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A review by meredithakatz
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
4.0
This book is beautifully written -- intense imagery, a long and uninterrupted flow of scenes without chapters to force a stop. Instead, it's entirely scene breaks to give you a pause for breath, and that really builds out the atmosphere. It's full of horror and beauty and resentment, both embracing Lovecraft's Dreamlands and lashing out at its implications.
That said, there were aspects of the writing that didn't work for me as well as I wanted them to. Mind, they read like deliberate choices rather than lack of ability or awareness of how it'd come across -- a deliberate choice to keep a distance from events, a deliberate choice to only put in information as it becomes relevant. It pushes back against the modern sensibility of putting you in the action, and of seeding things as foreshadowing then paying them off later. But as a choice it sometimes frustrated me, because it kept me from knowing Vellitt Boe as intimately. There are hundreds of conversations that have us being told they happened instead of showing them happening, broken up only occasionally by those we need to see happening. And in a lot of cases they're character moments! We're told: Vellitt knows how to deal with an arrogant man, so she does that, and gets the information she needs. We don't see the interiority of it. It means that when she thinks back to the people she's afraid will die, only one of them (the one who told the story at the bridge) is memorable to me, because we didn't actually see the others. Likewise, most things relevant get explained right as they happen -- for example, we are told. If that memory had come earlier, it would have felt like a payoff; as it, it feels convenient instead. And that's very much an aspect of the style so ymmv on if this is a benefit or not. For me, it tended to pull me out of the moments as they happened.
That doesn't necessarily mean I liked it less, exactly -- this is probably something I'll reread in the future, honestly, and I appreciate what it did and how it was used to maintain the dreamy flow. It just meant that I engaged with the individual scenes less. And that too might be deliberate -- they're meaningless, except as part of the scenery of the Dreamlands -- but I did find myself at odds with them often throughout as a result.
A really interesting read, both technically and as a story.
That said, there were aspects of the writing that didn't work for me as well as I wanted them to. Mind, they read like deliberate choices rather than lack of ability or awareness of how it'd come across -- a deliberate choice to keep a distance from events, a deliberate choice to only put in information as it becomes relevant. It pushes back against the modern sensibility of putting you in the action, and of seeding things as foreshadowing then paying them off later. But as a choice it sometimes frustrated me, because it kept me from knowing Vellitt Boe as intimately. There are hundreds of conversations that have us being told they happened instead of showing them happening, broken up only occasionally by those we need to see happening. And in a lot of cases they're character moments! We're told: Vellitt knows how to deal with an arrogant man, so she does that, and gets the information she needs. We don't see the interiority of it. It means that when she thinks back to the people she's afraid will die, only one of them (the one who told the story at the bridge) is memorable to me, because we didn't actually see the others. Likewise, most things relevant get explained right as they happen -- for example, we are told
Spoiler
she once rescued a baby Gug right before that Gug shows upThat doesn't necessarily mean I liked it less, exactly -- this is probably something I'll reread in the future, honestly, and I appreciate what it did and how it was used to maintain the dreamy flow. It just meant that I engaged with the individual scenes less. And that too might be deliberate -- they're meaningless, except as part of the scenery of the Dreamlands -- but I did find myself at odds with them often throughout as a result.
A really interesting read, both technically and as a story.