The Rook and Stiletto by Daniel O'malley
Sep. 28th, 2020 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Rook and Stiletto
3/5. Pair of novels about a secret British defense force of supernatural people attempting to lay their centuries-long feud with a network of secret medical researchers to rest, also amnesia and a lot of weird supernatural shit.
Cheerfully readable, even (especially?) in the parts about horrible ways for the supernatural to kill you, and also sometimes in the parts about how this organization essentially conscripts children and indoctrinates them into its service. These books have a sort of zany sensibility layered over real stakes, which is a combination I've been known to enjoy. It doesn't always work here, but I was entertained and more or less willing to go along.
There is more embarrassment squick "comedy" here than I like (which is to say, more than none) and when I glanced at the author's blog and read how he throws everything at the wall and has messy first drafts containing everything and none of it makes sense, I was like yeah, story checks out because yup, you can still tell after however many edits. But I enjoyed these nonetheless.
Content notes: Childhood trauma of various sorts, institutionalization, various ways to get messily dead, a whole lot of body modification and medical stuff in the second book.
3/5. Pair of novels about a secret British defense force of supernatural people attempting to lay their centuries-long feud with a network of secret medical researchers to rest, also amnesia and a lot of weird supernatural shit.
Cheerfully readable, even (especially?) in the parts about horrible ways for the supernatural to kill you, and also sometimes in the parts about how this organization essentially conscripts children and indoctrinates them into its service. These books have a sort of zany sensibility layered over real stakes, which is a combination I've been known to enjoy. It doesn't always work here, but I was entertained and more or less willing to go along.
There is more embarrassment squick "comedy" here than I like (which is to say, more than none) and when I glanced at the author's blog and read how he throws everything at the wall and has messy first drafts containing everything and none of it makes sense, I was like yeah, story checks out because yup, you can still tell after however many edits. But I enjoyed these nonetheless.
Content notes: Childhood trauma of various sorts, institutionalization, various ways to get messily dead, a whole lot of body modification and medical stuff in the second book.