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defrogNo, truly, I am. See?
The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le GuinMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Continuing my exploration of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, this 1980 novel gets compared to C.S. Lewis' Narnia and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, though the only similarity I can see is average young people finding access to a parallel world where time behaves differently. In this case, the parallel world is the idyllic woodland of Tembreabrezi, where it is always twilight and people live simple, peaceful lives. Or at least they did. But fear has gripped the land, and the people of Mountain Town find the paths are closing and they cannot leave.
The story kicks off with Hugh Rogers, a grocery clerk who lives with his mom and accidentally stumbles across a gateway to Tembreabrezi. After discovering that a day in Tembreabrezi is a minute here, he starts making frequent camping trips at the 'beginning place' by a river, feeling more at home there than in the real world. Inevitably, he meets Irena, a girl who has been coming to Tembreabrezi for years, and sees Hugh as an unwelcome interloper. But to her annoyance, the people of Mountain Town believe he may be the key to helping Tembreabrezi overcome its mysterious fear.
To be honest, I didn’t really connect with this one. I felt that Tembreabrezi was too underdeveloped as both a location and as a conceptual sanctuary for Hugh and Irena. Similarly, the eventual reveal of the source of the fear felt underwhelming. I’m told that it’s all meant to be Jungian metaphors and symbols – i.e. Tembreabrezi is more of a state of mind than a physical place, and Le Guin deliberately doesn’t explain anything so that you can puzzle over it. Well, okay, and I don’t think that authors have to spell everything out for you or get into the kind of hyperdetailed worldbuilding you get with Tolkien or George RR Martin, say. But if that’s what Le Guin was going for here, it was lost on a simple rube like me, for which I take full responsibility.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky ChambersMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is my second time reading Becky Chambers after starting with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built. This is her debut novel that, somewhat famously, she funded via Kickstarter and self-published, after which it got the attention of book publishers. It’s ostensibly a space opera set in the Galactic Commons, following the adventures of the crew of the Wayfarer, a galactic tunneling ship whose job is to create wormhole pathways enabling the various members of the GC to zip around space more quickly.
The story starts off with Rosemary Harper, a resident of Mars who joins the Wayfarer as a clerk, just as the ship gets a really big job – building a wormhole to connect Central Space with a distant planet now controlled by an unpredictable alien race called the Toremi whose clans are constantly embroiled in civil wars. Rosemary has a secret she doesn’t want anyone to learn. However, her plotline is just one of several, as just about everyone else in the crew (including the ship’s AI) gets a subplot, often having to do with personal relationships or family secrets. In fact, the book is mainly about that, rather than the actual job they’ve just accepted (which doesn’t even happen until around 200 pages into the story).
Indeed, Chambers spends most of the book building up the characters and their respective alien cultures, and exploring issues like alien sex, gender fluidity and multiculturalism that a universe populated by alien races would likely exhibit, and which most space operas tend to sidestep – so, points for that. On the downside, Chambers also populates the Wayfarer with characters that (with one exception) get along really well and are very kind-hearted, supportive and understanding of each other’s problems. Which is nice, I guess, but maybe a little too emo for me. Chambers took a similar charming, cosy approach to A Psalm for the Wild-Built, but that worked better for me – maybe because I find it more believable between two main characters rather than nine. I will say the final act is pure page-turning adrenaline and worth the price of admission, even if we have to take the long way to get to it. But then maybe that’s the point?
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