Automated updates: 2021-12-25
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title: Free Culture Book Club — Children of Wormwood, part 2
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date: 2021-12-25 07:09:12-0500
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categories:
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tags: [freeculture, bookclub]
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summary: Discussing the second quarter/eighth of Children of Wormwood
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thumbnail: /blog/assets/Children-of-Wormwood.png
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---
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This week, our [Free Culture Book Club]({% post_url 2020-05-02-freeculture %}) continues reading **Children of Wormwood**. And for those who celebrate, I hope that you have a merry Christmas 🎄 or nearest---probably belated---cultural equivalent. And for those of you who don't celebrate, I also 👍 have high hopes for *your* day...
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![Children of Wormwood cover](/blog/assets/Children-of-Wormwood.png " Vulture Priest with Raycat")
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To give this series some sense of organization, here are some basic facts without much in the way of context.
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* Full Title: **Children of Wormwood**
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* Location: <https://thefifthworld.com/wormwood/172151>
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* Released: 2019
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* License: CC-BY-SA
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* Creator: Giulianna Maria Lamanna
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* Medium: Serialized Novel
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* Length: Approximately 65,000 words (so far)
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* Content Advisories: Descriptions of radiation poisoning
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This should go without saying---even though I'm going to repeat it with every Book Club installment---but *Content Advisories* are not any sort of judgment on my part, just topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. It's to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
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## Children of Wormwood
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Here's the book's blurb.
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> Thirteen generations have passed since the ancestors burned the world. Little remains of that time now; the forests have grown back and people live in peace and plenty. The Vulture Priests keep watch over the worst relic of old: nuclear radiation. Their mysterious rituals contain it and drive people away from places it has poisoned.
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>
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> But sometimes, the Vulture Priests fail.
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>
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> Robin, a young woman on the brink of initiation, lives with her family downstream of a Vulture Priest temple. Soon, warnings begin piling up. Her parents suffer miscarriage after miscarriage. Men die too young, children fail to come into the world, and a dead green-furred ray-cat appears on the side of a creek. When Robin’s mother dies giving birth to a severely mutated baby, it forces the family to admit that radiation has poisoned their land.
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>
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> Now Robin, her father Glassknapper, her father’s sibling Narluga, and her aunt Vervain must leave their homelands and travel across the world in search of answers.
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The Fifth World is somewhere between a science fiction and fantasy setting, projecting the humanity that survives the [many disasters](https://thefifthworld.com/collapse) currently haunting today's world to create what they consider a paradise, rejecting the civilization that came before.
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Note that this is a different situation than our usual project, because the book is currently only in a half-finished state, and is---as you might notice if you follow the URL above---no longer presented on *The Fifth World*'s website by default.
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## What Works Well?
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I was going to complain that Glassknapper's internal narration bears no resemblance to how he speaks, but hints have amassed (and eventually confirmed) that he's deaf and speaks a kind of improvised sign language. It would make a fair amount of sense, then, that he has some trouble expressing himself in what's effectively a second language.
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Vervain's musings on saving the world are interesting, especially since it's a motivation that many adventure television shows grasp at.
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Similarly, it's not really the sort of expository commentary that interests me, but I'm sure that many readers will also enjoy Vervain's linguistic analysis of the verb "to be."
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## What Works...Less Well?
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These chapter seem overloaded with dry exposition. It feels like, in the movie version of this book, the action would frequently cut away to an elderly man in a tweed jacket, lecturing in front of a wall-sized world map.
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I commented on the pronoun usage, last time, but...
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> Hen shakes hen’s head, tells me hen just remembered hen forgot to do something in Pittsburgh.
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The passage shows the rapid collapse of language based on a poorly chosen pronoun. It's not Free Culture, but it reminds me of [*The Parking Lot Is Full*'s comic](http://j.aufbix.org/plif/archive/wc072.gif), even the right species, but not in a good way.
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Some cultural references are also a bit too precious for my tastes, such as "[Three Myland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident)." I realize that the idea is to simulate linguistic simplification over time, but it doesn't seem to happen anywhere else, to any significant extent.
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## Opportunities
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The *Fifth World* website has an entire page on [how to join](https://thefifthworld.com/about/membership) the community.
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For the purposes of disclosure, I should mention that I do support the project through Patreon, but have not yet been able to access any of the community features. I've been busy, and Godesky---the prime mover, so to speak, behind the world---has been busy, so we haven't been able to figure that out.
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## What's Adaptable?
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This time, we get more insight into the nature of the Vulture Priests, their mythology, and their overall mission, in addition to the idea of a Deathweaver.
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## Next
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Next time, we'll continue **Children of Wormwood** on pace, covering the second *Robin* and *Narluga* chapters.
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While we wait for that, what does everybody else think about *Part One* of the book?
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* * *
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**Credits**: The header image is **Children of Wormwood**'s cover, based on [* Vulture Priest with Raycat*](https://thefifthworld.com/art/giulianna-maria-lamanna/vulture-priest-with-raycat) by the author, released under the same license as the novel.
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