@renkonreads@bookwyrm.social oh this was great, thanks for the rec
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I read largely sff, some romance and mystery, very little non-fiction. I'm trying to write at least a little review of everything I'm reading, but it's a little bit of an experiment in progress.
I'm @picklish@weirder.earth elsewhere.
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enne📚 reviewed The Examiner by Janice Hallett
The Examiner
1 star
I love a mystery! I love an epistolary novel! However, The Examiner just did not work for me. This is largely going to be a negative review, so feel free to skip. If I wanted to pitch this book positively, I would say that it is a mystery novel about an art master's program told through the artifacts of its forum posts, class assignments, and group chats. An external examiner has been called in to make an accounting of the program, and becomes increasingly concerned that somebody may have died during the course of the class.
This is my first Janice Hallett book, and most of the way I bounced off of it is that the writing doesn't feel like text chat. Everybody capitalizes sentences and ends with full stops. There's very few sentence fragments. Characters have a largely similar writing style, even when they range from ages 20 to …
I love a mystery! I love an epistolary novel! However, The Examiner just did not work for me. This is largely going to be a negative review, so feel free to skip. If I wanted to pitch this book positively, I would say that it is a mystery novel about an art master's program told through the artifacts of its forum posts, class assignments, and group chats. An external examiner has been called in to make an accounting of the program, and becomes increasingly concerned that somebody may have died during the course of the class.
This is my first Janice Hallett book, and most of the way I bounced off of it is that the writing doesn't feel like text chat. Everybody capitalizes sentences and ends with full stops. There's very few sentence fragments. Characters have a largely similar writing style, even when they range from ages 20 to 60. The writing was so stilted that I almost set it down several times. I looked up some reviews (which were almost all hugely positive) that suggested there were interesting twists later, so I pushed through to a painful and bewildering end.
Honestly, the author really needs to go read Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet about the different ways people speak online, especially in generational senses. It'd also be great if only the emails and essays were business formal so that there could be different modalities of communication, but everybody sounds equally stilted in their private chats. There's a rare sprinkle of "OMG" and "FFS" thrown in (always capitalized) in a way that feels the author is trying too hard while holding a skateboard over their shoulder.
I am a huge sucker for telling a story through online artifacts, and so in my mind I compare this with other fiction that has done this much more effectively. I would recommend instead Sarah Pinsker's Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather short story or even the posts in Christine Love's don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story game or the text chat in Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing on CatNet novels. These all feel like real people writing online in ways that this novel did not.
I'm going to try to speedrun the rest of my grumps here.
The pacing is wild. It takes sixty percent of the book before you get any sense of what might be going on. To me, this doesn't feel like a proper mystery where the reader has any chance of understanding the whodunnit until it's brought directly to their attention with new details. There's often plenty of bread crumbs that make (some of) the reveals feel plausible, but there's just not enough here. Also, when the first half of the book is such low stakes academic squabbling, it's hard to care more deeply about it when you find out there's secret reasons behind some of it. Telling me for half the book that something more interesting has been going on secretly that I haven't seen yet is just not effective storytelling.
The descriptions of the way technology works big and small are ridiculous in ways that threw me off as a reader.
The politics are wild! This book has some discussion about environmentalism and ecology, and one might think there could be some good things to be concerned about, maybe around checks notes capitalism or global warming or oil pipelines or pollution. (spoilers but haha jk these are definitely not the environmental concerns of this story)
Sure, sure, there are some twists and reveals of things the reader may have guessed or in other cases had no way of knowing. I'll be kind and not spoil them here, but some of them are just wildly implausible and so disconnected from what the rest of the book is about that it makes the book feel scattered.
At any rate, not a fan, would not recommend.
enne📚 quoted Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
If Wiley City cares about nature, they must only care about the right kind. They must only care if the nature is pretty, or serves them. They must only care if the nature makes them feel good about themselves, or if caring makes them look good to others.
— Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2) (18%)
enne📚 reviewed Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Those Beyond the Wall
4 stars
This was the #SFFBookClub book for February 2025. I am honestly a little surprised that it got a sequel. While I enjoyed it, I think this book suffers a little from being in the shadow of such a strong first book. It brings back nearly every character, although rooted in one world rather than worldhopping, and as such you really need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. The pitch for this book read almost as a murder investigation, but with foreknowledge from book one, it seemed incredibly obvious what the cause could be. This could just be a case of incorrect expectations on my part that the book would have more of a mystery element.
Thematically, I'm here for this story about justice and tearing down borders that separate the hoarding and exploitative rich from the poor. Here for the anger about how these rich people …
This was the #SFFBookClub book for February 2025. I am honestly a little surprised that it got a sequel. While I enjoyed it, I think this book suffers a little from being in the shadow of such a strong first book. It brings back nearly every character, although rooted in one world rather than worldhopping, and as such you really need to have read the first book to enjoy this one. The pitch for this book read almost as a murder investigation, but with foreknowledge from book one, it seemed incredibly obvious what the cause could be. This could just be a case of incorrect expectations on my part that the book would have more of a mystery element.
Thematically, I'm here for this story about justice and tearing down borders that separate the hoarding and exploitative rich from the poor. Here for the anger about how these rich people will casually break promises and ignore consequences for undesirable people. This book ends up feeling extremely quotable, but in doing so sometimes come off as didactic and telling more than it shows, even while I am nodding my head in agreement.
One thing I think this book does really well is having the main character from the previous book show up here as a foil to the new main character Scales. We get to see ways in which Scales and Cara are very different people and the biases that Cara brought to the world. It also means that we get to see the runners and Nik Nik in a much different light than the first book too. Cara could have stolen the show, and the book manages to make it not about her.
