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lightreadsWitness for the Dead
3/5. Offshoot of the widely beloved The Goblin Emperor, featuring a minor character from that book off in a distant city going about his business speaking to the newly dead and, consequently, solving a series of mysteries.
Pleasant but restrained. Our narrator is suffering – grief and old pain and guilt and related self-doubt – but he doesn't want to tell us about it, so much of this book occurs by way of mystery solving in the foreground and a rather sparse background in which blips of feeling occasionally fuzz like static. A lot of people have said that this book does not resemble Goblin Emperor; it doesn't, except in that they are both about people who have been hurt to the point where they can no longer value themselves, but how there are some fundamentally good people around them who can do the valuing for them. That can be a satisfying story, and this one mostly is, but it doesn't go anywhere near the emotional places that Goblin Emperor does – our narrator has a sort of abortive crisis in his way, but he remains fundamentally very solitary and within himself and his pain, even as he makes incremental steps towards having a community.
So I enjoyed it, but the interpersonal story didn't knock my socks off, and, well. She's just not that good at mysteries? I mean, they're perfectly competent, but there's nothing particularly creative or interesting about them, so they don't sustain the book for me.
Content notes: Death, serial murder, ghouls and associated horror.
3/5. Offshoot of the widely beloved The Goblin Emperor, featuring a minor character from that book off in a distant city going about his business speaking to the newly dead and, consequently, solving a series of mysteries.
Pleasant but restrained. Our narrator is suffering – grief and old pain and guilt and related self-doubt – but he doesn't want to tell us about it, so much of this book occurs by way of mystery solving in the foreground and a rather sparse background in which blips of feeling occasionally fuzz like static. A lot of people have said that this book does not resemble Goblin Emperor; it doesn't, except in that they are both about people who have been hurt to the point where they can no longer value themselves, but how there are some fundamentally good people around them who can do the valuing for them. That can be a satisfying story, and this one mostly is, but it doesn't go anywhere near the emotional places that Goblin Emperor does – our narrator has a sort of abortive crisis in his way, but he remains fundamentally very solitary and within himself and his pain, even as he makes incremental steps towards having a community.
So I enjoyed it, but the interpersonal story didn't knock my socks off, and, well. She's just not that good at mysteries? I mean, they're perfectly competent, but there's nothing particularly creative or interesting about them, so they don't sustain the book for me.
Content notes: Death, serial murder, ghouls and associated horror.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-31 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-01 12:00 am (UTC)I find it kind of hard to fathom that she didn't work in a Maia cameo. It could have easily been done without destroying the sense of distance from the center of things in this book. And she had to know it's what people wanted.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-01 12:23 pm (UTC)