Did I say Tuesday? I clearly meant Thursday. Much belated reviews, plus bonus library post!

Beth Fertig - Why Can't u Teach me 2 Read?

I found this book mildly depressing. Fertig tells the story of three people, two boys in their very late teens and one girl in her early 20s, who have managed to reach high school graduation in New York City without learning how to read.  They sue the school board and are awarded funds to get tutoring and assistance, sometimes quite significant assistance, with learning disabilities. Along side the story of these students, Fertig tells the story of the NYC school system in 2008, as Mayor Blumberg attempted to implement significant change to the way that schools were rated, and the way in which they taught students.
I liked the way Fertig organized the book by splitting it into the seasons of the school year. This provided structure. I found particularly interesting the revelation that, really, we don't know how to teach students how to read. There is considerable, significant debate over the "whole language" versus the "phonics" systems, plus additional suggestions that a blend of the two - phonics early on to help kids learn to read, and then whole language later so they can read to learn - might be the best method.  But none of these methods are grounded in solid science, or, at any rate, the debates do not center on that science - instead, this has become an ideological battle.  Conservatives like phonics, liberals like whole language, and each has staked considerable political value on their position. Thus, as administrations change, especially at the state and city level, schools are bombarded with new facts, and also "facts", about this style of teaching or that style of teaching - and the schools and the students loose as a result, because there is no consistency. Further, if the experts don't agree, how are parents, who often don't have the time, let alone the training, to make fully evaluated decisions on the "right" way to teach kids, to decide if the school is doing the best for their children? Fertig really highlights this dilemma - the three students she shadows are all children of first generation immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.  Their parents are often working long hours, and often do not speak English - this makes it easy for them to not be aware of all the options available to their children, and it makes it easy for their children to fall through the cracks.

I didn't like the way that Fertig flipped back and forth between the students and the discussion of school board policy. Both parts of the book were fascinating, but I would get to the end of a chapter discussing a student, and be left hanging - will they advance? Will this be the time they drop out of the system for good? And then shift into discussion of principals fighting for their schools and teachers struggling with new technologies. I felt that both stories lost out due to this model, but I'm not sure that the book could have hung together had the two stories been divided. Perhaps a greater blending of the stories was in order.

I really didn't like the fact that that the NYC schools (and not just the NYC schools, but American schools in general) could have done, could do, so much better if they were better funded - class sizes down by 1/2, for instance, and dedicated reading teachers throughout the system. I am increasingly convinced that standarized testing is a bad idea. Fertig presents an argument that standarized tests, if used properly, can help teachers to see which students need help in which areas - I buy that idea, except that the tests are also used to determine if a student is suitable to move up the next grade, and if the teacher is suitable for retention, and if the school is suitable for funding, which is too much burden to place on a periodic test. Plus, if the test reveals that a student  is doing poorly because they cannot read and understand the test on a very basic level, the teacher has very little recourse. They are teaching 14-29 other students, all of whom have minor problems with the test, all of whom need to be prepared for the next test; the one student who is struggling gets left behind. The one student who is excelling - who needs no help on the test, who is beyond their classmates in a particular subject - there is nothing for them either. The solution to this problem is tricky, but I'm pretty sure its not to sink money into new technologies that the schools cannot afford to teach teachers to use, and then fire half the teachers because they can't or won't use the technology.

Adrian Tchaikovsky Blood of the Mantis

I had borrowed this one ages ago, and had to take it back before I could read it - it got recalled by someone else. Anyway, I've finally managed to borrow it again, and have quickly read it so that I can review it.  You may recall that I quite like Tchaikovsky's steampunk with insects. This book is no exception. Tchaikovsky has mostly written a spy story this time.  It has a little bit of politics, some musing on the nature of war and honor, episodes of violence, death, and violent death, with a few excellent scenes of aerial combat to round things out (actually, the aerial combat plays a major role in the book and the development of various characters), but it's mostly spies, intrigue and skull duggery. With fencing! The plot moves forward, the characters become more interesting and complex, and we discover what giant insect-people eat - smaller insects, mostly. There's a great deal to love here, and if you haven't started reading these books, I urge you to begin now. Seriously!