This is the step some civilians don't understand, the step Cara rejects: We can only make good on our promise of protection if there's blood on our hands. We can't bluff. The city only speaks the language of power, and we have to speak it right back for them to listen.
A minor observation, but I feel like there's a psychological shift in recent fiction (or in me) from "violence is never the answer" to "existing power will only respect violence". Babel (and its explicit subtitle) is certainly example of this too.
enne📚 quoted Motheater by Linda Codega
She was desperate enough to go after dead bodies in Appalachian rivers to prove what she knew: White Rock was letting their miners die in the dark.
Instead she had a real, live, breathing lady in the bed of her truck, dirt all on her boots, and none of the mining company.
— Motheater by Linda Codega (Page 3)
enne📚 reviewed Motheater by Linda Codega
Motheater
3 stars
I wanted to like this queer witchy Appalachian book a lot more than I ended up enjoying it. The setup is that Benethea Mattox has sacrificed everything to find out why her friend mysteriously died in a mining accident; she rescues a mysterious woman from a river, who turns out to be a hundred plus year old witch with her own vendetta.
The perspective of the book alternates between Bennie in the present and Motheater in the past. What doesn't work for me is that most of the interesting tension happens in the past; Bennie's own agency and mystery solving in the present is largely subsumed in service to helping Motheater with her own plot.
One interesting observation is that I read the conflict as being between protecting the people vs protecting the land. Motheater wants to provide for her people but is competing with the growing needs and desires …
I wanted to like this queer witchy Appalachian book a lot more than I ended up enjoying it. The setup is that Benethea Mattox has sacrificed everything to find out why her friend mysteriously died in a mining accident; she rescues a mysterious woman from a river, who turns out to be a hundred plus year old witch with her own vendetta.
The perspective of the book alternates between Bennie in the present and Motheater in the past. What doesn't work for me is that most of the interesting tension happens in the past; Bennie's own agency and mystery solving in the present is largely subsumed in service to helping Motheater with her own plot.
One interesting observation is that I read the conflict as being between protecting the people vs protecting the land. Motheater wants to provide for her people but is competing with the growing needs and desires of her town that lead them to increased mining, either on their own or through a company. Surprisingly, this turned out to be much less than I expected about mining companies exploiting people than it was about mining generally hurting the environment.
enne📚 quoted In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu
"You must understand that Ora is a city-state in exile," Anima continues. "We have suffered enormous collective trauma. And so, we must guarantee our citizens' safety. Everyone must be known. The punishment for lying is far worse than that for telling the truth."
— In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu (31%)
enne📚 reviewed In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu
In the Watchful City
4 stars
A novella about borders, stories, and painful transformation. Anima is part of a networked city panopticon, bound to try to protect aer citizens through the ability to possess animals. The mysterious stranger Vessel intrudes into the city, offering to trade stories from ser cabinet of wonders in exchange for Anima leaving a story of aer own.
My one real wish is that that the inner stories filled in more detail about the world than they did. They did all thematically resonate together enough that made the work satisfying as a whole, but I wish the storytelling and worldbuilding was knitted together a little bit more tightly.
enne📚 commented on These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein
The #SFFBookClub pick for March 2025.
Content warning spoilers for the first book
@eldang@outside.ofa.dog Mr. Cross is Michael, prince of the rurals, Esther's brother, and Cara's half brother (in this world); in the first book he was into chems and explosives, and Esther was worried Nik Nik was going to steal the explosives as "his due" but instead came and took Michael instead who ran away to join the runners
enne📚 quoted Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2)
Is this what science is? Putting your blood and sweat into something that might be nothing? Well, I fucking hate it.
— Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #2) (66%)
@eldang@outside.ofa.dog @Tak@reading.taks.garden Personally, I really can't imagine reading this second book without reading the first.
enne📚 replied to Sally Strange's status
Content warning unsolicited Scalzi book opinions
@SallyStrange@bookwyrm.social Starter Villain is definitely in the popcorn genre of Scalzi books; it's a snack and doesn't take itself too seriously. (I think most of his standalone novels fit in this popcorn category for better or for worse.) If you want something longer, I think his Interdependency space opera trilogy (starting with the Collapsing Empire) is probably what I'd recommend, mostly because it takes itself a little bit more seriously but still has delightful characters.
enne📚 quoted The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)
Why have I survived? Because I am a creature more devious than all the other mes put together. Because I saw myself bleeding out and instead of checking for a pulse, I began collecting her things. I survive the desert like a coyote survives, like all tricksters do.
— The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1) (15%)
enne📚 reviewed The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds, #1)
The Space Between Worlds
5 stars
I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.
This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same …
I read this book five years ago, and thought I'd refresh myself before the #SFFBookClub read of the sequel this month. I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed this story and world. The writing has a brusque, hardboiled tone from the cynical point of view of a survivor, and it really works for this particular kind of book.
This is a multiverse travelling story, where there is technology that can send people between similar worlds, but only safely to ones where their "other selves" are not alive. Cara is somebody who has fought to survive her whole life and thus has few other selves alive, so she gets a job as a "traverser" to be sent to other worlds to collect information. Because it deals with worldwalking between closely related worlds rather than wildly different ones (like Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series), it gets the opportunity to explore the same characters in different timelines where their lives had taken different paths.
The post-apocalyptic wasteland locale of this novel is split into the wealthy folks of Wiley City living behind a wall (literally and metaphorically the airquotes nice white people of this story), the religious Ruralites, and the survivors of Ashtown between them. Cara is constantly code switching and crossing borders, both locally and multiversally--she is pretending to be a Ruralite, is secretly from Ashtown, while she precariously lives in Wiley City (hoping to get citizenship). Thematically, I love how the book ends with doubling down on Cara's role as an intermediary between worlds.