ASRC 2021: Week 10

Hello everyone and welcome to another week of Literary Monopoly. You can find the rules here and fill out the form for participating here.

Current Literary Monopoly Board

Now for what staff has been up to this week:

Elias: I promise I'm not doing this on purpose but I landed on Leave a Review again, though this time I rolled low with a three. Thankfully I was in the process of reading a book that I'd been meaning to get back to for years and this gave me just the right kick to get it finished. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden is all at once historical-fiction, fantasy, and fairy-tale. Set in pre-Czarist but mid-Khanate Russia (or, more accurately of the era, Rus'), The Bear and the Nightingale captures the feeling of the era: the cold of the winters, the majesty and danger of the forests, and the constraints of the society. Its fairy-tale-like quality suffuses the novel with magic and makes you believe in the creatures usually reserved for tales told by firelight. It is, all at once, a simple tale of fighting to be oneself and a tale of grand forces fighting for the fate of the world.

Where the novel struggles is in the second half of that sentence. The dread necessary to sell the external threat at the end of the novel is held in reserve for too long and not sufficiently established throughout the novel's first half. While I appreciate the novel being stand alone as well as the start of a trilogy, the set-up for the final confrontation feels like it should have been farther out, if not pushed to another book entirely. The far more interesting aspects - the conflict between the old ways and "fire & brimstone" Christianity, the way gender roles pin in Vasya, and the layering of familiar fairy tale tropes onto more complicated characters - ends up getting pushed to the side rather than taking center stage. This isn't to say they're lacking; it's only to say that it is not explored in as meaningful and rich a way as the novel seems to want to in the first half. That is a shame but by no means a deal breaker for an otherwise wonderful, magical, and fierce novel.

I give The Bear and the Nightingale 4/5 stars.

Elizabeth: This week I rolled an eight and landed on "History." I chose to read a book that one of my professors from last semester recommended, Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction by Gabrielle Moss. It was a somewhat interesting look at the evolution of the genre we now know as Young Adult. Each chapter went over a different aspect of teen fiction, i.e. "Jobs," "School," "Family." However, Moss drew heavily upon the assumption that her reader would be filled with nostalgia as the books were described. However, these are not books I grew up reading so I found that the book fell flat for me. It was educational so I give it 3/5 stars.

Let us know what you've been up to and we'll see you back here next week.