Reading roundup
Apr. 1st, 2022 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartJuliet E. McKenna - The Green Man's Heir. Basically, urban fantasy in a rural setting. The novel started off looking like it was going to be a supernatural police procedural, with the hero (the son of a dryad and a human man, and therefore possessed of some supernatural abilities and able to see and speak to fey creatures) stumbling into a crime scene and trying to bring the killer to justice while avoiding the police's suspicions, but wrapped that storyline up about halfway through; it felt a bit like two linked novellas rather than one novel. I definitely enjoyed it, though, and will read the rest of the series.
Liz Williams - Comet Weather. I absolutely loved this fantasy novel about four sisters who grew up in a house full of ghosts and star spirits coming back together to search for their missing mother. It felt like a grown-up version of the children's fantasy novels I grew up with - The Children of Green Knowe, Narnia, and others, as well as a generous helping of Pratchett's Lords and Ladies - with its own engaging characters and wonderful sense of place.
Victoria Whitworth - Swimming with Seals. A lovely book, structured around a sea-swim off the coast of Orkney and punctuated by Facebook updates describing other swims, part memoir, part history, part nature writing, part meditation on life and faith. Less swimming than I had expected but I enjoyed it very much nevertheless.
Alan Garner - Treacle Walker. It's hard to find the words to describe Garner's latest novel. Treacle Walker is poetic, absorbing, profound in places and extremely funny in others. On the surface it seems slight - the story of an encounter between a young boy recuperating from an illness and a mysterious rag-and-bone man - but its depths go down for miles, and I don't think a single reading got me even halfway down; I was so wrapped up in the glorious way Garner uses words that I don't think I had much space for plot. Absolutely wonderful.
Daisy Johnson - Everything Under. A watery, elliptical book, telling the story of a mother and daughter who have been estranged for many years, with lots of shifting times and points of view. The mythical underpinnings were perhaps more obvious than they were meant to be, and I'd forgotten just how bleak litfic can be, but I still found it hauntingly original.
Seanan McGuire - Beneath the Sugar Sky. The third in the Wayward Children series, about what happens to the children who travel to other worlds in fantasy when they return. As always, the series is really strong on acceptance and diversity, but I found this one just a bit too whimsical for me.
Rainbow Rowell - Fangirl. The protagonist of this YA novel, Cath, writes fanfiction for a fictional book series which is clearly basically Harry Potter; Fangirl is about her first year at university, and how she adapts. I found this a really compelling read, and it was quite sweet, but I didn't love it; the plotting felt a bit too pat, sometimes, and often the characters' various Issues felt a bit shoehorned in to be convenient. (And in a novel set in 2011, why the hell did one character clearly have undiagnosed dyslexia?)
Liz Williams - Comet Weather. I absolutely loved this fantasy novel about four sisters who grew up in a house full of ghosts and star spirits coming back together to search for their missing mother. It felt like a grown-up version of the children's fantasy novels I grew up with - The Children of Green Knowe, Narnia, and others, as well as a generous helping of Pratchett's Lords and Ladies - with its own engaging characters and wonderful sense of place.
Victoria Whitworth - Swimming with Seals. A lovely book, structured around a sea-swim off the coast of Orkney and punctuated by Facebook updates describing other swims, part memoir, part history, part nature writing, part meditation on life and faith. Less swimming than I had expected but I enjoyed it very much nevertheless.
Alan Garner - Treacle Walker. It's hard to find the words to describe Garner's latest novel. Treacle Walker is poetic, absorbing, profound in places and extremely funny in others. On the surface it seems slight - the story of an encounter between a young boy recuperating from an illness and a mysterious rag-and-bone man - but its depths go down for miles, and I don't think a single reading got me even halfway down; I was so wrapped up in the glorious way Garner uses words that I don't think I had much space for plot. Absolutely wonderful.
Daisy Johnson - Everything Under. A watery, elliptical book, telling the story of a mother and daughter who have been estranged for many years, with lots of shifting times and points of view. The mythical underpinnings were perhaps more obvious than they were meant to be, and I'd forgotten just how bleak litfic can be, but I still found it hauntingly original.
Seanan McGuire - Beneath the Sugar Sky. The third in the Wayward Children series, about what happens to the children who travel to other worlds in fantasy when they return. As always, the series is really strong on acceptance and diversity, but I found this one just a bit too whimsical for me.
Rainbow Rowell - Fangirl. The protagonist of this YA novel, Cath, writes fanfiction for a fictional book series which is clearly basically Harry Potter; Fangirl is about her first year at university, and how she adapts. I found this a really compelling read, and it was quite sweet, but I didn't love it; the plotting felt a bit too pat, sometimes, and often the characters' various Issues felt a bit shoehorned in to be convenient. (And in a novel set in 2011, why the hell did one character clearly have undiagnosed dyslexia?)
no subject
Date: 2022-04-02 08:15 am (UTC)American schools are supposed to diagnose kids with learning disabilities. They are extremely resistant to doing so if that means they'll actually have to remediate, consequently, it can be nearly impossible to get a dyslexia diagnosis unless you go private, which is super spendy. American public schools will do almost anything to wiggle out of this, up to and including flat-out denying that dyslexia even exists, because once your child is diagnosed they (theoretically) have to do something about it.
This would be quite a scandal if more people realized that's how it works. Or, really, doesn't work.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-02 08:20 am (UTC)Despite having a diagnosis in hand, despite being very dyslexic, despite the school being great at accommodating her ADHD - they still managed to talk my sister out of insisting on orton-gillingham remediation for her writing, which is the one thing I had told her she had to insist on when she first discussed that IEP. Because OG training is expensive, and it costs money, and it's not like just giving the kid extended time on a test.
That's not the reason they gave, but that's the reason.
And to be clear, this is a kid who could not consistently spell her own name straight up through middle school, and that's already a huge improvement over elementary - when we started working on her spelling, our only goal was that she should be able to spell phonetically instead of just inserting random letters in any old order, so at least people could guess what she meant.
We weren't able to get her a dyslexia diagnosis through the schools.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-02 08:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-02 10:53 am (UTC)This was 2003-2005.
Outside of the private school we sent her to until she was 15 (which wasn't prefect, but was a whole lot better), things have never been any better.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-03 03:30 am (UTC)