I don’t have a ton to say about Dawnshard, the second of the two-so-far novellas in the Stormlight Archives. It’s a fun little story and gives a lot of screen time to Lopen, one of my favorite characters, although it introduces yet another set of adversaries and uses the word “Cosmere” too much. I’m finding that I don’t have a ton of patience for BrandySandy’s desire to knit each and every one of his books together into the same universe, particularly since the most obvious transfer so far has been the sword from Warbreaker and that was my least favorite of his books. I’m sure I’ve missed other bits here and there; it’s been forever since I read any of the Mistborn books and I don’t think I ever finished the second trilogy, but … blech. There’s no reason for it to be here and much like Lift and her constant use of the word “awesome,” It really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the series. Hell, it didn’t fit the tone of its own book, if I remember right, although I may not.
I made it 450 pages into Oathbringer when it first came out back in 2017. I was pissed when I decided I had to DNF it– but it had taken me a rather astonishing twelve days to make it those 450 pages (for comparison’s sake, on this reread, during a week where I was working, I finished the entire 1240-page thing in a week) and not only was I not having any fun with it I was finding myself slowly convinced that the book was on the side of the bad guys, and I wasn’t in the right headspace for it one way or another.
Well.
Oathbringer is boring as hell for 900 pages.
I mean, that’s really all there is to it. I can’t recommend reading this book to anyone. I can’t tell anybody to endure nine fucking hundred pages of wheel-spinning and navel-gazing and characters that desperately need to invent antidepressants and irrelevant subplots that could be excised in their entirety without affecting the overall structure of the book. It is exactly the type of bloat that so frequently settles into this type of megaseries, especially when the author has already proven themselves to be someone who could shit on a series of napkins, bind them between two covers, and sell a million copies. Sanderson’s untouchable, and I mean that as a compliment. He doesn’t need to write good books anymore. He can do whatever he wants.
I do not feel bad about abandoning this book on the first pass. I damn near didn’t make it on the second.
And, if anything, the most frustrating thing about this miserable slog of a novel is that the last, oh, 300 pages of the book are some of the most exciting shit he’s ever written. Somewhere toward the end of Part Four or the beginning of Part Five, this motherfucker steps on the gas and he absolutely does not let off until the book is done.
Which meant I was really Goddamned irritated when one of my fucking cats jumped on my chest while I was reading– not in itself a surprising event– and, with about 80 pages left, pissed on my fucking book.
It was a splat, not, like, a full-blast stream, and she somehow managed to not get a single drop on me or on the chair I was sitting in, but my cat fucking pissed on my book while I was reading the fucking thing and I somehow did not immediately kill her or throw her outside in retaliation.
And then, upon discovering Amazon can’t get me another hardcover copy for a couple of weeks and the only other new bookstore in town didn’t have any copies, I had to fucking finish the book after doing everything I could to, more or less unsuccessfully, soak everything up and banish the cat piss smell from my book.
The cat? Seems to be fine. I would immediately suspect a UTI, right? But I’ve had cats get UTIs in the past, and it generally involves lots of little pee accidents and a general feeling that maybe they’re struggling when they do pee, and this little asshole seems completely fine. We’re keeping an eye on her, obviously, and they were all due for vet appointments anyway, but right now I’m assuming this is some deeply weird and unexpected bit of shitheadery and not a sign of something more alarming.
This marks the second pet I’ve had that has ruined one or more of my books by pissing on them, but Hector at least did it while they were on the shelf and close to the floor and not in my Goddamned hands.
