Thursday DE
Oct. 2nd, 2025 08:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bjornwilde posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ways_back_roomSorry about Tuesday.
For today, is there anything your character has done in the past that they hope to never do again?
bjornwilde posting in ways_back_roomI am but a simple Bat-fanperson
Oct. 2nd, 2025 08:24 ampetraAnd when the internet gives me things like this short about Mark Hamill vis-à-vis Batman: The Animated Series, what can I do but weep and ship and weep and ship?
(It was SO HARD to pick an icon for this post. Too many options!)
(It was SO HARD to pick an icon for this post. Too many options!)
My straight man
Oct. 1st, 2025 06:25 pmpetraSO: "'We sell topsoil.' I never see anyone saying they sell bottomsoil."
Me: "I want my soil to be vers."
SO: "Hm?"
Me: "Soil that switches between top and bottom. I believe it's short for versatile, but I never inquired."
SO: "Maybe it's short for Versailles."
Me: "I want my soil to be vers."
SO: "Hm?"
Me: "Soil that switches between top and bottom. I believe it's short for versatile, but I never inquired."
SO: "Maybe it's short for Versailles."
Wednesday DE: go team
Oct. 1st, 2025 04:20 pmthebattycakes posting in ways_back_roomA rather late DE, but here it is!
Today's DE:
Is your pup into playing and/or watching any type of sportsball?
Today's DE:
Is your pup into playing and/or watching any type of sportsball?
Out of Air, by Rachel Reiss
Oct. 1st, 2025 11:14 pmrachelmanija
Just in terms of the premise, this is The Secret History meets Shadow Divers: a poor girl scuba diver falls in with a group of rich kid scuba divers, and they end up bound together by a shared deadly secret. There's other works it also reminded of, again just in terms of the premise, which are more spoilery: ( Read more... )
In the present timeline, Phoebe aka "Phibs," a poor aspiring underwater photographer, discovers a hidden underwater cave while on a diving trip with her four rich best friends, Gabriel (hot boy she likes), Will (Gabriel's fraternal twin, a joker), Lani (lost three fingers in past timeline, now afraid to dive), and Isabel (Lani's girlfriend). That is all the characterization Phibs's friends get, though Phibs herself gets a little bit more, or at least more backstory: she's the sole caretaker of her grandmother with dementia, and the women in her family have a possibly uncanny knack for finding things.
In the past timeline, Phibs finds five gold coins via the family knack, and something happens that led to Lani losing fingers and someone dying. In the present, Phibs finds a beautiful underwater cave with an air pocket. She and Gabriel rest and kiss in the air pocket... and then learn that there's a legend saying bad things happen to people who breathe the air in the cave. It seems to be true, as deeply creepy things begin happening to their bodies...
The plot and premise are great, and the diving and body horror/transformation scenes are really well-done. Reiss is a professional scuba diver, and you can tell. But the pacing feels a bit abrupt and choppy, which is not helped by the dual timelines cutting between the past and present, so that events that actually are set up still sometimes feel like they come out of the blue. I had a hard time figuring out the geography of anywhere that wasn't underwater, which is not a common complaint I have about books - for instance, I wasn't sure for most of the book whether the island base in the present storyline was a tiny island with only one house on it, or a large one with a town. And of course there's the mostly-nonexistent characterization, which is really the biggest problem with the book. If this had actual characters rather than "hot boy" and "Lani's girlfriend," it would have been so good.
I didn't mind that nothing is explained about what's actually up with the cave and Phibs's family knack, but in case you would mind: nothing is explained. I did enjoy reading the book but more attention to character and taking things slower could have made it excellent rather than just an enjoyable read with some standout elements.
The Bewitching & Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Oct. 1st, 2025 06:44 amrachelmanija
Three timelines intertwine, connected by witches and women. A grad student in Massachusetts in the 1990s, whose grandmother had a run-in with a witch in the early 1900s in Mexico, researches the mysterious disappearance of a promising woman horror writer in the 1930s.
