One of my most unfortunate popular posts is this one, where I found a certain article of feminine attire in an excitingly vivid color in a place where articles of feminine attire should never be found. It did not occur to me that putting a more, uh, punchy description of the clothing item in question directly in the title of the post was going to lead to a lot of idiots who would search for that particular clothing item and then literally click on every single post that showed up on Google.
People actually do that, by the way. That’s the only way to explain some of my search results.
Anyway, my day got completely derailed by a massive child porn investigation, how was yours?
I am, for only the second time since he has started going there, irritated with my son’s school. And, like, really irritated this time, not mildly irritated like the time he got in trouble over some bullshit that felt like the teacher’s fault in preschool. Sending-strongly-worded-emails irritated. How dare you make me disappoint my kid irritated.
And I don’t really want to get into details, especially since it’s 8:26 already and I’m showing signs of doomscrolling on top of everything else and I would really like to get away from my computer and go sit in a room with my kid with a book in my hand. I’m not gonna bitch about my kid’s school online, even in the mostly-anonymous format the blog affords me. But I really don’t need any external stressors right now because I know how my brain works and I’m likely to lash out at some poor fool who doesn’t deserve it because of unrelated stress, and I’m also irritated with my school for entirely unrelated reasons, and just … fuck.
Brace yourself, if you wish, for the rarest of all things from me: a mixed review of a book series. The majority of the time if I write a review of something it’s because I enjoyed it. After a lifetime of reading, I like most of the books I read, mostly because I know my tastes by now, there are lots of books, and for better or for worse I simply don’t experiment enough to be buying a lot of books that I’m not going to enjoy. I don’t like shitting on authors, either, so I’m not likely to write a review of a bad book unless I really hate it, or at the very least I think my dislike of it can be entertaining to someone. So mixed reviews simply don’t happen that often because I don’t feel the need to bother. The thing is, I read this entire series, all 1800 pages or so of it, over the course of October and I feel like it’s worth talking about.
Here’s the tl;dr: I enjoyed these books enough to read all three of them, and they’re certainly not bad, but worldbuilding and character issues drag the series down.
Spoilers, but only as necessary, and I’ll try to avoid mentioning major twists.
The series starts off well with The Bone Shard Daughter, easily the strongest of the series. Lin is the daughter of the emperor, who has been ruler of the Phoenix Empire for decades. The Phoenix Empire is a series of islands, and if this world includes any sort of mainland it’s never really mentioned. The emperor is a master of bone shard magic, which involves taking a small piece of the skull (!) of every citizen once they reach early adolescence. The shards are used to make constructs, which are basically Frankensteined animals. Instructions are written on the shards that basically constitute programming for the constructs; some simple ones only have a few but others can be much more complicated. Also, if your shard is used to power a construct, it will eventually kill you, and the construct will stop working once you die. Minor problem. I know. The emperor is stubbornly refusing to either name his daughter his heir– he has a male student who is also a candidate for the role– or to teach her bone shard magic, and a lot of the first book is dedicated to Lin sneaking around and teaching herself magic.
Oh, and Lin has lost a lot of her memory, as has the student, and the fact that he seems to be working harder to regain his memories is one of the points in his favor for some reason.
Also, occasionally the islands just … sink. Killing everyone on them, as you might imagine. It’s bad. But the main conflict of the first book, despite the presence of four other POV characters, is Lin’s relationship with her father and her attempts to get him to take her seriously. And the first book is genuinely good! I five-starred it, and I don’t regret it; it’s not until the second and third books that the series’ problems become more apparent.
Specifically, Lin becomes emperor through means I won’t reveal, and … it becomes real clear real fast that Lin doesn’t really know why she wants to be emperor, and she’s not very good at being emperor, and there are a whole lot– a whole lot, the refusal of the series to settle on a single villain is one of its problems– of people who think the entire dynasty just needs to go away. Lin ends the tithe (the process of taking bone shards) and in the process the book kind of unceremoniously abandons a lot of what made it cool.
The constructs are part of the problem. The book makes it clear (at first, at least) that the emperor is the only person who really understands bone shard magic, right, so the fact that there are thousands and thousands of constructs out there is kind of a problem, because you really feel like the guy didn’t have time to do anything but churn out constructs all the Goddamn time, and despite the constant harping about ending the dynasty there really seems to be very little that the emperor needs to do. Stewart seems to be aware that the islands need some sort of economy so that the emperor can worry about trade, and she’s invented two things: a stone called witstone and caro nuts.
It was never clear exactly what witstone was or how it was used other than people were constantly whining about needing to mine it (there is a running theory that overmining is related to the islands sinking) and it occasionally powering boats. Sometimes they’re very upset about running out of it. It feels like Stewart wants you to think that witstone is magical (and calling it witstone will never make any sense) but it’s basically just … coal. Like, I have no idea why she didn’t just call it coal, and if it’s different from coal somehow it’s never made clear how.
Caro nuts. God, caro nuts. Caro nuts are mentioned, conservatively, a couple hundred times across the trilogy. Islands need more caro nuts. Islands sink that were a source of caro nuts. Okay, I’ll do this, but you have to share your caro nut stash. Oh no they have stolen our caro nuts.
“Caro nuts” can cure “bog cough.” If they’re useful for anything else I’m not aware of it.
Bogs, by the way, are an ecological niche typically found in cooler northern climates– Scotland, for example– and not tropical islands.
No one will get bog cough at any point in the series. In fact, I’m pretty sure there is literally never an actual caro nut touched, handled, stolen, eaten or sold by any character during the series. We’re repeatedly told bog cough can be fatal and that people off-camera are getting it because it’s the rainy season. It’s completely off-camera. We don’t even meet any side characters with it. No survivors. No characters are, like, nurses or doctors or anything. The book just talks about caro nuts fucking endlessly because the emperor needs to be responsible for something and sure let’s make distribution of caro nuts a huge fucking deal.