Not much to brag about, I know— the Edgedancer novella is only around 40,000 words and the “prologue” is actually a chapter from Words of Radiance, so this took a couple of hours at most to get through today. I didn’t really love it; Sanderson says in the afterword that Lift is one of his favorite characters in the series, but the word “awesome” really doesn’t fit the tone of the first three books, and while it was okay to see it in that one interlude chapter, seeing it over and over and over again in this book gets kind of jarring.(*)
As far as Words of Radiance goes, I would compare it to A Clash of Kings; when you’re following up on one of the best fantasy novels out there, you can have a pretty serious drop off in quality and still be a really good book, and that’s what happens here. You start seeing the world really opening up in this book and a whole lot of different characters and organizations (there are at least three different groups, I think, who are trying to kill Elhokar? Four, if you count the Parshendi?) and I think you can be forgiven if your head is spinning a bit at the end of the book, particularly since a whole lot of major stuff happens in the last hundred and fifty pages (out of, remember, 1080) of the book. Even with all of that we’re still seeing some bloat; despite being the focus character in the book, Shallan doesn’t have nearly as much to do in this book as she did in the first one, and Kaladin kind of spends a lot of time spinning his wheels as well. There are also issues with plot armor; Kaladin being near-unkillable is a plot point so that’s not as big of a deal, but two other major characters are killed and then resurrected in this book. It still retains the propulsive energy and readability of the first book, though; I’ve read 2353 pages in five days, not counting whatever I manage from Oathbringer today, and I didn’t mean to finish Words of Radiance until today but chose to finish it instead of sleeping last night. And, again, it’s not a bad book, it just suffers in comparison to the first one.
This week will be the pivotal one. I don’t remember how far exactly I got into Oathbringer the first time but it wasn’t very far. If I finish it this week I think I’m probably good with finishing everything that’s been released. If I hit a brick wall again … we’ll see, I suppose.
(*) I’m also real real worried about that thing that that other thing says to Szeth at the very end of the book. And the thing itself also worries me. WordPress doesn’t support spoiler text AFAIK or I’d say more.
1001 pages read as of about 10:00 last night; as I’m typing this I’m just over a quarter of the way through the second book. Goal is to have that done by Sunday night, and then a couple of days for the first novella, and then I’m back to Oathbringer, which I haven’t finished yet.
This was my third read-through of The Way of Kings; I last read it when Words of Radiance came out in 2014. I had genuinely forgotten how good of a book it is; Sanderson gets lots of credit for his magic systems but the worldbuilding throughout this book is just superb, and the characters are some of my favorites in his canon. The Way of Kings does a tremendous job of lining up its mysteries; some things are absolutely not going to be explained in the first book, but just enough is revealed that you don’t feel like the whole book is a pointless mystery box. The book feels carefully planned in a way that first books of series often don’t, and that’s a hard thing to pull off.
I remain concerned about the Parshendi as an element of the series; it didn’t really sink in that the series felt like the “good guys” were the wrong side until Oathbringer came out, and that was definitely a major contributing factor to me abandoning it. The whole book just feels way too comfortable with “Hey, this entire species is our slaves, except for the ones we’re massacring, and those are constantly referred to as savages and monsters” for me, and I know full well it’s going to get worse. The thing is, in the years since Oathbringer I’ve literally never heard anyone make that criticism other than me, and it’s not like I have some sort of special insight. Like, people figured out that slavery was bad in the Harry Potter books, so … either they just didn’t apply that level of analysis to this book or maybe it gets resolved after I stopped reading. We’ll see, I guess.
It’s entirely possible that you’re going to get a flurry of posts today; I have at least three in the hopper right now and that’s only not five because I’m planning on packing three book reviews into a single post here. One of them is a super late entry into my best books of the year post, which right now is coming tomorrow, I think. We’ll see. Anyway, off we go:
Standard disclaimers, I suppose, for whenever I review an author who I “know” online; Kara and I have been mutuals long enough that I couldn’t tell you where we met or how long ago it was, and we tend to find each other near-immediately any time a new site pops up. That said, I’m a big fan of their Reanimator Mysteries series, the third book of which came out in October and I read a couple of days ago. Kara’s books tend to be(*) queer Victorian paranormal romances, and this one concerns Oliver Barlow, an autistic necromancer who works as a coroner, and Felipe Galvan, an investigator for New York’s Paranormal Society who is, uh, dead. And resurrected by Oliver. And they’re lovers now. And they can’t get more than half a mile apart.
It’s kind of a delightful series, believe it or not. The first sentence of the third book mentions “freshly rinsed organs.” It’s that kind of book.
