el dang reviewed Space opera by Catherynne M. Valente (duplicate)
Could have been great if it tried less hard or had a better edit
There's a book I would have truly loved in here, but it's buried under enough trying to make every sentence glitter that I almost gave up on reading it more than once.
I think this is a general vibe I get from Valente: my introduction to her work was a short story (or maybe a book chapter?) read aloud by a friend, and I loved it. But I haven't got on well enough with either of the novels I've read by her to want more. Every sentence, every paragraph, is beautiful and funny and quotable, but after a while it gets exhausting. It reminds me of why I never followed comedians on Twitter. In the terms of this book: it can feel like the sort of music in which every bar is someone's solo and they're all trying to outdo each other. It ends up lacking dynamics and coherency.
…There's a book I would have truly loved in here, but it's buried under enough trying to make every sentence glitter that I almost gave up on reading it more than once.
I think this is a general vibe I get from Valente: my introduction to her work was a short story (or maybe a book chapter?) read aloud by a friend, and I loved it. But I haven't got on well enough with either of the novels I've read by her to want more. Every sentence, every paragraph, is beautiful and funny and quotable, but after a while it gets exhausting. It reminds me of why I never followed comedians on Twitter. In the terms of this book: it can feel like the sort of music in which every bar is someone's solo and they're all trying to outdo each other. It ends up lacking dynamics and coherency.
I'm very charmed by the basic idea of this book: First Contact happens, and the aliens immediately demand that Earth enters Galactic Eurovision to prove its higher life forms are worth admitting to the galactic community and not a threat who should be exterminated. And at its best, it's a fun ride along that premise. Not trying to take itself seriously, in large part a tribute to Douglas Adams. But it just gets tiring to read.
And then there's one detail that really grated on me: a Turkish character named "Omar Calişkan". "Çalışkan" is a common Turkish name, but Turkish has strong linguistic well-formedness rules and "Calişkan" is Just Not Turkish to the point of being irritating to see. I know this is a niche complaint, but it never stopped bugging me that she found the "ş", but not the "Ç" which would always go with it in Turkish, even though that one's in Latin-1. "Omar" doesn't feel like a Turkish name to me either (the equivalent would be "Ömer"), though I'm less confident in this one: maybe it's just unusual enough that I haven't run into any Turkish Omars. But anyway, this felt extra-jarring when the characters (father and son) are so well-observed that I felt very personally skewered by the "Englishblokeman" thing, and had a specific individual in mind when reading about the son. Couldn't author or editor have found a Turk to run the name by?