boxofdelights

I picked this up because of the blurb that said it was a post-apocalyptic Persuasion. It is not.

Persuasion is about a romance between adults. Elliot and Kai, the characters who take the places of Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, are eighteen. That is, eighteen when the book begins, after Kai has made his fortune, when he returns to his childhood home to discover that the woman who refused him is still his one true love. They were fourteen when Elliot reneged on her promise to run away with him.

At first I thought Peterfreund might have de-aged them because modern sensibilities cannot respect a woman who allows herself to be persuaded away from her true love, but might be able to sympathize with a child in that position; but, as it turned out, there was no persuasion. Elliot made the intelligent, responsible decision not to run away entirely on her own.

So this is a romance about teenagers, with secrets, and failures to communicate, and high drama, and wrist-grabbing in anger, and no sense of proportion. If you can imagine a Jane Austen novel with no sense of proportion and no sense of humor, it might be like For Darkness Shows the Stars, but not at all like Jane Austen.

So, it isn't Jane Austen pastiche. It doesn't really work as science fiction either. It is not impossible to believe in a character who makes scientific breakthroughs with no training, no discovering a hundred ways that didn't work, and no standing on the shoulders of giants because the giants have all been razed. This book has three such characters, in three different fields. The world-building is more like set-dressing. Peterfreund's apocalypse has given her world plantation slavery without the guilt. The majority of the population, the Reduced, really are mentally inferior to the landowners, the Luddites: they can manage a few one-syllable words, some signs, and simple, repetitive tasks, and they are prone to self-harm when they are young, old, sick, or pregnant.

It is very well-written, for idfic.

Code Name Verity is included in a 20% off sale at Powells. Also, this weekend only, Powells has no minimum order for free shipping.

• What are you currently reading?

Pirate Cinema, by Cory Doctorow

• What did you recently finish reading?

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Quite satisfactory. What is up with that back cover though. Is Baen trying to coax back the weenies who are scared away by a woman's name on the cover? "Look, it's safe. We've got two women in underwear contorting themselves for your viewing pleasure, and a fully-dressed man using one of them as furniture!"

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Maybe Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, for my SF bookgroup on Thursday. But when I was checking the date I noticed another of the bookstore's bookgroups is discussing The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian on Sunday. Maybe I'll reread that.

I'm reading, or considering reading, a book called The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. In an AUTHOR'S NOTE, Preston says,

This book is narrative nonfiction. The characters are real and the events are factual, told to the best of my understanding. Passages in which I narrate a person's thoughts and feelings and present dialogue have been built from interviews with the subjects and witnesses, and have been fact-checked. So many incredible things happen in our world that are never noticed, so many stories never get told. My goal is to reveal people and realms that nobody had ever imagined.

Okay. A note about not revealing the exact location of rare plants. Three maps: the California coast and a bit of Australia. This is appealing. Then the narrative begins. October 1987. A baby-blue Honda Civic. The Oregon Coast Highway. A solid-looking young man gets out of the car. We get his description, his name, his college, his major. "He walked off to the side of the parking lot and unzipped his fly. There was a splashing sound."

...What? Is it important that Marwood stopped to urinate? And if you decide to mention it, why would you describe it so coyly?

Two more young men get out of the car. We get their descriptions, their names, their colleges. They are brothers. "Scott handed the binoculars to his younger brother, and their hands touched for an instant. The Sillett brothers' hands had the same appearance -- fine and sensitive-looking, with deft movements."

What. I don't think you are hinting at incest RPF but, seriously, what are you doing?

Boring stuff about the car. Okay! Almost two pages about coast redwoods! More boring stuff about the young men. I start flipping ahead. Really interesting illustrations. Too much text about shaving off eyebrows and having sex in hammocks. Somebody falling out of a tree and dying. Somebody falling out of a tree and being horribly damaged but not dying. All of these details about eyebrows and catheters seem as inconsequential as Marwood's splashing sound or the Sillett brothers' hands. They don't add up to anything. They're just details.

Is this narrative nonfiction a thing now? Is it a thing people like? Is this what nature writing has come to?