A Certain Slant of Light

Finished Half Magic yesterday! Somehow for the first time. Wild. I picked it up because I'd added Seven-day Magic to my TBR because it was on someone's 100 books list and was going to pick it up, when the library told me it was the seventh in a series. "Oh I see! My mistake!" And here we are. 

Eager apparently wrote it for his kids after discovering E. Nesbit, and It Shows. The premise of Half Magic is nearly the same as Five Children and It: Four+ siblings find a wish-delivering [fairy/coin], which, for the most part, causes more problems than it doesn't. However, they have a grand time, overall, and, when you think about it, Probably Learned Something. Both books have a terrific grasp of sibling dynamics and of authorial voice; both books are episodic, including one to Chivalric Times; ...both books have "yikes" attitudes about gender, race and class. 

They're fine! I loved Five Children when I read it as a kid and was disappointed to find it didn't hold up to my narrative interests as an adult, but both are really interested in the childhood as she is lived (for a certain white and more-affluent-than-they-think class of child) and magic as same. There's a bit in Half Magic where Eager discusses the relief and kind-of-magic of encountering an adult that 1) knows they're an adult, 2) knows you're a kid, and 3) thinks you can have a relationship anyway. I think both these books have something of that in them. 

Also played two free deduction-type games yesterday! Yesterday I accomplished very little! 

The Archives of Trevosa is a The Roottrees Are Dead-alike, in that someone has come to you with a collection of documents and asked you to figure out their family tree in order to solve an inheritance problem. The wrinkle in this one is two-fold: The documents are from a country called Trevosa, whose language has not been fully translated, and when you search the documents for a term, only the first three documents will show up. So there's some note-taking and creative termsearching involved! It's a quick game, but it's a good time. Some cute Easter eggs. 

The Red Pearls of Borneo is a Type Help-alike, in that someone has come to you with the story of a bunch of people who died on the same day, and given a few documents, you must use your special powers (in this case, being psychic), to figure out not only everyone's name and face, but which room they were in at which time. It took me about four hours to finish the whole thing, including the two side stories. 

It is kind of a downer!! Unlike Dinn and Type Help, which are horror stories, or Trevosa and Roottrees, which are part family drama part another ingredient, Borneo is about the escalation of the war in the Pacific during WWII, filtered through the experiences of folks living on a tobacco plantation in Borneo. It--maybe even more than Dinn, although it's been a long time--is successful at telling a narrative with character stakes. So it's kind of a bummer that people die. I honestly kind of forgot they were all supposed to die! That's on me... Much sadder than the other four I've played. 

Worth noting, that although there's some clear authorial awareness about Colonialism, most of the characters are British colonists, and they don't have any. You can also opt in or out to period-accurate racial slurs against the Japanese. Not complaining, but it's an interesting choice, given who were global colonizing powers in the area at the time--there's no such option given for cleaning up how the Brits talked about indigenous Borneans. In fairness, it's not really through racial slurs in the same way, within the game. Although of course they're still racist. One can also unlock "glossary" (not what that means......) entries that are nonfiction overviews of different economic, political, etc. forces at large at the time. I know very little about it, to be honest, but it seems the kind of well researched that bespeaks a guy for whom this is his Special Interest... It's also available in English and Chinese!

Both Trevosa and Pearls are apparently still in development, so, idk, watch this space? Watch those spaces? I will do a bad job of keeping track of it myself, but someday maybe I'll come back to them... Roottrees DLC I still won't pay 20 dollars for you....