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"Is there one among us who has not behaved badly in this tale?"

I would pitch this book as Gundam Joan of Arc. It follows the course of the life of Misery Nomaki :drum: who believes they are sick with the same void madness that claimed the life of their mother and causes them to hear the voice of an angel telling them what to do. They lie their way into being the foretold ninth messiah to try to get themselves out of larger trouble, but everybody believes them (and eventually they begin to wonder if maybe they're not lying to themselves after all).

I love Neon Yang's worldbuilding and characters. This book is set in the far future where humanity's exodus into the stars took them into a realm where a "nullvoid" epidemic warped people's bodies; they were saved by the Larex Forge who teaches them how to use magic stone and protects them from the nullvoid. There's also a political conflict between the throne and the church, who are at war with heretics.

Small details I enjoyed:

• One common motif here is "lies". The story about the Larex Forge is clearly a self-serving church narrative, but we only see one side. Misery lies to other people and to herself, and we only see the world through her eyes. We see a lot of the church and some of the throne, but hear very little of the heretics and what their side has to say for themselves. Also, the epilogue itself is a discussion about lies.

• I love the way that Misery changes the way they talk over the course of the book as they change from feeling like they are lying their way through the world to starting to become invested in their own ninth Messiah identity.

• The book explicitly gives everybody's pronouns, and I love that there's a minor plot detail that hinges on Misery using a pronoun for somebody they aren't supposed to know about.

• The angry royal princess with a whip who has a knock-down fight with Misery the first time they meet felt like a classic romance introduction, but I thought she ended up being a fun character. That first fight is also such a great literal introduction to the conflict between the church and the throne.

This is a book that is understandably entirely focused on the experience and biased perspective of Misery, and it leaves the motivations and machinations of throne, church, and heretics out of view. On top of that, the epilogue and ending narrative framing create far more questions than they answer and call many things into doubt. All of this together made me feel as if I had missed some significant puzzle pieces while I was reading. However, I learned afterwards that this is the first book in a trilogy, which hopefully creates room to fill in all these juicy details later.

A debut science fiction novel about secrets, genocide, and revenge.

I enjoyed all three point of view characters. Jun is a hacker with a secret past on the run. Esek is selfish, violent, and literally terrible, and yet she manages to be a captivating character. Chono is good-hearted and looks like a rule-following institutionalist, but her conflicting loyalties to people overrule her lawful tendencies. Chono and Esek are tied together by their relationships with Six, a mysterious figure who used to be a student with Chono; Esek spurning Six in the opening scene creates a feud that escalates out of control. I enjoyed the worldbuilding, but as you can see from this description, the heart of this book was in the relationships.

A content warning especially for genocide here. A good bit of the plot revolves around the Jeveni people; they were mostly killed on a small moon and the remaining few are now economically exploited and hated. Folks tut about the past while doing nothing about the present. Other content warnings for quite a bit of bloody violence on page, and mentions of rape and pedophilia.

(On the minor space gender front, this book also has characters wearing "gendermarks" which felt sort of like pronoun pins of the future. One character switches up their gendermark from scene to scene. There seems to be some non-binary [this is my word] options too. It reminded me a bit of the signifiers in Everina Maxwell's Winter's Orbit.)

The book was a bit slow to start. Jun is on the run from Chono and Esek, and for a good chunk of the book we see Chono and Esek repeatedly showing up just too late to find Jun. I wish the chase on their end did a little bit more narrative work.

I think my favorite part of the book is its use of flashbacks. The reader gets teased about the names of some events that we eventually get to see. Esek shows up with a mangled ear, and oh boy do we find out about that in a later flashback too. The novel takes a little bit to get going, but these reveals about the past mixing with action in the present make for some great twists and a satisfying conclusion.