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Vesi Mäletab (2014)

by Emmi Itäranta(Favorite Author)

3.78 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Koolibri

review 1: I like to seek out non-English-origin sf/f; this was originally published in Finnish and the story itself is set there (roughly); it's a semi-near future (few hundred years), post-global-warming-peak-oil-apocalypse and post civilization-crashing, when what's left is building itself back up. Somewhere during all of this the Chinese (Qianese) have managed to militarily take over at least Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, possibly elsewhere but the focus of the story is very local and the viewpoint that of a young woman, so we only know what she knows (and chooses to 'tell' - much is left out or at the edges).The language is beautiful The descriptions are lovely and lyrical, and there will be paragraphs where the first-person author sort of wanders down a particular thought p... moreath that are too relevant to be a true digression, but which take moments out from the plot to just.. think.Main character's a young woman approaching adulthood who lives with her father the Tea Master and her mother the academic. She's privileged, very much so compared to the rest of the village, but doesn't really recognize it when the story starts (she comes to, one of the very satisfying things about this book is that her character actually grows and changes). Her best friend/gf? is another young woman in the village who is a tinkerer, a fixer and explorer of lots of lost tech left in the junkyards and waste dumps of earlier ages. To so much more is to spoil, but this is a good coming-of-age story set in a really interesting future-world where difficult choices have real consequences.Content notes: no rape! No sexual violence at all, implied or explicit.
review 2: This was a beautifully written book. As some reviewers have noted it is fairly slow-paced but I think this is part of it's charm. And I think a lot of YA literature nowadays is deliberately action-packed and so to have an author deliberately make the choice to slow down the pace is refreshing. Plus that form is fitting for the style of Itäranta's writing and it just seems to...fit.There definitely were questions I was left with, but I was not bothered so much by them. Many I was able to figure out myself by picking up on the little clues scattered throughout. Plus, I enjoy books that don't wrap everything up neatly. All in all, this was a nice, quiet, and short read and I enjoyed the book. less

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