which are competent well-crafted novels that are exactly what the authors set out to write. The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Spare Man are the sort of books that can be recommended with the words "If you like [John Scalzi/Mary Robinette Kowal] you'll like this". Nettle and Bone is a bit more unruly, it is full of elements which I can fully believe popped out of the author's head just as she was writing that scene, with Ursula Vernon I feel like you sort of expect to encounter unexpected elements in a very expectable way. Nona the Ninth is the only Hugo finalist that I feel is doing really unexpected things and pushing the boundaries of the genre in a way that I consider award-worthy. And, surprisingly, I feel like Legends and Lattes, which I thought was good enough for me to nominate the author for the Astounding best new writer award even though I thought it was a fun cartoonish romp that I wouldn't consider nominating in the novel category, gets second place on my ballot. Yes, elements are shallow and cartoony, but there is a deeply heartfelt philosophical core that I find more sophisticated than anything else on the ballot (Nona the Ninth included) and if you ask me which of these books I will be most likely to reread in ten years, it's the one I would pick. (Although pretty much all of them pass that test, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is the only one I probably wouldn't reread but that isn't a slam on its quality, is just that all of the others except Nona are entertaining fluff of the sort I enjoy when I am looking for something pleasant and unchallenging, and Nona is the one I would reread to get stuff out of that I missed the first time.)
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Date: 2023-08-02 01:55 am (UTC)