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    Black Wine
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    Black Wine
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    Black Wine
    Ebook388 pages6 hours

    Black Wine

    By Candas Jane Dorsey

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Crawford Award, and Prix Aurora Award.

    An old woman hangs in a cage; a young woman slaves on a rich lord's estate. How does a woman discover and assert her identity in a primeval, barbaric world? From slave dense to merchant cities to isolated mountains, Candas Jane Dorsey's novel is a powerful exploration of gender, identity, and freedom.

    "Fantasy or a remote future, it doesn't really matter: the careful braiding of self, places, and times insidiously pulls you in, up to the point where you realize you don't know anything anymore, and then on the other side, you suddenly see the story, the words, and even the genres, more completely: inside out. That's Candas Jane Dorsey's rare gift as a writer. She makes you wiser, and never cheats." -Elisabeth Vonarburg

    "In terms of technique alone, Black Wine is one of the most sophisticated literary SF novels of the year....Black Wine lives in its passionate prose and startling imagery....A rewarding and moving novel." –Locus

    "As brilliant as William Gibson, as complex as Gene Wolfe, with a humanity and passion all her own. Candas Jane Dorsey isn't just a comer, she's a winner." -Ursula K. Le Guin

    "Dorsey's writing is unflinching and powerful, weaving a complex story about personal freedom and individuality. Fans of Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin, in particular, will find much to admire here." - Middlesex News (Framingham, Mass.)

    "Like its title, Black Wine is rare and darkly glowing with iridescence. A taut, spare, wonderful creation, it is justly deserving of consideration for the awards for which it will certainly be nominated." -The Edmonton Journal

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFive Rivers Publishing
    Release dateSep 17, 2013
    ISBN9781927400364
    Author

    Candas Jane Dorsey

    Candas Jane Dorsey is a Canadian poet and novelist whose works span across genre boundaries, having written poetry, fiction, mainstream and speculative, short and long form, arts journalism and advocacy, television and stage scripts, magazine and newspaper articles, and reviews. She has served on the executive board of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, as editor-in-chief at The Books Collective from 1992 through 2005, and was a founder of SF Canada. In 1998, Dorsey received the Prix Aurora Award for her novel, Black Wine. Dorsey currently teaches and holds workshops and readings. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.  

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    Reviews for Black Wine

    3.5/5

    68 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book is a little hard to get into, but oh my god, am I glad I stuck with it! It is a little confusing in the beginning, with too little information given to the reader. Some of the language choices made the reading, especially at the beginning, awkward.Setting aside the negatives (of which there are few), a couple of chapter in, I was so hooked that I stayed up all night to finish the book. As the world of Black Wine becomes clear and the women's stories are pulled together I found myself enjoying the rich universe that Dorsey created. It is so worth a read, the dark and fascinating plot lines of the individual women are woven together so beautifully and her unique way of telling a story spanning several generations make this book worth a look at.
    • 1/5
      I haven't been able to read much of the book. It's so dreary and I just don't like the characters. I'm in a place in my life where I prefer to read lighter --dare I say it.. happier fare. I don't intend to finish it any time soon, but I reserve the right to revise my review should I finish it.
    • 3/5
      I've received Black Wine from LTER and was excited to read. I'm a man and never read feminist literature before. However I'm an avid fantasy reader so thought it would be a provoking experience. It was an experience however not a very good one. My problem with the book isn't its topic but it's writing style. There seems to be no cohesion and sometimes it's frustrating. I guess it's a big literary achievement but not my type of book.
    • 3/5
      This work of feminist sci fi has a palindromic structure, weaving together the stories of several women in a complex way. Gradually we come to understand how the women's stories are related - and to see the common themes which join them, themes of freedom and dependence, love and maternal responsibility, the nature of home and the need to travel. Another major theme is what different languages are able to express - there are cruel languages in which it's impossible to say that you are free, and gentle languages which can't explain slavery.It's a story which is sometimes hard to follow - after three chapters I turned back to the beginning and took notes, which is something I've never done before - but I felt that I needed to do that to get the most out of the book. I enjoyed the challenge of making the pieces fit together, as well as meeting the smart, intrepid women and their friends who feature in the book. The worldbuilding was good too - an interesting range of societies, sketched vividly without too much description.It's not a perfect book. Some of the ideas were a bit clunky (there's a chapter actually titled "Women who transgress", for example), although not bad by the standards of the genre. A bigger problem for me was the utopianism - even though I know that it's ridiculous to criticise feminist SF for being utopian, that's what it's there for! But I guess I just don't believe in human nature being any better than what we see around us - and certainly not in a culture which doesn't even have words for nastiness. And I was more interested in the build-up than the resolution of the stories. But I enjoyed reading it, and would recommend it to someone interested in the genre.
    • 5/5
      I got this book as a birthday present from my sister.
      As soon as I was done reading it (with that shuddering pleasure that only the absolute best books give you), I passed it back to her to read... and I still haven't got it back, because when she was done, she gave it to her boyfriend to read (someone who is not the biggest fantasy fan), and he won't read the very end, because "But once I finish it, it'll be over!"
      I'm considering buying another copy, to re-read it and pass it on again to someone else.