Anyway, this one dives into both Felipe and Oliver’s pasts, and the main mystery of the book concerns the nearby town of Aldorhaven and a sudden infestation of the risen dead. Aldorhaven is a “murder town,” a decidedly unofficial designation for a place where the number of unexplained deaths and weird paranormal happenings is way above the norm. The town, and the forest surrounding it, become characters of a sort in this book, which has more than a little of The Shadow over Innsmouth‘s DNA in it. It’s wonderfully creepy in a whole lot of ways and you should probably grab the whole series, which starts with The Reanimator’s Heart and The Reanimator’s Soul. Book IV comes out next year.
(*) Tend to be? Possibly “always are”? This is Kara’s 10th book and I haven’t read them all.
I’ve been putting off picking up Marcus Kliewer’s We Used To Live Here until it came out on paperback, but Barnes & Noble’s still-ongoing end-of-year hardback sale and a couple of Christmas gift cards pushed me over the edge. The premise of this one is that a young couple has bought an old crumbling house high up on a mountain, planning on renovating and possibly flipping it, and one night a family of five shows up on their doorstep while Eve, one of the homeowners, is at home alone. The father claims that he used to live in the house, and asks if he can have fifteen minutes to show his family around. Eve reluctantly agrees, and … well, it doesn’t go well. This is psychological horror and not the murder-and-torturefest that “it doesn’t go well” implies there, but Eve basically spends the rest of the book going slowly crazy. It’s intense.
This, I think, is the most your-mileage-may-vary of the three books, because how much you enjoy this book is going to depend on how willing you are to 1) scour the text for clues that may or may not be in there and 2) live with ambiguity about what exactly is going on. Eve ends up unable to trust her own perceptions and her own memories about literally anything, and this is the kind of book that has little interstitials throughout, clips from interviews or TV shows or message board posts that initially won’t make sense but will tie together eventually, and all of them end with Morse code. I deciphered one and got the word “and” and decided that I didn’t need to decipher the rest. Maybe you will! Maybe that whole idea kind of annoys you. I have no idea if the Morse code is important or not. I know I didn’t bother to check.
Anyway, for me, this book started off as a great slow-burn mindfuck but sort of collapsed under its own weight by the end. I four-starred it on Goodreads, but you’ll need some tolerance for gaslighting and unexplained events and a wildly unintentionally unreliable narrator. By the end of the book if Eve so much as mentioned the color of something I was flipping back to see if that thing was the same color the last time she mentioned it. I don’t mind some ambiguity in this kind of book but it went a little beyond my comfort zone. You will doubt everything by the time the book ends, but the atmosphere and the oppressive quality of Kliewer’s writing meant I more or less finished this book cover-to-cover in a single sitting. You decide if that sounds like your type of thing.
I meant to hold off until paperback on the Kliewer book and ended up grabbing a hardback; I have this one in paperback and I regret not buying it sooner. Alexis Henderson’s debut, The Year of the Witching, was an Honorable Mention for my best books of 2020 list, and House of Hunger is better than Witching. It’s a vampire book in all but name; there is, in fact, no explicit magic or supernatural powers mentioned anywhere(*) in the book, but Marion, the main character, flees a life as a scullery maid to take a position as a Bloodmaiden in the ambiguously defined “north.” Her job is to provide her blood when her obscenely wealthy patroness, the Countess Lisavet, requests it. In return for seven years of indentured service, she will receive a huge pension for the rest of her life upon her retirement.
And, yeah, Lisavet isn’t a vampire, and neither are any of the other rich people in the book– blood is extracted through needles or occasionally through bites, and even when Marion is bitten it’s made clear that Lisavet is wearing prosthetic sharp fangs in order to puncture her skin. But there’s a whole lot of blood-drinking going on, and the closest the book gets to actual magic is mentions of things like “blood lamps,” which might just be regular lamps inside a hollow globe so that the light is red but might also be powered by blood somehow? It’s unclear. One way or another, Lisavet in particular is a fascinating character, and her relationship with Marion is really well-written and interesting, and when things inevitably go to hell at the end the horror is real. This book isn’t related to The Year of the Witching, and Henderson’s third book just came out and is also a standalone, but I’d love to see more about this world. I’m genuinely not sure if this is actually going to show up on the list tomorrow, but it’s definitely in the running. Check it out.
(*) Heavily implied, maybe, but not until late in the book.
