association-list

First book of the new year. I’m going to post them all, just so I can keep track of how much I’m read­ing and what’s actu­ally get­ting read.

This is the second book in the Aleut­ian tril­ogy, and I read it because I read Spirit: the Princess of Lengthy Sub­ti­tle in PDF over the christ­mas break. Spirit has great world­build­ing and a won­der­ful sense of place, at least until you get back to Sper­anza and are in full enig­matic super­woman Count of Monte Christo mode. Losing Bibi as a cen­tral char­ac­ter is a near-​​fatal blow to the novel.

North Wind is a much ear­lier book. Inter­est­ingly many of its fail­ures in the other direc­tion, as she some­how makes the weird, fated, fizzle-​​ending plot work, mostly on the strength of the char­ac­ters, but you never get a good sense of where you are, or what is hap­pen­ing there. A very per­sonal novel for its set­ting, which is in the middle of a world-​​wide low-​​intensity conflict.