Tag: historical

J’s Take on A Spy in the House by Y. S. Lee

A Spy in the House coverThe basic premise of A Spy in the House is that it’s er.. Victorian? London and this girl is plucked from prison where she’s about to be hanged for theft, and brought to a school. Where she learns, not how to be a proper lady, but how to think for herself. Not that she needed much help there. But she also learns maths and things. Only learning and then teaching at the school isn’t enough, and she asks if there isn’t more. And there is. There’s the Agency, which is a private company of spies. Female spies.

Unfortunately, we don’t get to see the school at ALL. Unless you count the headmistresses’ (or whoever they are) study, or room, or office (whatever it is). Four or five years go by between the introduction and the first chapter, and suddenly she’s 17 and ready to go do spy stuff. We don’t even get to see any of her super-intensive super-secret spy training!

But, that’s okay, because she was so super-awesome that she could do it super-intensively and not the long way. And maybe I wouldn’t have twigged ‘Mary Sue!’ if it hadn’t been so recently after my discussion with K about Babel-17. But I’m calling it on this one. Total Mary Sue.

So, yea, okay, the school sounds mostly normal and boring. But it was new to her and I really, really, really would’ve liked to have seen some of it. So, at this point I’m already rather annoyed. I’m more annoyed when she passes their spy wannabe test with super-awesome flying colors. I then get further annoyed when several chapters in, we randomly get a chapter from some guy’s point of view.

It’s around about this time that I start feeling it’s a historical romance novel disguised as a YA adventure-intrigue-mystery novel. Grr.

My annoyance escalates when, in the first scene where the main character (Er.. name name.. what was her name…? Mary Quinn? Ha ha! It totally was. Okay.) The first scene where Mary Sue Quinn and Hunky McDreamy are together, the point of view completely breaks down. Utter failure. It was his point of view, but then we get one of her thoughts. And that’s not a fluke. Because the entwined confusing points of view recur every time they’re later in a scene together.

So now I’m just ready for this book to be over with so I can write my review full of annoyance about it. But I’m not even halfway through. Fortunately it’s not a slog. And it’s not a long read. It’s just not a particularly interesting one either.

Then, ladies and gentlebeings of other genders, then we learn something about Mary Sue’s past that she knew all along. No, dude. No. You don’t get to hide something that important from us. If it was first person, sure. But it’s third person and we’re inside her head. The author should not be keeping that sort of secret from us. It’s just wrong.

And, yes, it does make the whole story a little more interesting from that point on, but I’m still beyond annoyed and into mad now. And while I’m reading, in the back of my mind I’m thinking.. if I say this in my review, is it a spoiler? When I firmly believe it should have been revealed in the first chapter? Hrrrm. Am I complicit in hiding it from other readers by not mentioning it? Well.. now you’re warned at least. And if you care to know, probably the second book in the series says it right in the summary.

So the next thing that happens is Mary Sue Q does the unforgiveable. She receives some deeply important information about her past. And she doesn’t read it. And she doesn’t take it with her. Why? I have no idea. You’d think she’d have plenty of hiding places in her dress. It’s not like it’s a steamy romance novel and McDreamy was going to rip it off of her in the next scene.

So, la la la.. plot, bickering, plot, flirting, plot, standard dialog you’d find from two love interests who don’t get along at first, maybe plot or something. And then it’s all over. The end.

Except it’s not. Because there are loose ends.

But there’s no way I’m reading the next book to see if they’re tied up!

And now I feel remorse. I feel I was too harsh on it. So let me soften the blow at the end here. It does try to say some things about gender. Women can be spies. Women make good spies, even. Women can be political and business minded. Women can be bad guys too. And Victorian London kind of sucked. Especially with the smelly Thames.

I really do like the cover. Kudos to the publisher on that. It’s subtle (to my eyes), but there.

And, I don’t know, maybe the series improves. But there’s not enough in this book to compel me to brave it.

—

Fun Fact: The first paragraph involves urine. Nice way to get teen girls to just jump into your story, isn’t it?

