Book Review: The Poppy War

The Poppy War
Written by R. F. Kuang in 2018

Synopsis: In this grimdark historical fantasy based on conflicts between China and Japan, war orphan Rin sacrifices everything to earn her way into her nation’s most prestigious military school, her only shot at a better life. At Sinegard Academy, however, Rin is only ostracized further, forcing her to turn to an insane teacher and his esoteric practices if she hopes to stay enrolled and serve in the impending war. 

Review: I don’t mind mentioning in the synopsis that Rin gets accepted into Sinegard, because a protagonist’s success in this particular near-impossible challenge has become a trope. The skeleton of the first half of the book is all predictable, despite Rin’s challenges being presented as having an unknown outcome for her and the other characters. However, the flesh around these known plot beats is still well-written. And by the second half, the plot and its characters have grown out of their shells into something breathtakingly unique.

Rin, for example, doesn’t initially possess any talents beyond dedication, a quality shown to harm her as much as it helps. Starting with burning herself with wax to stay awake all night studying, Rin aggressively scrubs off the underdog hero that young readers (including me) dream we would be, to reveal a distinct person with serious flaws and choices I never expected.

It’s difficult to describe the rest of the book without spoiling anything, and both the plot and the fantasy element are made stronger for how they are steadily introduced—knowing them in advance would ruin the fun. Save to say, Kuang’s debut novel proves that, for a savvy author, there’s still new ground to tread in this wrung-out genre, and I’m excited to read the rest of the trilogy.

Strengths:

• Opium addiction is an interesting, respectfully treated background element throughout the novel.

• Two enemies end up fighting back-to-back against a truer enemy. Their relationship made me want this dynamic in every speculative fiction story from here on out.

Weaknesses:

• The mentor character is the most recent victim to a writing choice that’s bothered me a lot recently. The author starts out with absurd or surreal humor, then tries to use that character/element for a serious plot purpose. I always end up feeling a bit cheated and needing to forget earlier descriptions in order to stay engaged with later ones.

Rating: 19/20 prisoners of the Chuluu Korikh

Ideal Setting: Read this after a conversation about spirituality.

Book Review: Dune

Dune

Written by Frank Herbert in 1965

Synopsis: When House Atreides is tasked with governing the desert planet Arrakis, they walk into a trap. For the duke’s prescient son Paul, the move will test the limits of his training as he struggles against an uninhabitable environment and the nightmarish destiny that awaits him if he survives.

Review: Wow.

Dune’s narrative voice is third-person omniscient, meaning we get multiple characters’ thoughts in each chapter. This choice has fallen out of fashion recently, especially in stories with young protagonists. Herbert proves that, when done right, having more characters’ perspectives can be really rewarding in nonviolent climactic scenes, like the high-stakes negotiation at the end of the novel. In a story characterized by both backstabbing and deep loyalty, witnessing everyone’s thoughts as they carry out their independent actions made the book easier to follow and much more interesting.

Perhaps the best outcome of this choice is how much development we get in both Paul and his mother Jessica. Jessica is brilliant and strong, but it would be all too easy to sideline her in a chosen-one story. Herbert thankfully gives her just as much of the action, and it’s fascinating to see each character’s evolving view of the other as they face challenges together.

Zooming out, the worldbuilding in Dune is strong overall. The culture of the Fremen comes through clearly, the workings of the interstellar government are boiled down to just what readers need to follow the plot, and the worms are adorable. I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

Strengths:

• All the unique ideas that went into the Bene Gesserit. Individuals from this school can make people instinctively obey commands by speaking in the exact right tone/impersonation tailored to make that person listen, and the group as a whole has planted entire religions for distant future strategic advantages.

• The best way I can put this is that Paul earns his role as the main character. It’s not just that Herbert orders us to follow him; the author crafted a dynamic, magnetic character who’s super fun to watch.

Weaknesses:

• There was a weird, happy tonal shift in the appendices, and the cost of their awkwardness outweighs the benefit of the extra context they provide.

• The Baron is a caricature villain. His every appearance on the page is accompanied by another description of his obese ugliness and his gay pedophilia.