It's a very nicely constructed, gripping, enjoyable novel of good and evil magic, and women's persistence in the face of what seem to be impossible odds.
Content notes: Cat death.
What it says on the tin: a very gothic-y gothic, set in Mexico. Noemi is a bit of a shallow, selfish debutante in 1950s Mexico. But when she realizes that her cousin who married a wealthy older man may be in trouble in their lavish home in rural Mexico, Noemi sets out to rescue her. She promptly encounters every gothic trope ever, plus a really fun twist on the haunted house/ghost story.
It turns out that being a mean girl debutante used to getting her own way is exactly what's needed to survive this story. I had no end of fun with Noemi bluntly calling out the rule about no talking at dinner, demanding to know exactly what medical treatment her cousin was getting, and generally running roughshod over the creepy atmosphere. A very enjoyable book that I read in a single sitting.
(no subject)
Sep. 30th, 2025 04:09 pmcamwynI hate. Hate. Hate. Medical terminology. So much sometimes.
if you have named a sleep disorder something that requires five out of six searchable sources of information to have something on the order of "Despite the name, the condition is harmless" as the SECOND LINE OF THE ARTICLE, then maybe, JUST MAYBE, you should consider renaming the disorder to something a LITTLE less disquieting than Exploding Head Syndrome!
(It's a parasomnia, a type of sleep disorder involving abnormal movements, behaviors, emotions, perceptions, or dreams. Sleepwalking, talking in your sleep, night terrors, etc. are all parasomnias. Exploding head syndrome just happens to have the worst possible name, because the diagnostic cases involved people waking out of a sound sleep from an auditory hallucination of a SUDDEN AND HORRIFYINGLY LOUD NOISE. From what I've read about the condition it's at least several hundred years old- the oldest recognizable description of it is in a 1691 biography of Rene Descartes, with the definition of the disorder dating to the 1870s and the official naming of the condition being done by a neurologist in 1989. No damage, pain, or other serious issues involved, just an incredibly distressing name.)
(... oh, yeah, long story short, I woke up ten minutes before my alarm went off because my brain decided I REALLY needed to hear the sound of somebody hammering on the doorbell as loudly as physically possible. I've had other cases of my brain doing this to me before, with all kinds of different, singular loud noises. It's been months since the last EHS incident, though.)
if you have named a sleep disorder something that requires five out of six searchable sources of information to have something on the order of "Despite the name, the condition is harmless" as the SECOND LINE OF THE ARTICLE, then maybe, JUST MAYBE, you should consider renaming the disorder to something a LITTLE less disquieting than Exploding Head Syndrome!
(It's a parasomnia, a type of sleep disorder involving abnormal movements, behaviors, emotions, perceptions, or dreams. Sleepwalking, talking in your sleep, night terrors, etc. are all parasomnias. Exploding head syndrome just happens to have the worst possible name, because the diagnostic cases involved people waking out of a sound sleep from an auditory hallucination of a SUDDEN AND HORRIFYINGLY LOUD NOISE. From what I've read about the condition it's at least several hundred years old- the oldest recognizable description of it is in a 1691 biography of Rene Descartes, with the definition of the disorder dating to the 1870s and the official naming of the condition being done by a neurologist in 1989. No damage, pain, or other serious issues involved, just an incredibly distressing name.)
(... oh, yeah, long story short, I woke up ten minutes before my alarm went off because my brain decided I REALLY needed to hear the sound of somebody hammering on the doorbell as loudly as physically possible. I've had other cases of my brain doing this to me before, with all kinds of different, singular loud noises. It's been months since the last EHS incident, though.)
Various media-(mostly book-)related things
Sep. 30th, 2025 11:03 amumadoshiSilver and Lead, the newest October Daye book (and the first one published by Tor) is out today!
