Team Human and How to Ditch Your Fairy: Two Book Reviews for the Price of One

[attackfish]

I had two exams at the library the day before yesterday, and then I had to go for an oral surgery consult (My wisdom teeth are impacted) so as a treat to myself, I took two books out of the library that I’ve been meaning to read for a while: How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier and Team Human by Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan.

Team Human:

Mel has never liked vampires.  Lucky for her, even though she lives in New Whitby, the famous vampire town, she hasn’t had to have much to do with them.  They stay on their side of town, and she stays on hers.  But vampires have always held a fascination for her best friend Cathy.  When a vampire who was turned as a teenager back in the eighteen hundreds decides to start taking classes at the local high school, it’s Mel’s job to figure out what he’s doing there and chase him off before Cathy finds herself drained of her blood and joining the ranks of the undead herself.

How to Ditch Your Fairy:

Charlie hates her fairy.  Fairies are supernatural good luck talismans, which means they’re supposed to be helpful right?  Her best friend has a clothes shopping fairy and it’s awesome.  Charlie meanwhile has a parking fairy, and at fourteen years old, this means everybody wants her to ride in their car.  After an unfortunate kidnapping incedent, she wants her fairy gone, and she will do anything to make that happen.

Okay, so you don’t get a cut because this will be short.  I decided to review these two books together because I have pretty much the same thing to say about both of them.  I liked them.  They’re clever, fun, charming, and witty.  I didn’t love them, I’m not overly attached to the characters, the settings were interesting, but the books didn’t explore the bits of them that most intrigued me, and I’m not devastated that they’re finished, nor do I want to reread them.  They are light, fun, happy books, and the perfect thing to read after final exams.  They made me feel better about getting my wisdom teeth out, and the fact that my car wouldn’t start, at night in the rain.  If you want something pleasant and diverting, don’t hesitate to pick them up.

Justine Larbalestier has a website at justinelarbalestier.com/ and tweets under the name JustineLavaworm.  Sarah Rees Brennan can be found all over the internet, as sarahtales on livehournal, on tumblr at sarahreesbrennan.tumblr.com, and on her own website, sarahreesbrennan.com.

Comments

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Both of these sound like they could be awesome deconstructions of the YA modern fantasy genre, specifically the trope that the fantastic is by itself Awesome and Special. Team Human in particular sounds like a Twilight parody, starting from the title. It doesn't seem like either book delved too deeply into the implications of their chosen premises, though.

In fact, reading the two titles together at the head of your post I assumed this was about overlithe's epic Legend of Korra-hatespired screed, LoK, Being on Team Human, and Stories About Nothing (http://overlithe.livejournal.com/185772.html). (The title of Part 1 is in fact "Fairies and Fascists, or Fleeing From Humanity," another reason for the confusion.)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

That's the thing, they didn't. Mel confronts the fact that she's pretty dang racist against vampires, and Charlie gets an awesome fairy (which completely subverts the be careful what you wish for theme the book otherwise had) and nobody ever dealt with anything below the surface. They're shiny without substance. Which sometimes is okay, I had a hard day when I read these, and shiny was A-okay with me.

Read it, agreed with a lot of it, disagreed with some. I think LoK the first season was about something real, that at its heart its about Korra confronting the fact that failure is possible, and realizing that her self confidence is fragile, and dealing with this is what sent me into a spiral of depression in collage. It's about Korra being a hothouse flower, and leaving the hothouse. Unfortunately, this makes it a story about the character growth of a privileged person with the backdrop of oppression, in which that oppression is never meaningfully dealt with. So, eh. Anyway, I'm watching Korra because I like Korra and care about her, but I care about her like I care about Zuko. I watch her and say "no, honey, no!" and feel like Iroh. But the narrative disagrees with Zuko, and shows and acknowledges why he needs redemption, and why what he did is wrong, and understandable, but wrong, and not excused by his pain. The narrative agrees with Korra, which is incredibly frustrating.

One of the lines in overlithe's essay, "In the third story, magic being gone from the world means that the protagonist will no longer have any cool powers and how they’ll have to go back to being one of the sheeple who don’t even know about dragons." really struck me. I actually think this could have been a fantastic story for LoK if done well. Overlithe criticizes that this is what Korra is about, but I think that this could have been a wonderful season two. If she hadn't gotten her bending back at the end of season one, and season two explored her feelings of responsibility for the world, and how this can be patronization, and how heavily her self esteem was based on being special, and how she lacks purpose, and how society is rapidly changing with many of the benders no longer benders, etc. It would have been a damn good story. But it would only be a good story if it presupposes that the sheeple aren't really sheeple, and it's the heroine's own inability to grasp this that is the real problem.

Reading the essay reminded me a lot with my conversations with my grandmother about fantasy, and convincing her that it wasn't a waste of time, and of my own novel, which is fundamentally a family story with magic as a backdrop

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

It's surprising how rare it is to find stories that really delve into their own chosen premise. Maybe because it's a lot of work that isn't worth it in a commercial sense. Works like Pan's Labyrinth and ATLA are rarities, as additions to ATLA's own franchise prove.

You took the words right out of my mouth on my frustrations with LoK. There's a good story in there, but the creative team can't seem to find it. It's another story with a promising premise and no serious follow-through. Thank God for fanfic, eh?