One of the POV characters spends the entire first book searching for his (presumably dead) wife, who will never be mentioned or thought about again after the first book. By the third book he spends most of his page time hating himself, and really I didn’t blame him because he was annoying the piss out of me.
The first half of the third book is spent in a quest for a magical (sort of) sword, one of, we’re told, seven, even though only about four ever show up. The sword is tossed into the ocean in a standoff about five pages after it is found, and they were very much not looking for it so that they could destroy it.
Eventually two of the characters will adopt a “gutter orphan.” Every orphan mentioned in the book is a “gutter orphan,” which starts to feel really squicky after a while. I would think if Lin wanted to get the people behind her maybe opening up some orphanages might be a good idea, but the book is so unconcerned with the lives of actual people that it’s hard to really know how many of them there are. At any rate, the massive refugee problem caused by the sinking islands, which simultaneously kill everyone on them and create refugees, is probably adding to the number of orphans.
I dunno, y’all. The first book really isn’t bad at all, but none of the problems that you might find in it are going to go away, and while some of the mysteries get explained none of them really get explained in a way that helps— every unraveled mystery just leads to more questions, and the decisions the characters make get more and more inexplicable as the series goes on. Lin herself goes from being easily the most interesting character, to the point where I haven’t even really named anyone else yet, to someone who constantly makes the wrong decisions and then endlessly second-guesses herself about them. She changes her mind about something at the end of the series that she has literally been arguing against for two and a half books.
But there’s still some compelling stuff here– a lot of the characters eventually get animal companions of a sort, and they are universally a lot of fun, just for example– or I’d not have finished the series, and it wasn’t really a case of good will from the first book lingering on. Frankly, I’m looking for excuses to bail on books right now– my unread shelf remains entirely out of control. The verdict, ultimately: The Bone Shard Daughter is very much worth reading, but let it sit for a month or so after you read it, and if you’re still thinking about it, go ahead and pick up the rest of the series. Just be aware that you’ve hit the high point already.
The election is in … nine days? I suppose it depends on how you count, and I think the fact that Nuremberg II is happening in New York City right now is probably a reason to start severely restricting my internet intake for a while. I will probably fail, because I always fail when I try to do shit like this, but … Jesus, enough. He’s a fucking Nazi, people. Republicans are Nazis. Point blank. No exceptions. If you are a Republican or you are willing to vote for them, you are a Nazi. Yes, that means “nice people,” yes, that means your neighbors, yes, that means your family members.
Donald Trump is a Nazi. If you don’t want to be called a Nazi, you need to vote for Kamala Harris. I will not be debating this topic.
I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!
The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.
Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.
He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.
I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.
Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.
I damn near forgot to post today, what with doing all sorts of accident-related adulting early in the day, my son having a friend over for the whole afternoon, and then a Trunk & Treat at Hogwarts filling up my evening. I also managed to squeeze in some reading, my Arabic, and finally putting Black Myth: Wukong to bed, although I think I’m going to play for a bit longer to get the platinum on it. I’ll probably do a full review, but the short version is “It’s pretty fucking awesome and you should play it.” That said, the reports of insane difficulty on the final boss and the final optional boss are a little overstated. Erlang took maybe half an hour and The Great Sage’s Broken Shell maybe an hour, neither of which qualifies as enormous difficulty in my book, especially since the strategies needed became clear pretty quickly and it was just a matter of putting everything together.
Just, y’know, forgot the website until 9:00. Sorry!
I managed to hit a parked car in my own fucking driveway this morning.
We have, for lack of a better word and in the interest of not telling a long story, a Tenant in our house. She’s been here for several months. She parks her car in the driveway every single morning. Because our garage is currently packed full with bullshit, my wife has also been parking in the driveway. I am on Fall Break, as all of you know, and for some reason when I left my house for a doctor’s appointment at 7:50 this morning, the fact that my wife’s car was not in the driveway made my fucking brain short-circuit and I assumed that that meant the other car was not in the driveway either. I realized my terrible mistake about half a second too late, and I don’t know yet how much my fucking idiocy is going to cost me.
To the doctor’s! Where I received a hepatitis B shot (needle #1) and had blood drawn (needle #2) so that my A1C could be tested. It’s 5.7! The diabeetus is officially Controlled! I can go off one of my many medications now!
Seriously, one of these days I’m going to take a picture of the pile of fucking pills I ingest every night. It’s ludicrous.
I also had to fill out the questionnaire about my mental health that I have to fill out every time I go to the doctor since I’m on brain meds. I was honest on the depression scale, but I handed the anxiety scale over to the doctor and told her flat-out that I was lying on it. Why? There’s a fucking election in two weeks, and my anxiety is off the scale but not in a way that adjusting my meds is going to help. We’re gonna leave those alone, and in about two weeks I’m either gonna be fine or I’m gonna need a prescription for fucking strychnine.
I mailed the postcards.
And then I went and got my second tattoo (Needles #3- God, who knows) in two months. My appointment started at 11:00 in the morning and I wasn’t finished until 4:15. My arm fucking hurts— this was easily the most painful tattoo (and the biggest, and the most colorful) I’ve ever had, and you can see from all the open pores at the bottom of the image that my arm isn’t terribly happy with me. Hummingbirds were my mom’s favorites, though, and I absolutely love the design. Griffin Freehling at Enamored Arts, LLC does great work. But holy shit, I need to not spend any more money at all for the rest of my break.
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