lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2018-01-21 03:00 pm
lightreads) wrote2018-01-21 03:00 pm
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River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey
River of Teeth
2/5. I swear I am not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, but here we go with another novella everyone raves about and that I don’t particularly like.
On the plus side: A great concept (hippos imported to the U.S. as a meat source, with consequent huge changes on the ecology of the Mississippi). Also, I appreciate Gailey’s approach to representation here. I’m not talking about the presence of the variously queer and brown people, but specifically the presentation of the nonbinary character, whose preferred pronoun is used unfailingly by absolutely everyone, even people they haven’t met. Realistic or remotely explicable? Nope. But there are criminals riding fucking hippos, so why the hell not. It’s a nice reversal of the usual “we can have dragons but we can’t have queer people because it would be unrealistic in this setting” thing.
On the minus side: Um. I hated 90% of the characters? And also I hate westerns. Even, it turns out, westerns with hippo. And this is a pointless bloodbath from start to finish in the name of some ridiculous tiresome revenge quest and ugh. Everything about this was so not for me.
2/5. I swear I am not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, but here we go with another novella everyone raves about and that I don’t particularly like.
On the plus side: A great concept (hippos imported to the U.S. as a meat source, with consequent huge changes on the ecology of the Mississippi). Also, I appreciate Gailey’s approach to representation here. I’m not talking about the presence of the variously queer and brown people, but specifically the presentation of the nonbinary character, whose preferred pronoun is used unfailingly by absolutely everyone, even people they haven’t met. Realistic or remotely explicable? Nope. But there are criminals riding fucking hippos, so why the hell not. It’s a nice reversal of the usual “we can have dragons but we can’t have queer people because it would be unrealistic in this setting” thing.
On the minus side: Um. I hated 90% of the characters? And also I hate westerns. Even, it turns out, westerns with hippo. And this is a pointless bloodbath from start to finish in the name of some ridiculous tiresome revenge quest and ugh. Everything about this was so not for me.