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Five queer kids save the world after an apocalypse!
With that premise, I expected to enjoy the book a lot more than I actually did. It’s largely a comedy, with the apocalypse caused by Muldoona, a Goddess lurking in her Fortress of Despair and eating peeled grapes. Humor is the most subjective of forms, and others might well find this book funnier than I did. I mostly found it totally unfunny.
The first chapter introduces Skilly, a bisexual 5000-year-old caveman in a 17-year-old body, due to having been given an Amulet of Immortality by his brother Urf.
It is a rule of fiction that protagonist cavepeople get names that sound like names, and non-protagonists get guttural grunts. See also The Clan of the Cave Bear
: Protagonist: Ayla. Leading Man: Jondalar. Supporting Cast: Creb, Brun, Broud. In both books, this is explained within the text: Ayla and Jondalar are Cro-Magnons, who are more verbal, and Skilly was not his birth name. Still, the rule stands. Why don’t cavepeople ever get brief names that don’t sound like manly grunts, like Eee, Bip, or Baa?
I am always complaining that ancient immortals never sound, talk, or act like ancient immortals. But in a comedy, why not mine the fact that a main character is prehistoric for laughs? Though Skilly mentions ancient stuff sometimes, he otherwise seems like a modern 20-something.
The other main characters are Vikky and Ginger, a pair of indistinguishable shallow, snarky teenagers, Julia, a less shallow but still snarky teenager, and Marly, who is trans or genderqueer. Marly’s gender identity is not clear-cut, which I liked. Marly is in a locked-in juvenile facility for skipping school. It was explained that teenagers can be locked up for stuff which is not illegal for adults. This is true, but, as was typical of many plot points, an unlikely motivation or occurrence does not get any more plausible just because it’s given one line of justification. Some of this was clearly meant as a joke, but I generally didn't find it funny. In other cases, even satire needs to make sense on its own terms, and this book often didn't.
The apocalypse consists of magically-induced nuclear catastrophe, which kills hundreds of thousands of people and leads to Ginger and Julia getting stranded, along with other shallow American tourists, inside Anne Frank’s house. This is every bit as embarrassingly anvillicious as it sounds. Meanwhile, Marly is stranded in juvenile detention. The kids’ predicament has some nice narrative tension… until Gods give them all magical amulets that solve everything.
If this had been about straight kids, I would not have made it past chapter one. If I hadn’t been on an airplane, I would have given up right there. However, I made it to the end, and I’m kind of glad I did, because the WTF just kept coming. Starting with Marly, previously the most sympathetic character, in the space of a single conversation, becoming one of the least sympathetic characters I have ever encountered in anything.
So, hundreds of thousands of people have died horribly of radiation poisoning, and a cloud of radiation will shortly kill all the survivors. Julia points out to Marly that they need her help to time-travel and reverse the catastrophe. Marly, who has set up a nice community beneath the looming radiation cloud, refuses to help out on the grounds of “Eh, who cares? We’ll be happy until we all die horribly.”
W. T. F. She does eventually, reluctantly help out, but I was never able to get past that. I was also unable to get past the other characters not having a major issue with that. I think Olsen was trying to do a version of "refusing the call," but when the stakes are "saves the world," you need a better reason to not want to help out than "who cares?"
In the department of “bizarrely unsympathetic decisions made for even weirder reasons,” Ginger betrays them all and helps Muldoona try to wipe out the human race because, in a revelation that comes totally out of the blue, Ginger had a baby who she gave up for adoption and whose existence would be wiped out by time travel because she’d never get pregnant because… “The father was a jerk so I wouldn’t have sex with him again, now that I know what a jerk he was.”
W. T. F. So, her entire motivation – the reason for which she’d kill everyone on Earth – is because of a baby whose existence she could guarantee by simply having sex with a jerk, then saving the world. But no! She’d rather kill everyone on Earth, including her baby!
The magic amulets solve everything when one character realizes that they have unlimited power if they only believe that they have unlimited power.
The entire thing was the result of a lover’s spat between male and female Gods. Thematically, either they should have been queer Gods (like, explicitly bisexual), or it should have been some sort of “straight love doomed the world, queer love will save it.” As it was, it just seemed like totally random straightness in an otherwise queer world.
Marly, now time-traveled into her ten-year-old body, shares a tongue kiss with an also-deaged, now fourteen-year-old Julia. EW.
It concludes with a totally inexplicable epilogue in which Skilly, whom everyone hates because he wouldn’t give up his own immortality to save Ginger (who had a change of heart and was killed in battle), goes to China and looks for opium (W. T. F.) and meets a handsome stranger. Seriously, I have NO idea what point the epilogue was attempting to make.
Not my cup of tea. But it might be yours! I have a low tolerance for hipster irony, and very particular tastes in comedy.
The End
With that premise, I expected to enjoy the book a lot more than I actually did. It’s largely a comedy, with the apocalypse caused by Muldoona, a Goddess lurking in her Fortress of Despair and eating peeled grapes. Humor is the most subjective of forms, and others might well find this book funnier than I did. I mostly found it totally unfunny.
The first chapter introduces Skilly, a bisexual 5000-year-old caveman in a 17-year-old body, due to having been given an Amulet of Immortality by his brother Urf.
