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This is the second book in the first Foreigner trilogy, and one where Bren gets a little bit more agency than the first, where he is mostly kept in the dark.

It's a classic Foreigner book where the bulk of the book is careful, slowly building politics--internal Atevi ones, external mainland ones with Deana Hanks the temporary paidhi, and ones from the ship with its people imminently landing--all of which come together in a satisfying action sequence. I think this book is where the first trilogy really starts going, and sets up the third book which is probably my favorite of the three. It's the book where Bren starts to realize that his loyalty is truly more towards keeping the treaty and its peace than with the institute of his own state department that technically gives him the authority to do what he is doing.

I like the tension here with Bren's fiance Barb and the increasing romantic tension between Bren and Jago. Barb is absolutely incredibly emotionally immature, both pushing Bren away because the relationship is (understandably) not working for her but also asking for him back (because her new relationship isn't working either); I think it is a little over the top but it works because it's such a contrast with Atevi mindsets.

I said this in the first book, but I feel like this entire first trilogy is one where Illisidi is an independent wild card, where she has her own agenda and politics and Bren (and the reader) can never fully depend on her support and where her loyalties will lie.

Also extremely minor, but as touchpoints for future books, we also get our first pizza party, our first trip to the Taiben hunting lodge, and our first meeting with Tabini's fiancee Damiri.

I have read other Cassandra Khaw, and this story continues in their writing vein of being bloody and extremely visceral (literally and metaphorically). It's less body horror and more horror horror; it's the fiction version of the last twenty minutes of The Substance where everything turns monstrous and there's a firehose of blood and gore.

This is another "dark academia book", where magic children who have apocalyptic abilities are sent (or taken) to keep them safe from the rest of the world. Obviously where there's power, there's abuse of power and this is fundamentally a revenge story from a traumatized woman who likes her bodily autonomy.

The story is told from the main character's perspective in both the present and the past, with the past narrative catching up to the present eventually to help explain some of the in medias res. I do really like this technique when it's done well, and I feel like it helps flash back to backstory for characters and create some level of doubt about the main character's motivations. The present is mostly action, and so it makes for satisfying pacing to have interleaved backstory and tension.

I think this book is best viewed as a classic horror story--it feels very much like a movie where parts of the cast are slowly being killed off. It's about establishing characters rather than a strong sense of place. Still, it's interesting to compare some of the world building of Scholomance to here. Despite the fact that both contain the classic trope of a school that constantly rearranges itself, the Scholomance has a map and a sense of threat about being in a lower room or getting lost. Here, the physical school itself is mostly just a side detail and I don't really have a sense of space or tension.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy this book, but in comparison to other adjacent dark academia genre books I think it just doesn't quite stand out. The worldbuilding and deadly graduation ceremony was much more thin than in the Scholomance. I found the characters in Emily Tesh's The Incandescent to be much stronger and more interesting. Even Khaw's previous Little Mermaid retelling The Salt Grows Heavy sticks with me much more than the moments in this book.

I wonder if this will land better for folks who are more into horror than I am.

@otterlove@bookwyrm.social for what it's worth, I do feel like each book does a good job of having at least one focus character with a significant arc where we get a lot of backstory and flashbacks for them specifically

It is very long though. It is absolutely the current version of ye olde fantasy tome.

This Christine Love story is an extremely anime story about a student learning to fight robots with a giant sword and falling in love with her turncoat fencing teacher.

I wanted to like this, but I just felt like it wasn't for me (in the literal sense that perhaps I am not the target audience). Maybe I haven't seen enough Gundam. Maybe anime tropes aren't quite my cuppa. I wish the worldbuilding around universal language and the Voyager broadcast weren't quite so thin. I have love love loved Christine Love's games writing universally, and Get in the Car, Loser! is one of my most favorite games, but somehow this just didn't land for me. I don't mean that as a euphemism though; I know this will really land for some folks.

A conversation on Mastodon prompted me to read this novella. It's a coming of age story on some future flooded planet with a history of angels that used to exist, and is largely about disillusionment with religion (specifically one with Christian overtones).

(This story is also surprisingly accessible for Greg Egan; I think this is my own recency bias in reading several of his novels over the years. There's an escalation of the science aspects over narrative as the years go on (Clockwork Rocket was not for me), but Oceanic is more like what I expect from his earlier work.)

Just as women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God, so were Freelanders and Firmlanders. (Some commentators insisted that this was literally true: God chose to blind Herself to where we lived, and whether or not we’d been born with a penis.)

It's got a little bit of tangential gender stuff going on, but it also feels quite dated to me. Maybe I just forget what 1998 looked like. The main detail is that people's bodies in this universe transfer a penis from one body to another during piv sex. There's some social gender around this (e.g. "who brings a bridge to this marriage?", although this attitude is considered dated by some characters), but when this comes into play for the protagonist it feels more like a virginity metaphor than a gender one. This mechanic seems like it should have a larger social impact in terms of surrounding cultural context, but it functions more like fun unrelated worldbuilding in this story.

This body horror pregnancy trans dysphoria story was... a lot, but it was also raw and real and quite good.

Crane is part of a local cult, run by a hive of sentient flies and worms, and when he gets pregnant the hive insists he carries the child to his utter distress and terror. It's visceral and disturbing--full of trauma and abuse, self-loathing and self-injury, and shitty choices in a shittier world.