lightreads

The Everlasting

3/5. Fantasy about the soldier turned scholar who ends up going back in time (and back . . . and back . . . and back) to meet the lady knight who is pivotal to the founding myth of his nation. Arthurian time travel about nation-building and myth creation and racism.

Man, I don’t know what it is, but I just do not like Alix Harrow books the way I should. Even this one, where the overwrought quality of her writing finally has a story to match its tone. The writing in some sections is notably strong, I should say. But there is something in every single one of her books that I cannot put my finger on, and it just annoys the crap out of me.

I will admit this is structurally clever. The narrative gets rewritten multiple times to create new founding national myths, and she manages that while not being too terribly repetitive, and also establishing a few important touchpoints that orient the reader to how the angle of history has changed in just a few sentences. That is well done.

I still don’t know. The one objection I can concretely point to here is that I don’t like the way this book centers nation-building around the ego and trauma and psychopathy of one single person. The metaphor of it all collapses there, because that’s not how this works. Systems of racial oppression and societal violence don’t form on the whim of a single person, and there is something trite in the way Harrow has her villain reconstructing this nation over and over again based on, like, ten minutes of history that get played out a thousand years before the modern day events. Which is a real objection – I think that is a weakness of the book. But it’s not the thing I found annoying and off-putting, and I still don’t know what that is.

I’d bet on this to go on a bunch of award lists, though, just you wait.

Content notes: Racialized oppression, violence in war and otherwise, discussion of the killing of civilians, mention of stillbirth and sexual assault, something that is not the death of children but awfully close.

Kill the Beast

3/5. Standalone fantasy about a very angry young woman who gets hired to kill the dangerous beast that killed her brother.

This is just okay. Points for having the relationship that develops between protag and her employer be a friendship rather than a romance. Otherwise, this telegraphs its twists so hard that I spotted the one that drops around the 75% mark when I was only 15% in. Yikes. And it’s not just about wanting to be surprised, either – the emotional arc of this book probably only works decently well if you don’t see everything coming. Because the protag doesn’t, and she does need a few hard kicks to get her head on straight. But when you do see everything coming, it all just takes too long to play out.

Content notes: A lot of violence, references to parental death and abandonment, alcoholism.

Saint Death's Herald

3/5. Sequel, do not start here. Further wholesomely necromantic (it’s a vibe) adventures. Rough road trip when you have to chase down your great grandfather’s psychopathic ghost.

This book continues in the footsteps of the first by being cheerfully morbid, with great character work and complicated relationships. Weird thing though: I thought the first book was messy and oddly paced and overlong. This sequel is about 9 hours of audio shorter (so about 90,000 words, give or take) and so straightforward, I was baffled. Then the author said in the afterword that her editor made her cut 90,000 words, and ah. I see. I think I actually would like a little more mess in this book, believe it or not. Maybe the third book can get it just right.

Anyway, my point is: read if you would like a sort of T. Kingfisher plus Tamsyn Muir vibe plus normalized polyamory and queerness. And a reanimated tiger rug as the noble steed. And an undead wolf who is a very good boy.

Content notes: Death, violence, possession, mind control.

Brown Girl in the Ring

4/5. A story of family and crime and survival in a sort of post apocalypse Toronto, all flavored with afro-caribbean mythology.

Of course I’d heard about this book for years and years before reading it. What I heard: great writing, rich own voices fantasy, just plain good. Correct, correct, and correct. But I spent most of this book occupied by its exploration of intergenerational trauma. Four generations, from an infant to an old matriarch, and how they fail their children and how they don’t and how useless men are. This book lets it all be terribly messy and textured and real, in that way where mothers are incredibly sympathetic and deeply unsympathetic at the same time. That’s good stuff.

I am worried about the quality of the audiobook narration on other books of hers, though, which I hear lean even more heavily into the dialect.

Content notes: Violence, torture, possession, organ harvesting.

