★★★☆☆ Gillian's experience of the reality excursion

Chide the Waves

Seanan McGuire

Chide the Waves is Seanan McGuire's March 2025 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows:

(Image: A wide-eyed tortoiseshell Maine Coon on a beige background. She is very fluffy. The reflection of a television is visible in the window behind her.)
Elsie sees ghosts we have proof.
Ahem. I'm trying to move away from this time period in Toby's life, but it's hard when so much was happening to so many people. (I swear the next accidental novel will be Arden and Nolan on the Golden Shore.) Now it's Gillian's turn, as she tries to contend yet again with Faerie crashing in and gleefully wrecking her life.
She is not having a good time.

This is another installment in the October Daye series. As McGuire's introduction suggests, it's the story of Titania's attempt to impose her own custom reality on faery, as told in the novel Sleep No More. Sleep No More told how Toby (with a little help from her friends) defeated Titania and banished her. Since then McGuire has been treating us to a series of stories of this same time, told from the points of view of various other participants. This is, I think, the fifth such retelling, and honestly, I have to say, I'm over my limit. Move on, Seanan!

Chide the Waves is told by Gillian, Toby's estranged daughter. Toby was absent for most of Gillian's childhood -- through no fault of her own, she spent 14 years in a pond in Golden Gate Park in the form of a fish. Unfortunately, Gillian didn't find that out until later -- she was told that Toby abandoned her. After that a whole lot of very bad stuff happened to Gillian, because Toby has enemies, and that made Gillian a target. If this weren't enough, Toby has in the meantime become a Hero of the Realm. Everyone Gillian runs into admires Toby.

Gillian has had it up to HERE with Toby. Her first-person point of view is full of whining about her mother, and this is tiresome. It is also the case that Gillian doesn't have much of a story to tell of the Titania reality excursion. She just got shoved away in the undersea and hung out.

The upshot is that this is not a great story.

Chide the Waves on Patreon.

Comments

★★★★☆ The Chinese classic novel with WOMEN!

The Story of the Stone Cao Xueqin There are four widely-recognized classic Chinese novels. Seriously, do a web search for "classic Chinese novels" and you will find dozens of pages referring to "The Four Classic Novels of Chinese Literature". (Wikipedia lists six on its Classic Chinese Novels page" -- these include the usual four, plus two others.) The phrase "Four classic Chinese novels" also appears frequently in commentary on Chinese literature. The four are Romance of the Three Kingdoms The Water Margin Journey to the West The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber Red Chamber is distinctly different from the first three. It is the only one that feels (to me) like a modern novel. For instance, there are WOMEN! And they are not mere objects or cardboard cut-outs, but real, complex characters who carry the plot. Cao intended Red Chamber to be a memorial to the women he knew in his youth. And there is a love story! The protagonist, ...

★★★★☆ No Kings!

Men at Arms Terry Pratchett, Jon Culshaw (Narrator), Peter Serafinowicz (Narrator), Bill Nighy (Narrator) Men at Arms is only the second novel in Terry Pratchett 's City Watch subseries of the Discworld series, but I think I already discern their central message. It is that the good that is done in the world (be it Discworld or Earth) is accomplished not by Great Persons -- not by Kings and Geniuses and Modern Major Generals -- but by ordinary hard-working people who keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's fair to point out that it's a hackneyed message. On the other hand, it's a theme that I love and can never get too much of. Although Pratchett is not alone in extolling ordinary folk, his way of doing it is unique. No other writer lights off the sorts of linguistic fireworks that Pratchett pops off line after line, page after page, seemingly without effort. (I say "seemingly" because that appearance of e...

★★★★★ Finding a home

The Blue Sword Robin McKinley When I was growing up my father's job kept my family moving. Mom and Dad eventually settled down, but just when they did I became an itinerant academic, moving to study and work at various research institutions. I was a 27 year old grad student at Stanford when I first read The Blue Sword and the longest I had ever lived in one place was six years. (Understand, I am not complaining -- I was and am a Happy Nomad.) There's a peculiar type of homesickness experienced by rootless people. One usually thinks of homesickness as being away from and missing a very specific place -- the place one calls home. But I had no place to call home. And yet I sometimes felt homesick -- I felt the lack of a home -- all the more because there was no home where I longed to be. In the first few chapters of The Blue Sword I immediately recognized this feeling of rootless homesickness in Angharad (Harry) Crewe, the hero of the book. As the book begins Harry ...

