I think I liked the culture and culture colliding parts of The Kin! Oh yeah, that sounds neat! Dickinson is good at world-building in that way, and I think also good at books that stand up for both teenagers/younger teens and adults in their way.
I feel like I'm going to write an essay if I get into the mysteries I enjoy--I should just write up a Peter Dickinson post in my own journal, really--but, let's see, I think some of my favorites are Play Dead, about a fiftyish grandmother who is bored stiff in her post-divorce rut and gets involved in a murder at the local playground, Some Deaths Before Dying, in which an almost totally paralyzed old lady solves a murder/family tragedy from many years ago with the help of her nurse and a young lawyer and the photographs she's taken all her life, Shadow of a Hero--not a mystery, kind of YA, the heroine is thirteen and is going back to her family's Eastern European country of origin just as the Iron Curtain collapses, and The Seventh Raven, also not a mystery, kind of a thriller set during a hostage crisis at a children's opera rehearsal. These are so hard to summarize in a way that does them justice lol :) but I do like that a lot of his protagonists are women and girls, and I like the way personal needs and relationships get mixed in with sociopolitical happenings, sometimes in imaginary but plausible countries. aagh, I wrote an essay after all...
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branchandroot
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Date: 2024-12-07 14:00 (UTC)Oh yeah, that sounds neat! Dickinson is good at world-building in that way, and I think also good at books that stand up for both teenagers/younger teens and adults in their way.
I feel like I'm going to write an essay if I get into the mysteries I enjoy--I should just write up a Peter Dickinson post in my own journal, really--but, let's see, I think some of my favorites are Play Dead, about a fiftyish grandmother who is bored stiff in her post-divorce rut and gets involved in a murder at the local playground, Some Deaths Before Dying, in which an almost totally paralyzed old lady solves a murder/family tragedy from many years ago with the help of her nurse and a young lawyer and the photographs she's taken all her life, Shadow of a Hero--not a mystery, kind of YA, the heroine is thirteen and is going back to her family's Eastern European country of origin just as the Iron Curtain collapses, and The Seventh Raven, also not a mystery, kind of a thriller set during a hostage crisis at a children's opera rehearsal. These are so hard to summarize in a way that does them justice lol :) but I do like that a lot of his protagonists are women and girls, and I like the way personal needs and relationships get mixed in with sociopolitical happenings, sometimes in imaginary but plausible countries. aagh, I wrote an essay after all...