upbeat: Raksura

[dragonlady7]

So, I've discussed on here before, I think, how I've been reading The Books of the Raksura to my 4-year-old niece. It started because she was fascinated with my e-reader, and I didn't have anything specifically suitable on there to read to her, so I read a couple of the short stories from the Raksura collections, and when she was still interested, just decided to dive in and start reading The Cloud Roads until she got bored.
But she didn't.
Now, they're not kids' books; people die, there's violence. There's some sex, though Wells as a writer tends to fade-to-black or focus on the overall rather than choreography, if you know what I mean-- so the books are probably PG, except for the part where people die a fair amount and there's some pretty advanced emotional choreography going on. So, really, in effect, probably about a T rating, if I'm understanding those properly, with some trigger warnings for mentions of heavy topics like sexual assault and child abuse and such.
But I've read the books so often, I know them well, and I've figured out I can just summarize some things and slide over others. And as for the rest, well-- this is Farmkid, and she knows about death a bit (she lives on a farm with livestock, after all), and we have pauses for discussions sometimes. I tone down the gory details a little, sometimes. There isn't much I've needed to change.
I've had to explain the concept of an unreliable narrator. The series is told from Moon's close POV, and he's paranoid, among other things. So I've had little sidebars where I'm like, "Now, Farmkid, think about what the other people in this scene probably felt. Do you think they were as angry as Moon thought? I bet they were really scared instead, weren't they? That's probably why they seemed so mean. It's because he's scared too."
And that's gone over pretty well.

Anyway-- we've made it through two entire novels, together, over about a year. I think it's been really fantastic for her to have a large, immersive story that doesn't have pat morals; not everything works out the way you hope, and some things are grim now and then. But the overall message of the books tends to be hopeful. And the really neat thing is that there are no humans, so the gender roles are-- not exactly inverted, but much different. The characters known as 'queens' are the most powerful physically; the male protagonist winds up expected to play a decorative role like a fairytale princess, and has to struggle to subvert those expectations.

Farmsister just texted me that she's managed to borrow an ebook of the Cloud Roads trilogy from the library, so she can read it to herself on their trip. (This is the one time of year she gets to read books for pleasure, mostly while hiding from her in-laws.) "It's sounded right up my alley," she said, "but I never have time to sit and listen when you're reading it."

So she's reading it now, and I've just begun to wonder if I couldn't make a stuffed doll Raksura somehow... I need another sewing project in my copious free time, after all.

Comments

[toujours_nigel]

That is truly amazing and lovely. I loved being read to and helped read books at that age (she's five-ish iirc?) which weren't necessarily designed for kids; it helped me feel like I was reading real things, which were obvs more interesting than the books I was meant to be reading.

[dragonlady7]

I too read a lot of books that weren't meant for kids. Some of them, I really shouldn't have. I discovered a couple years back that I belong to a venerable tradition of kids who were waaaaaayy too young for them who read Jean Auel's books about cavemen, and learned really really really inappropriately about softcore porn. (I vividly remember, I was like eight, and the first novel has a graphic, violent rape scene in it.)

So I figure, well. Pre-screened is good, here. I remember my mother saying "i think that book is too old for you" and I was like "but i can read big books" and she was like "i think it has sexy things in it?" and I was like [the i don't know sound] and she was like "fine whatever" but no she was absolutely right and should not have let me read that.
oh well, i'm fucked-up but i'm not an axe murderer so it's probably all good.

Farmkid is way ahead of her age in language skills, speaking and reading, but notably not at all ahead in emotional regulation and such, so she's in the same kind of danger I was. But everybody gets fucked up over something, and me reading her adventure stories with the sexy bits snipped out is highly unlikely to be what does it, LOL.

[toujours_nigel]

My parents' edict was that if I could't understand something in a book, however insignificant, I wasn't old enough for it. I think the only thing they explicitly banned was Lady Chatterley's Lover, when I was 11ish.
Little did they know I had found a book in the fifth-sixth grade cupboard of the school library that had explicit sex on the second page and rather a lot of assault throughout. I remember being very solemn and 9 and telling the librarian to put it in the eleventh-twelfth grade cupboard; I also know she didn't because one of my juniors read it the very next year. *sigh*

Adventure stories with the sex snipped out is much better.

[dragonlady7]

And I even leave in more or less the fact of the sex-- allusions to it, anyway. She has the idea of the general shape of there being an Interaction that Adults Sometimes Do, and so generally I can leave in the lead-up and much of the discussion of it. Just... not quite so much of the details. And there aren't a ton of details in this book anyway, so there's nowhere I have to skip a lot.
One of them I just summarized the paragraph to "and they curled up together to sleep, finally friends!" because that was more or less what happened. Just. Sort of.

I don't recall how much censorship my parents did-- I do know they knowingly let me read some books with adult-ish stuff because Mom at least felt that if I didn't understand it, I wouldn't care that much about it. Which was true! Except when it was, like, violent graphic assault. That was like, well, you can't just sort of skip over that and shrug. You don't have to understand what's going on to understand what's going on.

[toujours_nigel]

I remember using whatever book I was reading--I always read at the dining table much to my mother's horror--to shield my eyes if there was assault onscreen. It was usually very elided, this being India in the nineties and early aughts, but even very young I knew I didn't wanna see that and it would greatly discomfit my family if I did. But I mean, I did understand something Bad was happening, even with the sound muted or whathaveyou.
Gently elided sex is much easier fare.

[dragonlady7]

There is sexual assault offscreen in the Raksura books, though-- a major plot point is that some Raksura have been captured and used forcibly for breeding by a related but enemy race, the Fell, who are trying to make crossbreeds for various nefarious magical purposes. It was mentioned in the first book, but it wasn't as obvious. The book we have left, there's a character who is one of these crossbreeds, and it's somewhat discussed-- his father is the same as the protagonist's, and died in captivity, but the crossbreed was rescued by the protagonist's mother, who having lost the protagonist in the attack, went ahead and raised this crossbreed as her son.
So there's not really a way to have the story make sense without all these things being revealed, but there's no lurid detail at all. I think I'm just going to go ahead and leave it in; it's treated as a terrible thing in-story, but there's no recounting of it. Just its effects, which are acknowledged.
(It's somewhat of a change, though, because fertile female Raksura are too large and powerful to capture and keep, so it's males who were captured for these schemes; it doesn't change the dynamic so much in-universe, but I think it does to read it as a person in this society, you know?)