• This is a personal preference, but the line between natural skills/training and supernatural abilities should have been made clearer, because the increasing importance of the latter continually chipped away at all the awesome aspects of the former.

Rating: 19/20 names for one guy

Ideal Setting: Read this when you need another hero to look up to whose abilities you could theoretically learn to match.

 

Book Review: A Wizard of Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea

Written by Ursula K. Le Guin in 1968

Synopsis: The beginning of the saga of Ged, a young prodigy in a world where knowledge of the Old Speech gives wizards power over their environment and one’s true name is their most vulnerable secret. 

Review: Le Guin published this novel in 1968, and I worry that a lot of what I found dull here was original at the time and has since been done to death. The most off-putting example was a chapter about one year of Ged’s education at a renowned magic school. Students are sent to an isolated tower, with a professor who barely speaks except to deliver one profound quote and monitor the students’ assignments—they will spend the year memorizing tens of thousands of true names, a mind-numbingly dull task that will nonetheless make them almost instinctive experts. I still found this idea really cool, but it would’ve hit harder if I hadn’t previously read basically the same chapter in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, published in 2009.

So the correct interpretation ought to be that Earthsea has an inventive language-based magic system and an approach to wizard education that will tickle any Harry Potter fan. However, I wish I’d seen more of it. The narrator takes an overt storytelling stance at the beginning and end, and that telling-not-showing tone keeps insidiously cropping up throughout the book. Events also happen rather quickly, with climactic encounters taking no more than a handful of pages. A Wizard of Earthsea told me a worthwhile story from the rocking chair opposite mine, but other authors have encouraged me to hold fantasy to the standard of living these stories, while Le Guin was content to keep some distance.

Strengths:

• Ged is fighting against an evil that he himself is largely responsible for, which was refreshing in a high fantasy good vs. evil novel. This antagonist also had a very interesting nature that Le Guin utilized well.

• Sentient dragons are hard to mess up, but Le Guin nonetheless created a fun secondary antagonist with a unique voice.

Weaknesses:

• Though the novel lacks a love interest, the other archetypes for female characters are as well developed as you might expect from a ‘60s fantasy novel.

• A wizard transforming into an animal for the first time should not have enough mastery over his body to defeat real versions of that animal in combat.

Rating: 16/20 improvised boats

Ideal Setting: Read this just after you mistakenly get scared by a shadow.

Book Review: Children of Time

Children of Time

Written by Adrian Tchaikovsky in 2015

Synopsis: Children of Time tells two stories on a collision course, each spanning thousands of years and beginning long after Earth civilization destroyed itself. One follows the last of humanity, who have deciphered enough of their predecessors’ technology to launch an aging starship and now drift in and out of cryostasis as they search for a new home. The other follows a derailed terraforming experiment on a distant planet and generation after generation of the sentient life and civilization that has developed there.

Review: Befitting the title, the way Tchaikovsky plays with time in this book is masterful. The main human character we follow is woken for a couple days at a time between centuries-long sleeps, and the author beautifully captures his growing emotional ache and vertigo as he loses external markers of time, and his strained relationship with a confidant who is kept awake longer and steadily grows older than him. Planet-side, where everyone is living normal-length lives, each part of the book picks up with a new generation. While individual characters thus only survive for a few chapters, the next part gives three new characters the same names, treating them as continuations of the same archetypes—the main characters are each generation’s leader, its sharpest scientist, and its most talented second-class citizen. These unique time-jumps were fun to follow, and switching between the two stories at pivotal moments meant I was constantly kept in suspense.

Everything about life on the new planet Tchaikovsky invented is fascinating. The individual character and societal developments also feel authentic, meaning this novel might rope you in even if you’ve been burned too many times by hard sci-fi historical exposition. The human group too is given time to change. By the time these two civilizations began their inevitable conflict, far later in the book than I’d expected, I didn’t know who would win, nor who I wanted to.

Strengths:

• Dr. Avrana Kern. Both sets of characters are at the mercy of an entity whose dialogue is haunting.

• The commander isn’t a flat character hellbent on the triumph of industry or power for its own sake!

