Queen City Jazz

This is the book that redeems all the books I've slogged through just because my book group was reading them. Because I slogged through this one, too, but it was worth it.

For the most part, I did not enjoy reading it. The beginning, with the neo-Shakers, was interesting and caught my attention; but our heroine leaves home relatively early, and there's a long section in the middle there where things get weird -- like, drug-trippy weird; and even though it's not drugs and there is a science fictional and integral-to-the-story reason for it, it felt a lot like the 70s New Wave SF that was heavily into drugs, which I actively disliked.

But when I was about 60% of the way through, I suddenly realized I was engaged with the story; I cared show more about the character; and I wanted to see how things would work out.

The book is at once a hero's journey, a coming-of-age story, a post-apocalypse story, a druggie vision quest story, and a story with some very interesting science fictional ideas, and I think it suffered by trying to do all of this at once. It also uses a storytelling strategy in which neither the viewpoint character nor the readers have any idea what is really going on, and everything is bewildering and confusing until gradually, in flashbacks, things start to become clear: in other words, the story is told backwards for much of the book. This seems to be an increasingly popular storytelling strategy which I find increasingly annoying, and I think I finally became engaged when I did because by that point I finally had enough of the backstory to start caring. I will say that the flashbacks are presented in a way that is perfectly integrated into the plot, which isn't always the case.

There were a lot of allusions to literature, music, and drama - I'm sure most of that went over my head as I'm not well enough read in the humanities. I suspect too that the author was deliberately attempting a literary version of jazz in this story, and I don't actually like jazz very much, which probably contributed to the slogging. A significant theme in the book was the relationship between life and art, and the temptation to value art more than life; this reminded me of [b:School of Light|567807|School of Light|Jody Lynn Nye|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1175871868s/567807.jpg|554876], although it's treated much more lightly (ahem) in that book.

There were also a lot of beautifully written sentences and paragraphs -- I kindle-highlighted a *lot* of passages in this book -- which makes me believe that the slogging was the result of an intentional stylistic choice that I don't enjoy, rather than an inability to write; and makes me want to read more by this author. Probably even the next book in this series, although not for a while yet: this one needs time to settle. It will be interesting to see if I like the "Blues" better than I did the "Jazz".

My biggest peeve: although the protagonist is a young woman, and although there are several other important women characters in the book, most of them turn out to be proxies for either the mother, or the wife, of the man whose fault everything is, and a great deal of time is spent on his relationships with them. So for a book with so many women, it weirdly feels like it's actually all about this one guy, his mom, and his girlfriend. Ugh.

There are some good meaty themes here, and some original ideas, both of which were interesting to read about and to think about. Despite how little I enjoyed reading this book, I'm extremely happy to have read it. show less

6.5/10
I feel like this is a book that couldn’t quite decide what kind of story it wanted to tell—a young girl’s coming of age, or maybe a quest to save a city, or a treatise on the nature of consciousness, or a story of conflicting world visions, or a dystopian tale of nanotech run amok, or maybe a love story—and just what is love, or perhaps a perspective on our attitudes toward death… You get the idea—the plot was just being pulled in too many directions, as if the author had all these fantastic ideas and rather than pare them down to a manageable few, she tried to weave them all into a rather unwieldy story that suffered from uneven pacing and tone.

Yet the characters were interesting, even as they sometimes metamorphosed show more into other characters, and the world-building was well done. The reader was fully immersed in Shaker Hill, Dayton, the voyage to Cincinnati, and the Queen City itself, in all its weirdness. Along the way, I learned a lot about bees and, while not a jazz aficionado, I could appreciate the importance of music and dance as a means of emotional expression and communication with others. show less

The latest installment of my intermittent quest to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati, the "Queen City" of the title. Of the ones I've read so far, this is definitely the most Cincinnati, down to the Roebling Suspension Bridge being featured on the back cover, and passages praising the beauty of Union Terminal. Part of my reason for reading novels set in my hometown was to access what I imagine people who live in New York City or Los Angeles experience all the time when consuming media, a feeling of familiarity. I will admit to a certain frisson when reading that the protagonist, Verity, grew up in Miamisburg (40 miles up the Great Miami from where I grew up), or travels to Lockland (where I worked for a year). Cincinnati also show more has a depth of history that renders it well-suited for Goonan's project here; near its end, the novel becomes about history and how we remember things, which is apt for a city some accuse of being too obsessed with its past. (It's hard for me to imagine that conservative Cincinnati could ever become the fourth city in America to vote to undergo nanotech enhancement, though; fifty-fourth seems more likely.)

I liked the protagonist, but aside from those aspects, much of this novel was frustratingly obscure. I'm not sure I really grasped what was going on except in the broadest of strokes, and I wasn't really encouraged to put the effort into figuring it out. Goonan clearly has a way with words, but that way is often confusing. There are three other books in this series, but this one was not engaging enough to incline me to read them given that the action moves away from Cincinnati. show less

Published a year before Diamond Age this explores a seed mode of nano-based materialism infusing a mental programing throughout the Queen City. It is a fascinating "trip" through a technological dream/nightmare, and if the very structure of what is being relayed prevents it from being relayed smoothly, still there is enough scenery to squeeze you through to the end. And if you are a jazz loving American lit fan, well there's a bit more.

Amazing concepts, but somewhat poorly executed. And I know how odd that sounds, considering the awards and praise from big names this novel has gotten, but I didn't find the prose layered and complex. I found it unclear. I found Verity to be inconsistent in her reactions, and I also felt that Sphere was two-dimensional. I liked the hive concept, and the deep thinking about information, and the ways information is metaphorized. I just think it could have come in a cleaner package.

The first 60%: amazing and detailed worldbuilding with really original and fascinating ideas. No real story, to be honest, and the female MC is completely passive (in truth just a witness, never a real factor, always pushed around by others), but the sense of wonder more than makes for that. Loved it. The next 20%: endless and boring introspection and inner MC doubts, plus thick packets of infodump served exactly as infodump: the MC, and therefore the reader, simply receives episodes of explanations from the past. Still no story, too many unintersting and unidimensional SC, and too much jazz references, unfortunately (I love blues but really, really hate jazz)... At 80% i couldn't cope with the slugging boredom anymore and gave up. A show more hugely wasted opportunity of an amazing scifi world... show less

This one got off to a good start - I was ready to learn about this new world transformed and decimated by nanotech, but once Verity made it to the city, she just kept meandering around and it never got as interesting again.