The ebook came to about $25, and I just bought it, but OUCH. Just. Ouch. Since the Toby books started getting initially published as hardcovers, I've been buying the ebooks initially and then getting paperbacks later, but this might keep me from rebuying in hard copy going forward. >.< We'll see.
I expect I'll start reading Toby today (it's a day off), but up to this point, for the last week or so I haven't been trying to get my brain to engage with a new story of any kind, what with the work crunch. I've mostly stuck to watching things withscruloose when there's been a chance. We're caught up on The Summer Hikaru Died (and I think the most recent episode might've been the season finale? Anyone know offhand?) and made more of a dent into season 1 of Silo.
Other than that, I watched a couple episodes of Leverage on Friday (late season 4, and finally into the chunk of episodes I know I haven't seen; I think from here on the only ep. of the original show I've previously seen is the series finale) and I've been sifting through cookbooks.
C&Ped from elsenet, posted yesterday:
After months of not getting around to it, I just ordered a heap of danmei (and one manga volume) from the Beguiling in Toronto (a fantastic comic store to begin with, and I appreciate them enough now for maintaining a masking policy that I'd rather order from them even though free shipping requires a $300+ order).
I always enjoy seeing (and envy) people's danmei shelves, but nearly all of my danmei is in ebooks a) to save both money and shelf space and b) because I'm much better at actually reading things that way. But the Rosmei danmei doesn't have that option, and they licensed some priest titles, so hard copies it is!
[Yesterday's] order: Coins of Destiny 1, The Defectives 1, Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire 1-2, Global Examination 1, Kaleidoscope of Death 1-2, Silent Reading (Mo Du) 1 special edition (one of my hard copy exceptions from 7S), and Kaze Hikaru 33.
The ebook came to about $25, and I just bought it, but OUCH. Just. Ouch. Since the Toby books started getting initially published as hardcovers, I've been buying the ebooks initially and then getting paperbacks later, but this might keep me from rebuying in hard copy going forward. >.< We'll see.
I expect I'll start reading Toby today (it's a day off), but up to this point, for the last week or so I haven't been trying to get my brain to engage with a new story of any kind, what with the work crunch. I've mostly stuck to watching things with
scruloose when there's been a chance. We're caught up on The Summer Hikaru Died (and I think the most recent episode might've been the season finale? Anyone know offhand?) and made more of a dent into season 1 of Silo.Other than that, I watched a couple episodes of Leverage on Friday (late season 4, and finally into the chunk of episodes I know I haven't seen; I think from here on the only ep. of the original show I've previously seen is the series finale) and I've been sifting through cookbooks.
C&Ped from elsenet, posted yesterday:
After months of not getting around to it, I just ordered a heap of danmei (and one manga volume) from the Beguiling in Toronto (a fantastic comic store to begin with, and I appreciate them enough now for maintaining a masking policy that I'd rather order from them even though free shipping requires a $300+ order).
I always enjoy seeing (and envy) people's danmei shelves, but nearly all of my danmei is in ebooks a) to save both money and shelf space and b) because I'm much better at actually reading things that way. But the Rosmei danmei doesn't have that option, and they licensed some priest titles, so hard copies it is!
[Yesterday's] order: Coins of Destiny 1, The Defectives 1, Drowning Sorrows in Raging Fire 1-2, Global Examination 1, Kaleidoscope of Death 1-2, Silent Reading (Mo Du) 1 special edition (one of my hard copy exceptions from 7S), and Kaze Hikaru 33.
Tag of the day
Sep. 29th, 2025 09:19 pmpetraMirror Kukalaka (Star Trek) is a searchable tag on AO3.
As of this writing, Mirror Spot (Star Trek) is not.
I am so glad that people are examining the question, "But what if the teddy bear was evil?"
Spot, too, deserves a rampage, being the best kitty.
As of this writing, Mirror Spot (Star Trek) is not.
I am so glad that people are examining the question, "But what if the teddy bear was evil?"
