Reading

[badgerbag]

Read The Thirteenth Child. It wasn't very good. Eff was a dull character, worrying about having too much magic, and then finally using it without really understanding it. I got what Wrede was doing by showing an obedient girl child who wants to be good growing up in a sexist culture in the shadow of her brother who is given every advantage and privilege. That was okay, but not my cup of tea. The actively bad bits were all the magical negritude of her teacher Miss Ochiba who has no personality or life aside from hanging out in this remote outpost to teach Eff and some of her middle school age-mates her arcane knowledge of Aphrikan and Hijero-Cathayan magic for ... something like 10 years? WHY. When she's no longer needed she does at least get a mention of going off to teach at a famous university (making it even more weird... did she really hang out in their frontier town just to be the exotic guru for this one child, and if her magic and credentials were all that, yet totally ignored by the town and the state and the other adults, might she be a little bit pissed off about that rather than being all calm and smiley not to mention, asexual?)

The mammoths and dinosaury creatures served as the proxy Native Americans. Rather than being absent entirely, North America's Native American population was still present in the text, dehumanized - animalized - turned to mammoths and vague, chaotic, scary magic forces of nature kept in check by the Barrier - yet doomed (as if they deserved it) by the manifest destiny of the pioneers to be conquered, used, made extinct. It was disgusting.

Comments

[al_zorra]

More than anything that infuriated me about this book is the entire ignorance that without the millennia of cultivation, plant breeding, forest management, etc. the infrastructure of roads, trails, good settlement sites, and FOOD, would not have been available to the colonialists. They would have failed everywhere without being able to appropriate all that the native peoples had accomplished.

They stole the native peoples' stores of food; they took over their village and town sites; they traveled by the roads and trails the native peoples built, and so on and so forth.

Which is why it is RIDICULOUS -- MAY I SHOUT LOUDER AND LOUDER? -- TO SAY MEGAFAUNA THAT DON'T FARM OR BUILD ARE STAND-INS FOR PE0PLE.

Love, C.