Review: Martha Wells, The Cloud Roads
Mar. 18th, 2011 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I felt myself coming down with the rotten cold that's been going around work, the other day. My boss noticed too, and dismissed me early. Which made my day, as I'd snuck online and reserved myself a copy of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marthawells's latest at the Barnes & Noble across the street. I had time to zip over and grab it before picking Z up from work, and settled in for a really rotten chest cold that wouldn't let me do anything but sit perfectly still... and read. I've read the whole book 3 times now, and my favorite parts, well-- there are a lot of them, but I have them almost memorized.
I had similarly good timing with my last purchase of her last releases-- I bought the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy and received it right as a crippling blizzard shut down my city for four days. ("The Gate of Gods" still has white wax on two of the pages where I jostled my tealight candle that I was using to read it while the power was out.)
She's a perfect comfort read. All of her books I've read so far have been perfect. Not stupid-- never shallow-- but not pretentious either. Sure, I wish she went a little more in-depth; occasionally I wish her dialogue scenes were longer and less snappy, but only because I like the characters and want them to talk more. She writes so surely, so relentlessly, and her characters are never shallow. It's swashbuckling and action-laden stuff, nonstop; nothing revolutionary on the surface, but when you step back to consider it, it's actually quite different. Her characters are all round, even the minor ones; her gender roles are often cleverly muddled (Ile-Rien featured a matriarchial society in which men couldn't own property; this book, well, I'll get into it) and her worlds are so surely drawn that you almost believe she's been there. Don't ever think she's one of those obtrusive world-builders, though. Details are revealed matter-of-factly, flawlessly, seamlessly; there's no feeling of fantasy here. It neatly removes you from this world and puts you into another one.
I can't express how happy I am that Wells has a new book out; her career nearly ended in all the publishing-house collapses, in that quiet way that reliable mid-list authors who aren't a franchise can just fade out. The devastating blizzard when I read her last trilogy was in 2006. It was several years before the next book sold. That's the current climate of publishing-- just being reliable without being a superstar isn't enough to get you a new contract. Ugh. But enough of this-- I'm going togush about review the current book, and urge you all to go out and buy it now. She's sold the next book too, which is apparently set in the same world but not featuring the same characters. Alas! I love these characters.
Here's the quietly revolutionary thing about this book: Nobody in it is human. It's set in a world populated by countless intelligent races, many of them approximately humanoid, but many with features like scales, feathers, blue or green skin, insect-like qualities. Most of them can talk to one another. Some of them are predators, and a sharp distinction seems to be drawn between human-like omnivores, who will hunt the unintelligent species and supplement their diets with farmed or gathered plants, and "predators", who will eat the other intelligent species. She doesn't infodump this, you have to surmise it by reading the book. One of the Predator races is the Fell, who thrive on destroying the cities of intelligent species, often by trickery and betrayal, and seem to revel in cruelty. They are shape-shifters, with humanoid-like forms and winged forms.
Our protagonist, Moon, is also a shifter. (That's not a spoiler, in that it's on the book jacket; if you just read the book cold, though, it's again not info-dumped; he just does it in the first chapter, which you can read here. "Moon didn't know what he was, just that he could do this.") His family was killed when he was a young child, and he has been making his way alone in the world as best he can ever since. Due to his winged form's similarity in appearance to the Fell, he has learned to hide it, and to join "groundling" (humanoid) settlements and blend in as best he can.
There's a wonderful short story featuring Moon, by the way, as a child, available for free on Wells's website. Please take a break from my ramblings and go read it.
The Forest Boy
This book is the story of what happens when his people finally find him. It's a realistic exploration; Moon is a fully-realized character, a mature, sensitive, intelligent young adult who's spent his entire life hiding a crucial part of himself, dealing with constant fear and overwhelming loneliness. He doesn't just fly into the open arms of his waiting family; he stumbles into a tense political situation, made desperately worse by the ever-growing threat of the Fell. Moon's people's similarity to the Fell is not lost on them either, and gets them singled out for special, horrifying attention from the ruthless predators.
My consistently favorite features of Wells's books, however, are the clever, often funny details. They're incredibly real. Moon's friends at the beginning of the book include a surly, difficult woman with whom he has an uneasy, bickering relationship, but she is complex, not a caricature. When he encounters the colony where his people live, and smells baking bread, he is unutterably relieved: on the road, his people hunt and eat only what they can kill, and he had worried that they were exclusively carnivores, while he was used to eating cooked food as well.