Now normally when I say something like that, it’s a bad sign. This isn’t that. The Nightward is a good book. But it is a good book in a very specific way, and the specific way it’s good makes it kinda hard to talk about. This is a book with lots of secrets, and lots of mysteries that may or may not be unraveled in the course of the text. In some ways it’s a very straightforward narrative and in some other ways I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on.
Let me give you what I can: the basic narrative, as I said, is reasonably simple, and is spelled out pretty effectively on the cover: the two most prominent characters are Viella, the nine-year-old princess of the Queendom of Dun, and Luka, her bodyguard. Viella is only princess for a short time; there is a coup and her mother is killed, and the rest of the book is more or less about keeping her alive while the villains work various and sundry machinations in the background. Dun is one of six Queendoms– the book’s society is very matriarchal– and we see most of them for at least a little while over the course of the book.
(There’s a map at the beginning of the book. I probably should have paid more attention to the map. It’s that kind of book.)
Now, that doesn’t sound like much, I know. It’s R.S.A. Garcia’s worldbuilding that sets this book apart, though, and that’s part of what’s hard to talk about. There are queens everywhere and armies of badass women and pregnancy increases magical power to what appears to be a pretty substantial degree, and there are dragons and zombies and battle cats (which probably aren’t actually Battle Cat, but try and stop me) and then there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on that will make you go wait, what? and then you’ll start paying closer attention and there will be lots of hints, at first, and then later on outright blinking neon signs that Something Else Is Going On Here.
(The titular Nightward, by the way, is a book. It’s probably a spellbook of some sort, and the bad guys opening it was Definitely Bad. It … might not be a spellbook, though? Maybe.)
Do I know what the Something Else is? Nope. Not a bit.
And here’s the rub, right? I really liked this book, but it’s book one of a duology, and book two doesn’t come out until the end of 2025, and I kind of want to counsel you to put this on a wishlist and wait until book two comes out and then buy them both at once. Because I want it now, and the problem is I’m going to have read 150 books in between this one and the sequel and I’m gonna have to reread Book One anyway if I want to properly appreciate Book Two. And Garcia has an awful lot of plates spinning on poles right now, and not to mix metaphors or anything but I feel like sticking the landing properly on this is going to be challenging. If she pulls it off, this is going to be a truly remarkable series. If she doesn’t … well, you’re not going to be rereading Book One in the future if you didn’t like Book Two, right?
So. I five-starred this. I am very heavily anticipating the sequel, and I will preorder it the second I learn that it is available. And I want you to at least have it on your radar, but right now my recommendation is very much based on potential awesomeness, because there’s so much going on that’s not quite clear yet and I need a slightly clearer picture before I can start jumping up and down and waving this book over my head at people. Maybe hold off until late 2025, and then buy both of them at once. If you remember books better after a year than I do, jump in now, if only so I have someone to talk to about this. But definitely stick it in the back of your head, one way or another.
Can’t wait to see what sort of suggested tags the system throws up for this one.
So I’m definitely doing this stupid “read the entire Stormlight Archives in January” contest with myself, and I decided to make it even harder, because there are two novellas alongside the five canonical novels, and I decided I’m going to read those motherfuckers too. Pictured there is the doorstop-ass hardback copy of Wind and Truth, weighing in at 1344 pages and 2.31 pounds. Worth pointing out: while this is the longest book of the series, it is not the physically largest of the series, which still goes to Words of Radiance, the second book, which is about 300 pages shorter but presumably uses thicker paper.
Pictured next to it: the two novellas, which are somehow smaller than they look there.
And if you are like me you are already aware of why I want to have a conversation with someone about this, and why that conversation might involve hitting them upside their fool heads with one of those three books, or perhaps all three of those books stuffed into a pillowcase.
I discovered the work of M.L. Wang through BookTok, which is, by and large, convinced that her The Sword of Kaigen is one of the best books ever written. I read that one first, and … it’s not one of the best books ever written, not by a long shot, but it was good enough to get me to pick Blood over Bright Haven up and then take several months to get around to reading it. I didn’t start off well with this book either; by pure coincidence it shares a lot of plot points with Ava Reid’s A Study in Drowning, which I read immediately before it, and starting a second book in a row where the main character was a trailblazing female academic in a field where no one wanted her around and who cried all the time was a bit jarring even before it turned out that, somehow, in both books the fact that said main character was a huge fucking racist was a big plot point. Now, this is fantasy racism, which doesn’t make it a lot better,(*) mind you, but it’s a big theme of both books, so be prepared for that. Also, while we’re talking about things that might be in a content warning, Drowning has a character who is a rape survivor (although, creepily, the act in question comes off as consensual the first time it’s described) and there’s a rape attempt in Blood.
