The Summer War

The Summer War, by Naomi Novik

I'm a huge Novik fan, so it's no surprise that I really enjoyed The Summer War. It's quite short (I was able to read it from start to finish in the waiting room while my partner got an MRI, and still had ten minutes to muck about on my phone), which can be both a strength and a weakness but in this case I think is mostly a strength. The story could have been told at much greater length and detail, but I think in this case the fairytale style of storytelling suits the length quite well, as does the archetypal character design.

Novik is a versatile and skilled writer, so even archetypal characters wrung a lot of emotion from me (I'm a sucker for sibling relationships written like they actually matter, so parts of this book made it lucky that I was the only person in the waiting room so no random strangers saw me tearing up). And I love the working of a fairy tale that recreates that fairy tale logic, where magic and fate and curses and people's personal choices and who you fall in love with are all intertwined into unreasonable but rule-following patterns, but uses a modern code of ethics. Overall a great read.

N.B. Novik is a founder of the Archive of Our Own, and writes fanfiction under a penname. I don't know if it's bad form to reveal her penname, since she's actively writing and a lot of her stories are 'fixits' of other writers' work, but if you know, you know. I honestly love reading her traditionally published work alongside her fan work, because you can see the influences of not just other writers on her (which of course is always part of creating) but of her own takes on other writers' work. A major thread in The Summer War is the relationship between love and power, specifically how love is a kind of power a person can choose to wield as sharply and effectively as a sword--first, you swing the love, and then you swing the sword.

I don't think this is an idea that comes from any single work, of course, and I don't mean to say that Novik is taking ideas from other writers at all. This is all too meta to be confined to a single story, and anyway I don't think the original story she's been playing around with understands love in this way at all. And the whole phenomenon of fandom is that fans pass an idea back and forth and develop it far beyond the original creator's intentions. I don't know, it's just interesting to see. It adds a layer to the story, for me, and it meant that, having read some of her most recent fan works, I was really anticipating The Summer War. The Summer War still surprised me! but I do read it in conversation with her other writing in a way I really like.