She's incredibly consistent in her worldbuilding, too. At the risk of a slight spoiler, Moon's non-human people have very non-human biology as well, in that the only winged females who can breed are "queens"; the queens of his colony are beautifully characterized, believable and human-like and consistent. The older one, Pearl, is ruthlessly political, as a ruling queen would have to be; the younger, Jade, is brave and decisive, possibly the greatest physical hero of the book. (Queens are stronger than normal warriors, and are the fiercest fighters.) Only certain winged males are fertile and can breed with the queens. I won't get into the details, but while Wells avoids any graphic descriptions of sex (and, for the record, her gore is fairly politely-described as well), Jade's first encounter with a male she can breed with is very well-drawn-- her awkward, yet self-possessed lust and frustration when her advances are rebuffed are incredibly realistic. She is strong and absolutely anti-stereotypically feminine in every interaction, from ripping an opponent's head off to attempting to court a prospective consort.
Wells also manages, usually, to avoid having stereotypical heroes or villains. Her heroes are just people determined to do the best they can with what they have. Her villains? Nobody's just "evil". She never gets deeply into it-- her books are strongly character-driven, close third-person POV, and she never puts in A Narrator to Explain Things. But her POV characters (in this book, always Moon) are always intelligent and reasonable, and usually have a moment where they figure out the villians' motivation. In Necromancer it was lust for power; in Element, revenge; in the trilogy, insanity backed up by terrible, almost bureaucratic compliance. In this book? How can she make murdering, cruel predators sympathetic, even for a moment? Well, you'll have to find out.
How do I sum up? Read the book, and then go read her back catalogue, because you'll want to. Tragically, many of them are out of print, so you'll have to get creative; I discovered Wells when she was in the process of putting The Element of Fire online for free, once the rights had finally reverted to her. (You can read it on her website, if you'd like to swash some buckle. Or you can buy the self-pubbed e-book.)
marthawells's latest at the Barnes & Noble across the street. I had time to zip over and grab it before picking Z up from work, and settled in for a really rotten chest cold that wouldn't let me do anything but sit perfectly still... and read. I've read the whole book 3 times now, and my favorite parts, well-- there are a lot of them, but I have them almost memorized.I had similarly good timing with my last purchase of her last releases-- I bought the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy and received it right as a crippling blizzard shut down my city for four days. ("The Gate of Gods" still has white wax on two of the pages where I jostled my tealight candle that I was using to read it while the power was out.)
She's a perfect comfort read. All of her books I've read so far have been perfect. Not stupid-- never shallow-- but not pretentious either. Sure, I wish she went a little more in-depth; occasionally I wish her dialogue scenes were longer and less snappy, but only because I like the characters and want them to talk more. She writes so surely, so relentlessly, and her characters are never shallow. It's swashbuckling and action-laden stuff, nonstop; nothing revolutionary on the surface, but when you step back to consider it, it's actually quite different. Her characters are all round, even the minor ones; her gender roles are often cleverly muddled (Ile-Rien featured a matriarchial society in which men couldn't own property; this book, well, I'll get into it) and her worlds are so surely drawn that you almost believe she's been there. Don't ever think she's one of those obtrusive world-builders, though. Details are revealed matter-of-factly, flawlessly, seamlessly; there's no feeling of fantasy here. It neatly removes you from this world and puts you into another one.
I can't express how happy I am that Wells has a new book out; her career nearly ended in all the publishing-house collapses, in that quiet way that reliable mid-list authors who aren't a franchise can just fade out. The devastating blizzard when I read her last trilogy was in 2006. It was several years before the next book sold. That's the current climate of publishing-- just being reliable without being a superstar isn't enough to get you a new contract. Ugh. But enough of this-- I'm going to
Here's the quietly revolutionary thing about this book: Nobody in it is human. It's set in a world populated by countless intelligent races, many of them approximately humanoid, but many with features like scales, feathers, blue or green skin, insect-like qualities. Most of them can talk to one another. Some of them are predators, and a sharp distinction seems to be drawn between human-like omnivores, who will hunt the unintelligent species and supplement their diets with farmed or gathered plants, and "predators", who will eat the other intelligent species. She doesn't infodump this, you have to surmise it by reading the book. One of the Predator races is the Fell, who thrive on destroying the cities of intelligent species, often by trickery and betrayal, and seem to revel in cruelty. They are shape-shifters, with humanoid-like forms and winged forms.