A Study in Drowning was not a great book– serviceable, but not much more– and it kind of poisoned me against Blood over Bright Haven for the first third or so. I nearly put it down. I’m glad I didn’t.
For starters, and I don’t want to get too deep into spoilers, because you deserve to experience this at the book’s pace, Sciona is very much not the main character of Blood over Bright Haven, even though it will seem like she is for most of the book.
Second, Blood over Bright Haven is one of the angriest books I’ve ever read, up there with Yellowface and Iron Widow,(**) although, again, you spend enough time in Sciona’s head that you might not realize how angry the book is at first. This is a deliberate misdirect on the part of the author and in retrospect it’s tremendously effective at prepping you for the big twist midway through the book. A bit of background: Sciona starts the book off by being named a Highmage of her home city-state of Tiran, an office that no woman has ever held before. This happens quickly; another weird similarity it has to Drowning, come to think of it; you get yourself mentally ready for her to take half the book to become a highmage and it’s, like, a chapter. Magic in this book is fascinatingly mathematical and complicated and meaty, it’s more like writing equations or geometric proofs than what for lack of a better word I’ll call “traditional” spell casting, although it’s not as explicitly mathematical as, say, To Shape a Dragon’s Breath.
Anyway, for our purposes the salient part of writing a spell is that you have to determine where the spell gets its energy from, and how much energy it might take to pull off any given magical effect. If you pull too little you’ll get partial results and if you pull too much, something is probably going to explode. Sciona is a prodigy at mapping, which is the process of figuring out where magical energy sources are and how to pull from them, and she gets put on a huge project involving pushing back the magical wall that surrounds the city, a huge … public works project, which isn’t quite what you might expect from a fantasy book but that really is what’s going on here.
Also, spells are written on magical typewriters, which is just super fucking cool.
Anyway, blah blah blah class conflict blah blah blah sexism blah blah blah plot development and then she figures out where the sources of her magic are really being pulled from, and I’m not telling you anything else, because you deserve to experience this on your own, and probably by this point if you’re like me you’ve decided you don’t like Sciona all that much. Unlikable MCs are tricky, right? First of all, you often can’t be sure if the author realizes they’ve written an unlikable main character, or if it’s just your reaction to that person (I call this “Lana Lang syndrome”) and also because the author wants you to keep reading, which can be a hard sell if you don’t like living in the head of the person you’re reading about.
I’m just going to say that it was clear quickly that M.L. Wang knew exactly what she was doing here, and that Sciona’s personality flaws are clearly intentional and are also pretty essential to the book unfolding the way it does. She has a great conversation (well, fight) with a relative late in the book where the relative just rips her to shreds and every word she says about her is true and I just kind of read it in awe of how fully in control of her characters Wang was.
Also, and I’m not going to go into details because, again, I want as few spoilers as possible, but reading this book on Thanksgiving lent the whole book a really interesting synchronicity with actual life. You’ll understand when you read it.
And, yeah, I’m about to end the second review in a row with the phrase “one of the best books of the year,” and a wish that M.L. Wang’s many fans on BookTok and elsewhere would realize which of her tradpubbed books (she has several that she published herself, and this and Kaigen were both originally indie titles) is clearly the superior one, because this book deserves the press and attention that The Sword of Kaigen has gotten. Go read it.
(*) The sole physical characteristic that the Kwen characters are given is “copper hair,” and I’m still unclear what precisely the difference between copper and red hair is, but you could take this as evidence that the despised minority in this book are white people, which is an interesting choice that ultimately doesn’t end up mattering very much since this is very much a Not Earth book.
(**) The fact that all three of the authors here are Asian women is a coincidence. It’s an interesting coincidence, but a coincidence nonetheless.
