author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This is another one of those unfortunate weeks where the Friday Fictionette will have to be a Weekend Fictionette. I could blame yesterday's scrimmage, which was fantastic but left me exhausted enough to use "roller derby recovery" as an excuse to sleep late the next day. I could blame that, but I won't, because that's not the problem. The problem was, when I finally got up, I rolled over, grabbed my library copy of The Bone Clocks, and didn't put it down again until I'd reached the end.

My problem is, I have very little self-discipline around books.

Now, this weekend is a weekend containing no less than eight hours of roller derby doings and a good friend's birthday party, so I'm going to have to be clever about eking out enough time to get the fictionette up while we can still sort of kind of call it December: Week 2. Clever and also somewhat strict with myself. (Alas. It is no fun whatsoever to be strict with myself.) But not so strict that I don't let myself get enough sleep, because, well, roller derby. Athletes need sleep!

But at least I finished the library book, so that temptation is behind me.

The Bone Clocks is by David Mitchell, who also wrote that Cloud Atlas whose movie adaptation everyone was raving about not so long ago. In this book, he's created a huge sort of puzzle box that solves itself for you slowly, piece by piece, over the course of one woman's lifetime. In many ways it felt like a more mature and nuanced version of what Sheri Tepper was trying to do with Beauty. It's got a very similar story structure--at least, superficially so--and it voices very similar concerns. But it strikes a much more convincing balance between "Some things are just wrong, mmkay?" and "It's always more complicated than you think." And when it was over I not only cried a little at the end, but I found myself more prone to crying over other things, both happy and sad, for some time after I'd closed the book. It was as though the book stayed not so much in my conscious thoughts as in my emotional circuitry, magnifying everything else I felt for the rest of the afternoon.

It's either science fiction or fantasy depending on your point of view. Maybe a little of both. It has a science fictional tendency towards exploring future outcomes of present day action. It has a fantastical approach to psionic powers, reincarnation, and the afterlife. It has a terribly realistic viewpoint on disasters both past and present, but it never quite robs the reader of hope. It dangles what feel like hundreds of loose threads over the course of the story, and all but I think two of them get woven back into a satisfying resulotion. (One of those unresolved threads is a real humdinger, though, I gotta say. [ROT13]Pevfcva'f zheqre jnf fhccbfrq gb znxr gur cbrzf trg angvbany nggragvba, ohg gurl ner va snpg arire zragvbarq ntnva.[/ROT13] This bugs. But by the end of the book I wasn't thinking about that. I didn't actually think about it until hours after I'd finished, because everything else about the book was so good.)

It wouldn't be fair to give me all of the blame for my unfortunate binge-reading. I think Mitchell has to shoulder some of the responsibility. He wrote a book that was very, very hard to put down. I'm going to have to wait some time before checking out Cloud Atlas. Purely out of self-defense, you understand. Can't afford to have days like this every day.