This is going to be one of those books that is difficult to review, at least the way I usually do reviews. Or maybe it won’t be. I’ve certainly written some reviews before that involved flapping my arms around like a landed fish and babbling shut up and buy it before; this will, more or less, be one of those, because despite having read this book cover to cover and having been nearly hypnotized by it throughout that process I find it difficult to describe it without a lot of comparisons that may or may not make any sense.
It’s as if you rolled Gormenghast, The Shadow of the Torturer and Through the Looking Glass into a meatball and then rolled it in honey.
It’s like Harrow the Ninth, but it makes sense.
It’s Labyrinth but the baby eats people. And the baby’s not the point. But the baby’s in there, I promise. Oh and also if China Miéville wrote Labyrinth.
This is a book that uses perfectly normal words to describe things, like “light,” only then you discover that light can be poured out of a jar. Someone’s hair is made of twigs and someone else is a rabbit, only they lay eggs. Something will be described as a beehive and you will think you know what a beehive is and then it will crouch down on the legs that you didn’t realize it had and excrete honey into a jar through a urethra, typically not a body part possessed by a beehive, which don’t even have bodies, much less body parts. Everything is larger than you think it is and has more mouths than you think it should, except for the one thing that has lots of tongues, because that thing has no mouths at all. Everything is crumbling and decrepit and falling apart and no one remembers why they are doing the things that they are doing anymore other than continuing to eke out a pointless existence in a palace that goes on forever, and the world is sort of ruled by five sisters only they aren’t really sisters and I’m not sure they’re even female, because at one point a character gets what for the sake of this sentence I’ll call a promotion and then that character is referred to exclusively with female pronouns for the rest of the book.
This is a book where on one level you will have a pretty good idea what is going on, because the page-to-page events are explained clearly and vividly, and on another hand you will have absolutely no idea what is going on, because none of the nouns mean what they think they mean and your mental picture of what is happening is probably wildly inaccurate for a reason the book hasn’t even revealed yet. It’s a book with not one big quest but two big quests that are sort of intertwined, with a knight and a squire and a Beast that must be vanquished and a Mother who is sixteen and has no children but will find a child in a sack and many Ladies, only some of them have towers for heads and some are birds and at one point a character will be revealed to have three arms and four legs and you won’t be sure if that was the case for the whole book or not, and sometimes everything is on fire, and that’s usually bad.
It’s fucking amazing and it’s one of my favorite books of the year.
I just wish I had some idea how to pronounce “Pechaček.”
I have to say that I kind of needed this book. I absolutely adored The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune’s first book in what we’re apparently calling the Cerulean Chronicles, and I’m really hoping that the fact that the series has a title now means we’re going to see more of it. My review of that first book has become one of my most inexplicably popular posts– my seventh most popular post in the history of the blog, in fact– and traffic for it tends to come in waves. It’ll have 40 hits over the course of a day and then trail off, and then a couple of weeks later it’ll have a hundred, and then it happens again. I don’t know why! I don’t get enough information about referrers from WordPress and if there’s something else I can use to look up where views are coming from, I don’t know how to use it. Feel free to enlighten me in comments, if you have a suggestion.
Anyway, Somewhere Beyond the Sea returns to the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and the magical children and their two caretakers, who continue to have one of the most adorable relationships in all of literature. This book lives in Arthur Parnassus’ head, though, instead of Linus Baker, the main character and POV of the first book. While the switch makes perfect sense in the context of the series, Arthur is a darker, angrier character than Linus, and some of the gentleness and charm of the first book is lost in the switch. This book also introduces a couple of actual villains, as DICOMY, the Department In Charge of Magical Youth, Linus’ employer from the first book, turns on the orphanage and in particular on one of the children who live there. There is another DICOMY inspector, this one very much cut from the “I pretend to be here to help the children and am absolutely not here to help the children” cloth that I was so pleased to see Linus was not in the first book.
The first book was about a family forming. This one is about threats to tear that family apart, although the addition of a new child to the orphanage adds another new perspective that isn’t as negative as the two representatives of DICOMY.
Ironically, while the book isn’t quite the cozy “big gay blanket” of the first book, I found that I related to Arthur more than I ever did to Linus, which wasn’t something I was expecting on the way in. Arthur has a traumatic past– that’s not the bit I relate to, mind you, as I can’t really make that claim– but he spends much of the book struggling with his temper, as he has the ability to simply make the threats to his family go away in the most violent and retributive manner possible and repeatedly chooses not to, as that’s not the person he wishes to be.
