booknook

Crossposted from my DW:

In a way, it was a very typical and also a very un-typical Pulley book. I like her style a lot and there are enough twists in the story to keep me entertained. Some of it was utterly predictable, but in a good way where I want to know how they pull off a trope.

I've been rereading some of the Pulley books recently and they're all much more minimalistic than I do remember them after the first read. Which is...weird, sort of, but I think is actually a perk of her style. It looks like a hole when you scrutinize it, but your mind actually makes up for it.

The Mars House is a bit denser written than her previous things, but in a good way, it's fun.

It has a lot of Mandarin (and footnotes!!), but often the hanzi are missing in favour of only giving the Pinyin. As someone with a basic language and C-ent background, this is mildly annoying. I think the random Pinyin would drive me even more bonkers if I didn't have that background. I like it! I genuinely do and I think it's nicely done. But also...I'm not sure how people other readers are experiencing this.

The characters are nicely drawn, I like them all even if I want to bash January over the head sometimes.

I especially like the gender abolition topic, because it's a nice point of societal friction.

A list of thoughts:

January. I love him. He has no clue what kind of story he's in. Which is fair! But he makes some Really Dumb Decisions, which are understandable in his position - he's not a politician, he has only been paying surface attention to the politics, Gale is being cagey about a lot of things, he's traumatized, marginalized, and has good reason to believe he'll meet the same fate as Max - but argh. January, honey, get with the program and pay attention. (He comes around.)

Gale (River) is a smart idiot. I love them. But for all their intelligence, they are a bit stupid. I get why. It makes sense for them. But they could have made this a lot easier on everyone if they'd just come clean to January.

As I said, I need to suspend my disbelief here, simply because I mean

Mammoths?!

What do the mammoths eat and drink, if water is the limiting factor? How do they have pine forests, if they are low on water? I mean I get it, pine do better in cold climate, but pine also needs water. There are examples of arid cold climates on earth, but....hrm idk. Weird.

Why are mammoths relevant for the ecosystem anyway?

The resistance cages are such a central part and idk if it really makes sense. Like yes, gravity is lower on Mars, sure. And yes, people will probably grow taller in lower gravity. But one the one hand, evolution doesn't work that quickly (sure, they do genetic engineering), but also people who come to Mars will have less muscles after a while. We see it with ISS astronauts and they exercise a lot up there. So the danger would actually be less after a while if they just left people out of cages. There's even a point of that in the book, where Sasha and his staff train with the cages.