Share

A Spy in the House (Y.S. Lee)

The Plot

The orphaned Mary Lang’s nascent crime spree was halted abruptly when she was caught in the act. Sentenced to hang for her behavior, the twelve year old was instead spirited away to Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls and educated to the point where she could make an independent living for herself by non-illegal means. Now aged seventeen and going by the name of Mary Quinn, she finds herself asked to join a group associated with the school: The Agency. An intelligence gathering operation, The Agency might be able to provide Mary with the sort of purposeful and stimulating life she craves. She soon finds herself sent out on her very first assignment, to report upon the suspected criminal activity of Henry Thorold while posing as the paid companion of his daughter Angelica.

My Thoughts
We’re first introduced to Mary Lang at the tender age of twelve, as she stands in the dock to hear her sentence of death by hanging. Mary, orphaned after the death of her mother and the disappearance (and supposed death) of her father, has been scraping by Oliver Twist-style by means of petty thievery. She was caught after graduating to housebreaking and her short career – and life – seems to be at an end. But that would be a very short book indeed, so instead Mary finds herself abducted from the prison yard and given the opportunity to attend Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls.

The Academy is a place for girls of all stripes and backgrounds to gain the education with which to make their own way in the world. Not that there are many ways to make it as a woman in Victorian society. The story leaps past Mary’s school years in order to focus on a potential answer to this dilemma: how can a clever and educated woman with no background or influence make a real contribution to the world? In Mary’s case, opportunity presents itself in the form of an invitation to join “The Agency”, a sort of shadow companion institution to the school. The Agency, an intelligence gathering organization staffed by women, has managed to find itself a niche market by where it provides otherwise unobtainable information to the likes of Scotland Yard. Mary is eager to prove herself a top prospect as an agent, and after a brief period of training, she is sent out on her very first assignment.

After swiftly setting up the scene, it’s here in this middle section where the book bogs down a bit. Mary is hired by the Thorold family as the paid companion to their eighteen year old daughter Angelica. Mary’s been given little direction in her real assignment, which is to observe and report upon the household, in particular upon Henry Thorold (Angelica’s father), who is suspected of being a smuggler. Another agent, unseen and unnamed, has the primary responsibility for this case, and Mary’s task is just to provide supplemental information and evidence. Mary, barely trained and very inexperienced, flounders around uncertainly, unable to figure out what she’s supposed to do next. And while this is extremely realistic, this was definitely the least interesting portion of the book and at times I found myself really pushing to keep my attention focused.

Fortunately, the pace picks up again once Mary grows impatient do be doing something – anything! – and begins to make more active efforts to investigate. Though the sequence of events which leads to the climax and ultimate conclusion strain credulity a little, it’s still an enjoyable ride. Mary stays true to her character throughout and never ends up shunted aside even in the final act.

Though Mary’s assignment is resolved by the end of the book, there are quite a few plot threads left dangling unanswered. Not to mention a villain I’ll be very disappointed with if no further activity from them is seen. In other words, it’s clearly not the end of the story, just a good place to pause.

In Short
Y.S. Lee’s A Spy in the House manages to create a realistic and realistically flawed heroine in the character of Mary Quinn. The book itself isn’t perfect – the middle chapters were less engaging than the beginning and the end – but the pace was good and on top of the plot it managed to say a lot about the condition of women in Victorian England without going out of its way to be preachy (or teachy). I’ll definitely be picking up the rest of this series.

Share

Botchan (Natsume Soseki)

Botchan coverThe Plot
The younger son of a relatively middle class family in Meiji era Japan, the narrator of Botchan advances through life with a reckless attitude and next to no thought at all for his future prospects. We follow him through his days as a troublemaking child, the favorite of no one but the family’s servant, Kiyo, through the end of his first job — an ill-fated stint as a mathematics teacher at a small boys’ school out in the countryside. Botchan consistently baffles and astonishes everyone he meets with his lack of interest in political machinations and his unmeasured responses to social norms.

My Thoughts
We begin the book with a sketch of the narrator’s childhood. He grows up with parents who show little affection toward him, who favor his older brother to a very great extent. As a consequence, the family maid, Kiyo, determines to prefer him in all things and attribute to him any number of positive traits which he doesn’t really possess.