Nathalie Mallet Princes of the Golden Cage


In numerous discussions over the years, my wife and I have posited that all novels are, on some level, mystery novels. That is, a critical element of the plot is focused on the principle characters trying to figure out what is really going on. In some cases, this element of the novel is closer to the surface than in others, but the mysterious element has to be there, or what's the point? (Additionally, all novels are romance novels, and all novels are horror novels, and all novels contain some element of the fantastic...) This book has the element of mystery fairly close to the surface, given that it's actually a fantasy novel and not a mystery. Clearly Mallet's first novel, Princes features fantastic characters who react to their surroundings and their situations mostly realistically, an excellent plot with lots of nice twists and double-backs and a fine reveal at the end, and good pacing. Mallet needed a better editor to catch many minor word choice errors - properly spelled, but the wrong word - one does not bare weapons (well, I suppose one does, but that's not what she meant), one bears them - and phrasing peculiarities - "I took the direction of the kitchen" is the one that stuck out - but those were fairly minor concerns. Some of the plot twists were easy to anticipate, and there were some moments where Mallet's characters were deliberately obtuse in order to not figure things out quite yet, but the writing was still strong. I look forward to the next book.

Bonus Library Post!

Before we left town on Friday, I had gotten a note that a book had arrived at the library for me - but I arrived just as they were closing, and so could not pick it up. I went in on Tuesday and got it:

J.M. Sterling - The High King of Montival


I've been enjoying this extended series of post-apocalyptic novels, and this is the most recent one. I sense that Sterling is coming to some grand conclusion, possibly a point wherein the magic fixes everything, but perhaps not, we'll have to see. Anyway, watch for a review of this in the next couple of weeks.

Book Reviews for Friday, 5/21/2010

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling
Book Two of Shadows of the Apt. Oooo, I do like these books a great deal. Tchaikovsky is addressing all manner of deep and important things here about loyalty, friendship, adulthood, war, empire, technology... All sorts of good things here. The march of the Wasp Empire continues, Collegium falls under siege, our principle characters are forced to make some difficult decisions about who they are, what they want, and where they see themselves in the world. A couple of things I liked most especially:

1) the contrast between Collegium and the Wasp Empire. Both are dominated by "apt" folks - both can use technology, but they treat technology differently. The masters of Collegium are excited by technology, and constantly seek to develop new things and new ways of doing things. This results in a chaotic technology. The Wasp Empire sees technology as a means to an end; a way to speed things up, but not something to be pursued for its own sake. The closest comparison I can think of - and it's not a great comparison, really - is the US and Japan during WWII. The US War Department had an office devoted to accepting, evaluating, and responding to various voluntary ideas for weapons and techniques.[1] There's a scene in the book where a huge number of proposed defenses for Collegium are described, each master has his own pet device that he wants to see mounted on the walls or tossed into the skies, or launched into the harbor - this struck me as similar to the US approach to technology. The Japanese developed excellent technology at the beginning of the war, but were not big on innovation during the war, for a number of reasons, some ideological, but most systemic - lack of resources for R&D, mostly. The Wasp Empire has good technology, but it is clear that developing new technology throughout the war is going to be a struggle against a belief that technology is a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself - this is critical to the development of several characters in the novel.

2) The response - the tension between remorse at the damage done and amazement that the theory worked - that technologists feel after seeing their devices in action. This felt very real to me, and meshes with what I've read about, for instance, the scientists who worked on the A-Bomb, and their response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm thinking particularly of Oppenheimer here, who lost his position within academia and within US society for his condemnation of his invention.

