SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Here's the place to talk about the full book. What did you guys think?

I really liked it up to the moment that Noria and Sanja started visiting the spring together. Then it just got stupid.

These people are living in a police state where people are having their throats slit in public for "water crimes", and Noria's family has already been straight out told that they're under suspicion, and I'm expected to believe that she can't find a way to avoid taking pointless risks to save her life? In spite of walking past the blue circles every day?

At this point her narration outright telegraphs that she's being pointlessly careless and is going to get caught.

I thought it was going to be a 4-star book up to that point.

David wrote: "At this point her narration outright telegraphs that she's being pointlessly careless and is going to get caught.

I think the prologue made it pretty clear how it was going to end, so the foreshadowing wasn't really something that bothered me. If this had been a typical YA dystopian, there would have been many things about the plot that would've bothered me. But since (to me) this isn't at all about the plot, it was easy to just bypass those moments without paying too much attention to all the irrelevant details.

It was kind of interesting to go through the different chains of events to see which decision and who it was that set the course of things to come. Of course none of it matters, because their secret was known from the beginning, and it was just a matter of the officials waiting it out until they found the location of the spring.

I thought that there needed to be more world building. One crucial bit of worldbuilding is the background about the tea ceremony. If the tea ceremony is the protagonist's cause, then we need to know its significance.

I didn't mind the fact that Noria made some decisions that, from a remove, would seem obviously detrimental to her. After all, she isn't at a remove--she's in it. And she's left with a tea house she doesn't necessarily want (which is, I think, why the significance of it got short shrift). By then her real goal is to follow the records of the expedition to what might be some kind of water-rich promised land. I like that her inexperience and naiveté gets in her in trouble--that feels much more real, more relatable than if she was a super-capable, super-smart, super-prepared super-heroine.

I agree about not knowing enough about the tea ceremonies. I wondered exactly where that was coming from... a fictional element or a true regional one. I'm not sure if this is technically YA but it had a lot of tropes and cliches from the genre but I don't think it was horrible.

I also was a little thrown off about her swimming in the waters when people are dying of thirst around her. I get keeping it sacred but that seemed a little extra. I mean they had to find the CDs but that was it. I also wish they used her friends tinkering skills more.

Julia wrote: "I agree about not knowing enough about the tea ceremonies. I wondered exactly where that was coming from... a fictional element or a true regional one. I'm not sure if this is technically YA but it..."

The tea ceremonies are a real thing from a number of different Asian cultures. I had associated them mostly with Japan but I guess China has them too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_ceremony

The way I interpreted this was: in the twilight century, China became uninhabitable and the inhabitants of China had to move north to survive. One group of them conquered Scandinavia and brought their culture with them, including tea ceremonies.

This is why I originally assumed the Kaitio family was Chinese.

David wrote: "This is why I originally assumed the Kaitio family was Chinese."

I thought of everyone as a mix of Eastern European and Asian, mainly Chinese/Japanese/Russian/Finnish.

To me it seemed as though most of the people in the village were, at least racially speaking, Scandanavian, but it's been conquered territory for so long that Asian culture has intermingled with theirs in ways that people have grown to simply take for granted so the Chinese/Japanese invaders no longer seem foreign in any way. This is some new hybrid culture.

I loved the pace of this book and the beautiful flowing, measured language.

These people are living in a police state where people are having their throats slit in public for "water crimes", and Noria's family has already been straight out told that they're under suspicion, and I'm expected to believe that she can't find a way to avoid taking pointless risks to save her life? In spite of walking past the blue circles every day?

This didn't bother me. Noria's mother had abandoned her and her father had died. She was all alone and Sanja was her only friend in the world. She was desperate for connection, even at the risk of exposing the spring. She was never certain the spring should be hidden anyways, she just knew that the military shouldn't have it.

I did feel like things fell flat in the end. For me it was her conversation with Taro, and Itaranta needing to telegraph all the work she had done to that point by having Noria 'remember' all of her sightings of the blond guy, etc. It broke the spell that Itarnata's language otherwise cast. Was this meant to be YA? this was the only part that felt like it to me.

In all though I thought it was quite beautiful.

I was definitely left with a feeling of having entered the story mid-conversation. The tea ceremony being very Asian influenced, but then everything else seemed culturally Scandinavian.

Then there was the political state of affairs. Given the scarcity of water, the preservation of the tea ceremony seemed out of context with the state of the world.

I have to agree, that the behavior of the girls was beyond foolish. When you read stories based on historical examples of police states controlling scarce resources, you see how quickly humans become careful and clever to avoid detection. So, this didn't read authentic to me.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CW8fuHgJ8KN/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11969576/

Teaser trailer of the upcoming movie adaptation called "Veden vartija" (Guardian of Water), in Finnish only, sorry. I can't wait to watch this! <3

https://deadline.com/video/the-match-...

Here's the same trailer with English subtitles.

For me the book fell a little flat, but I think a movie could be really good. Exciting.

So it seemed to me that this was a comparison between environmental irresponsibility and the other forms of state sponsored genocide Europe has seen over the past 100 years. People who deserve water are those who are content with natural resources being hoarded by those in favor and people who want to protect earth are enemies.

Tea ceremonies, as I've been led (assuming this is inspired by Japanese/Taiwanese traditions) to believe are meant to be a time to stop and reflect on our connection to everything - tea leaves are from earth, steeped in water in fire until the scent takes to the air.

I would have liked this elaborated a bit more, and I would have liked a comparison between what the town had when there was a water guardian who seemed (?) to make use of the stream mostly for his own use and what happens when the town gets to use it too.

Because, the problem I had is that the "tragedy of the commons" (like when everyone litters in a park because they see other people doing it and taxes are gonna pay for it anyways) is in a shared sense of overconsumption and privilege to a space. This felt like it was more about survival than greed and therefore didn't hit me the same way.

But I also appreciate it was MEANT to communicate this, that some of us have to make the hard decisions because we didn't make slightly hard decisions earlier on (I'm thinking of the paper vs plastic mixed branding in the 90s in the US, vs early adoption of reusable bags elsewhere--we didn't make a slightly inconvenient choice then and now are facing the trash mountain that we have to reconcile with in the ocean).

I loved it for the beauty of the language and the purity of the friendship, but I'm sure that if I could read Finnish and had a bit more of the appropriate cultural awareness this would have gone from wistful and thoughtful to amazing.

I finished this one yesterday - trying to make my bookshelf challenge goal. The last few books I've read have been very sad, so this one fit right in. Even though the prologue foreshadowed something bad would happen, I didn't realize until the very end exactly what that bad thing was going to be.

Still, I thought much about the telling was beautiful, even the end. Reading the past conversation in the this thread and the first impressions, I wish that I knew Finnish to be able to read that version.

One thing that really bothered me, though, was that we never found out what was on the last disk. Noria and Sanja listen to it, but they never tell us what they learned. It's hinted at, but I kept expecting we would find out, since we hear about what was on the other disks and in many of the journals. It was a bit of a frustrating let down for me.

I read this one a while ago for a different book club and I really liked it. I did learn that the author is bilingual so did her own translation of it.

At the time, the idea of a world run by some sort of Russian/Chinese government seemed far fetched. I'm sure it would hit very different now.