The narrator’s mother dies when he’s quite young, and then his father passes away when he’s a teenager. He receives a legacy (courtesy of his brother) after his father’s death, and decides the best course of action will be to spend it upon some sort of schooling. But nothing that requires too much ambition and effort to attain. So he spends three years at a school of the physical sciences, and eventually emerges with enough of a resume to secure himself a position as a math teacher at a boys’ school some distance from Tokyo.

We follow his adventures at the school for the remainder of the book. Like any sort of place of work, there are cliques and petty bickering, and Botchan has no interest at all in attempting to become involved: in fact, while he can sometimes make out the self-serving motivations of others, such backhandedness baffles and infuriates him. Understandably, his tenure at the school turns very rocky as a result.

The original Japanese text of Botchan is now out of copyright, and it’s old enough that even a translation of it is available for free on the Project Gutenberg website. I began my read-through using that translation. Or perhaps I should say transliteration, because there is a difference. As most everyone knows, translating something is a difficult business, particularly when the languages involved are very different from one another. The translator must constantly make decisions about whether to attempt to convey the meaning of a statement rather than a literal translation of the words, since often the latter winds up sounding stilted and awkward. The best translators make the process seem easy, even obvious — of course that’s how you would render that phrase in English! Those less skilled can leave the reader scratching their head, trying to puzzle out what a sentence was actually trying to say.

The translation from Project Gutenberg, unfortunately, swung more toward the ‘less skilled’ side. The rhythm of the sentences was just off somehow, still foreign, and it was very tiring to read. Halfway through I switched to a newer translation which improved things somewhat, though it also resulted in confusion, as the names given to several characters changed abruptly halfway through. (The book, narrated in first person, refers to many characters almost exclusively by nickname.)

It might have been the tough translation or it might not have, but I failed to achieve any sort of connection with the characters in the book. Most of them were not particularly sympathetic, or developed enough for sympathy to be worthwhile. Botchan himself was a slippery character to me. Even though the book is told in the first person, he’s not particularly introspective or thoughtful, so most of what we see are his instinctive reactions to what others are doing and his outrage when they fail to conform to his expectations. I got the impression that we were supposed to find him refreshing, a breath of fresh air, admirable because he was above the sort of infighting and scheming of the others. But he just came off as a thoughtless jerk to me, no better than any of the others. The only unambiguously ‘good’ character in the book is Kiyo, and even she has her own fault of blind (very blind!) loyalty to Botchan.

In Short
I find myself with an ambivalent feeling toward this book even now, some weeks after I finished reading it. I’m glad I read it – because it’s a classic, and from another culture, and has thus somehow expanded my mind by the mere fact of my reading. But was it actually good? I don’t know if I could go that far. I didn’t find it especially amusing or dramatic or endearing. I never felt connected to any of the characters. I may, however, attempt to have a look at the anime rendering of the story to see if it improves my opinion of the content.

Share

Rurouni Kenshin 1-6 by Nobuhiro Watsuki: B+

It feels like I last read Rurouni Kenshin eons ago, even though it’s only been five years since the US edition came to an end. The siren call of a potential reread has been increasing in volume lately and finally, I could take it no more. Joined by my friend and fellow Kenshin fan, K, I’m yielding to temptation and diving back in! Over the course of the next month or so, I’ll be reviewing the entire series, starting with the individual volumes and finishing up with the final VIZBIG edition, which contains some bonus material not included in the series’ original run. You can find an archive of both K’s and my Kenshin posts at Triple Take.

To summarize the general premise, during the Bakumatsu era a skilled young swordsman named Himura Kenshin fought on the side of the ishin shishi (pro-Emperor) patriots and earned the nickname hitokiri battōsai (essentially: a manslayer who has mastered the art of battōjutsu) before vanishing and becoming a figure of legend. While many of the ishin shishi eventually took up powerful positions in the new Meiji government, Kenshin was not interested in profiting thus from his actions, since he had fought only with the aim of providing a more peaceful future for Japan’s people. Instead, he becomes an unassuming rurouni (wandering samurai) and wields his sakabatō (a reverse-blade katana nearly incapable of killing) on behalf of those needing his help.

