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hrjTremontaine is an experimental project, and as such, I feel like I’m reviewing the form as much as the content. This prequel to Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint is an episodic serial, released in both text and semi-dramatized audio form, written by multiple authors (each episode having a specific author), and involving the braided stories of several equal protagonists. The authors are Ellen Kushner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, Patty Bryant, and Paul Witcover. The narrators are Nick Sullivan, Sarah Mollo-Christensen, and Katherine Kellgren. And the series is available through a new venture named Serial Box (serialbox.com).
This format means that a variety of consumption patterns are available: episodic versus binge, text versus audio. I chose the audio form as I have more time in my schedule for audio than text, and I listened each week as the episodes came out, so my experience was strung out over 13+ weeks. (This means my comments about repetitiveness were not due to having binge-listened.)
The basic story involves the intersecting lives of the Duke and Duchess Tremontaine (grandparents of one of the protagonists of Swordspoint, who features in a birth announcement at the beginning of the story), the Balaam family who control the chocolate trade from an overseas Not!America (that very definitely has not been colonized by Not!Europeans), a collection of self-satisfied university students on the cusp of their examinations, the turnip farmer and mathematical genius Micah who falls into a chance to develop and use her talents further, and a certain forger named Tess the Hand. We have economic plots, political plots, cultural clashes, university politics, several tempestuous love affairs, and a dark secret from the past involving murder.
OK, enough dithering over the preliminaries. I…liked Tremontaine, but I didn’t love it. Not the way I hoped to love it. I loved individual characters, especially Micah, the mathematical genius. (I've seen other reviewers use the word "savant" for Micah, but for me that is too evocative of the word that typically precedes "savant" in popular use. Micah is clearly on the autistic spectrum but I see no reason to imply that her genius is because of that, rather than in addition to that.)
I loved the way the Duchess Tremontaine seized the world by the throat to get what she wanted from it. I loved the contrast of the various parts of the city and how they interacted. I loved the politics and culture around the chocolate trade. I loved the diversity of characters in all the ways that the word “diversity” is currently being used. I loved the way that same-sex relationships are normalized within the world of Riverside.
Despite the variety of authors, I never felt tripped up by transitions in style or inconsistencies in characterization. (Although it took me a while to figure out that it was the characters, not the authors who were confused about Micah’s gender.)
Moving on to the negative side, I didn’t much care for the repetitiveness of the exposition. I felt like I was being told the same background information over and over again. I was amused by Ixkaab Balaam’s smug attitude of, “No you are the uncivilized savages" but, again, it got repetitive.
While I loved the normalization of same-sex relations, I felt that only ones between men were truly "normalized". It felt to me as if Riverside has a clear expectation that men will have sexual and romantic relationships with other men as a casual matter of course, but I didn't get that same sense of expectation about the women. Ixkaab and Tess's romance is, in some ways, treated as a personal quirk, rather than with a sense of "but of course women are going to have affairs with women all the time." When you look at reader response to the Riverside novels, and especially the response of the interactive fans who create art and fan-fiction, it's clear that the centering of m/m relationships is a major draw. And I expect that this aspect of the setting will be viewed differently by readers for whom that is true. This isn't in any way a flaw--I'm delighted to have a f/f relationship as part of the central story--it's just an observation.
I like the idea of having very individual character voices acted in the audio version, but the actual presentation of some of the characters grated on me in ways that might not have happened if I’d been reading it as text. And as much as I found a number of the characters quite striking, none of them really fastened on to my reader’s heart.
So in summary, I found the innovative format intriguing and may choose to consume the next season in text form the first time to do a compare-and-contrast. (Yes, I will be consuming the next season. I did like it that much.) The story is complex and layered, if sometimes a bit predictable. (I saw the "twist" coming several episodes in advance, and the survival of certain characters into Swordspoint can be considered a bit of a spoiler for the possible resolutions of this prequel.) I do wish I’d loved it a bit more, though. I wanted to.
This format means that a variety of consumption patterns are available: episodic versus binge, text versus audio. I chose the audio form as I have more time in my schedule for audio than text, and I listened each week as the episodes came out, so my experience was strung out over 13+ weeks. (This means my comments about repetitiveness were not due to having binge-listened.)
The basic story involves the intersecting lives of the Duke and Duchess Tremontaine (grandparents of one of the protagonists of Swordspoint, who features in a birth announcement at the beginning of the story), the Balaam family who control the chocolate trade from an overseas Not!America (that very definitely has not been colonized by Not!Europeans), a collection of self-satisfied university students on the cusp of their examinations, the turnip farmer and mathematical genius Micah who falls into a chance to develop and use her talents further, and a certain forger named Tess the Hand. We have economic plots, political plots, cultural clashes, university politics, several tempestuous love affairs, and a dark secret from the past involving murder.
OK, enough dithering over the preliminaries. I…liked Tremontaine, but I didn’t love it. Not the way I hoped to love it. I loved individual characters, especially Micah, the mathematical genius. (I've seen other reviewers use the word "savant" for Micah, but for me that is too evocative of the word that typically precedes "savant" in popular use. Micah is clearly on the autistic spectrum but I see no reason to imply that her genius is because of that, rather than in addition to that.)
I loved the way the Duchess Tremontaine seized the world by the throat to get what she wanted from it. I loved the contrast of the various parts of the city and how they interacted. I loved the politics and culture around the chocolate trade. I loved the diversity of characters in all the ways that the word “diversity” is currently being used. I loved the way that same-sex relationships are normalized within the world of Riverside.
Despite the variety of authors, I never felt tripped up by transitions in style or inconsistencies in characterization. (Although it took me a while to figure out that it was the characters, not the authors who were confused about Micah’s gender.)
Moving on to the negative side, I didn’t much care for the repetitiveness of the exposition. I felt like I was being told the same background information over and over again. I was amused by Ixkaab Balaam’s smug attitude of, “No you are the uncivilized savages" but, again, it got repetitive.
While I loved the normalization of same-sex relations, I felt that only ones between men were truly "normalized". It felt to me as if Riverside has a clear expectation that men will have sexual and romantic relationships with other men as a casual matter of course, but I didn't get that same sense of expectation about the women. Ixkaab and Tess's romance is, in some ways, treated as a personal quirk, rather than with a sense of "but of course women are going to have affairs with women all the time." When you look at reader response to the Riverside novels, and especially the response of the interactive fans who create art and fan-fiction, it's clear that the centering of m/m relationships is a major draw. And I expect that this aspect of the setting will be viewed differently by readers for whom that is true. This isn't in any way a flaw--I'm delighted to have a f/f relationship as part of the central story--it's just an observation.
I like the idea of having very individual character voices acted in the audio version, but the actual presentation of some of the characters grated on me in ways that might not have happened if I’d been reading it as text. And as much as I found a number of the characters quite striking, none of them really fastened on to my reader’s heart.
So in summary, I found the innovative format intriguing and may choose to consume the next season in text form the first time to do a compare-and-contrast. (Yes, I will be consuming the next season. I did like it that much.) The story is complex and layered, if sometimes a bit predictable. (I saw the "twist" coming several episodes in advance, and the survival of certain characters into Swordspoint can be considered a bit of a spoiler for the possible resolutions of this prequel.) I do wish I’d loved it a bit more, though. I wanted to.