★★★★★ A brilliant mess

Long Live Evil Sarah Rees Brennan The publisher's blurb for Sarah Rees Brennan 's Long Live Evil makes it sound like a funny book about a real-world character who slips into a book and finds herself the villain. And it IS that! There were many laugh-out-loud moments, such as this one Books often described kisses as ‘searing’ which made Rae think of salmon, but characters seemed to enjoy the seared-salmon kisses. or this “You saw this horse born,” Marius reminded ... “I told you his bloodline could find their way anywhere. You named him.” “That was a joke,” ... Marius didn’t see what was humorous. He’d thought it was a nice name. ... “So this is my noble steed, Google Maps?” Rae, our heroine/villainess, is a fantasy book lover, who knows all the plot tropes, not to mention the movies and songs. Plugged into a fantasy novel (à la Inkworld or Thursday Next -- both are referenced in the Acknowledgments) Rae reacts like the thoroughly modern young wo...

★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed Shades of Grey , the first novel in Jasper Fforde 's Shades of Grey series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what Red Side Story is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong. Red Side Story contains multitudes. Shades of Grey ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sen...

★★★☆☆ The Great Geometer

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius Patchen Barss If I were asked to name the greatest physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, I would probably choose three: Richard Feynman , Steven Weinberg , and Roger Penrose . (I am a neuroscientist and a mathematician with a long interest in physics. I'm not the best person to choose great physicists, but I'm not the worst.) Thus when my local Theoretical Physics Institute (every town should have one!), the Perimeter Institute , announced a public presentation by Patchen Barss , a science journalist who has written this biography of Penrose , I immediately snagged a ticket. Barss wounded my confidence by emitting that cliché of the science popularizer: that you make science interesting by telling the "human story." Oh, please! I don't read a biography of Penrose for the sake of the human story. Why do science popularizers find it so hard to believe that there...

★★★★☆ Ramona Qimby meets a dragon

The Tears of a Dragon Intisar Khanani OK, that title is a lie. Intisar Khanani 's The Tears of a Dragon is not really about Beverly Cleary 's Ramona Quimby meeting a dragon. Or is it? The Tears of a Dragon is a novella in Khanani 's Dauntless Path series. It immediately follows The Bone Knife . Both stories concern a family in rural Menaiya. The father trains horses and has three daughters: Niya, Rae, and Bean. Bean, the putative Ramona of this family, is the youngest. In The Bone Knife the sisters helped a visiting Elf, Genno Stonmane, and he gave each of them a gift. Bean's gift was a small stone horse, which she wears on a thong around her neck. A troop of soldiers visits their village, and the gossip is that they have captured a baby dragon, whom they plan to use as bait to kill the mother. Bean is outraged and drags her sisters into a ill-planned raid to rescue the baby dragon. It's a good little story. S...

★★★☆☆ What a difference a few inches make...

Fed Mira Grant **Spoilers for Feed follow ** (Also spoilers for Deadline and Blackout , but I will protect those in spoiler tags. Fed is an alternative ending for Feed . It is available free from Orbit books as a PDF download. At 53 pages it's either a long short story or a very short novella. When I reviewed Feed , I wrote, "The book ends well". Feed ended with Shaun Mason putting a bullet in the brain of the love of his life, his sister Georgia Mason, because she had become a zombie. (That's the big spoiler for Feed I promised above.) I thought this was a splendid ending. Tragic, yes, Gruesome, yes, but Feed is, after all, a zombie novel. I added the remark, "While I say, 'The book ends well,' I'm pretty sure that many readers are going to be unhappy with the ending." That was certainly true. For instance, one Amazon reviewer, following in the long tradition of people inventing ar...

★★☆☆☆ Song Jiang is no Robin Hood

Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh Shi Nai'an, Edwin Lowe (Foreword), J.H. Jackson (Translator) There are four widely-recognized classic Chinese novels. Seriously, do a web search for "classic Chinese novels" and you will find dozens of pages referring to "The Four Classic Novels of Chinese Literature". (Wikipedia lists six on its Classic Chinese Novels page" -- these include the usual four, plus two others.) The phrase "Four classic Chinese novels" also appears frequently in commentary on Chinese literature. The four are Romance of the Three Kingdoms The Water Margin Journey to the West Dream of the Red Chamber I begin by clarifying that in this review of Water Margin I am trying only to answer the question, "If an educated American who understands no Chinese and has only the most cursory knowledge of Chinese culture (that would be me) reads Water Margin , will they find it entertaining/rewarding?" I make no attempt to judge its li...

★★★★★ The best kind of childishness!

What If? 2 Randall Munroe Randall Munroe is the author of the free web comic XKCD . XKCD comics are instantly recognizable by Munroe 's surprisingly individual and expressive faceless stick-figure characters. They are less instantly recognizable by their focus on science and mathematics, and by Munroe 's ability to write startlingly accurate jokes on these subjects which are actually funny, but also sometimes informative or touching, For a few years now he has also had a blog called "What If?" in which he answers questions from users. What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions and What If? 2 are collections of those questions and answers. I started with What If? 2 because I mistakenly ordered it before What If? 1 . I do, however, follow Munroe 's What If? blog, so it is likely I've seen most of What If? 1 . Just to give you a taste, the first question of What If? 2 ...

Search This Blog