![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Because I was about to travel to my doctor's office, several big western states away, I first made my way down to the library. Nowadays I rarely head down to the library for fun, as University and research has eaten up almost all of my free time. I sit tucked away in the nonfiction section, packed amidst political documents and journalists’ exposés and try to ignore the plaintive whimpers and yelps from the Young Adult fiction section. This time, out of habit, my feet guided me across the atrium (such as it is) down to the nonfiction, the clamors and cajoling from the YA titles louder than ever.
Fish's Conscience: No no, you must resist.
YA Books: But you came in this time just for us!
Fish's Conscience: You have far more productive and scholarly things to do.
YA Books: But we never get to see you anymore.
Fish's Conscience: Don't lie! I see her sneaking down your way and stowing a few of you away each time she comes for school, don't you think I don't.
Fish: Shut up you. Books! My sweet YA fantasy, my darlings, how could I have strayed?
It's so wonderful to do something simply for the pleasure of it, entirely without guilt. High up on the reasons I would like to become a professional writer is that I could call reading my favorite books "market research.”
So, as such the entirety of my travel reading is brand new to me.
I've thought about it and thought about it, and I just don't see how I can write anything resembling a proper review of these two books without spoiling completely. Besides, I guessed the little twist a few pages in, and it didn't ruin it for me. All, or at least most of the spoilers are safely below the cut, however.
Young Prince Octavian has grown up in the lap of luxury. Surrounded by his strange nameless guardians, his every wish is attended to, his education handled with the utmost care by the finest tutors attainable. Yet something is off. A strange discontentment fills his elegant mother, and one of the servants whispers that he too has a name, and when Octavian ventures through a forbidden door, he finds out that the one thing his numbered guardians neglected to inform him in his education is that they own him.
( It is ever the lot of children to accept their circumstances as universal and their particularities as general. )
These historical novels, told from a perspective so radically different from most of what formal education exposes us (except occasionally by implication) was by turns thrilling and heartbreaking, and I can’t recommend them strongly enough.
Fish's Conscience: No no, you must resist.
YA Books: But you came in this time just for us!
Fish's Conscience: You have far more productive and scholarly things to do.
YA Books: But we never get to see you anymore.
Fish's Conscience: Don't lie! I see her sneaking down your way and stowing a few of you away each time she comes for school, don't you think I don't.
Fish: Shut up you. Books! My sweet YA fantasy, my darlings, how could I have strayed?
It's so wonderful to do something simply for the pleasure of it, entirely without guilt. High up on the reasons I would like to become a professional writer is that I could call reading my favorite books "market research.”
So, as such the entirety of my travel reading is brand new to me.
I've thought about it and thought about it, and I just don't see how I can write anything resembling a proper review of these two books without spoiling completely. Besides, I guessed the little twist a few pages in, and it didn't ruin it for me. All, or at least most of the spoilers are safely below the cut, however.
Young Prince Octavian has grown up in the lap of luxury. Surrounded by his strange nameless guardians, his every wish is attended to, his education handled with the utmost care by the finest tutors attainable. Yet something is off. A strange discontentment fills his elegant mother, and one of the servants whispers that he too has a name, and when Octavian ventures through a forbidden door, he finds out that the one thing his numbered guardians neglected to inform him in his education is that they own him.
( It is ever the lot of children to accept their circumstances as universal and their particularities as general. )
These historical novels, told from a perspective so radically different from most of what formal education exposes us (except occasionally by implication) was by turns thrilling and heartbreaking, and I can’t recommend them strongly enough.