Before commencing this reread, my recollection was that Rurouni Kenshin gets good in volume seven, when one of Kenshin’s old enemies (the awesome Saitō Hajime from the pro-Shogunate Shinsengumi) pays him a visit. It turns out, though, that that’s not exactly true, since the first two volumes are very good.

The story begins in Tokyo during the eleventh year of the Meiji era (1879 or thereabouts). As he travels through the city, Kenshin is accosted by Kamiya Kaoru, the feisty instructor of Kamiya Kasshin-ryÅ« (a school of swordsmanship that emphasizes non-lethal techniques), who is searching for the murderer who has tarnished the name of her school (and driven away its students) by claiming to be one of its devotees. Kenshin helps out, since this fellow is also claiming to be the hitokiri battōsai, and during the course of events, Kaoru discovers some of his violent past. Still, she asks him to stay, saying, “I don’t care who you used to be!” He agrees to stay put a while and moves into the dojo.

Like any good shounen series, our hero needs a band of friends, so volume two sets about fulfilling that requirement. The first addition to the cast is Myōjin Yahiko, an orphaned boy of samurai lineage who has been forced to steal in order to survive. He becomes Kaoru’s first student, and though somewhat obnoxious at first, he matures a lot in a short time, especially after he gets confirmation that all the training is paying off. Next is Sagara Sanosuke, “the fight merchant,” who was once a member of a civilian army that was betrayed by the ishin shishi. He has been hired to fight Kenshin, but realizes the rurouni is different from the other, corrupt patriots and ends up becoming his right-hand man.

In addition, much is made during these first two volumes about the Meiji government not delivering on many of its promises. Watsuki also works on building the relationship between Kenshin and Kaoru, showing the former contentedly helping out with the chores and the latter putting herself at risk when Kenshin is challenged by another former hitokiri simply because she’d rather be in danger than be alone again. It’s significant that when the battle triggers Kenshin’s battōsai mode, Kaoru is the one who prevents him from killing his opponent, for which Kenshin is profoundly grateful.

Volumes three and four are not quite as good, but close. I just can’t summon much interest in Takani Megumi, a woman from a long line of doctors who was coerced into making opium for a greedy industrialist, and she frustrates me by attempting to take her own life after Kenshin and Sanosuke have weathered some tough fights attempting to rescue her. Still, the introduction of Shinomori Aoshi, a former guard of Edo castle who is bitter about not seeing any fighting during the war, is significant, and the fates of his less-able-to-move-on-with-their-lives companions are compelling.

Where the story really sags, though, is in volumes five and six. Watsuki’s sidebars are full of comments like he can’t believe the series is still ongoing, how much work it is, and how certain stories were written “during a period of extreme exhaustion.” I must say that it shows. First, Yahiko defends a young girl named Tsubame against some dudes who are making her an accomplice to a burglary. Then a swordsman tries to recruit Kenshin to the cause of reviving a more lethal version of “the Japanese art of swords.” Lastly, Sano encounters a former comrade from his army days and must decide whether to participate in his anti-government plans. Zzz. Volume six, in particular, was a bit of a slog to get through.

Artistically, Watsuki’s style is attractive, featuring quite a few bishounen characters (somewhat to his apparent dismay, this results in a lot of female fans) as well as bizarre-looking ones. It takes a few volumes for the characters’ looks to settle down, and sometimes the metamorphosis is even faster (Aoshi looks a good bit different even just two chapters after his original appearance, though he’s still immediately recognizable.) One thing I find slightly weird is how often Watsuki openly admits to borrowing character designs from other sources (though in at least one case he specifies that he had the original artist’s permission to do so). Tsubame, for example, appears to be an exact replica of Tomoe Hotaru from Sailor Moon.