Weaknesses:

• After a certain point, I couldn’t understand or fully picture the ant computers. Admittedly, I have a similar upper limit on comprehending our computers.

• I’m sick of the epilogue trope where a child descended from and named after the main characters marvels at how the new society has worked itself out.

Rating: 18/20 orbits of the Messenger

Ideal Setting: Read this somewhere with minimal chance of encountering a spider.

Series Review: The Kyoshi Novels (Chronicles of the Avatar)

“The Rise of Kyoshi” and “The Shadow of Kyoshi”
Written by F.C. Yee in 2019

Synopsis: This “The Last Airbender” prequel duology* follows Aang’s past life, the Earth avatar Kyoshi, who learns of her identity much later than intended and finds herself in a reckless quest for survival and revenge.

Review: ATLA co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino has a foreword talking about his apprehensions with any spinoff and his personal requirements for an Avatar story. He signed off on Yee’s novels, and it quickly becomes clear why. The series drops readers back into a beloved world, complete with familiar bits like the hybrid animal species and innovative benders with unique signature moves, as well as brilliant scripting of minor characters to develop the main cast’s skills and worldviews as they work up to fighting the true antagonists. Yee’s writing also respectfully handles nostalgia, deprioritizing explicit references to the original series in favor of worldbuilding opportunities. In one memorable dialogue, we learn that Zuko’s obsession with honor in the show is a symptom of his culture as a whole. Kyoshi’s companion Rangi nearly says something that would give away Kyoshi’s identity in a dangerous situation, only to be cut off by someone fed up with hearing Fire nationals talk about their honor.

On the whole, Yee leans into worldbuilding in the places ATLA couldn’t. Plot points surrounding rival Fire Nation clans, a shrewd Earth minister, and ‘Fifth Nation’ pirates all flesh out the politics and culture of this world. This reflects the slightly older target audience of the series, and I was gripped by the dark turns and major twists in both books. Kyoshi’s coming into her own is radically different from Aang and Korra’s stories, and her legend is undoubtedly a worthwhile addition to the Avatar saga.

Strengths:

• We only meet one Airbender in each book, but they and their bison are wonderful.

• My long-standing question of “Can’t you use any element to make yourself fly?” has a satisfying answer.

• There are a dozen more entertaining moments and ideas I could list here.

Weaknesses: 

• Kyoshi’s closest companions don’t experience any development, and there is little to grasp at for any fans wanting more friend group antics.

Rating: 18/20 times Kyoshi is asked if she plays Pai Sho

Ideal Setting: Read this when it’s been too long since you tried moving the elements with your mind.

*The series is technically three books with a planned fourth, but the third begins an entirely new (well, older) story with Yangchen, and I was happy to stop here.

Book Review: Lies My Teacher Told Me

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Written by James W. Loewen in 1995; 3rd edition released in 2018

Synopsis: History and sociology professor James Loewen critically examined twelve of the most popular American history textbooks. He found their content to be oversimplified and nationalistic to the point of being inaccurate (and boring!), failing to present history as an ongoing debate relevant for students today. Half of Lies gives a full, nuanced treatment to major periods in American history, while the rest of the book shows how implicit and explicit cultural agendas have distorted history textbooks and why educational reform has proven so difficult.

Review: I concur with other reviewers that every American citizen age 18 and above should read this book.

Loewen follows my Goldberg Gold Standard of Arguments: He gives a fair treatment of multiple perspectives, then doesn’t just explain why he believes others are wrong but also how they’ve come to hold those positions. Lies is not just revisionist history with a leftist agenda. It’s a plea by a concerned teacher who’s watched a generation of students make it to college stuffed with memorized facts about the War of 1812 and no understanding of Vietnam, students who aren’t even properly taught about America’s strengths despite being aggressively shielded from its hypocrisies.

There are some obvious culprits. Loewen has acted on his values, writing a more accurate Mississippi textbook rather than just calling out others’ flaws, and he places the example of his book being shut down by the state’s school boards within a nationwide pattern of officials and parents explicitly fighting to keep history bright and white. But Loewen doesn’t point fingers so much as splay his hands at systemic issues.  In incisive, documentary-like chapters, he gives sobering statistics on overworked teachers who themselves didn’t study history in college, blatant plagiarism and fact-checking failures by publishers trying to turn a profit, historians who lend their name to the covers of textbooks they neither wrote nor reviewed, and self-censorship from all parties out of an outdated fear of appearing Marxist. The resulting history education is a bland folk tale that leaves many students, myself included, baffled when we learn anything real about other cultures and our own.