3/5. Another novella in this fantasy series about the scholar who has a demon in his head. This one about a misadventure with teens in tow, and how families grow and change, and young people starting to find their way.

Pleasant, but I continue to think that there is a tidiness to these books that keeps me from really liking them. It’s not just the knowledge that everything will work out in the end, which it generally does, but occasionally not. I think it’s that she’s set up this theological system to be a bit . . . I don’t know. Categorical? Hogwarts house-y? Overly interventionist? IDK, these books feel terminally undangerous in the midst of dangerous things happening. Angsty teens figure out their life plans in 30,000 words or less. Everyone has a salutary lesson. Go home. I’m not expressing it well. Whatever it is, I think it emanates from the theology, and it renders these books just a little bit too neat, too easy.

Hemlock & Silver

4/5. One of her standalone twisted fairy tales, this one about the poisoning expert called in to figure out if the king’s daughter is being poisoned, and the strange and horrifying magical discoveries she makes.

This is good, but it finally clarified for me what is wrong with her romances. The good stuff first: a wonderfully practical, weird, obsessive, traditionally unbeautiful heroine. A series of animal companions, talking and otherwise. A genuinely creepy place to explore. A sad fairy tale under it all.

The romance: This one is not as bad as many of her others, I will say. But I finally put my finger on what’s wrong with them. It’s that she spent the first half of this book developing this woman into a vivid, quirky, peculiar, wonderful character. And the second the romance is on page, every jot of that character work vanishes and she reverts to boring and clumsy romance beats. Like the heroine coming to the conclusion, despite vast mountains of evidence, that the guy is repulsed by her. A thing that could happen? Sure. A thing that could happen with this character? I suppose, but you’d have to lay a lot of groundwork. Fundamentally, I think her heroines, which are the best part of these books, stop being themselves when it comes to romance, and I hate that.

Content notes: Past child death, past murder of spouse, creepiness with mirrors, body horror.

Greenhollow duology

3/5. Pair of novellas about the wild man of the wood and the folklorist who moves in next door.

Okay, now I’m taking this personally. I picked these up because I got interested in Tesh, who wrote a book sharing some themes with mine. But I thought I wouldn’t be as into these and we wouldn’t crossover interests here because I’m generally meh on British folklore. And indeed, these are well-written, but not very interesting to me.

But do you know what the second one is about? In part, it’s about the mistakes of a queer near-immortal who is having a really hard time loving a short-lived mortal, and who makes some bad decisions as a result. Do you know what I am currently writing about? Do you?

Content notes: Various kinds of magical mind control.

A 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?

The Obsidian Tower

3/5. Fantasy about the woman who is the one with apparently necromantic magic in a family of vivomancers, and what happens when the door her family has guarded for thousands of years (they have a stupid rhyme about it and everything) is opened.

I picked this up because I liked her more recent release. This has many of the same good elements: bisexual heroine, complex webs of relationships, actual politics, and interest in friendship and teamwork. But I did not like this one nearly so much. I am generally in a bad mood right now, so take this as you will, but the protag’s repeated emotional victimization by two-thirds of the people in the book (including herself), and how she takes on guilt for basically everything, and her self-sacrificing tendencies really irritated me. I imagine the arc of this trilogy will be towards better relationships and some actual self-worth but meh, I’m not along for the ride.

Content notes: Torture.

The Last Hour Between Worlds

4/5. A single mother, just two months post-partum, gets out for one night to attend a ball in her fantasy city. Which gets complicated when the whole ballroom keeps falling through levels of reality each time the clock strikes, and when her former crush turned professional enemy, the hot lady thief, is also on the case.

This is a lot of fun, and very stylish. Visually, I mean – there’s a lot going on here with what people are wearing and carrying, and with the shifting esthetics of each layer of reality. And you know I’m in favor of adventure books about mothers, particularly very new mothers like this one.

If you’re paying even moderate amounts of attention, none of these plot twists will rock you. But they are all pleasing to unwind, as is the whole book.

Content notes: Violence, temporary character death.