Spot, too, deserves a rampage, being the best kitty.
Monday DE: (Just Like) Starting Over
Sep. 29th, 2025 11:08 amsplash_of_blue posting in ways_back_roomMrgh. Monday, the day in which we all regret our life choices (mainly the 'choice' to become adults and labour under capitalism).
If your pup had the chance to start their life over from scratch, would they take it?
Is there any one thing they would go back and do over if they could?
If your pup had the chance to start their life over from scratch, would they take it?
Is there any one thing they would go back and do over if they could?
There once were subscribers so patient
Sep. 28th, 2025 08:14 pmpetraI used part of my stuck-in-bed-with-owies day to catch up on my story index of 2025, at the end of which I discovered I never finished updating the one from 2024. 2024 will have to wait, because at the moment I am just floored by how many fucking limericks I have written this year.
If you subscribe to me on AO3 and you don't like my poetry, I am so, so sorry (insincere). This will continue unabated, as I just came to the (un)fortunate realization that I can do limericks for Kinktober.
For anyone whose ears perked up at the mention of Kinktober, here's a possible kink list for you.
If you subscribe to me on AO3 and you don't like my poetry, I am so, so sorry (insincere). This will continue unabated, as I just came to the (un)fortunate realization that I can do limericks for Kinktober.
For anyone whose ears perked up at the mention of Kinktober, here's a possible kink list for you.
(no subject)
Sep. 28th, 2025 08:25 amskygiantsVOYAGER CATCH UP. I said I wanted to post about the first half of S6 before we were actually done with s6 and have not .... quite achieved that, technically, but TODAY we start the seventh and final season so I feel like if I post today it more or less counts, spiritually, emotionally, etc.
( Voyager Season 6, episodes 1-13 )
Overall early S6 not a high point in our Voyager experience, with some exceptions; it feels like we're on a little bit of a downward arc after the highs of S4/S5, but we will see what the future holds!
( Voyager Season 6, episodes 1-13 )
Overall early S6 not a high point in our Voyager experience, with some exceptions; it feels like we're on a little bit of a downward arc after the highs of S4/S5, but we will see what the future holds!
(no subject)
Sep. 27th, 2025 12:37 pmskygiantsQ: So, did you expect to like Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword?
A: No. If I'm being honest, I did not pick up this book in a generous spirit: I haven't read any Grossman previously (though I watched some of The Magicians TV show) but my vague impression was that his Magicians books were kind of edgelordy, and also he annoyed me on a panel I saw him on ten years ago.
Q: Given all this, why did you decide to pick up his new seven hundred page novel?
A: I saw some promotional material that called it 'the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium' and I wanted to fight with it.
Q: And now you've finished it! Are you ready to fight?
A: ... well ... as it turned out I actually had a good time ........
Q: Ah. I see. Did it have a good Kay?
A: NO. Kay does show up for a hot second and I did get excited about it but it's not for very long and he's always being an asshole in flashbacks. It has a really good Palomides though -- possibly the best Palomides I've yet encountered, which is honestly not a high bar but still very exciting. Also, genuinely, a good Arthur!
Q: Gay at all?
A: No, very straight Arthur. Bedivere's pining for him but it's very unrequired, alas for Bedivere. There is also a trans knight and you can tell that Lev Grossman is very proud of himself for every element of that storyline, which I thought was fine.
Q: What about the women, did you like them? Guinevere? Nimue? Morgan?
A: Well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best, and he really wants you to know that he's On Their Side and Understands Their Problems and Respects Their Competence and, well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best.
Q: Lancelot?
A: I have arguments with the Lancelot. Can we stop going down a character list though and talk about --
Q: God?
