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I am sometimes a grumpus about fairy tale retellings, because it's been done so many times in so many ways that it's hard to find anything fresh.

This book is Cinderella by way of: what if Cinderella dies in the first paragraph, becomes a ghost that is also a haunted house, and goes to the ball mostly to eat food. Honestly, delightful.

The final scenes come a little too quickly for my tastes, but there's only so much space in a novella. (Something something, I guess that's what fanfic is for.)

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a reader, but somehow here it lent itself to a feeling in the narrator's head, of a story being told stream of consciousness style. Because this book focuses on words, there's also some fun wordplay.

Despite being a dystopian story, all of this gives it a dreamy quality that I quite enjoyed.

New Murderbot! An action snack, but a bit shallow. It was fine—I will read every Murderbot until the end of time—but also, there just isn't enough here for me.

I said, “We’re not sacrificing anybody.” It just came out, I couldn’t help it.

(Emotion check: Apparently there is an easier way to do things, but I wouldn’t know. I like to do it the hard way, and take as much physical and emotional damage as possible.)

The new shtick this book is that Murderbot has installed a mental health module that checks in with it when its neural tissue generates "weird chemicals or whatever". Murderbot has to explicitly deal more with its feelings that normally it would ignore. Unfortunately, this narrative device doesn't feel like it has the same level of impact on the story as something like the trauma response in System Collapse.

I wish we had gotten more character development or even just character reveals. We get more Farai, but there's not enough ART or Three for my tastes.

This was on the #SFFBookClub poll but never got picked.

The Bewitching is three intertwined stories that all revolve around witchcraft. In 1998, struggling grad student Minerva is researching Beatrice Tremblay who wrote a novel the Vanishing roughly based on the disappearance of her friend Virginia. The second thread is that Minerva gets a chance to read Beatrice's journals, and so we hear Beatrice's perspective of mysterious and traumatic events of 1934. The final thread is Minerva's great-grandmother Alba who tells Minerva a story on her deathbed about events from her childhood in 1908.

At night the three of them talked on ICQ about meaningless and profound topics.

I am a sucker for parallel stories, but I especially love how rooted each of these different narratives are in highly specific times and places.

As a horror story, the pacing reminded me a lot of her previous book Mexican Gothic. There's a slow foreshadowing of creeping horror where things are going slightly awry (or maybe it's coincidence). And then, very late, there is a mask off moment where it's explicit what is happening. Having three intertwined stories that each have their own arc of tension only makes this stronger.

Red Rising grumping, continued

Style

The style is a lot here, and I don't think it's doing the book any favors. Sentences are short. Fragmented. Deep in the head of the teenage protagonist. Maybe it's supposed to be gritty. Instead, it's choppy. Cheesy.

The book's newTechnology comboWord parade of shinyThings is exhausting: clawDrills, headTalks, godTrees, ionBlades, ghostCloaks, gravBoots, pulseShields, and recoilArmor. Occasionally, we also get PascalCase HellDivers, SchoolHouses, and ArchGovernors. Even more rarely also we get lowercase combo words like duroglass, durobags, and synthleather. (Pick one! Or zero!!)

I sometimes give Brandon Sanderson a hard time for writing systems and worlds that are so unambiguous that you could pin their corpse to a wiki. But, this book is more like a Calvinball match, where ideas are forgotten with less warning than with which they are introduced. To the book's credit, it can get minor points for properly foreshadowing the plot-critical gravBoots, but I will side-eye the rest. It's not that I don't understand their obvious function from the word; it's more that I don't understand how they fit into the worldbuilding or their purpose for existing at all. (And that also, from a writing perspective, I don't find these neologisms effective, especially when there's so many of them that none of them feel special.)

An good example of this is that in exactly three places in the book, Darrow comments on Golds talking in "highLingo" vs "midLingo". The first time it comes up, it's new to the reader, having not even been mentioned during the long training montage sequence of Darrow learning to be a Gold. Worse, there's no difference between these two modes of speaking on the page, and so it feels all tell and no show. A missed opportunity for linguistic worldbuilding.