It is a rule of fiction that protagonist cavepeople get names that sound like names, and non-protagonists get guttural grunts. See also The Clan of the Cave Bear
: Protagonist: Ayla. Leading Man: Jondalar. Supporting Cast: Creb, Brun, Broud. In both books, this is explained within the text: Ayla and Jondalar are Cro-Magnons, who are more verbal, and Skilly was not his birth name. Still, the rule stands. Why don’t cavepeople ever get brief names that don’t sound like manly grunts, like Eee, Bip, or Baa?I am always complaining that ancient immortals never sound, talk, or act like ancient immortals. But in a comedy, why not mine the fact that a main character is prehistoric for laughs? Though Skilly mentions ancient stuff sometimes, he otherwise seems like a modern 20-something.
The other main characters are Vikky and Ginger, a pair of indistinguishable shallow, snarky teenagers, Julia, a less shallow but still snarky teenager, and Marly, who is trans or genderqueer. Marly’s gender identity is not clear-cut, which I liked. Marly is in a locked-in juvenile facility for skipping school. It was explained that teenagers can be locked up for stuff which is not illegal for adults. This is true, but, as was typical of many plot points, an unlikely motivation or occurrence does not get any more plausible just because it’s given one line of justification. Some of this was clearly meant as a joke, but I generally didn't find it funny. In other cases, even satire needs to make sense on its own terms, and this book often didn't.
The apocalypse consists of magically-induced nuclear catastrophe, which kills hundreds of thousands of people and leads to Ginger and Julia getting stranded, along with other shallow American tourists, inside Anne Frank’s house. This is every bit as embarrassingly anvillicious as it sounds. Meanwhile, Marly is stranded in juvenile detention. The kids’ predicament has some nice narrative tension… until Gods give them all magical amulets that solve everything.
If this had been about straight kids, I would not have made it past chapter one. If I hadn’t been on an airplane, I would have given up right there. However, I made it to the end, and I’m kind of glad I did, because the WTF just kept coming. Starting with Marly, previously the most sympathetic character, in the space of a single conversation, becoming one of the least sympathetic characters I have ever encountered in anything.
So, hundreds of thousands of people have died horribly of radiation poisoning, and a cloud of radiation will shortly kill all the survivors. Julia points out to Marly that they need her help to time-travel and reverse the catastrophe. Marly, who has set up a nice community beneath the looming radiation cloud, refuses to help out on the grounds of “Eh, who cares? We’ll be happy until we all die horribly.”
W. T. F. She does eventually, reluctantly help out, but I was never able to get past that. I was also unable to get past the other characters not having a major issue with that. I think Olsen was trying to do a version of "refusing the call," but when the stakes are "saves the world," you need a better reason to not want to help out than "who cares?"
In the department of “bizarrely unsympathetic decisions made for even weirder reasons,” Ginger betrays them all and helps Muldoona try to wipe out the human race because, in a revelation that comes totally out of the blue, Ginger had a baby who she gave up for adoption and whose existence would be wiped out by time travel because she’d never get pregnant because… “The father was a jerk so I wouldn’t have sex with him again, now that I know what a jerk he was.”
W. T. F. So, her entire motivation – the reason for which she’d kill everyone on Earth – is because of a baby whose existence she could guarantee by simply having sex with a jerk, then saving the world. But no! She’d rather kill everyone on Earth, including her baby!
The magic amulets solve everything when one character realizes that they have unlimited power if they only believe that they have unlimited power.
The entire thing was the result of a lover’s spat between male and female Gods. Thematically, either they should have been queer Gods (like, explicitly bisexual), or it should have been some sort of “straight love doomed the world, queer love will save it.” As it was, it just seemed like totally random straightness in an otherwise queer world.
Marly, now time-traveled into her ten-year-old body, shares a tongue kiss with an also-deaged, now fourteen-year-old Julia. EW.
It concludes with a totally inexplicable epilogue in which Skilly, whom everyone hates because he wouldn’t give up his own immortality to save Ginger (who had a change of heart and was killed in battle), goes to China and looks for opium (W. T. F.) and meets a handsome stranger. Seriously, I have NO idea what point the epilogue was attempting to make.
Not my cup of tea. But it might be yours! I have a low tolerance for hipster irony, and very particular tastes in comedy.
The End
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....and it probably says too much about me that that sinks it for me, right there.
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I will definitely also write up The Man Who Was Thursday, though.
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I would love to see your Thursday review. If I feel particularly motivated I might even read it (the book) in the immediate future so I can comment on it.
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Also, Jondalar does not appear in the first book. Hmm, maybe I should sign out so I can leave this comment anonymously, rather than reveal so much knowledge of this series...
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It's a weird habit shift, because I still pack the things that I need nudging to read, and I still pick up the paper books to read them first. I just don't get stuck having to finish them nearly so often.
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I always get irritated when people treat prehistory as a single, undifferentiated time-period.
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Also in the department of semi-unreasonable annoyances (given that this is a book which contains a Fortress of Despair, I don't think the author was going for realism) but Urf dies of an infected wound, despite Skilly's efforts to "keep it clean."
Given how long it took for western doctors to figure that out, I am pretty sure that cavepeople did not know that wounds should be kept clean.
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