Reviews and Comments

Finally, Emily has a cozy little family to keep her company while she's, uuh, being the queen of a drama heavy fairy kingdom.

I finished this a few days ago. It's a lot of fun, basically Emily is going on an expedition with a larger and more neurodiverse group than she's really comfortable with, and a lot of entertaining-from-the-outside/horrifying stuff happens, for variously good reasons. Waiting for that third book in the library app!

It's very similar to Migrations in some ways: the way the personal, societal and ecological blend and make the story really hard to summarise, for example. It's about things like wolves and violent men and trauma and knowing what is dangerous and what it is even happening. The world feels more real and the storytelling more polished, which leads to an even more perfectly frustrating reading experience. I kept begging the book not to go certain ways, and it mostly obeyed, luckily.

It took me a while to get back into the story. It's certainly a fun story with tons of absurd escapes, but not very fluffy, as everything is pretty horrible, the world and the situations, and all the relationship stuff can only do so much.

Liked it :) not as much as T. Kingfisher's other fairy tale stories that I've read so far, but there's sweet characters and the plot is fun. I especially enjoyed how all the disclaimers around Anja's healer title are handled.

Also ich hab es vor allem wegen dem Titel lesen wollen. Es war dann aber schon ein bisschen überraschend. Es ist eine queere Klimakrisen-Story über das Internet, unter anderem. Eras Tante muss ungefähr so alt sein wie ich, sie kennt Foren und frische Zwiebeln und die Bananen, die es aktuell gibt, aber keine Modem-Töne. Zwischen Wetter-Extremen und Kapitalismus bleibt ein Wohnprojekt als Zuhause, das vor allem ein Gartenprojekt ist, und der Luxus essbarer frischer Pflanzen ist für Era und ihre Mutter aber durch die vielen, vielen Mitbewohnis und offenen Türen getrübt. Und dann ist die Geschichte nach ausgestorbenen Vögeln strukturiert, was mich an "Migrations" von Charlotte McConaghy erinntert hat, aber doch sehr anders ist. Insgesamt.... bisschen sperrig, bisschen langsam, bisschen das awkwarde Gefühl, mit der Autorin unbekannter Weise vor 15 Jahren in angrenzenden Twitter-Bubbles gewesen zu sein. Ich mag es.

I love Samin Nosrat's other book, and the show, and the Home Cooking podcast, so I expected to love this too. I didn't. I think part of it was that it didn't work well for me as an audio book, at least not one to listen to while doing counting-heavy crochet. It would have needed more attention to get all the the cooking advice. But also.... I think the message of the book was supposed to be that food is an everyday thing and it's important to make food that works and is enjoyable for you. Instead, i kept wishing i was someone else. Someone who likes cilantro, for example, because Samin Nosrat likes cilantro and i want to share that joy! Oof. Maybe it wasn't the right moment for this book.

Knowing some of the authors other brilliant writing actually makes me like this series a little less. But it's still a really good story. How dare the monster.... ok that would be a spoiler. But.

Ok ok yes I liked it. I liked the things that I liked about the first one, there were no/less things that annoyed me, and I really enjoyed the more hopeful and revolutionary twists. I know it doesn't sound like it the way I write about it, but I really have a soft spot for this series.

It's not my favourite Tamara Bach book, but I think it's a really nice one, about dealing with asshole authority figures.