The Gameshouse by Claire North
Feb. 27th, 2021 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Gameshouse by Claire North
3/5. Series of entwined novellas about people engaged with the gameshouse, an organization that exists in many places and many times, where players come to play games with stakes like years of their lives or their love of a particular color or, more broadly, the fate of humanity.
Interesting, but not her best. I've read three of her books and they are all, to some degree, about a person whose power or affliction (generally both) renders them slightly outside of humanity, and the stories North tells are about them reconciling that or coming back into the fold in some way. This book is also on this territory; the characters are either players or pieces (sometimes both) and this leaves them a little disconnected from humanity even as they meddle hugely in the world's political and economic affairs.
This book was at its best in the second novella, which is a tense, grueling game of hide-and-seek across the length of Thailand. The stakes are real and personal – a player has bet his entire memory – and it makes for an interesting and plausible arc for someone who is very old and very tired to come back to a kind of life. But I don't think North ties off these stories in the third novella, which blows out the scale to global unrest and the course of humanity, and yet reduces the showdown to a boring gunfight? Over motivations that, well, put it this way, I kept waiting for the twist that would make them interesting, and it didn't happen.
3/5. Series of entwined novellas about people engaged with the gameshouse, an organization that exists in many places and many times, where players come to play games with stakes like years of their lives or their love of a particular color or, more broadly, the fate of humanity.
Interesting, but not her best. I've read three of her books and they are all, to some degree, about a person whose power or affliction (generally both) renders them slightly outside of humanity, and the stories North tells are about them reconciling that or coming back into the fold in some way. This book is also on this territory; the characters are either players or pieces (sometimes both) and this leaves them a little disconnected from humanity even as they meddle hugely in the world's political and economic affairs.
This book was at its best in the second novella, which is a tense, grueling game of hide-and-seek across the length of Thailand. The stakes are real and personal – a player has bet his entire memory – and it makes for an interesting and plausible arc for someone who is very old and very tired to come back to a kind of life. But I don't think North ties off these stories in the third novella, which blows out the scale to global unrest and the course of humanity, and yet reduces the showdown to a boring gunfight? Over motivations that, well, put it this way, I kept waiting for the twist that would make them interesting, and it didn't happen.