Hellbound [지옥]

unorthodox

Another series I watched during quarantine is the short and powerful Unorthodox, by Anna Winger, featuring the fantastic actress Shira Haas as Etsy, fleeing her unhappy marriage and the stifling rules set by her Hasidic community in Williamsburg, New York, to seek refuge in Berlin, although ambivalent to get help from her distanced mother once there. I found the story quite moving and intense in the slow unfolding of Etsy’s progressive unraveling of her un-orthodoxy and of her desperate escape into a world she knows nothing about. While her difficulties in apprehending this new universe are well rendered, I however find the part of the story when she joins a friendly group of music students somewhat too lazy a plot, although her fight there for achieving autonomy by herself only is remarkably transcribed. I am equally quite impressed by the show immersion into the Hasidic community, which is putting a considerable effort in replacing their tradition into an historical perspective and exposing the outworldly separation between men and women, who are essentially reduced to becoming mothers. The main strength of Unorthodox is that it keeps away from manichaeism, with people stuck into a frozen tradition and not seeing the oppression it induces. As most often with fundamentalism.

ravencry [book review]

After enjoying Ed McDonald’s Blackwing this summer, I ordered the second volume, Ravencry, which I read in a couple of days between Warwick and Edinburgh.

“Valya had marked all of the impact sites, then numbered them according to the night they had struck. The first night was more widely distributed, the second slightly more clustered. As the nights passed, the clusters drew together with fewer and fewer outliers.”

Since this is a sequel, the fantasy universe in which the story takes place has not changed much, but gains in consistence and depth. Especially the wastelands created by the wizard controlling the central character. The characters are mostly the same, with the same limited ethics for the surviving ones!, albeit with unexpected twists (no spoiler!), with the perils of a second volume, namely the sudden occurrence of a completely new and obviously deadly threat to the entire world, mostly avoided by connecting quite closely with the first volume. Even the arch-exploited theme of a new religious cult fits rather nicely the new plot. Despite of the urgency of the menace (as usual) to their world, the core characters do not do much in the first part of the book, engaged in a kind of detective work that is rather unusual for fantasy books, but the second part sees a lot of both action and explanation, which is why it became a page-turner for me. And while there are much less allusions to magical mathematics in this volume, a John Snow moment occurs near the above quote.