Prophet by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blache

[lightreads]

Prophet

3/5. Scifi(ish) thriller about a disgraced post mental breakdown/addiction British agent and a buttoned-up U.S. soldier who have history and get paired up to investigate a sequence of strange manifestations. Also, one of them can discern lies from truth (except from the other) and also also they might have a thing for each other.

This book was a minor sensation among my general online circle and OTOH, sure, I get it, this is doing stuff with weaponized nostalgia and how that doesn’t work on traumatic queer childhoods. But on the other hand, I don’t know, this is a whole lot of familiar M/M tropes with a rather unsatisfying scifi thriller wrapping, and I kind of wonder if the people who thought this was amazing haven’t kept up on the absolute decadent glut of queer scifi of the past few years?

Read if you like this trope set – see character archetypes above, that tells you a lot – or if you have a taste for somewhat ambiguous plots that land in the space between scifi and military thriller. None of that really lit me up, personally, even if this is well-executed.

A warning, though, for that thing where at least one of these authors uses character names in dialogue so frequently, it rendered the book nearly unreadable once I noticed. These guys use each other’s names practically every sentence at some points. How did that slide by an editor?

Content notes: Recollections of addiction, military violence and torture, abusive childhood, loss.

Comments

[cyprinella]

Yeah, I was left with an opinion of "it was fine?" which was a disappointment for how it had been gassed up.

[ellen_fremedon]

I read this last week, and I think enjoyed it a little more than you did, though I'm not feeling fannish about it. (I did both like and appreciate how thoroughly they'd worked out the parameters of Rao's talent, and how fair they played with it. I listened to an interview where they talked about getting a philosophy of language consult on Rao, and it shows.)

[lightreads]

Yeah, I will say, his part of this was by far my favorite. I particularly liked that his talent wasn't, in fact, detecting lies, but something far deeper about the nature of perceived reality.

[lokifan]

This book was a minor sensation among my general online circle and OTOH, sure, I get it, this is doing stuff with weaponized nostalgia and how that doesn’t work on traumatic queer childhoods. But on the other hand, I don’t know, this is a whole lot of familiar M/M tropes with a rather unsatisfying scifi thriller wrapping, and I kind of wonder if the people who thought this was amazing haven’t kept up on the absolute decadent glut of queer scifi of the past few years?

Mmm, I especially felt it around the ending. That said, I did really like Rao's vivid voice and Adam did gut me right at the end when he thinks about how he's boring, so he's too dull to be imagining what's happening. I guess for me it's both - I did really like it but I also thought it was a bit overrated.