#but I'm kinda saturated now sdbhndjeb whoops

[child-of-hurin]

can you tell me more about le passe-miroir? what you like about it?

I need to write a disclaimer first that I don’t want to shoulder the responsibility of recommending these books to anyone (anymore… s/o Ellis and Nóra) lol. They have a bunch of structural problems and sometimes you just want to e-mail the editor/s about it idk. Some people have no problems with it but, pesonally, When I was reading the first half of the first book all I did was complain. I actually gave up at some point, and I don’t even know why I went back to it. So like, yeah, take that into account, and if you decide to read it and end up hating it please don’t put the responsibility on me :p

What I like about it tho!! I think it just goes into a bunch of topics I love: reconstruction of the self via the other, people learning how to talk to each other & creating a new mutual “grammar”, art x artist, agency and responsibility, bla bla bla… It’s funny because when you start reading this book, you can spot the tropes from a mile, and then you sit down and wait for happen, eyes ready to roll, and then… some of these tropes just…. don’t happen… it’s a weird feeling that I enjoyed hahaha

Like I was telling a friend, I think this happens because (IMO) the author’s greatest merit is that she really lets herself go, so the majority of this work feels very sincere and (esp the last two books) has a high symbolic value, which I’m not sure she was necessarily aiming to put there, but which really attracts me all the more because of that ;P I particularly like that the characters in general feel very “fleshy”… Two things that tire me out in fantasy is a) characters that are like, archetype armors held up by the author’s imagination cardboard equivalent, and b)  when the author suddenly swoops down and intervenes in order to produce a neater structure…. I don’t have the vocabulary to discuss this dbhnjmds but I’d say both of these things flow from the same source of like, an artist being too taken up with ‘idea’, or maybe, curating their production too carefully, to the point where it’s all ego and no id. If in art I have to choose between “neat” and “messy”, in terms of the relationship between the art and the artist, I do prefer “messy”. And these books are kinda messy lmao… That was probably a relief, as two fantasy books I read recently had a bit of those problems.

More direct:I also particularly like the main character, and I also know that… 8 years ago I would have hated some later plot points, which nowadays I just find really very interesting hehehe ;D Ah yes also! The worldbuilding attracts me, which is also very rare in fantasy :) And I also like the relationships between the characters and the worldbuilding… Like, this book (and Nóra’s gentle encouragement) actually motivated me to create OCs lmao. I can’t even remember the last this happened…

Anyway, without spoilers, I think that’s it! As a PS, I also want to say that I like the fandom, so far I haven’t seen a single sign of ship wars or anti posturing