In the diction department, there's quite a bit of homophobic and misogynistic insults. There's also some awkward turns of phrase, like "arrogants" as a noun (or a typo) and "Novas rejoins his thirty heavy horse."

Fridges

"If you led the others to freedom. The things you could do, Darrow. The things you could make happen. [...] It chills me. You have been given so, so much, but you set your sights so low."

The most egregious plot detail for me is that early on in chapter three, Darrow's wife Eo tries to talk Darrow into rebellion with a long corny speech. She is then immediately fridged in the very next chapter, and her tragic death is what (theoretically) motivates Darrow, who was previously uninterested in revolution. When she gave this speech, I wrote in my notes, "Oh, she's really not living for more than a couple more chapters, is she." grimacing emoji

Unfortunately, it's very unclear what the specifics of her politics are or what she's urging Darrow to do. She says: "live for more" and "break the chains". But what do any of these things actually mean in general, or even just to Darrow? If Darrow had gone to the Institute with a clear vision from Eo, maybe this would have felt more impactful, but mostly her role is to make him feel sad and angry.

Pacing

There are a number of places in the book where there's a a critical moment that is over in a sentence or two. There's tension buildup and pre-worry about an event, and then the event itself is anticlimactic.

This happens all over the place. The duel with Cassius, who feels betrayed after one of Darrow's long-held secrets comes out. The fight with Mercury. The final moment where Darrow worries that Mustang is betraying him for secret reasons. Even the ending ceremony is merely "ope, I'll pin a badge on you for winning, guess we're done here". (Honestly, it's not even precise what "winning" truly even means in this competition. The rules are made up and the points don't matter.)

At least the Hunger Games knew how to put on a show.

Miscellaneous Petty Complaints

Here's a list of quibbles I had that while reading that probably won't make sense unless you're read the book.

Plot things:

• The first chapter transitions directly from "oh these grumpy elders don't think we'll ever make quota to win the laurel this quarter" to chapter two "jk the laurel ceremony is literally tonight and we know we've definitely won for sure" with zero time passing in between.
• Eo brings Darrow to a secret forest with a night sky, and yet somehow the daytime blue sky in the city that Dancer brings him to later is new and surprising and reveals the "Mars is actually terraformed with breathable air" lie underlying all of Red society? Was this an inside forest? Exactly what about a night time forest does not say "terraforming"?
• I'll just accept that Mars has been magically terraformed here and handwave past its lack of magnetosphere and the presence of enough water to have blizzards.
• But what is going on with Mars gravity? The book explicitly uses the word ".37grav" but it doesn't seem to remember this most of the time. How are horses running normally in Mars gravity? Are the castles much taller to avoid somebody leaping up into them? So many questions.
• Applicants to the Institute have negative scores by their name when they are sitting down at the first table after the draft. This score never comes up again? Only the alternative scoring bars towards being Primus? It's also weird that these virtual Primus bar scores only get mentioned every once in a while, but yet everybody knows about them? Are they always visible?
• Darrow holds onto the red sweatband (or "sweat band", spelled both ways) during the Passage abduction, which is then not mentioned for most of the book; then he uses it to wipe the sweat off like 90% of the way through the book when he confronts Jupiter. Why would nobody have commented on this? What sort of Gold would wear a red-colored band? Where has he kept this the whole time???
• Darrow takes Eo's wedding band (of silk and hair) with him to the Institute, wears it on his finger, and nobody asks about this? It's obvious as a wedding band to Dancer who calls it queer, but maybe that's just because Dancer is also a Red. There's no indication of how this fits into his fake family story. He certainly is still wearing it during the Julian fight, and then it's never mentioned again?
• Exam score wise, everybody is a "lowDraft" or a "midDraft" or a "highDraft"; but how does Darrow know mid-combat that he is kneeing a highDraft in the face?
• It's hard to believe that "bloodydamn" would give away a Red, especially with the worldbuilding detail that people go "slumming" in lower colors, such that there would socially probably be some social cachet in appropriating the lingo of other colors; also, wouldn't literally knowing and singing all of the lyrics to a forbidden song when you have a recording ring on your finger be slightly more damning?
• Why are all of the proctors named Roman gods like Apollo, Venus, Minerva leading houses of their own name, but then we've also got Fitchner (leading House Mars)?
• It's funny to read Alix Harrow's The Everlasting worrying about accurately portraying the needs of taking care of a singular horse, and these warbands of starving children just acquire (and lose) dozens of horses constantly? Who is taking care of them, let alone feeding them?

