Notes on “Hat Full of Sky”

[x_los]

- The introduction of the Hiver is extremely “Dirk Gently” inflected.

- This book feels as though it ends ages before it does (slightly anti-climatically, when the Hiver is thrown out of Tiffany), and there are weird structural snarls. Ultimately Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax go camping for no reason, and while sure, sometimes all of us do pointless errands, that’s generally not considered narratively stage-worthy. 

- The emotional flow of the scene where Tiffany’s friend sticks up for herself and Anna Grammer cowers is really all over the place. It’s very hard to draw a causal through-line, here. Character development in the scene keeps ping-pong reverting in a way that’s again, potentially slightly realistic but unusual and unsatisfying in a book. I think listening to this may make it more obvious? This needs a light edit (the previous issue needed a thornier, structural one).

- Granny Weatherwax complains about diaries with eyes on them. My listening memory is not as good as my reading memory, but I don’t believe she should know about these *to* do a call back? She wasn’t in the scene in the shop where these came up. I can think of a couple narratively built-in ways to justify this, but the text doesn’t gesture to any of these.

- I hate knowing anything about authors. I don’t want to be on the look out for signs of this or that, as if I’m reading a bedside chart rather than a book. I wish I didn’t know anything about this bloke who I never, to my knowledge, met. (UK SFF is teeny tiny so of course we shared friends, but the most famous people in those spaces tend to have circulated widely until they got annoying famous and then slid right out. Everyone older than you will have been their bestie and no one your age will have met them except maybe at a signing. The tiny quality is fairly hateful, because it makes ever doing crit exceptionally delicate, in a useless sort of way. “Oh don’t say Steve is a missing stair, I was best man at his wedding!” How interesting, and did he grope anyone there or did he hold off just the once on account of its being something of a special occasion?)

- This makes it sound like this wasn’t a good book, but there were many excellent prose moments, themes, etc. The general level of skill is what makes these snags feel weirder. 

Comments

[vorvayne]

You know, this is interesting because I *love* the Tiffany Aching books but I did always feel that a Hat Full Of Sky was the weakest of them, but without any kind of real weight or meat behind that opinion. When you talked about the issues you saw I was nodding along like, ah, yes, I remember those bits and feeling odd about them.

The remaining three aren't per se structurally flawless, but iirc they hold enough emotional weight that the whole thing just feels like it holds together a bit better on the back of it.

Mm, now I fancy a reread. Or a relisten - I think actually I *read* these, which is pretty unusual because I do enjoy the TP audiobooks a lot.

[x_los]

We skipped over to Amazing Maurice for a bit there, but are now on Wintersmith. VERY good audio, yes.