Reviews and Comments

This is a story told in dream logic, where you believe the impossible things that are right in front of you because to deny them would just waste everyone's time. The protagonist is unflinchingly practical, and learns to use her temper to her advantage. The antagonist is an embodiment of the petulant powerful who fear being laughed at, and find that that somehow justifies the disproportionate misery they inflict on others. The setting is a concentrated infusion of off-axis 1920s that seeps into every crevice of the narrative. Beautifully delivered.

This reads like a collage of (at least) Iain M Banks, Becky Chambers, Jodi Taylor, and Ann Leckie, which would normally be a slam dunk for me but the execution is disjointed -- not enough time to melt together, individual lifts still too recognizable to feel like a cohesive thought.

It may have suffered a bit in the reading; I would 100% listen to Adjoa Andoh all day every day but either she was blindsided by the layers necessary for the protagonist or she'd never listened to Zara Ramm's rendition of Madeline Maxwell, which hits similar character development notes but does it while making the character, not the reading, seem fractured.

Nevertheless! I want to know more about this universe and how it functions, I enjoyed racing the characters to the end, and I was delighted by several surprises. The treatment of disability and assistive technology was refreshing; neither rosy nor disposable.

This was a fun romp, the author clearly proud of their worldbuilding notebook and still learning how to thread it through a narrative, with strong chaos bisexual energy... and then it turned out the whole thing was holding up a blood purity story, and not the kind where anybody knows it's bullshit -- potentially the author included. What a shame.