Reviews and Comments

Aw man, I was way too hard on The Fifth Season, wasn't I? "Harumph, this book doesn't handle its racism-metaphor quite that well, I don't think it's all that Hugo-worthy." Nothing to help you appreciate a fast-paced action-adventure in a truly unique world than a book that... isn't that.

I'm less than a hundred pages away from the finish line, and I am a completionist, plus this book was a gift and I feel obligated, so I will finish this! I just need to talk about it.

It's awful when you really want to like a book, but just can't. "The Priory of the Orange Tree" has so much going for it. A matriarchal world and diverse cast, a really cool and interesting magic system, Eastern and Western dragons and some interesting (but underdeveloped) religious themes. It even does Fantasy Netherlands, which is both flattering and kind of cringe (Look, I get it. I do get it, "Door to the Sea" sounds like a great name for a semi-Dutch harbor city. But it doesn't retain an ounce of that grandness in translation. "Zeedeur" sounds... very silly.)

Okay, rapid-fire complaints:

• There are multiple ancient mysteries that scholars have been pondering without solving them for centuries, apparently. But none of them seem that difficult to me. I'm not saying I'd be smart enough to solve them (I'm not that smart), but I'm not many scholars over the course of centuries. For one of them the solution is to just interpret a mysterious ancient text in the most straight-forward, literal and obvious way possible, and yet we're supposed to believe that no one did this for a thousand years. Another one is the sort of puzzle I could probably solve if it was presented to me in an escape room. I just don't believe that people were stumped by this for so long, I'm not buying it.

• The characters go through a lot of emotions, but I could never fully connect to them. It always felt like their feelings were described to me, while I watched emotion-less puppets act them out. I don't know if this is just me or if other people who read this book experienced it too.

• Most fantasy authors take inspiration from real cultures, that's fine, but this world is such a one-to-one with reality, it feels boring to me. At least Fantasy Italy is livened up a bit by making the Pope a female hereditary position (genuinely very cool!), but from the first "East" chapter it irked me how much the rest of the world is just TotallyNotJapan and Bchina.

• You can fuck up all the above if you write a readable, exiting book. The plot is there, the plot is pretty good. The pacing is not. You cannot write an 800-page book and fuck up the pacing. About every 100 pages I felt like I was finally getting into the story and then I lost it again. By the time I had accepted that this book was never going to read like the page-turner it was clearly meant to be I was too far in to quit it. That's a personality flaw on my part though.

I think this is my favourite of Mielville yet! God, the worldbuilding is so vivid and creative, and the plot is tearing along, the politics are uncompromisingly evoking of Marxism in a time of capitalist realism. This is everything I wanted from him, and almost, but didn't quite, get in his other novels. Highly recommended.

A horror story about a '70s UK folk band, a pretty amazing era and environment for folk and music in general. Hand made the truly inspired choice to tell the entire story in the form of interviews with the band members, decades after the events of the book, which I'm guessing was inspired by her background in music journalism. It also adds to the realism of this being one of those half-apocryphal, half-confirmed fact music legend stories, and I wonder if it was also inspired by one - specifically the mysterious disappearance of Licorice McKechnie, who sang for The Incredible String Band. Not only is this a great update to the epistolary genre, I also feel it should really play into the current true crime/horror podcast genre that often uses similar story telling devices.

Apart from that though, I found the story a bit mediocre. It's a spooky, very slow-burn about a haunted house, that just didn't really get the escalation to truly creep me out. I like this stuff in film, where cinematography, music etc. can make it all a little bit more effective, but in books I need some more intense horror to get me to shiver. (Apart from, I suppose, true masters of the genre like Shirley Jackson. But her novels I read just as much for her beautiful prose as for the horror.) On top of that, what happens in the house and what could cause it never becomes clear to me. Of course, you want there to be ambiguity in these types of stories, but if you leave too many things unanswered, I think things feel lackluster and you actually miss out on opportunities for scares of the "sinking realization" variety. It's a difficult balance, and there's also just the possibility that I'm stupid and missed out on some clues. I'm sure Wylding Hall struck the right notes (ha!) for some people, but not for me.

So. Storytime. In my country, children are separated into different high schools at twelve years old, based on academical aptitude. At the highest level, there are two types of school, gymnasium and atheneum, with the only difference being that at a gymnasium they also teach Greek and Latin. That's the one I went to (not bragging, I was a very mediocre student). As you might imagine, the type of twelve-year old that chooses to go to a gymnasium usually isn't just smart, but also very driven to prove themselves academically. Many of us staked a lot of our self-esteem on our intelligence, especially if we didn't have a lot else going on, like also being athletic or socially gifted. We were all kind of used to being the smartest kid in the room, and then suddenly we weren't. Worse, there were always a couple of stand out, near genius level students who were really only in that school because there wasn't anywhere higher for them to go to. So, what you get, is an entire school full of teenagers all simultaneously realising that the one trait they thought gave them value isn't actually all that special, while also dealing with the hormonal hell that is puberty.

Basically, what I'm saying is, I knew a lot of Quentins. Quite frankly, I was Quentin at times. I related very heavily to his character and really empathized with his struggles. Not because I thought his self-absorption, entitlement and disgust with mundanity were justified, but because I so deeply understood the insecurities those traits all stemmed from. I've been there, man.

And then I went online and found out that many readers absolutely hated his character and his personality ruined the books for them.

Well.

Always good to get an outside perspective.

