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Apocryphal
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Aren’t heroes generally selfless, and villains selfish? In that sense, it’s easy to see how no one is purely one or the other. However, I do think Smith is a villain - even though he has a higher cause, it’s essentially a selfish one. Takahashi was …
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He had 3 years to fall in love with Sachi - it just was kind of glossed over because this isn’t really a love story. But I thought that loyalty to his word (rather than love) was his driver through the second half, and the need to do a good job in t…
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It’s an interesting tension. The whole idea of patriotism in the USA is entwined with the idea that ‘patriots’ are willing to do what’s necessary to overthrow an ‘oppressive’ government. This tension underlies the Jan 6 riots and the Canadian convoy…
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Luckily, as someone who neither has to kill, nor formulate a law, nor worry about the programming of an A.I., I have no need to put the necessary work into developing an answer. :-)
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Not really, no. I’ve done a lot of running by the seat of my pants (the latter method) and it can result in a lot of red herrings and not really any more satisfying a conclusion. And the players spend a lot of time wondering why this NPC or that did…
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For my part, the meat of roleplaying isn’t investigation or action or planning, it’s conversation. In character conversation. Whatever you can do to foster that is a good. I’ve also found that mysteries can be very compelling drives both in fict…
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Those views are now considered sexist/ racist by western university educated elites, but are still widely held around the world and even by many in the west. In other words, that outlook has not yet been relegated to history, in my view. I don’t…
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Ah, that’s interesting. Ok know very little about the history of Hawaii, so I’ll have to read up. I know there was a Hudson Bay Company factory there at one time. I noted in the text the use of ‘King St’ and also something else that made it differen…
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My comment wrt this is that that I found in remarkable and highly implausible that both McGrady and the Japanese American woman both floated through the whole war in a kind of cocoon. Japanese Americans and Canadians were rounded up and placed in in…
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Why wouldn’t it have a place in a modern book?
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I honestly didn’t notice anything remarkable about it. Since you bring it up, though, I do wonder if the book would have been better or worse in first person. I don’t have an answer. Is it a purely stylistic choice, in this case?
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Turning to Wikipedia, this seems to be more hard mobiles than noir. This is from the ‘hard boiled’ entry: "The best definition of hard boiled I know is that of critic Eddie Duggan. In noir, the primary focus is interior: psychic imbalance le…
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I think McGrady is a well-meaning enough fellow, and is sympathetic to the every day joe. This is an aspirational quality. Does he have flaws? Sure. He’s pretty jaded, and becomes more so over the course of the novel. He also doesn’t really understa…
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The book held my interest all the way through, and I had no issue with the pacing. I didn’t find the book flagged during the ‘basement’ scenes, but it did feel to me that the first sex scene (with Molly) was kind of an odd interlude that broke the p…
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I’m finished now as well.
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There was something in the news this week about remembering Chinua Achebe’s influential novel, _Things Fall Apart,_ and I got to thinking how it would make for an interesting comparison read to _The Orenda,_ tackling many of the same themes.
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I’m about half way through. First impression: Pretty solid detective fiction.
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RPGs for the most part emulate heroic fiction, and most game designers give players a chance to play ‘big heroes’. If that’s what most people ( or at least most vocal people) want to play, then that’s what most designers will make. I’ve often wonder…
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What kind of stories would you prefer to read, @BarnerCobblewood ?
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Fangorn forest, more like 😂 Paul always said I was an ent.
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I am amazed at the attitudes of people around me, and I've lived in a variety of Canadian cities my whole life LOL.
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Thanks, @RichardAbbott - I'll probably read this one, too.
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Very nice analysis @RichardAbbott !
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Hmm, I may have been confusing what I read about Georges Sioui (who was born in Wendak, Quebec) when I wrote that. According to Wikipedia, Boyden claims Ojibwe and Nipmuc heritage (and previously Mi'kmak and Metis.) However, this shift in my percept…
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We’ll, fist off, I disagree with the thesis that it’s doesn’t read like fiction. It reads to me like all historical fiction, where the events are known but the details and character motivations are not. I can only speculate as to why he wrote it…
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The big changes to the world around them largely go unnoticed by them in their villages. It’s only at the end, when the Iroquois show up en mass, that the effect is really felt, I suppose. Before that, it’s mainly just Bird’s creeping malaise sugges…
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We don't know for sure that the feud would have ended - it may well have continued even after Snow Falls was returned. If the English had not given the Iroquois guns, things might have ended differently, too. But it seems inevitable to me that the E…
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Although there's a fair amount of mysticism in the Wendat camp - Gosling, for sure, as a sort of medicine woman, but Snow Falls is also prone to some bouts of mysticism. But Christophe is, too, in his own way. He accurately predicts when the rain wi…
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I don't understand the 'no dramatic thrust to the events' comment - the books seems full of dramatic events, many of which are brought about by the character's actions. I do agree that there's definitely a slice of life quality. I don't see that thi…
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Some reviewers seemed to think that the Iroquois were the villains, and that Christophe was the hero, and that this made the novel 'predictable'. I certainly didn't see things that way. I think each of the main characters are the hero of their own s…