The Dubious Hills

Starting to read this it felt very like total immersion science fiction, as I tried to work out what was happening (and discarded various theories as they failed to fit). This book is hard work in the best of ways, it mirrored various aspects of mundane life in a magical world in ways I haven't seen before, and the problems its protagonist faced were so real as to seem insoluble and I still don't know what the right answers were.
Certainly not standard quest fantasy, this has wonderful world building in simple community life. And I loved the profanity.

A highly original fantasy about free will and choice, about growing up, and about the nature of knowledge. Set in the same world as the YA series "The Secret Country" Dean describes life in an enchanted country, where knowledge is parcelled out, each denizen receives a well defined and limited knowledge as their birthright, and beliefs are hard to maintain.
Arry is the local Physici - which means that her province of knowledge is pain, and she experience all the pain in her vicinity, in The Dubious Hills only another Physici can experience and know about pain - who at the age of 14 has been responsible for raising her younger siblings since her parents disappeared.
When wolves who don't act like wolves appear, and odd things begin to show more happen, the response of the people in her village falls somewhat within Arrys domain of pain, and she tries to find out what is happening to correct it.
The mental and emotional pain caused by the wolves appearance causes her to become uncertain of her own knowledge, and this in turn open her eyes for the emotional pain of her siblings that she feels ill equiped to deal with. Tryeing to learn about it she gains an understanding of the threat the wolves poses to the society she lives in.
This book does something that is unusual for a fantasy, it explores big existetial themes, trying to understand the difference between knowledge and experience, and whether free will and peace are mutually exclusive. The book makes an analogy between fairy tale evil and free will which is interesting, and mirrors the genesis story.

It takes a while for the story to hit its stride, and the complexity of the setting to shine.
The scope of this story is wider than that of a typical fantasy, but this does not make it less of a entertaining novel, with characters to empathise with, and an interesting storyline. show less

A very strange book, and I'm not sure I liked it. It's a terribly ambitious concept - a society where people only know one thing, and everything else they either have experience of or are told by someone else - but I'm not sure it came off very well. It might have been the base concept, or possibly the main characters (all children, which is disorienting) or maybe something about the strangely distant writing. Best use of werewolves I've seen in a while, though.

What a wonderful, deep, thoughtful book. Very odd fantasy. What a strange line, between knowing and memory and doubt... I don't think I quite grasped it on my first reading, not until after. This was my third reading.I think most writers telling a tale of this sort would have made escape from the spell the goal, and thus Halver hero, not villian. I'm still not sure. But the society wasn't a bad one, the people not unhappy, mostly, even if they couldn't know it. I suppose the key is the end, with Oonan's "It's not the certain knowledge, the right knowledge, that did us harm, if harm was being done to us. It was refusing to step outside it." And so they didn't know that a mother leaving might cause pain in her children. Until she read show more about all the cruel mothers.I wonder about the wizards. It says they set up the society to eliminate war, murder, and yet no hint as to why that particular setup would achieve that goal. Perhaps just that no one had the knowledge of killing? Or perhaps the loss of certainty... If they thought war was rooted in certainties, leading to fanaticisms. show less

I shelved this under fantasy rather than science fantasy or sci-fi because the premise...doesn't make sense. Which, okay, I can totally roll with that, it's not like my adored Arthurian legends have much resemblance to reality.

But this doesn't hold together. I feel like I was handed a bowl, and when I tried to take the dough out of the bowl to knead and bake, it turned out to be batter. This doesn't hold together, I don't understand how this world functions, I don't understand the laws of magic here, I don't understand what Arry is trying to do half the time, and I am therefore not happy.

copperbadge says that the line in Doctor Who 5.01, "Believe me for twenty minutes," is Steven Moffat as the writer talking — just believe me for show more twenty minutes. Just suspend your disbelief for twenty minutes and let me tell you this story. But the thing is, if I do you that favor, if I agree to believe for those twenty minutes, because I do not owe you the author my suspension of disbelief, you have to give me something in return, and I don't think Dean did. Her writing seems purposefully opaque here, intentionally dense. I would have been grateful for an info dump or two, because this makes no fucking sense. show less

This one was a little bit tougher of a read than the rest of this author's works. I liked it, but it just wasn't in the same league as the others.