Choppy prose, sloppy plotting, thin worldbuilding, poor pacing. Do not recommend.

If I were just going to write a review, I'd probably just leave it at the above. I don't like to hate read things. If I'm going to spend my time on a book, it's gotta be something I at least think I'm going to enjoy.

Sometimes though, a friend says: I read this book everybody told me was good, and I have a lot of feelings but I can't quite find the words. Maybe you should read this to have some context and we can have a book discussion. A book discussion, you say! I'm in.

And now, because several of my friends have read this for whatever reason and want to talk about it, now I have to think more about this book that wasn't for me. I am told that the later books are more interesting, but I... just don't have it in me with so many things in the to-read pile.

If I was going to steer people towards other books that are adjacent to Red Rising, I'd say:

If you want people acting as gods on Mars presiding over mock warfare, Dan Simmons did a much better job of this in his Ilium and Olympos duology. (Also featuring: literary references and gay robots on a submarine.)

If you want a competitive school environment that transitions into the Hunger Games, also featuring the most special YA protagonist who is secretly there to burn down all of society and can't let anybody know what his true identity is, I think the Will of the Many is a better choice. (I also appreciate the way that book constantly ratchets up the tension on the protagonist's secrets.)

If you just want arbitrary stratified dystopian social classes, might I recommend this classic ghosthoney video: www.tiktok.com/@ghosthoney/video/6884050977389874437

Here's the extended remix of my grumpy feelings.

Catching up on the Hugo noms for this year, I picked up Alix Harrow's The Everlasting, a time loop-esque narrative about empires and the power of stories. Owen Mallory is a historian that has been researching Una the Everlasting who gets sent back to Una's time to write a good story about her to make the future country stronger.

One narrative issue with time loop stories is that they get repetitive in their structure. The reader has already seen the scenes, and something needs to shift to keep them fresh. (Sometimes you can lean into that discomfort for narrative reasons like In Stars and Time, but I think that would work less in a written format.) What works quite well for me in this book, is that the first time we see everything through Owen's perspective, who is coming in with his own biases about who Una is and is trying to learn about the world (along with the reader). The second time through we get Una's perspective, which is much different and delightfully directly refutes a lot of Owen's misperceptions.

As a warning, I will say that this story leans on Arthurian legend—the book Mallory is reading/writing is called The Death of Una Everlasting. It's not a direct retelling (thank goodness), but it does take a number of names, characters, and ideas and kind of smears them around to tell a new story. Personally, I think these direct references aren't necessary as the story stands well enough on its own, but I'm a bit of a hater on the Arthur front. These bits were blurry enough (and the story fresh enough) that I could squint and enjoy it.

Overall, I really liked this novel. There's a lot of good details early on that seem like innocuous character building but are instead well-laid foreshadowing. Love some romantic yearning. Lots of fun, quite grippy, would recommend.

They left even their sexes behind, dressing sometimes as two men or two women, binding or stuffing their chests, lengthening or shortening their stride. This, at least, came easily to them, for neither of them had ever quite been what they were supposed to be, or acted how they ought to act. They were too manly or too womanish, too loud or too soft-spoken, too tall or too slim, too strong or too weak. It was no hardship to trade one disguise for another.

This is a side comment, as this isn't really a story centered on gender, but it does have some interesting things going in that department all the same.

Owen and Una both feel like they are "doing a poor impression of what they are" and live outside gendered expectations. It's a good contrast to Vivian, who feels imprisoned, and whose goals are entirely rooted in gendered reasons (or at least the way other people treat her for it).

There was a certain pleasure, God knew, in following orders, in placing the heavy reins of your life in somebody else's hands. All your sins were not truly yours, then; all your unruly desires were safely curbed.

Also, incredibly minorly, but I appreciated this moment of kink that felt well-earned from a story and character perspective.