Speaking of your grandmother and fantasy (in the realm of totally shoehorned segues), did your mom every see my Eowyn essay? If she did, what did she think? *puppy-dog eyes*

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Speaking from the point of view of someone writing a novel, it's really hard to delve into the premise. I keep going back and rewriting because I find myself glossing over some things. So my main character is the granddaughter of my main villain. He is a conquering dictator who has enslaved millions of people, including my heroine's father (and yes, there are massive consent issues between him and my heroine's mother). But he's affectionate towards his granddaughter. She knows he is a horrible human being who has done unspeakable things. She's actually watched him beat her father. However, she has incredibly mixed feelings about him because due to the particulars of this royal court and its politics, she hasn't had a whole lot of people who have ever been nice to her. Her grandfather always was. I'm having a difficult time examining and exploring this without overloading my novel with exposition (and telling people about emotions instead of showing it doesn't work well anyway) or having my heroine talk about it, which is not her style. She makes Zuko look forthcoming.

On the other hand, Legend of Korra didn't even try. I get the feeling Bryke didn't know what story they had. They needed the Ehaszes, and Korra shows us just how much.

Speaking of fanfic, I keep having to stop myself from writing this long, sprawling fanfic about Korra getting captured by Amon at the end of "Out of the Past", and him taking away her bending, and her finding out who he is, and the two of them developing this really twisted mentor-student relationship, and somewhere in there she gets her bending back, because they end up being the kind of teacher and student who bloodbend each other in fits of rage.

As for mom, yes she did! And she was really excited about it, and also very puzzled, and asked me if there were a lot of people in fandom who did literature homework for fun, and I was like, yeah, that's basically what fandom is....

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

I adore the premise (or that part of the premise) of your novel. The easy way, obviously, would be to make the grandfather a monster who is abusive to the heroine etc., but the easy way is seldom interesting and I'm glad you're not taking it. To me he seems like not so much a deliberately cruel man as a limited one, who is capable of great kindness to the people in his life but doesn't see all people as people. He probably sees what he does as necessary for survival and order, and maybe even a net good for the people he oppresses because those people don't have what it takes to decide their own destiny and they'd be worse off on their own etc. (Just typing that makes me feel dirty.) I can imagine him saying something casually and benevolently bigoted in his granddaughter's presence and her twitching but not saying anything. Or maybe they're sharing a very sweet moment and she wonders why she keeps imagining him dead at her hands even as she wants to bask in his affection forever. What works and what doesn't is all very highly context-dependent, of course.

Also it's fascinating that you've inverted the usual genders of an unequal het relationship and it's just as troubling as the other way around. I mean, the person whose consent is at issue might react in different ways depending on who they are and the expectations they have. After all, slave women in Earth's history were often proud of being the master's concubine, bearing his children etc,, and a slave man may similarly find it a source of pride that a highborn woman found him worthy of siring her child over his social betters, and he may feel tenderly toward the lady. And of course none of the above makes the situation okay and there are going to be strains and discord somewhere.

This also raises questions about the heroine's own status, is she a slave herself due to something like the "one drop" rule, is she somehow both noble and lowborn due to some awkward loophole etc. Maybe she's a royal bastard, or maybe the classes are configured very differently. Whatever the particulars of her status, this girl seems precisely poised to go on a Hero's Journey to grapple with her grandfather's legacy and maybe heal the rift in her community. Moses seems to be a good template with his own dual identity.

Must... shut up... If you need an editor or just someone to bounce ideas off of, just ask!

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I'm replying to you by PM.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Love your fanfic idea. I've been thinking for a while of one where Korra and her friends watch a motion picture which is LoK Book 1 and grow furious at the distortions and propaganda.

LOL, kudos to you and your mom for giving a perfect definition of what fandom is. I think I have a thirst for this kind of stuff because I've never been taught to read literature critically, unless you count solving multiple-choice questions about poems and novel excerpts. *shudder* Maybe that's the case for a lot of other fandom nerds, too. President Obama in a past State of the Union address seemed to think South Korean education was the bee's knees, but I worry that entire generations have been taught the skills for being obedient worker drones and nothing more.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I got a pretty good literary analysis education, but in high school, I had it made very clear to me that A) my analysis of a work better be the same as my teachers' and B) we were going to read a whole bunch of works that I hated, and my well reasoned, articulate responses to why I though they stunk were just an example of how I "didn't appreciate great literature." Fandom taught me that I could apply those literary criticism tools to something other than Lord of the Flies and that there was no one right way to look at something.

What kills me is that in the US we know how to teach. We have fantastic schools... for the rich. So we don't need to look at the school systems of other nations to figure out how to fix our broken system (though getting ideas and incorporating them is of course fine, I'm not arguing for some sort of pure American schools thing) we need to fix our education inequality. If we do that, those precious test scores will go sky high, and more importantly, more of the kids in this country will actually have a good education. Unfortunately, that would cost a lot of money, and make education a federal instead of local operating concern. And also, we can't really educate our poor kids. Why, they might become doctors, and scientists and lawyers and be better at it than our little Johny and Suzy.

In another universe, Book 1 is the Ember Island Players version of Korra.