A: Okay, NOW we're talking. I don't know that I agree with Lev Grossman about God. Often I think I don't. Often while reading the book, I was like, Mr. Grossman, I think you're giving me kind of a trite answer to an interesting question. I don't actually think we need to settle this with a bunch of angels and a bunch of fairy knights having a big stupid fight around the Lance of Longinus. BUT! you're asking the question! You understand that if we're talking about Arthurian myths we have to talk about God! And we have to talk about fairy, and Adventures, and the Grail, and the legacy of Rome, and we have to talk about the way that the stories partake of these kind of layered and contradictory levels of myth and belief and historicity, and we don't have to try to bring all these into concordance with each other -- instead we can pull out the ways that they contradict, that it's interesting to highlight the contradictions. You can have post-Roman Britain, and you can have plate armor and samite dresses and the hunting of the white stag, and the old gods, and the Grail Quest -- you don't have to talk to just one strain of Arthuriana, you can talk to all of them.
Q: Really? All of them?
A: Okay, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. I think that's why I liked it -- I think he really is trying to position himself in the middle of a big conversation with Malory and Tennyson and White and Bradley and the whole recent line of Strictly Historical Arthurs, and pull them into dialogue with each other. And, to be clear, I think, often failing! Often coming to conclusions I don't agree with! Often his answer is just like 'daddy issues' or 'depression,' and I'm like 'sure, okay.' But it's still an interesting conversation, it's a conversation about the things I think are interesting in the Matter of Britain -- how and why we struggle for goodness and utopia, how and why we inevitably fail, and a new question that I like to see and which Arthurian books don't often pick up on, which is what we do after the fall occurs.
Q: Speaking of the matter of Britain, isn't Lev Grossman very American?
A: Extremely. And this is a very American Arthuriana. It wants to know what happens when the age of wonders is ending -- when life has been good for a while, within a charmed circle, and now things are falling apart; but the charmed circle itself was built on layers of colonial occupation and a foundational atrocity, and maybe that did poison it from the beginning. So, you know. But I don't think any of this is irrelevant to the UK either --
Q: Well, you also are very American and maybe not best qualified to talk about that, so let's get back to characters. What did you think of Collum?
A: Oh, the well-meaning rural young man with a mysterious backstory who wants to be a knight and unfortunately rolls up five minutes after the fall of the Round Table, just in time to accompany the few remaining knights on a doomed quest to figure out whether Arthur is still alive somewhere or if not who should be king after him, in the actual main plot of the book?
Q: Yeah, him. You know, the book's actual protagonist.
A: Eh, I thought he was fine.
A: No. If I'm being honest, I did not pick up this book in a generous spirit: I haven't read any Grossman previously (though I watched some of The Magicians TV show) but my vague impression was that his Magicians books were kind of edgelordy, and also he annoyed me on a panel I saw him on ten years ago.
Q: Given all this, why did you decide to pick up his new seven hundred page novel?
A: I saw some promotional material that called it 'the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium' and I wanted to fight with it.
Q: And now you've finished it! Are you ready to fight?
A: ... well ... as it turned out I actually had a good time ........
Q: Ah. I see. Did it have a good Kay?
A: NO. Kay does show up for a hot second and I did get excited about it but it's not for very long and he's always being an asshole in flashbacks. It has a really good Palomides though -- possibly the best Palomides I've yet encountered, which is honestly not a high bar but still very exciting. Also, genuinely, a good Arthur!
Q: Gay at all?
A: No, very straight Arthur. Bedivere's pining for him but it's very unrequired, alas for Bedivere. There is also a trans knight and you can tell that Lev Grossman is very proud of himself for every element of that storyline, which I thought was fine.
Q: What about the women, did you like them? Guinevere? Nimue? Morgan?
A: Well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best, and he really wants you to know that he's On Their Side and Understands Their Problems and Respects Their Competence and, well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best.
Q: Lancelot?
A: I have arguments with the Lancelot. Can we stop going down a character list though and talk about --
Q: God?
