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The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison
Mar. 8th, 2023 02:06 pmThe Grief of Stones
3+/5. Sequel to Witness for the Dead. Our protagonist continues investigating small and large mysteries in his fantasy city, acquires an apprentice, and might even have an emotion.
Consider this an exercise in subjectivity. I thought the prequel was fine, but complained about how the protagonist was so emotionally locked down that he seemed to barely exist at times, and how there was only the most microscopic change to that, and it wasn’t satisfying. I picked this book up out of a sense of completionism, but at least in part expecting to wash my hands of the series.
And actually? This book is very similar to the first, except it landed much better this time. Granted, our protagonist is beginning to, in the tiniest ways, engage in his community, and he might even acknowledge that he has feelings once in a while, so there is an arc here. It’s just an incredibly slow one – there’s a point where something spiritually violent happens to him, and he is so incapable of talking about his own pain that what he says of it is brief and oblique to the point of throwing me out of the book in confusion about WTF had actually happened. So there’s still a lot of that. But I actually believe now that she’s going somewhere with this.
But it’s still quite a similar book, to be fair, and this time I liked it more. That’s how it is sometimes.
Content notes: All sorts of death and loss via the mysteries, including stillbirth, murder, suicide, betrayal, maternal mortality. Also sexual exploitation of minors.
3+/5. Sequel to Witness for the Dead. Our protagonist continues investigating small and large mysteries in his fantasy city, acquires an apprentice, and might even have an emotion.
Consider this an exercise in subjectivity. I thought the prequel was fine, but complained about how the protagonist was so emotionally locked down that he seemed to barely exist at times, and how there was only the most microscopic change to that, and it wasn’t satisfying. I picked this book up out of a sense of completionism, but at least in part expecting to wash my hands of the series.
And actually? This book is very similar to the first, except it landed much better this time. Granted, our protagonist is beginning to, in the tiniest ways, engage in his community, and he might even acknowledge that he has feelings once in a while, so there is an arc here. It’s just an incredibly slow one – there’s a point where something spiritually violent happens to him, and he is so incapable of talking about his own pain that what he says of it is brief and oblique to the point of throwing me out of the book in confusion about WTF had actually happened. So there’s still a lot of that. But I actually believe now that she’s going somewhere with this.
But it’s still quite a similar book, to be fair, and this time I liked it more. That’s how it is sometimes.
Content notes: All sorts of death and loss via the mysteries, including stillbirth, murder, suicide, betrayal, maternal mortality. Also sexual exploitation of minors.