      It's amazing that 'Black Wine' is a first novel. The characters are complex enough to fully immerse yourself in their lives. The world is not some faux-medieval wish-fulfillment daydream, but a real, gritty and harsh land - that still somehow has the feel of one of your deepest dreams.
      Recommended for fans of Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Atwood, and Sheri S. Tepper. (But having said that, I feel I should add that the "feminist" undercurrent of the book is neither distracting, nor does it leave you with that nasty "agenda" taste in your mouth.)

      (oh, and they play Scrabble! Yay! (as Scrabble fanatics, both me & my sister got a big kick out of that!)
    • 5/5
      what a grown up fairy tale should be, with sex and philosophy
    • 3/5
      I found this book a difficult read. We don’t learn the names of some of the characters until late in the game, and the story jumps from plot line to plot line. Some names are very similar to each other. And absolutely nothing is explained; it’s just action and dialogue. The setting seems to be a future earth, where settlements are far flung and have very different languages and social customs from each other; some are horrendously authoritarian, some easy going; some have people who never touch each other if at all possible while in others, sex is casual as breathing. The story follows several generations of women, all but one of whom live horrible lives; some are the horror, while others are on the receiving end of it. It does seem that with each generation, life gets a bit better and each woman is freer to be herself, even though the oldest woman in the chain is a ruler of a city/country and the youngest works in a warehouse. This is a novel where the characters are very real; no one is 100% likeable- although there are one or two who are 100% loathsome. This is not fantasy (other than one character), but rather the type of science fiction that isn’t fun to read but makes one pay attention and think.
    • 3/5
      Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey I found to be an interesting, if frustrating in places, read. Interesting in terms of the themes and the clear feminist ideology being espoused and frustrating in terms of the structure – a cycle of three intertwined stories of different generations of women from the same matrilineal family (as I came to understand it) where the names and relationships are not explicitly delineated and must be teased out by inference and implication.I can see why it won the Tiptree Award – as well as the feminist backbone and its examination of institutionalised (?) rape and slavery topics, it’s the first book I remember reading which explicitly described FGM. And there are some lovely descriptive touches – the non-verbal language of the mute slaves was both evocative and profoundly believable.Stylistically, it felt very much a ‘literary’ and contemplative work. But overall, I found it confusing and uneven – the pacing varied from overly languid in places to the other extreme where action flew past so fast I had to re-read multiple sections to actually catch what happened. I’d assess it as an ambitious and challenging work which didn’t quite hit its intended targets.
    • 2/5
      Beautifully written. Weaves through complex families and fantasy geography with no maps. DNF at page 100 because I was unable to follow who-was-who.
    • 4/5
      Very confusing at the beginning with the 3 separate storylines, but worth it eventually.
    • 5/5
      This book really blew my mind. Dorsey is one of those authors that should be appreciated more - I had no idea. She uses beautiful and truly moving language. Her story is complex and just carries you along like any good story should. I felt she really captured the emotional ebb and flow of real women who struggle through life, in the context of a thought-provoking world (our own or another?) Her treatment of gender and sexuality is nuanced and really carries the story through its complicated twists and turns. One of my new favorite authors!