Oh, go read her Palimpsest! That's how I first found her. And "The Girl Who Circumnavigated..." is referred to in Palimpsest, which predates "The Girl..."
"The Girl..." wasn't originally intended to ever be written, but she started it as a project on LJ as a way to earn income, and then a publisher picked it up. I forgot that it was coming out as a book in its own right; I need to pick it up.
Anyway, read Palimpsest. It's lovely and mind-blowing.
I'm looking forward to reading Fairyland, and now Palimpsest too!
Okay, I almost ordered "The Girl who Circumnavigated..." based on a Tweet from Kate P earlier this week - but now you guys have forced me to order that and Palimpsest.
sumi, do you mean another Kate P or someone else? I love love love
The Girl Who Circumnavigated...
, but I'm not on Twitter.
I will definitely have to check out
Palimpsest
now! And I have
Deathless
as well, which I would like to get to sometime this summer.
This looks like a lot of fun, too -- a YAish novel that uses found pictures, from Quirk Books. The prologue and first chapter are up here to sample.
hmmm, now I can't think of whose twitter feed I got it from.
Okay. Behind the times here, but I just devoured (sorry) the Hunger Games trilogy. And yeah, I loved it. The holes in world-building didn't bother me, really, only little pet peeves in the first book like for god's sake, Katniss, if you
are dying of thirst chew on some leaves, ffs
. And it didn't bother me that she spent so much of Mockingjay
sedated and/or in closets
. She lost much of her
agency
, true, but since so much of that
agency was illusory,
I didn't blame her for
retreating
. Clearly YMockingjayMV. I guessed that she was going to
kill Coin
, and it didn't strike me as giving up her
one goal so much as giving up on revenge and ultimately rejecting her role as pawn of any administration.
Plus, it was pretty obvious that
Snow was going to die anyway
. Katniss was never one for
wasting an arrow
. And yes, the ending to the whole thing was a bit of a cheat, but it bothered me much less than that of
Harry Potter
. Especially once I realized that
Gale's
prediction had come true; she had chosen
the one of them who had what she couldn't live without - hope
. Chilling, in its own way.
Prim's
death didn't bother me either (I mean, it devastated me, but narratively speaking; in a way, it reminded me of
Anya's in that I didn't see it coming and it's always sudden and war doesn't know when to stop.
. And I'm completely convinced that it was
Gale's/Beetee's bomb, and Coin's order
. Didn't Gale say that he didn't mind
killing their spies who were in the Nut, for a larger purpose
?
I don't know. I'm not sure how coherent I'm being. I also want to make it clear that it's not that some people's objections are unfair, just trying to explain why they didn't bother me. I kind of think of the trilogy as sort of a mashup of
Gladiator + Survivor + Lord of the Flies + random war movie
and it worked for me. I dig flawed, unreliable, badass female narrators (see also: The Blue Place's Aud Torvingen). And given the waterboarding saga of the last several years, I find
not sinking to the level of our enemies to be a still-relevant conversation
.
I'll be interested to see what amyth thinks of it. I don't know how I'm going to watch the movies, though. I watched that fan-filmed scene of
Katniss at Rue's death
and nearly couldn't take it.
eta I find it funny that I got all the spoiler tags right, but managed to misspell Katniss.
Okay, I'm reading "Mark Reads The Hunger Games" and this bit from the review for Chapter 7 just elicited an actual bark of laughter from me:
well, I still don’t have a sense of whether or not
Collins is actually going to kill anyone off yet.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA.
Snerk. Boy, is he in for a ride.
smonster, your take is pretty similar to mine. The whole trilogy was gutting, and I sobbed more than once, but the choices she made in
Mockingjay
worked for me, for the most part.
What grabbed me and never let go, above and beyond world-building or other details, was Katniss. Her ferocity, her determination, but also the honest moments of WTF AM I DOING? and confusion and just being a girl in this world. At her heart, Katniss felt real to me, which made the read really emotional and really satisfying, even if it was grim as fuck.
Wow, I'm tired. Stupid typos.