Tiptree Awards
26/4/09 23:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI've just found out that one of the winners of this years Tiptree Awards is "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness; the other is "Filter House" by Nisi Shawl, which I haven't read yet.
I read Knife last year and I don't know why it didn't occur to me as a Tiptree candidate. It's all about masculinity and violence, how we construct them as being intertwined, and what that means for men; what that means for women; what that means for those who are in positions of powerlessness; what that means for girls, and especially for boys.
I tried to make an argument, when "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" came out, that if it didn't succeed on any other level, it did at least succeed in starting to deconstruct this image of masculinity where a man is someone who is capable of violence. And you can prove how manly you are by killing something.
But "Knife" is certainly better at that critique than "Sing-Along Blog." I like the book tremendously, for its marriage of suspense plot and introspection, for its not pulling any punches, even for how Ness has a genuine ear for regional dialects and the small variations between them. Really, though, it's only half a book, and I hesitate to judge half a book.
"The Ask and the Answer", the sequel, is coming out May 2009 in the UK, and not till September in the US; that's long enough to wait that I'm sort of considering ordering it overseas...
Honor list here, at the bottom. The only book on the list that I've read is "Tender Morsels," and I can't decide if it ought to have beaten out "Knife"; I had it picked as a Tiptree candidate because of the different ways the three main characters grow into womanhood, and as a feminist book I think it's a very good one, and on an aesthetic level -- as good as Knife is, I like Tender Morsels even more. But I don't think it explores or questions gender to quite the same extent as Knife, so I'm not entirely displeased.
I read Knife last year and I don't know why it didn't occur to me as a Tiptree candidate. It's all about masculinity and violence, how we construct them as being intertwined, and what that means for men; what that means for women; what that means for those who are in positions of powerlessness; what that means for girls, and especially for boys.
I tried to make an argument, when "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" came out, that if it didn't succeed on any other level, it did at least succeed in starting to deconstruct this image of masculinity where a man is someone who is capable of violence. And you can prove how manly you are by killing something.
But "Knife" is certainly better at that critique than "Sing-Along Blog." I like the book tremendously, for its marriage of suspense plot and introspection, for its not pulling any punches, even for how Ness has a genuine ear for regional dialects and the small variations between them. Really, though, it's only half a book, and I hesitate to judge half a book.
"The Ask and the Answer", the sequel, is coming out May 2009 in the UK, and not till September in the US; that's long enough to wait that I'm sort of considering ordering it overseas...
Honor list here, at the bottom. The only book on the list that I've read is "Tender Morsels," and I can't decide if it ought to have beaten out "Knife"; I had it picked as a Tiptree candidate because of the different ways the three main characters grow into womanhood, and as a feminist book I think it's a very good one, and on an aesthetic level -- as good as Knife is, I like Tender Morsels even more. But I don't think it explores or questions gender to quite the same extent as Knife, so I'm not entirely displeased.