Don’t get me wrong, I love the stained edges trend, but I’m not sure that I love that I can find this image but not a straight image of the book cover like I’ve been using for years.

You have seen Michelle Jabès Corpora’s (not, fuck you autocorrect, Michelle Babes Corporation) name around here before; I read her His Face is the Sun almost exactly a year ago and loved it, and it ended up twelfth on my end of the year list. An interesting phenomenon: I said in my piece about it in December that I’d have ranked it higher, but a hundred books after first picking it up, I didn’t remember it very well other than that it was set in not-Egypt and I really liked it, and I resolved that I was going to reread it before the sequel, which I already knew was coming in May.

Well, I didn’t reread His Face is the Sun before picking up She Knows All the Names, and I’m pleased and more than a little fascinated to report that once I had the sequel in my hands I had no problems with recalling the events of the first book at all. I almost didn’t review this, to be honest, as what I have to say about it is nearly identical to what I had to say about Sun (go read that review); Corpora’s worldbuilding and characters are fantastic, the plot is twisty-turny and resolves a major plot element from the first book, clearing the way for a different antagonist to take center stage for the final book of the trilogy. I loved the first book, and the second is nearly a perfect sequel, and one of the best middle-book-in-the-trilogy volumes I’ve read in a very long time. I actually, genuinely do want to reread both books before the third volume comes out– not, this time, because I think I’ll need to, but because I think the series will deserve it.

Oh, and the cat’s back. I was a little worried at first; this book uses an animal as a framing device the same way that the first book did, but it’s an ibis and not the cat. No worries! The cat is back, it’s just not a POV character. Maybe the POV animal in the third book will be a crocodile. We can hope, right?

Pick it up.