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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.

This review seems like a recapitulation of my feelings after Witch King: I was gripped by the world, have mixed feelings about the book as a whole, wish more characters had depth, and was disappointed by parts of the ending. It's not to say I didn't enjoy it (and maybe it's just that my expectations were too high) but overall it was "fine".

One thing I really enjoy here is that we get into some really good Martha Wells fantasy ruins. Witch King and Queen Demon both follow in the path of City of Bones (my favorite Martha Wells fantasy story) and some of the Raksura books as well. I'm not sure what makes these so appealing, but I think there's something about her use of dangerous and creepy structures full of unknown danger that she does a great job with.

This book continues with interleaved narratives from the past and present. (As an aside, I do wonder if this will be a trilogy and the past narrative will cover all the way up to the present narrative in the first book.) The first book interestingly had both narratives in the same Summer Palace location at different times, which echoed nicely. This book's present timeline foreshadows some of the dust witch history, but otherwise feels quite disconnected.

I continue to be somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness of this structure for this story; there's not much tension about what's missing in between the two parts and they are not particularly great foils for each other. If the book weren't committed to this structure, some flashbacks to more moments with Arn would have gone a long way to making some emotional moments feel more impactful.

But maybe that's a larger problem of feeling the book is a bit muddy. Both halves of the first book ended with wanting to unburn the world, but I don't know if I'd say that's the story here. Is working to destroy the Hierarchs truly unburning the world? If there's any consistent theme, it's coming together to resist authoritarian rule of any sort, but even that is maybe a stretch.

The characterization also continues to feel pretty shallow for everybody who is not Kai and Bashasa. Tenes and Sanja especially feel like they need more screen time and characterization or reason for being with the rest of the party. Nightjar and Highsun similarly feel like they're important characters but we hear and see quite little of them despite them being involved in pivotal moments.

The ending is my biggest disappointment. At least the present narrative carries the tension, but the past narrative just ... elides it? Maybe this is just a big editing decision here to just cut out action to keep the book at four hundred pages, but it feels like there could be such an emotional contrast to Kai's rescue in the Summer Halls and Kai's actions in Descar-Arik and all we get is a small concluding moment with Bashasa at the end. Additionally, there feels like there's some uh pretty momentous reveals at the end of the present narrative and they just get buried :drum: in the final moments of action and they're gone almost as soon as they appear. Both halves end unsatisfyingly, each in their own way.

I will almost certainly read the next book, but I really hope it can tie everything together in a more satisfying way.

This book isn't even 100 pages long, so I finished it in a single sitting, and I don't regret doing that. I loved Ray Nayler's debut novel and this short novella was just as great, if not better in many ways.

He tackles so many serious issues with such sincerity and depth despite the length and the multiple character perspectives really highlight the positionality of different people in society and how it affects their views and what they care about and their memories. Obviously what can't be ignored about this book is the idea that you can bring back extinct species and the underlying current of the climate crisis and humans and destruction, but those issues weren't really at the forefront of my mind as I was reading--they only came later.

This book showcases breathtaking cruelty, but also a heartbreaking kind of kindness too. Very good. Will buy whatever he publishes next.

How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?

I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.

It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.

And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.

#SFFBookClub