Reviews and Comments

I'm going to be honest, this one is for the fans. The short novella is divided into the telling of three short stories about the dead friends of Danielle's scooby gang, characters who were important to the events of Freedom, Iowa that the reader never never got a chance to know. As an enthusiastic fan of the series, I found this insight and world building to be rewarding and its overall message well-received. I would highly recommend it to other fans of the series. But for those who aren't already fans, this is probably not the place where you want to start. For that, I would strongly and enthusiastically recommend The Lamb Will Slaughter The Lion (2017).

That said, as much I appreciated these additional stories, I do hope that we will get at least one more full story in the Danielle Cain series, because if anything this book has only made me remember how much I love this universe and these characters.

I finished reading this a while ago, and I really liked it. Been meaning to write a review, but I've been procrastinating because I have some complicated thoughts about it.

This book is like Lex for time travelers. If like, I dunno, Lex was actually good and people responded to each other with long poetic, intimate letters.

Even though the book is relatively short, it's taking me a long time to read because after each letter, I want to stop and digest it for a while, like after getting a long message from a dear friend.

I'm only on the third chapter and I'm already loving this.

Time agents on opposite sides a temporal war who become engaged in a lesbian romance. Each of them from a future that mutually excludes the other's very existence. Their very ability to meet (and presumably touch) a paradox only made possible by the tension of the uncertainty over which future will come to exist.

Thus far, a full half of the novella has been the correspondence the two agents have left for each other across time and space while they carry out their missions.

If the rest of the book is as good as the first two sentences, this is going to be fucking amazing.

They don't call me Mankiller Jones for nothing. They call me Mankiller Jones because I tell people that's my name and I throw kind of a fit if anyone calls me anything else.

I think I would've liked this more when I was 14.

I don't know what I was expecting with this, but I guess it wasn't a pretty bog standard fantasy wizard novel with all the trimmings, and more than a few tired tropes.

I suppose you could point out that this novel was written at a time when modern fantasy novel basically meant Lord of the Rings, when a lot of these tropes were new, and with this book Le Guin literally invented the young wizard coming of age subgenre.

You might even excuse the patriarchal society of Earthsea — including the shockingly unchallenged assertion that "women's magic" is weaker than "men's magic" — as a reflection of the patriarchal 1960's US society Le Guin wrote it in. Certainly, in the afterword of the edition I read, Le Guin talks about how she felt writing about a young brown-skinned teen wizard who doesn't even rescue any damseled girls, she was already pushing tropes as far as she felt she could if she wanted to get published.

And that seems all fair and reasonable given the historical context. But unfortunately, I'm not sure historical context makes for a good read.

Like I said, I think I would've liked this better in middle school, when I was a much less critical reader and much more prone to getting swept up in adventure.

I did enjoy the ending. It was satisfying in a way that I wasn't expecting. It might've been that I was too distracted by the things that annoyed me to notice the foreshadowing (no pun intended) but I feel like Le Guin held her cards very close to her chest on this one. And it pays off instantly the moment you get there, so I'm glad that I didn't give up on it. I just wish some of the journey to get there had be a bit less tedious.

My only complaint is that there's only two books in the series. I want more adventures with Danielle Cain and her Scooby gang of anarchist paranormal investigators.