But yeah, I really loved this book. Most of the characters are all kind of assholes with few redeeming traits (they get better in the sequels!) and magic isn't the fun escapism it usually is. It's an excellent deconstruction of both the worlds Hogwarts and Narnia present, which I honestly think is worthwhile for all fantasy fans to kind of ruminate on. Why do we so badly want to be whisked away to a school for special people with special powers that they very pointedly do not share with the rest of the world? Why do we want to live in a parallel world where we get to be kings and queens, and close personal friends with Jesus? We're not bad people for having these fantasies of being special and amazing, they're pretty much universal. But they're also something you need to let go of at a certain point in order to be happy as what you most likely are; an ordinary person with just as much of a right to rule a kingdom as anyone else. Taken as a whole, the series is a manifesto on the necessity of finding value in the life that exists when the adventure is over, to be happy with stability and mundanity, because nothing is so special you don't ultimately get used to it, and you can't find life satisfaction in continuing to chase the next big thrill. Satisfaction is not about getting everything you ever wanted, but about how to stop wanting when you have enough, which is what takes so long for Quentin to fully understand.

Expect only questions, no answers from this book.

Have you ever read one of those stories where after the apocalypse, or maybe on an uninhabited island, one person is left, seemingly the only person left alive at all? And the whole story arc is about them dealing with loneliness and trying to find another human? Usually they do, usually one of the opposite sex, the implication being that they'll procreate, thereby solving the loneliness problem for at least two generations. Have you ever thought about that second generation? The siblings who will either have to resort to incest or dying out one by one? I often did. I wondered what it would be like for the last sibling, truly the last person on earth now.

I Who Have Never Known Men is about that last person, an account of her life, and it's as bleak as you would expect it to be. Everywhere this is grouped as a feminist novel, which I think is a bit shallow. Sure, the topic of gender comes up, and all the characters are women, but it's one of those stories were if the genders were flipped, if it was about a sole male surviving the apocalypse, no one would see that as a statement on gender. Really, in my opinion, it's about the meaning of life, and how much would be left of it without the rest of humanity. What use are the women's attempts at rebuilding a semblance of their previous lives, at finding out why what happened to them happened to them, at passing down knowledge to the one child among them, if there are no other people to share it with, no next generation to pass it down to? The pointlessness is soul-sucking. And it never abates.

It takes a special kind of person to enjoy a book like this, but if you like bleak, questioning, open-ended narratives, with the grace to be short reads, you should definitely give this one a try.

A story about a band during the British Folk Revival in a (haunted?) house. Love the music from that era, so that's huge plus. The whole story is written like a set of intertwined interviews with all the band members, which is a brilliant find.

Second time I'm reading this book. First time was, god, more than a decade ago, and I'm noticing it goes down much easier now. It was a bit difficult to get into back then. I don't know why, but it feels like such a nice, cozy November read for me right now. It's not a cozy story, but I picture the whole story as taking place in a vaguely steampunkish world, set against the constant black of space.

I looked it up, "Who Fears Death" isn't a debut novel, but it feels like a debut novel in the best possible way. It's emotionally raw, and slightly unfinished in the sense that you can feel the author poured all her ideas and feelings and all the themes she wanted to explore into this book to the point she couldn't possibly get to all of them. The result is something that's brimming with creativity and life. While the book reads mostly like something targeted at a YA audience, it's frank and direct in its discussion of sex and female sexuality in a way that you wouldn't expect to see outside of adult literature, but it lends a lot of power to the story overall. This is something that matters to the author, and you can tell.

The setting in which magic exists next to the left-over technology from an implied pre-apocalyptic society is very well-developed. Especially the magic system is well-thought-out to the point that I wonder if it's based on a real belief system. It reminds me a bit of the books on witchcraft in Africa I read back when I studied anthropology.

For me, the only real flaw of this book - and this feels like a downside of the same creative force that makes it so enjoyable - is that the second half of the book takes on a bit of road trip plot with way too many stops. While they're all interesting individually, they are too loosely connected and the story loses much of its momentum in this section. It makes me wish that Nnedi Okorafor had had a very stern editor who could've put their foot down and forced her to kill her darlings.

I've seen that she's still a very productive author, and purely based on the covers and descriptions her new books seem to be a bit more mainstream YA fantasy fare. I'd like to pick those up to see what I think as well, but I'm a bit apprehensive. I'd be surprised if they contain the same raw, frank emotional force as Who Fears Death, as that is, admittedly, not its most sellable quality. But I can't imagine Okorafor's work not suffering from sanding down those rough edges.

After Sunshine, I'm returning to the McKinley writing I enjoy - her fairy tale re-tellings.

While I missed the darkness of Deerskin, it's a perfectly well done version of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale. There's a bit of coming of age, there's a bit of romance. I liked that all three sisters had a really good relationship. It was enjoyable and there isn't much more to say about it. That may be because of the source material, of course. Beauty and Beast was written by Barbot de Villeneuve to educate young French noblewomen on virtue (as far as I know), while Deerskin comes from the oral tradition of German mothers telling terrifying tales so their children would stay out of the woods. And even within that category it is one of the Grimms' more horrifying fairytales. Disney isn't going to adapt that one, you can be sure. (I wonder if Beauty being a bookish girl, and the giant library inspired the Disney version, or if this was already a thing in the original story. I can't quite remember.)

McKinley also wrote another book based on this fairytale - Rose Daughter - which I'm learning from reviews is a little bit more complex. I loved reading Angela Carter's different versions of this tale in her story collection, and comparing them, so I'm super curious about that.

Almost finished this book. I'm honestly really disappointed it doesn't included the same past-lives sections as the former three, that was kind of their whole selling point and what I enjoyed most. From googling a bit, I also gather it's not going to come back in the sequels...

Man, I'm really hankering for a big fantasy doorstopper that is not too grimdark (Malazan is on my list, but those are pretty dark right?), but I think I'm going to give some others a shot. Maybe Patrick Rothfuss, The Gentleman Bastard? Recommendations welcome.