readerjane | What I'm reading

This week I finished a novella called All Systems Red, the first in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries series. What do you get when you teach a person to believe he's an object? You get someone with trauma so deep he's barely aware of it, who self-medicates by streaming hours of soap opera. You get someone who takes it for granted his every action is monitored and will be punished if he breaks the rules without being sneaky enough. Someone who is deeply uncomfortable when he encounters a group of clients who treat him like a person. Someone who has no idea what he wants his life to be, because he's never been told he has any say about it.

I was impressed with this story, and will definitely be following-up with the series.

Currently I'm reading The Light Between Worlds, by Laura Weymouth. This story is very Narnia-like: much more so than The Magicians, which was among other things a deconstruction of Narnia. Only, Weymouth has chosen to focus on the saddest part of the portal story - the part where the children have been exiled to the mundane world and don't want to believe they're never going back. It reminds me a bit of Dr Who's School Reunion, where Sarah Jane tells the Doctor what it was like to re-adjust to normal life after he abandoned her. But tLBW also reminds me of Normal Again, the BtVS AU episode where the whole Slayer story had just been a delusion in Buffy's mind. Until halfway through tLBW, I was almost expecting to find the main character *was* delusional. She is certainly mentally ill with depression. Not until her brother and sister talk with her about their magical journey, in a way that is clearly not indulging a fantasy, was I sure that wasn't the way the story was going.

This is beautiful, but so, so sad.