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lightreadsA Letter from the Lonesome Shore
3/5. Sequel to last year’s charming, epistolary science fantasy novel about mental illness and academia. More of the same concludes this duology, but either I was cranky when reading (I definitely was) or this book misses a step (I think it does). This is still charming epistolary science-fantasy with a lot of feelings about academia and structures of knowledge and inquiry. But some of the small lingering questions I had from the first book about how this world works are much bigger and even less resolved now in ways I do not enjoy. Like, there are extremely basic things that I’m still wait, what? about.
But if you want an epistolary romance about two unusual people – multiple mental illnesses floating around, plus someone on the ase spectrum – then I do recommend these. And I would be curious for other opinions on the resolution of E’s story here. I’m of multiple minds about what it is doing in terms of mental illness, and I haven’t resolved that yet. Is it treating her social anxiety as a kind of superpower that lets her do a hard and isolating thing that many others could not? Maybe. Or is it doing something far less positive with it?
3/5. Sequel to last year’s charming, epistolary science fantasy novel about mental illness and academia. More of the same concludes this duology, but either I was cranky when reading (I definitely was) or this book misses a step (I think it does). This is still charming epistolary science-fantasy with a lot of feelings about academia and structures of knowledge and inquiry. But some of the small lingering questions I had from the first book about how this world works are much bigger and even less resolved now in ways I do not enjoy. Like, there are extremely basic things that I’m still wait, what? about.
But if you want an epistolary romance about two unusual people – multiple mental illnesses floating around, plus someone on the ase spectrum – then I do recommend these. And I would be curious for other opinions on the resolution of E’s story here. I’m of multiple minds about what it is doing in terms of mental illness, and I haven’t resolved that yet. Is it treating her social anxiety as a kind of superpower that lets her do a hard and isolating thing that many others could not? Maybe. Or is it doing something far less positive with it?