Let me just say that it is not difficult for me to relate to a character who is a father and an educator who occasionally struggles with preventing his rage at the injustice and unfairness of the world from affecting the way he lives in it. Not difficult at all. I lack the ability to set things on fire with my mind, however, so his struggle has a touch more immediate salience than mine might.
Most interestingly, I think with Arthur and particularly Arthur’s past, and the fact that this book does dwell on trauma in a way that Cerulean Sea did not, Klune is in some ways addressing the criticisms of his first book, which I won’t go into here, but you’re welcome to click on that link up there. It turns out that Arthur Parnassus ending up the Master at Marsyas Island was not an accident. I’ll leave it at that.
I can’t issue quite as strong a recommendation for this book as I did Cerulean Sea, but that was one of my favorite books of the year it came out and remains my favorite of Klune’s books, so that’s not saying a lot. This is still a comfortable #2 in his body of work, and you should give it a read.
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.
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 have, I believe, read everything Shannon Chakraborty has in print, or at least the three major novels and companion novella in her Daevabad Trilogy; if she has anything else out there other than maybe some short stories here and there, I’m not aware of them. I liked the Daevabad books enough that I read all of them, of course, but I’d characterize all of them as slower reads; her books have always taken me longer to read than pure word count might indicate, and something about them never quite fully clicked with me. If someone asked me about the series, I’d say something sort of generically positive rather than jumping in with both feet.
I had no idea that she had The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi in her.
I am writing this at work in between bouts of having Things to Do, as I wasn’t able to finish the book until last night, although I feel like this is substantially the exact same review if I had written it a couple of days ago when I had 200 pages left. This is another “take a look at that cover” book. See the pirate ship? Being attacked by something huge and tentacular? Okay. It’s that book. Amina al-Sirafi is a pirate. Retired, at least at the beginning, but a pirate. She’s a mom. She only sorta gets along with her mom. And then she gets handed a job: rescue the daughter of a local noble from her kidnapper, with an enormous reward at stake, and it’s time to put the band back together and go unleash hell.
God, I loved it. I loved every page. This book puts its foot on the gas at about the 100-page mark and it just absolutely does not let up until the very end, and there are pirates and sea monsters and other pirates and magicians and sea monsters and rakshasha and a couple of wry references to Daevabad— the book is technically set in the same universe but 1000 years earlier, and you absolutely don’t need to know anything about Daevabad to read it– and more sea monsters and zombie-things and magic pearls that aren’t pearls and gods and goddesses and celestial bird-thing courts and it is probably not literally a perfect book but it is definitely a perfect book for me and it’s going to be very high on my top 10 list at the end of the year.
Let’sbe clear here, and not bury the lede on this review: You have read Ryan Cahill’s Of Blood and Fire before. No, really, I promise you have. If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, or Dragonlance, or The Sword of Shannara, or the first book of The Wheel of Time, or John Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen series, or especially if you’ve read– gag– Eragon, you’ve read Of Blood and Fire. The book’s biggest weakness is that in its nearly five hundred pages there is not a single original idea. It adheres to the dictates of classic fantasy with near-perfect fidelity, from the main characters hailing from a small town suddenly infringed upon by the evil of the outer world to suddenly dead parents to one of the three main characters being The Chosen One to parents and authority figures with a Secret Past to dragon riding to elves and dwarves and orcs, here called Uraks, to a distinct lack of female characters. Hell, all it needs is “A Noun” at the beginning of the title and even that feels ripped off.
There is a human king named Arthur and an elf named Ellisar, for God’s sake. I’m not going to bother to tell you what the book’s about. You already know. Again, you’ve read this book before.
And yet this is not going to be a negative review, because originality isn’t everything– hell, this book manages to rip off two or three books that were themselves massive ripoffs of earlier, better books– although I would neither blame you nor be particularly surprised if that first paragraph keeps you from picking it up. Somehow, despite being an utter pastiche of a ton of stuff that came before it, it’s a competent pastiche, and frankly it’s a pastiche of a genre of book that I have been a big fan of for my entire life. It’s a cheeseburger and fries. You know what a cheeseburger and fries is going to taste like before you pick it up, and you don’t necessarily need anyone trying to get super creative with a cheeseburger and fries, right? It can taste like three thousand other burgers so long as it does being a burger correctly, and, well, this does being a burger mostly pretty well.
(Why mostly? This is self-published, to boot, and there are signs of occasionally needing maybe one more editorial pass. The book begins with someone telling someone else they’re going to ask them Four Questions, and it’s said like that where you want to add capital letters, and then they ask them at least seven questions. Shit like that.)