So, to sum up… Kenshin starts strong, but gradually falters, culminating in the rather boring volumes five and six. Take heart, though, because if memory serves, volume seven is truly fabulous, and sets off the Kyoto arc, which most Kenshin fans will probably name as their favorite part of the series. I’ll be reviewing the first half of it next time, so watch this space!

Share

Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh (R.L. LaFevers)


The Plot
At the end of the last book, Theodosia set out with her mother to Egypt. Their avowed purpose was to search for the temple of Thutmose III, but Theodosia had a secret mission of her own: to return the Emerald Tablet to the secret wedjadeen before the Serpents of Chaos could get their hands on it. She soon manages to make contact with the wedjadeen, but not before she discovers Chaos is on her trail.

My Thoughts
Far from the flying visit to Egypt which encompassed the last couple of chapters of Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos, Egypt is the main setting for this book. Theodosia and her mother have set out on an archaeological expedition to discover the temple of Thutmose III before someone else can locate and get the credit for it. In addition to this, Theo has brought along some of the powerful Egyptian artifacts she’s come into possession of through the course of the series, with the intention of returning them to their rightful guardians.

The journey into Egypt is full of period detail, most of which seems reasonably historically accurate based on my own limited knowledge of Egyptian-British history and some quick internet research. Theodosia finds herself in the midst of some political unrest, with the Egyptian Nationalist party protesting and agitating for the British colonial rule to end. This is of limited interest to her, as her own tasks occupy her thoughts and provide her with plenty to worry about.

Because Theo’s mother is not ‘in the know’ with respect to her involvement with various secret societies and ancient magics, the book’s plot develops along parallel lines even moreso than in previous installments, where Theo’s time with her parents was more incidental. So part of the time we spend with Mrs. Throckmorton on the “dig”. Her lack of interest in following any sort of procedure or, apparently, any archaeological methods is rather more Tomb Raider than not — not atypical for the period, not unforeshadowed, but surprising to the reader and also to Theodosia herself. This is also the first time we really see Theodosia spend any extended time with one of her parents, and I was left with an uneasy feeling from the interactions with her mother.

But that may just be par for the course: I get an uneasy feeling when Theodosia deals with almost any adult in this series, including her parents, something which continues through this volume. Whether or not this is purposeful on the part of LaFevers I’m not sure, but the only adult character I’ve been able to accept at face value is Theodosia’s grandmother. All the others seem to have their own hidden agenda with the potential of turning out to be traitorous evildoers at any moment.

Her child-companions do not present this problem, and Theo acquires a new one very early on in this book, the Egyptian donkey boy Gadji whom she ‘hires’ as a servant. I admit that I spent the first third of the book bracing myself for either Theo’s brother or her street-urchin friend Sticky Will to pop out of nowhere and it was a relief when they did not. Gadji is necessarily less developed than either of those two boys, but his arrival is handled well and his participation is not heavy handed.

The book does an excellent job in forwarding the ongoing plot with new revelations and clues while also providing a story which wraps up by the final chapter. I certainly wouldn’t recommend jumping into the series on this book, but the point is you probably could. There are also quite a few nice little bits sprinkled in (Habiba, for one — I could have stood to see more of her) and one or two things that I thought could have used more explanation (the wedjadeen’s insistence upon a male pharaoh — since we know there is precedent otherwise). But overall it was a strong installment; the decision to change the setting was wise, as the middle of a continuing series can bog down and this kept things from feeling stale.

In Short
As we become more embroiled in the ongoing plot, the Theodosia series continues to improve from its so-so beginnings. This entry in the series shifts its setting from London to Egypt, meaning that a number of recurring characters do not appear — a wise choice on the part of LaFevers, who resisted what must have been a real temptation to have one or two of them pop up to lend a hand. It’s unclear if the new characters introduced here will have a continuing role in the series, but they were interesting enough that I can hope for their return. We also get a more revealing glimpse of Theodosia’s mother, which felt as if it might be setting up for conflict later on. The introduction of new players in the game and the new setting helps build this volume to a satisfying conclusion while still driving the whole of the series toward a climax that feels as if it must come relatively soon.

eARC was provided by netGalley. Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh will be available in April, 2011.

Share