The actual history Loewen presents is fascinating, backed in nearly every sentence by primary and secondary sources. I would’ve loved in high school to hear the full story of Squanto, the helpful Indian from the Thanksgiving story. Most textbooks just say he learned English from fishermen; Loewen charts his course being sold into slavery in Spain, escaping to England, convincing colonists to bring him home, and then prudently casting his lot with the Pilgrims after finding that his entire village had been wiped out by smallpox in his absence. If that makes anyone defensive about a beloved American tradition, it’s also worth noting Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today was spearheaded by Lincoln to boost patriotism during the Civil War, relatively recently for a holiday about our founding. 

Lies makes clear that the history of our history is deeply important and relevant to navigating today’s challenges. Here is a history textbook that fills in the gaps we didn’t know we had and that teaches readers to think critically about how we interpret imperfect historical evidence, as my high school textbook should have.

Strength/Weakness: If your interest is just in learning accurate history and less in discussing education and historiography, you can skip Chapters 1, 12, and 13 and still get a full book. 

Rating: 20/20 interventions in Latin America

Ideal Setting: Read this.

Book Review: I Contain Multitudes

 I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Written by Ed Yong in 2016

Synopsis: Science journalist Ed Yong explores the monumental role of bacteria in human life and our ecosystems. He walks through the history of microbial science and our changing attitudes toward our omnipresent tiny companions, meets with a balanced variety of scientists across disciplines, and offers an altered perspective of life on Earth, where plants and animals evolved in an environment already chock-full of microbes and our existence has always been completely intertwined with theirs.

Review: Yong is an insightful and entertaining science writer (How to Tackle a Giraffe), and I picked up this book ⅔ for broad faith that he had written this for good reason, and ⅓ for interest in the subject matter, cultivated by some fun research on how microbial infections might affect our personalities. And overall, Yong did not disappoint.

The author’s explanations are clear, leaning into analogies enough to get across an image or point and usually not leaning too much further into anthropomorphization or poetic waxing. His profiles of scientists create memorable characters and anchors to follow. And while the content I was initially excited about didn’t come up in the sections I read, I was fascinated by and moved to care about plenty of other bacterial qualities and applications. There is simply some really cool stuff bacteria do, and if you’re even one part per million a science enthusiast, or you sometimes wonder what people are on about when they say gut bacteria affect your health, this is worth checking out.

But I didn’t finish I Contain Multitudes. I can’t really pinpoint anything wrong that turned me off from reading further—no anecdotes stretched too long, no blind, probiotic fanaticism. It’s just that no amount of quality writing is going to keep me, and probably most of you, invested in microbes for 92,000 words. Coming in as a Yong fan instead of a bacteria fan, I just felt about halfway through the book that I was done. I expect to come back to the rest within a couple years when I need another science fix. 

I won’t go so far as to say that Yong was ill-equipped to transition from short articles to a full-length book—though I do wish he had given the chapters more concrete names so that readers could jump to what excites them most. But since this book isn’t easy to read all at once, I hope that next time an author like him will consider making a website or series of articles as a better vessel to transmit their information.

Strengths:

• Coming off my last review—this book did a much better job of keeping the metaphors and puns in moderation.

Weaknesses:

• Yong wisely addresses that much of the research that has made headlines needs to be replicated or may have alternate explanations. Given that, some sections needed a longer disclaimer about whether a particular idea was well-established or still hotly debated.

Rating: 16/20 microballs*

Ideal Setting: Read this somewhere that will not cause you to be frightened when the book informs you that you are not alone.**

*“I want to call them bioballs,” he adds. “Or maybe microballs.” I tell him that he cannot call them microballs. He sniggers, proving my point.”

**Just a personal thought here: “You’re not alone” is either the scariest or most reassuring thing you can hear, depending on context.