Review of "Wind Will Rove" by Sarah Pinsker

[forestofglory]

“Wind Will Rove” by Sarah Pinsker is a Hugo finalist in the novelette category this year. I recently read it as part of my Hugo reading process and I have thoughts that I wanted to share.

I mostly liked this story. It featured tons of things I love, such as a grandma POV character, slice of life, and cute kids playing with goats. It's really nice to see that many smaller scale stories with more domestic elements are finalist this year.

It’s also a music story, which I’m meh about because I don’t really get music due to my auditory processing problems. It's like magic sound emotion stuff -- but I’m happy to read about other types of magic that I can’t experience so I mostly treat fictional music like strange magic system. But that’s neither here nor there.

The story focuses on history teacher who is dealing with a student who doesn’t think history is worth studying. This seems like a great topic for story -- I love history and want more people to understand why it is valuable. However I think this story confuses the question of why people study history with the question of the value of remembering the past and contuniting practices (in this case playing old songs) routed in the past. I view academic history and ritual practice as two separate things. The story argues that we should study history for the same reasons we should continue these kinds of practices -- but it fails to differentiate between the two and therefore misses many of the reasons that history is important.

So the story spending lot time talking about how practices rooted in history make us feel. It discusses how these types of practices honor the present moment while providing continuity between present, past and future moments. It practice Jews ritual knowing that people in the past used these same rituals, and people in the future will use them too. I think the main character of the story feels the same way about playing traditional tunes.

However, history as academic discipline exists for many reasons, studying history can be a way of connecting to the past, but the story misses out on a lot of the reasons that people do study history. And that makes it a much weaker story that it should be. Personally I study history to understand the present. History helps me understand how we got to where we are now. Looking at the history if an institution helps us to understand how it is structured today. For example I can better understand California's political system by studying the progressive movement and the problems they were trying to fix. More broadly studying the past can teach us about how societies change or fail to change and we can use this knowledge to inform our activism today. The story totally misses this aspect of historical study.

I think the story’s focus on feeling a personal connection to history would have been ok it the story had not been framed around a history class. However since it was framed as a argument between the teacher and the student it frustrating to read about two characters having an argument where I felt that I could have made a better case for the teacher’s side.

So I wanted to like this story because it contained so many elements that I enjoy, but ultimately I think the story failed at answering the question that it set out to answer and in doing so failed historians and history as subject of study. So I found it a frustrating read, full of subject matter I enjoyed but thematically never quite becoming what I wanted it to.

Comments

[owlmoose]

I didn't think of this criticism while I was reading the story, but now that you lay out the argument I think it's a really strong one. Even though I found this story beautifully written (until the end, which fell a bit flat for me), I agree the weakness of the teacher's argument also weakens the story overall.