A: Okay, NOW we're talking. I don't know that I agree with Lev Grossman about God. Often I think I don't. Often while reading the book, I was like, Mr. Grossman, I think you're giving me kind of a trite answer to an interesting question. I don't actually think we need to settle this with a bunch of angels and a bunch of fairy knights having a big stupid fight around the Lance of Longinus. BUT! you're asking the question! You understand that if we're talking about Arthurian myths we have to talk about God! And we have to talk about fairy, and Adventures, and the Grail, and the legacy of Rome, and we have to talk about the way that the stories partake of these kind of layered and contradictory levels of myth and belief and historicity, and we don't have to try to bring all these into concordance with each other -- instead we can pull out the ways that they contradict, that it's interesting to highlight the contradictions. You can have post-Roman Britain, and you can have plate armor and samite dresses and the hunting of the white stag, and the old gods, and the Grail Quest -- you don't have to talk to just one strain of Arthuriana, you can talk to all of them.
Q: Really? All of them?
A: Okay, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. I think that's why I liked it -- I think he really is trying to position himself in the middle of a big conversation with Malory and Tennyson and White and Bradley and the whole recent line of Strictly Historical Arthurs, and pull them into dialogue with each other. And, to be clear, I think, often failing! Often coming to conclusions I don't agree with! Often his answer is just like 'daddy issues' or 'depression,' and I'm like 'sure, okay.' But it's still an interesting conversation, it's a conversation about the things I think are interesting in the Matter of Britain -- how and why we struggle for goodness and utopia, how and why we inevitably fail, and a new question that I like to see and which Arthurian books don't often pick up on, which is what we do after the fall occurs.
Q: Speaking of the matter of Britain, isn't Lev Grossman very American?
A: Extremely. And this is a very American Arthuriana. It wants to know what happens when the age of wonders is ending -- when life has been good for a while, within a charmed circle, and now things are falling apart; but the charmed circle itself was built on layers of colonial occupation and a foundational atrocity, and maybe that did poison it from the beginning. So, you know. But I don't think any of this is irrelevant to the UK either --
Q: Well, you also are very American and maybe not best qualified to talk about that, so let's get back to characters. What did you think of Collum?
A: Oh, the well-meaning rural young man with a mysterious backstory who wants to be a knight and unfortunately rolls up five minutes after the fall of the Round Table, just in time to accompany the few remaining knights on a doomed quest to figure out whether Arthur is still alive somewhere or if not who should be king after him, in the actual main plot of the book?
Q: Yeah, him. You know, the book's actual protagonist.
A: Eh, I thought he was fine.
Weather | A cookbook on sale
Sep. 26th, 2025 03:09 pmumadoshiWoke up to a very classic autumnal bluster that made me just as glad to not have to venture outside, given the humidity. (One local on Bluesky: "It's a rainy day, and VERY warm. Expect individual ecosystems to form in your rain jacket this morning. Un-zipping the armpit holes for ventilation is a MUST this AM" Another local's response: "This is the sort of weather report I want. Not “plan for this temp or that precipitation”. I want “don’t straighten your hair, and make sure you have good armpit ventilation.”")
And our friendly local meteorologist measured 20.5mm of rain overnight--hardly drought-ending, but still very appreciated.
I don't know how widespread this sale is, but at least on Kobo Canada, the ebook of Margaret Eby's You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible is currently $2.99.
I've bought this book twice, when after reading it in ebook I really wanted a hard copy. Have I actually cooked from it? No. (No one is shocked.) But for a second rec,runpunkrun reviewed it in a more informative way last month. (In comments there, jesse_the_k noted that this subset of cookbooks--which includes other excellent books such as The Sad Bastard Cookbook--is called "struggle cooking".)
And our friendly local meteorologist measured 20.5mm of rain overnight--hardly drought-ending, but still very appreciated.
I don't know how widespread this sale is, but at least on Kobo Canada, the ebook of Margaret Eby's You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible is currently $2.99.