Things I didn't like - Tchaikovsky split his party, and that made it difficult to follow the narrative at times. He was all over the place, in three different locations at once often. So, a chapter would end, and the next chapter would pick up somewhere else. This was dealt with fairly well, but I often wished for longer blocks of direct continuity. Also, Tchaikovsky began killing off characters with some abandon in the second half of the book. Fair enough - the books are set during a war, after all, and death is bound to happen - but there was a small sense that these characters had been developed just enough so that when killed the Really Important Characters - Stenwold, especially - could feel guilty and angry and sad. And the reader too, of course. This was not a huge thing, and I might not even have noticed it had someone else not raised the objection in regards to some other book, where it was (says he - I have not read the book in question) egregious.

The third book of this series is on order at the library, and I will review it in due time. I will say, at this point, I would love to steal this setting for role playing - it has a great deal of juicy possibilities in that direction.

Elizabeth Moon - Legacy of Gird

So, somewhere in the middle of my "to-read" stack is Moon's newest book - Oath of Fealty - and, in order to get to that, I felt it necessary to re-read the previous stuff in the setting - the Paksennarion books, and the Legacy of Gird books. Legacy contains two novels; Surrender None and Liar's Oath. These books come, chronologically, before the Paksennarion books, but were written after, clearly to explain the world of the earlier books. Surrender None is brilliant, by far my favorite of the two. This addresses the revolution of Gird, a figure who has become, by Paksennarion's day, a deity, or at least a major saint. His Code has become the principle legal document for at least one nation, and the way he organized his army has become a template for society. In Surrender None, Moon explores "what really happened," and it is an excellent description of a war between a subservient group and the dominant body of society. Moon has military experience, and it shows in this book - the struggle of soldiers and their commanders to come to grips with the realities of combat are vibrant and ring true (at least to me, a committed civilian). So, yes, a very good book by itself.

Having finished Liar's Oath, I'm not sure I've ever re-read it. There's a lot in there which is good - I like, especially, the discussion of the difficulty of recording events for posterity - how do you handle reality when what you want to write is a legend? I like, also, the description of the struggle of people to establish a society after a revolution - very real, and a good portrayal of the dichotomy between idealism and realism in society. As I mentioned last week, I like authors who consider the question of "what happened next?" in all of it's possible implications, and, to the extent that Moon does that here, she does it very well. The problem is that Moon needs this book to do something else - to bridge the divide between Surrender None and Sheepfarmer's Daughter, the first book of the Paksennarion trilogy. How do we get from the society described in the first book to the society described in the second? The bits which need to act as that bridge in this book feel forced. It is clear that the narrative did not want to be such a bridge, and so there are several places where a chapter opens with "time passed," or something of that nature. Another trouble is that Moon is trying to tell three different stories from three different points of view. Each works internally, but the links between the three are weak in places. I would love to see each of the three stories handled separately - the story of Seri and Aris, the story of Luap and his people, and the story of society under the second Marshall-General (of which we get the least narrative). Additionally, I would love to see, perhaps as a pair of chapbook type publications, the full text of Torre's Ride and the full text of Gird's Code, with Commentaries. I think those would be fascinating, although perhaps not widely demanded.

Anyway, I'm going to take a break from Moon for a couple of days - Paksennarion is three books long and quite a lengthy trilogy at that - and come back to her, perhaps towards the end of next week.

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[1] The two which stick in my mind are the cat bombs and the bat bomb. Cats, according to the inventor, would naturally run away from water towards the interior of Japan, which was where Japan had most of its industry. So, bombs carried by cats would inevitably arrive in the interior of Japan, thus doing damage to Japanese industry. That idea was never tested, but the bat bombs were - bats, the theory went, would perch on the eaves of Japanese houses, which were highly flammable. So, incendiary bombs attached to bats would cause large fires. However, when tested, it turned out that bats were not a good delivery system, because they became disoriented in airplanes, and could not be reliably expected to land on Japanese houses.

