Wells, Ankaret - The Books of Requite
Tue, Dec. 11th, 2012 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceter(consists of The Maker's Mask and The Hawkwood War)
Tzenni Boccamera would like to rescue her sister Catha from the stronghold of the Kapellans, as the feud between Boccamera and Kapellan is legendary. Then things get incredibly complicated with the search for various missing Kapellans, a genderqueer bodyguard, dizzyingly complex politics, the involvement of more families, ancient technologies, secret orders, and a very detailed world. I am not entirely sure all of it makes sense to me in the end, but it's great fun to read even when I can't keep track of half of what's going on. My main gripe would be that there's enough content in here to make for a very fat trilogy, as opposed to the two relatively slim volumes there are.
These books have a lot of things I like. Tzenni is an engineering geek who is rather frustrated at being entangled in all these politics, and she is overwhelmingly practical until faced with an engineering problem, which of course requires her undevoted attention and brainspace no matter what else is going on. Innes Liang the bodyguard is made of ten kinds of awesome, and it is an epicon (genderqueer for the world, "it" seems to be its preferred pronoun) of great wit and sardocness, and its relationship with Tzenni is one of my favorites in the books. The books easily pass the Bechdel test, and there are a lot of very interesting women doing very interesting things, some of whom I like, some of whom I don't, and some of whom I am on the fence about. I particularly want to know more about the system of inheritance and families; marriages frequently consist of more than two people, heirs are chosen and named and can skip generations, and there's a huge injunction that two heirs or a Prime (like a ruler) and an heir should not marry.
The world is one of those populated by the descendents of space-faring peoples, with a mix of space fantasy and VR tech and telepathy or something, and although you get a bit of the world's backstory and how the various technologies were forgotten or recovered or lost, I actually wanted a lot more infodumping than I got. The dialogue is witty and fun, and the pace is breakneck. I did have a bit of trouble following the many, many plot twists, though never enough to keep me from enjoying the book. I feel a bit odd in that I can't quite summarize the plot of the book because I'm still not quite sure what exactly it was, because there was so much of it.
I do wish one of the primary villains weren't an epicon, particularly given his/her branch of villainy, but overall I like the gender and sexuality bits of the world a lot. Other requests I guess would be more central non-het relationships, and more of Innes Liang in general.
But yes. One could have worse complaints than "More please!" (Dear Ankaret Wells, I really hope there is going to be more set on Requite, because I like it a lot so far and would read many many more pages about it, even without the current characters. And I very much want more of the current characters too.)
Thanks tocoffeeandink for the rec!
Tzenni Boccamera would like to rescue her sister Catha from the stronghold of the Kapellans, as the feud between Boccamera and Kapellan is legendary. Then things get incredibly complicated with the search for various missing Kapellans, a genderqueer bodyguard, dizzyingly complex politics, the involvement of more families, ancient technologies, secret orders, and a very detailed world. I am not entirely sure all of it makes sense to me in the end, but it's great fun to read even when I can't keep track of half of what's going on. My main gripe would be that there's enough content in here to make for a very fat trilogy, as opposed to the two relatively slim volumes there are.
These books have a lot of things I like. Tzenni is an engineering geek who is rather frustrated at being entangled in all these politics, and she is overwhelmingly practical until faced with an engineering problem, which of course requires her undevoted attention and brainspace no matter what else is going on. Innes Liang the bodyguard is made of ten kinds of awesome, and it is an epicon (genderqueer for the world, "it" seems to be its preferred pronoun) of great wit and sardocness, and its relationship with Tzenni is one of my favorites in the books. The books easily pass the Bechdel test, and there are a lot of very interesting women doing very interesting things, some of whom I like, some of whom I don't, and some of whom I am on the fence about. I particularly want to know more about the system of inheritance and families; marriages frequently consist of more than two people, heirs are chosen and named and can skip generations, and there's a huge injunction that two heirs or a Prime (like a ruler) and an heir should not marry.
The world is one of those populated by the descendents of space-faring peoples, with a mix of space fantasy and VR tech and telepathy or something, and although you get a bit of the world's backstory and how the various technologies were forgotten or recovered or lost, I actually wanted a lot more infodumping than I got. The dialogue is witty and fun, and the pace is breakneck. I did have a bit of trouble following the many, many plot twists, though never enough to keep me from enjoying the book. I feel a bit odd in that I can't quite summarize the plot of the book because I'm still not quite sure what exactly it was, because there was so much of it.
I do wish one of the primary villains weren't an epicon, particularly given his/her branch of villainy, but overall I like the gender and sexuality bits of the world a lot. Other requests I guess would be more central non-het relationships, and more of Innes Liang in general.
But yes. One could have worse complaints than "More please!" (Dear Ankaret Wells, I really hope there is going to be more set on Requite, because I like it a lot so far and would read many many more pages about it, even without the current characters. And I very much want more of the current characters too.)
Thanks to
coffeeandink for the rec!Tags:
(no subject)
Wed, Dec. 12th, 2012 06:18 pm (UTC)