I've bought this book twice, when after reading it in ebook I really wanted a hard copy. Have I actually cooked from it? No. (No one is shocked.) But for a second rec,
runpunkrun reviewed it in a more informative way last month. (In comments there, jesse_the_k noted that this subset of cookbooks--which includes other excellent books such as The Sad Bastard Cookbook--is called "struggle cooking".)Small joy and a rec
Sep. 26th, 2025 12:35 pmpetraLess exciting by a long shot than yesterday's Huntington treatment news, but I was feeling extremely icky today and then Genghis Khan by Miike Snow came on in the café where I stopped for lunch, and it made me chair dance.
I didn't link the official video. I linked a shot-for-shot remake from Phineas and Ferb, a tv show about which I know approximately nothing not found in the vid. And I ship it anyway.
I didn't link the official video. I linked a shot-for-shot remake from Phineas and Ferb, a tv show about which I know approximately nothing not found in the vid. And I ship it anyway.
(no subject)
Sep. 25th, 2025 08:39 ambjornwilde posting in ways_back_room Oh hey. I need to post something here don’t I?
well my work has blocked Dreamwidth so I’m using my phone. How would your pup feel able using a phone keyboard for writing long posts?
well my work has blocked Dreamwidth so I’m using my phone. How would your pup feel able using a phone keyboard for writing long posts?
(no subject)
Sep. 24th, 2025 08:42 pmskygiantsI have now finished reading the duology that began with Max in the House of Spies, in which a Kindertransport refugee with a dybbuk and a kobold on each shoulder wrangles his way into being sent back to Germany as a British spy.
The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.
Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.
ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.
And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then ( he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )
The first book featured a lot of Ewen Montagu RPF, which was extremely fun and funny for me. The second book, Max in the Land of Lies, features a lot of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent RPF, which is obviously less fun and funny, though I still did have several moments where a character would appear on-page and I would exchange a sage nod with Adam Gidwitz: yes, I too have read all of Ben Macintyre's books about WWII espionage, and I do recognize Those Abwehr Guys Who Are Obsessed With British Culture, we both enjoy our little inside joke.
Our little inside jokes aside, I ended up feeling a sort of conflicted and contradictory way about both the book and the duology as a whole. It's very didactic -- it is shouting at you about its project at every turn -- but the project it's shouting about is 'the narrative is more nuanced and complex than you think!' On the one hand, people in Germany (many of them Based on Real People) who are involved in The Nazi Situation in various messy ways are constantly explaining the various messy ways that they are involved in The Nazi Situation to Max, a totally non-suspicious definitely not Jewish surprise twelve-year-old who's just appeared on the scene, at the absolute drop of a hat. It is somewhat hard to believe that Max is achieving these really spectacular espionage results when the only stat he ever rolls is 'knowledge: radio!' although his 'knowledge: radio!' number is really high.
ON the other hand, it is so easy and in vogue to come down in a place of 'Nazis: bad!' and so much more difficult and important to sit with the fact that believing in a monstrous ideology, participating in monstrous acts, does not prevent a person from being likeable, interesting or intelligent, and vice versa; that the line between Nazi Germany and, for example, colonial Great Britain is not so thick as one would like to believe; that people are never comfortably reducible to Monsters and Not Monsters. At root this is clearly Gidwitz's project and I have a lot of respect for it: this didactic book for children is more nuanced, complex and interesting than many books for adults I've read.
And then there's the dybbuk and the kobold. Throughout the second book they continue to function primarily as a stressed-out Statler and Waldorf, which I think is a bit of a waste of a dybbuk and a kobold. Also, at one point one of them says nostalgically "there were no Nazis in the fifteenth century" and while this IS technically true I DO think that there were other things going on in fifteenth century Germany that they probably also did not enjoy and at this point I WAS about to come down on "Adam Gidwitz probably should just not have included these guys in his children's spy story." But Then ( he did something very spoilery that I actually found profoundly interesting )