"I don't know; maybe this was on the sand already, and something else fell on my head." Bare Bear winked her one glass eye at me. So long I hadn't seen her. "A leaf from out a sea grape tree, something like that. Right, Bare Bear?" I hugged Lucky Bare Bear to my chest. I grinned at Hector. "She get small over the years, or I get big." She still fit in her old place, up against my breastbone.
Book Review: The New Moon’s Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson. Of all the novels I’ve read, this one falls much closer to the bottom of the list than the top. I'd call it mediocre, in fact. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is neat and swimming in myth (pun intended). I dig her whole take on selkies, and the way she integrates Caribbean folklore. However, I don’t dig the way she brings up characters and/or plot elements and continually lets them fall by. I just now realize that she was probably trying to cram too much into one novel. Either that or, as she was writing, she forgot what she’d already written and forgot about the various things she brought up earlier but never did anything/much with. The weird thing is, she’s an award-winning writer, and this is her fourth novel. Oi. Well, more power to her, I guess. This book wasn’t quite bad enough to set aside, but I’ve definitely seen better storytelling. I wonder if she was getting lazy by the time she got to this one.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
New Moon's Arms
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I'm finishing up a post to my own blog right now which ends up talking about how I handled the plot threads in The New Moon's Arms. That's what gave me the impulse to respond to this post of yours which I'd read a few weeks(?) ago. The New Moon's Arms wasn't much your cup of tea, I gather. :) So I really appreciate your reading it through and taking the time to think and talk about how it struck you. I'm pretty sure I haven't gotten lazy. I still have too many days in a row where I don't know where the next meal is coming from and every phone call is from unhappy creditors; on a practical level, I can't afford to get lazy. But more important than the financial stuff, which just goes with the territory, is the brain chemistry zing. If I don't give my mind interesting things to chew on from something I'm writing, I am unable to keep writing it. If I don't work at it, then I can't work at all. So I wasn't coasting. I was trying some new things. A more straightforward narrative, for instance. A through-line of humour. A protagonist whose challenges are not life and death, just life. How to bring out political issues when the protagonist isn't so concerned with them. And fiddling with the balance between spelling it all out versus leaving the reader with more ambiguity on which to chew. Every story is a bit of an experiment. The reactions to NMA are ranging from yours to "It's the best thing she's ever written!" With the previous book, the range was more like "wtf??!!" to "It's the best thing she's ever written!" If I had to generalise, I'd say that the people who were wtf??!! on The Salt Roads are more likely to enjoy The New Moon's Arms, and vice versa. With many exceptions, just to keep me guessing. But, hell, if human beings were uncomplicated animals, then we'd probably never have created fiction, and I'd be out of work!
BTW: I giggled when I read you wondering whether I'd forgotten those plot threads. I check and triple check. And were I to blank on a plot thread, which I generally don't do, my editor has a hawk's eyes, and she'd ask me about it as I went into rewrites.
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