Hamilton, Custard and Zombies!
Feb. 1st, 2018 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearLast night, after purchasing tickets over a year ago, we went to see Hamilton, which overall was pretty awesome. The cast were enthusiastic and all the performances were committed and excellent. I was initially quite disappointed by the roles given to the two main female characters, particularly when Eliza's main song in the first half was titled "Helpless". I know it was reflective of women's position and lack of agency at the time, but a lot of the other attitudes in the production were modernised, so I expected better from the women. However, both Eliza and Anjelica came into their own a bit more in the second half, and it's excusable that they were only presented in terms of their relationship to Hamilton, because *all* the other characters were presented in that way. I've read in reviews that Hamilton himself is skewed as the hero of the piece, and presented entirely sympathetically - but I didn't get that impression at all. To my mind, he treated people badly and acted selfishly, foolishly or arrogantly all the way through! Still, it's an impressive and entertaining musical, and I'm glad we got to see it.
Today, I finished listening to the second in The Custard Protocol series by Gail Carriger, titled Imprudence. It was quite fun overall, and I do like the narrator, but it was very slight and didn't really have a cohesive plot. Rue and her airship just bimbled about, not really understanding what was going on, and then it all got sorted out very quickly and easily in the end. The main plotline that ran all the way through related to Rue's relationship with the ship's engineer, Quesnel (and I never would have guessed that was spelled like that from the pronunciation, which sounded more like Canelle), and I didn't really like it at all. It involved a lot of cross-purposes and misunderstanding, and a rather uncomfortable series of 'lessons' Quesnel gave Rue in sexual relations. I'm not against romance, as a rule, but I did find the whole thing a bit off-putting, not least because of the power differential between them, which had previously not been an issue in their interactions. Still, I do like the world, and the characters, so I may well persevere with the series anyway.
I also finished reading The Splits by MV Clark, which presents itself as a series of 'personal histories' from some kind of archive, relating the history of an outbreak of what is essentially a zombie virus in 1969, tracking its progress through to 2010. It follows a small number of characters, who each get their own fractured narrative, which builds up a picture of the situation as a whole. I found it quite gripping, and generally well-written, but the framing idea of the archive files just didn't work at all. There was no way the characters would have written down their accounts as they were presented, partly because they wouldn't have wanted the other characters to have read them, and in some cases because their production would have been impossible (since a couple of the pieces ended in the narrators' deaths - written in the past tense). So, the idea that these accounts had somehow been collected together by someone at a later date was ridiculous and it annoyed me enough to pull me out of the story quite a bit. I got the impression towards the latter stages that the whole thing might be an allegory for the history of the treatment of and attitude to mental illness, which was quite interesting. But, if that was the case, I wasn't sure what the book was trying to say, and it kind of fizzled out at the end without coming to any conclusions. Overall, it was sort of World War Z meets We Need To Talk About Kevin, which is a bizarre mix, and worked to a certain extent, but could have done with a better hook to pull it all together.
Today, I finished listening to the second in The Custard Protocol series by Gail Carriger, titled Imprudence. It was quite fun overall, and I do like the narrator, but it was very slight and didn't really have a cohesive plot. Rue and her airship just bimbled about, not really understanding what was going on, and then it all got sorted out very quickly and easily in the end. The main plotline that ran all the way through related to Rue's relationship with the ship's engineer, Quesnel (and I never would have guessed that was spelled like that from the pronunciation, which sounded more like Canelle), and I didn't really like it at all. It involved a lot of cross-purposes and misunderstanding, and a rather uncomfortable series of 'lessons' Quesnel gave Rue in sexual relations. I'm not against romance, as a rule, but I did find the whole thing a bit off-putting, not least because of the power differential between them, which had previously not been an issue in their interactions. Still, I do like the world, and the characters, so I may well persevere with the series anyway.
I also finished reading The Splits by MV Clark, which presents itself as a series of 'personal histories' from some kind of archive, relating the history of an outbreak of what is essentially a zombie virus in 1969, tracking its progress through to 2010. It follows a small number of characters, who each get their own fractured narrative, which builds up a picture of the situation as a whole. I found it quite gripping, and generally well-written, but the framing idea of the archive files just didn't work at all. There was no way the characters would have written down their accounts as they were presented, partly because they wouldn't have wanted the other characters to have read them, and in some cases because their production would have been impossible (since a couple of the pieces ended in the narrators' deaths - written in the past tense). So, the idea that these accounts had somehow been collected together by someone at a later date was ridiculous and it annoyed me enough to pull me out of the story quite a bit. I got the impression towards the latter stages that the whole thing might be an allegory for the history of the treatment of and attitude to mental illness, which was quite interesting. But, if that was the case, I wasn't sure what the book was trying to say, and it kind of fizzled out at the end without coming to any conclusions. Overall, it was sort of World War Z meets We Need To Talk About Kevin, which is a bizarre mix, and worked to a certain extent, but could have done with a better hook to pull it all together.