Review Post for Friday, 4/22/2010

So, my day job is in academia - I teach college classes. And this time of the semester, as we start to wrap up and give and take final exams and write and grade final papers - this is probably the worst time to start a new side project, especially one involving a great deal of reading. Which is not an excuse, but merely something to say that, based on past experience, I had expected to have read more than 1 or 2 books by this point in the week.
Anyway, here's what I read this week.

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

This is a book about a bunch of people who are also bugs. Tchaikovsky never attempts to explain why they are bugs, but there are beetle people and ant people and mantis people and spider people and fly people and moth people and scorpion people and wasp people, and they all have certain traits which make them those people.

Before you flee in terror, let me stress something - this book was really really good. I think that, in addition to the stage of the semester, contributed to my slow pace - solid books are often harder to read quickly than fluffy ones. Actually, that's probably the definition of a solid book, right? So, what did I like about this book? First, it hit all of the things I enjoy in a good book recently: 1) politics and war, 2) swashbuckling, 3) a nice touch of steam(punk?), 4) good, meaty characters who it's possible to care about. I think the 4th is the key element - without that, everything else is just window dressing. This book has #4 in spades; nuanced good and bad characters each with a whole array of believable motivations, motivations which are often in conflict with each other. Do I do what is right for the Empire; do I do what is right for me; do I do what is right for this friendship; what do I do when I cannot do all three?

There is a deep back story here - a lengthy history which Tchaikovsky reveals in tantalizing snippets. Sometime in the distant past - centuries ago - the nations strong in "art", or magic, enslaved the nations strong in "apt", or technology. There was a rebellion, the Apt won (repeating crossbows will defeat cunning magic most days of the week), and now the resulting world is endangered by an Empire of the Apt - the Wasps. But, because selling Wasps weapons is good business, many people refuse to see that the Wasps will inevitably turn on the weapons-makers. So, on one side of the story, we have a bunch of stalwart folks who see the encroaching danger set out to establish a defense of those who do not wish to be defended. And, in the process, finding themselves asking if what they are setting out to defend is worth the effort. So there's your politics and your war and your intrigue and your spies and such. Good stuff. On the other side, we have the loyal officers of the Empire seeking to do what is good for the Empire, and firmly believing that what is good for the Empire is good for themselves. Until it isn't. And I believe I mentioned that above. And they spend most of the novel racing around, jumping off of things, fencing with each other, preparing to take revenge, finding lost children they didn't know they had - and there's your swashbuckling. And the whole thing culminates in a battle royale around a brand new steam locomotive, so there's your steam. Is it steampunk? That must be the subject of a future post on what, exactly, steampunk is or is not. I can entertain the possibility of arguments stating that Empire of Black and Gold is steampunk (the author, for one, believes that it is), and arguments that it is not (this book is neither Victorian, nor science fiction). Although I tend to defer to the author in this sort of situation (unless the author is patently wrong, and I don't think that's the case here), neither of these arguments matter much in the long run, because what Empire of Black and Gold undeniably is is a really really good book.

One warning, perhaps. At present, there are 4 books in this series (in England, only 3 here in North America), with a 5th at the publishers, and a projected 7 books total. This is good, if you like the series and enjoy the characters and want to see more, but does raise the unpleasant possibility that the series will never be done.

I would be remiss if I did not include a link to Mr. Tchaikovsky's blog, which answers a great number of the questions about backstory and pre-history.

Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity's Death

After Empire, this book was a nice change, much lighter. Where the previous book was solid, this book was airy, and where the previous book was tantalizingly unresolved, this Aunt Dimity was delightfully complete within its own covers. It had good characters, and the whole thing sparkles. I'm not sure how to classify this book. Later books in the series are mysteries, but this one wasn't quite. It's a ghost story, and it's a romance, and there are elements of mystery there too. At any rate, it was a nice palette cleanser after Empire, but I don't know how hard I will look for the next book in the series.