I dunno. I four-starred this, and at least one of those stars was for the exceptional quality of the hardback– this book is an absolute pleasure to hold in the hand, with a pleasant heft and exceptionally smooth, creamy paper, and if you buy books for their qualities as physical objects you definitely want to own it– and I’m looking forward to reading the sequels, but it is absolutely McDonald’s fantasy fiction, to be even more specific with the “cheeseburger” metaphor. You’ve had this before, and sometimes you get a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that was just made perfectly, but it’s still a DQP with for all that. That’s what this is. I’m in for more, but maybe you don’t like fast food, and that’s okay.
A touch of housekeeping first– I have parent/teacher conferences after school tomorrow and Tuesday, and am expecting to get home a shattered wreck of a human being both nights, so I’m going to do my damnedest to get three book reviews written today so that I don’t have to get home and scribble something down after 13-hour days at work. In accordance with prophecy, this means that I absolutely will get home and scribble something down after both of those 13-hour days, but still.
Dana Elmendorf’s In the Hour of Crows is one of those books where I heard about the premise and then suddenly had the book; I don’t recall spending money or making an active decision that I needed to own it, but I heard “Appalachian gothic horror about a young woman who can raise the dead” and then it was on my unread shelf somehow. It’s a quick read at only 288 pages, and I started it before bed one night and finished it the next morning. The main character, Weatherly, has the ability to raise the dead by “talking the death out of them,” which I can imagine being the premise for something utterly ridiculous and instead ended up being this cool Christian/aboriginal syncretistic thing where she starts by whispering secret Bible verses into a dead or dying person’s palm and ends with her absorbing their deaths and literally spitting the substance of their deaths out into a nearby vessel, one that can never have contained alcohol before she uses it. She can only do this once for any person; if she tries it again, it won’t work, and her powers must be deliberately passed on to someone else before she dies.
Like, right away, yup, I’m in, and let me remind everyone again that part of the reason I like most of the books I read is that I have years of practice in determining what I like to read and what I don’t. And I was utterly on-target on this one; between the setting, the approach to magic, and the characters (Weatherly’s grandmother, who despises her, is a standout) I ended up really enjoying this one. The book actually ends up being a murder mystery, as Weatherly attempts to save someone and fails, leading everyone to assume that she did it on purpose, and her cousin Adaire’s death in a car accident ends up being wrapped up in that death. Weatherly herself is a bit of a hellion, or at least recovering from her hellion years– she’s in her early/mid twenties in the “now” of the book, but it jumps around in time quite a bit– and her utter lack of concern for what the law might want in any particular set of circumstances is occasionally kind of hilarious. Pretty much every move she makes makes her look more guilty of murder, and she … just does shit anyway, because she wants to. She’s great.
The book also features the single most disrespectful and petty funeral service I have ever seen in print; it’s probably only a couple of pages in total, but it’s the thing I’ll remember the most about this book after the details have faded on the rest of it.
I think this is Elmendorf’s debut, and I kind of hope she stays with this wider setting and style of book in the future, as I’d love to read more of it. More books about Weatherly probably aren’t super likely, but if she wants to write an actual sequel of sorts, I’d love to see something about the grandmother. Definitely give it a look.
And now the third review in a row of a book I got sent as a free ARC, thus discharging all of my current review obligations. I feel kind of bad about how long it took me to get to this; I didn’t get a release date when they sent me the book, and I put it on a sort of mental “find out when this is coming out” list, only to discover it had already been released when they sent it to me. So this is not timely; my apologies.
This is a hell of a concept for an anthology, really; the back cover describes it as “a hopeful, empowering science fiction anthology filled with own-voices stories from neurodivergent creators”– in other words, stories about neurodivergent people encountering aliens, written by people who are themselves neurodivergent but presumably have not encountered aliens. I find the word “neurodiversiverse” immensely fun to say, and while anthologies aren’t always my thing, there are certainly some gems to be found in here. Cat Rambo’s Scary Monsters, Super Creeps is about a young woman with an anxiety disorder who discovers it gives her superpowers, and Ada Hoffman’s Music, Not Words is about an autistic girl who is the first contact for an alien race.
Most of the authors in the collection are people I’m not familiar with, though; I sort of jumped around rather than reading the collection straight through (how do people usually read anthologies? Is that weird?) and Lauren D. Fulter’s The Cow Test is probably the standout of the rest of the anthology, for me at least. It involves cows. It’s a short story, I’m not spoiling the details. 🙂 There are art pieces and poetry as well. Some of the aspects of neurodivergence that get explored here are really interesting; Jody Lynn Nye’s A Hint of Color is about synesthesia, for example, and Keiko O’Leary’s Close Encounter In the Public Bathroom is the only poem I’ve ever read that combines being about OCD and aliens.
No, seriously, this anthology made me recommend a poem. That’s worth picking up, right?