Our protagonist, Moon, is also a shifter. (That's not a spoiler, in that it's on the book jacket; if you just read the book cold, though, it's again not info-dumped; he just does it in the first chapter, which you can read here. "Moon didn't know what he was, just that he could do this.") His family was killed when he was a young child, and he has been making his way alone in the world as best he can ever since. Due to his winged form's similarity in appearance to the Fell, he has learned to hide it, and to join "groundling" (humanoid) settlements and blend in as best he can.
There's a wonderful short story featuring Moon, by the way, as a child, available for free on Wells's website. Please take a break from my ramblings and go read it.
The Forest Boy
This book is the story of what happens when his people finally find him. It's a realistic exploration; Moon is a fully-realized character, a mature, sensitive, intelligent young adult who's spent his entire life hiding a crucial part of himself, dealing with constant fear and overwhelming loneliness. He doesn't just fly into the open arms of his waiting family; he stumbles into a tense political situation, made desperately worse by the ever-growing threat of the Fell. Moon's people's similarity to the Fell is not lost on them either, and gets them singled out for special, horrifying attention from the ruthless predators.
My consistently favorite features of Wells's books, however, are the clever, often funny details. They're incredibly real. Moon's friends at the beginning of the book include a surly, difficult woman with whom he has an uneasy, bickering relationship, but she is complex, not a caricature. When he encounters the colony where his people live, and smells baking bread, he is unutterably relieved: on the road, his people hunt and eat only what they can kill, and he had worried that they were exclusively carnivores, while he was used to eating cooked food as well.
She's incredibly consistent in her worldbuilding, too. At the risk of a slight spoiler, Moon's non-human people have very non-human biology as well, in that the only winged females who can breed are "queens"; the queens of his colony are beautifully characterized, believable and human-like and consistent. The older one, Pearl, is ruthlessly political, as a ruling queen would have to be; the younger, Jade, is brave and decisive, possibly the greatest physical hero of the book. (Queens are stronger than normal warriors, and are the fiercest fighters.) Only certain winged males are fertile and can breed with the queens. I won't get into the details, but while Wells avoids any graphic descriptions of sex (and, for the record, her gore is fairly politely-described as well), Jade's first encounter with a male she can breed with is very well-drawn-- her awkward, yet self-possessed lust and frustration when her advances are rebuffed are incredibly realistic. She is strong and absolutely anti-stereotypically feminine in every interaction, from ripping an opponent's head off to attempting to court a prospective consort.
Wells also manages, usually, to avoid having stereotypical heroes or villains. Her heroes are just people determined to do the best they can with what they have. Her villains? Nobody's just "evil". She never gets deeply into it-- her books are strongly character-driven, close third-person POV, and she never puts in A Narrator to Explain Things. But her POV characters (in this book, always Moon) are always intelligent and reasonable, and usually have a moment where they figure out the villians' motivation. In Necromancer it was lust for power; in Element, revenge; in the trilogy, insanity backed up by terrible, almost bureaucratic compliance. In this book? How can she make murdering, cruel predators sympathetic, even for a moment? Well, you'll have to find out.
How do I sum up? Read the book, and then go read her back catalogue, because you'll want to. Tragically, many of them are out of print, so you'll have to get creative; I discovered Wells when she was in the process of putting The Element of Fire online for free, once the rights had finally reverted to her. (You can read it on her website, if you'd like to swash some buckle. Or you can buy the self-pubbed e-book.)
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-19 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-23 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-24 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-24 02:57 am (UTC)Sorry for the capslock I got really excited.
I mean, it's not the best book I've ever read, by any means, but it's definitely the best book I've read lately. I admit though I don't read a lot anymore. Because, erm, I get obsessive about it.
CHIME IS MY NEW BOYFRIEND.
... Sorry, I've been on Tumblr a lot and everyone seems to talk like that there.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 01:57 am (UTC)So many fun touches in this one: Moon being called "high-strung", and Selis getting out of her village, and the wee royal siblings. Still, I think my highest admiration of this book is for the ending. It's so perfectly balanced: plenty of plot threads left for a sequel, but just the right endpoint so that you feel satisfied with where things stop.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 01:30 pm (UTC)