Most novels are more fun when the protagonist changes over the course of the story. But some of my favorite books are those where the change is the story. I’ve just re-read two of those – Gillian Bradshaw’s Island of Ghosts and Cleopatra’s Heir – and was better able to savor the protagonists’ journeys back from despair because I already knew the incidents of the story and wasn’t reading to find out what happens next. I’ve been trying to think of other books like this and have only come up with two: Benjamin Capps’ A Woman of the People and Ellen Emerson White’s The Road Home. Oh, and maybe Household Gods, by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove, fits the description as well. Although I’d describe the heroine’s journey in that case not as “back from despair” so much as “mugged by reality.”
There must be a lot of others out there, but there’s been so much Real Life happening this week that I’m virtually brain-dead. I can’t even remember which disaster happened first. The AC must have died before the circuit board did, because it was the AC repairmen who discovered that problem and refused to come back until a licensed electrician Did Something. But when did the washing machine fail in a way that flooded half the house and soaked the walls, so that we’ve had a dehumidifier blowing for much of the week?
So, don’t mind me. I’m going to hide out away from the emergency-beeping smoke alarm which we haven’t been able to shut off yet and read something nice. And calm. And soothing.
But (dragging myself back on topic) what other books of this type have you read? And did you like them?
(Image: shamelessly stolen from Sarah Hoyt)
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Growing and changing”
Speaking of what books are being read:
https://www.isegoria.net/2024/05/no-one-buys-books/
“The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.”
“the top 4 percent of titles drive 60 percent of the profitability”
“2 percent of all titles earn an advance over $250,000” … “account for 70 percent of advance spending.” ”85 percent of the books with advances of $250,000 and up never earn out their advance.”
Most of those are $millions advanced for books by prominent politicians that nobody will ever want to read. They’re not expected to sell. Eventually the publishers will write them off as losses.
It’s bribery, money laundering and back-door political contributions.
Eh, not as much as you think. See, there are plenty of academic publications that have a print run of… tens. Really interesting stuff, but unless you’re Barry Cunliffe, unlikely to get widespread attention.
Like this, which is really valuable for my worldbuilding, but I don’t expect it’s going to sell 2,000 copies:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1606354280/&tag=davfresoffweb-20
Do they get advances in the $millions, though? Like Liz Cheney’s book, that you won’t even find on the $1.00 table because they know it would just take up space. It’s worth less than the paper it’s printed on. All those trees died for nothing, and less than nothing.
I’m just happy to see you back and posting again.
I can’t recall any books where the character change is the story, but I have had a run of 1920s westerns (most of my reading for the past *cough* years has been PD stuff, since I publish it and proofreading has to happen, and also I have to write something halfway-intelligent as an intro to meet Amazon’s terms for PD books) and they have been curiously female-centered, for a genre that latter-day feminists disdain as toxically male and misogynist.
The current example is *The Gun Tamer* by Max Brand. Which, from title and author, I did *not* expect to be about a middle-aged mother trying to prevent her daughter from marrying badly, but that’s what a good chunk of the novel is about. Sure, the potentially bad husband is a charming and handsome Mexican who is far better with a gun than he wants anybody to know, and there’s a sheriff and gun fights and derring-do along the way. But the bulk of the story is the mother trying to prevent the marriage and, more importantly, not lose her daughter forever.
Just before that, and now published, Charles Alden Seltzer’s *The Raider* tells more than half its tale from the view of a headstrong young woman from the east, who more or less bullies her way into marriage with the hero, then has to spend most of the book convincing him that she really does love him, and is worth his time, even as he catches her lying, and lying *well*, multiple times in the story.
Seltzer had several books in the ’20s with strong, willful female characters. *Last Hope Ranch* opens with the female lead sitting calmly on a porch, cradling a rifle, waiting to see if the man who tried to rape her will escape the building she locked him inside. *West!* makes the female lead the antagonist, another eastern woman who gets it into her head to impose her ideas of civilization on these uncouth western folks. (The hero is mostly charmed by how wrong-headed she is, no matter how much trouble she causes.)
Please take care of yourselves – it wasn’t the dishwasher’s fill valve failing on and the resulting flood that got us in December, it was the remediation.
While it was certainly a unique experience to realize that sitting in an ER waiting for test results after an extreme blood pressure spike wasn’t interminable this time, because it was so much quieter than home and therefore more restful (a term I have never applier to the ER before or since)… I do not recommend it.
…now to stop offering unasked-for advice, and actually answer your question?
Lois Bujold pulled it off well in The Curse of Chalion and The Paladin of Souls. There’s plenty of action going on, eventually, but they are at heart the journey of two people who have lost everything (a freshly bereaved widow in a medieval society, and a former noble soldier who was captured and enslaved by the enemy, now returned penniless and broken, respectively)… and their search to come back from the utter despair and loss of their… their world, for lack of better terms.
I know there are more out there, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head. It’s a hard sell, to me, to want to keep reading a character who starts in a very dark place… because I know that place so well, and the filters in my head to keep from slipping back there do not want to let in a character’s thoughts and feelings any more than self-generated ones.
Those two slipped by because I trusted the author not to mire me in angst and self-pity or worse… and because, right from the beginning, there was a promise of action to come, and them getting better. Sideways, backhandedly, but eventually better.