lightreads

Katabasis

3/5. The elevator pitch on this is two grad students go to hell to retrieve their dead advisor in order to get recommendation letters. As you might expect, there’s a bit more to it than that.

Congratulate me, I finally finished an RF Kuang book. This was my third attempt in five years.

Parts of this are great. Some really sharp and accurate observations of what you do inside your mind as a woman trying to succeed under the authority of an asshole man. My circumstances were different, but boy did she nail the compromises, the things you tell yourself, the ways you try to out-competent misogyny (it doesn’t work that way). This book is also constructed on paradoxes as a magic system, and it goes hard on the double-think you have to engage in to survive that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really like anything else: the characters, the whole hell set of nested metaphors, the romance (god help me, I really cannot with that). I’m being a bit unfair here because I think I’m irritated at this book in part because of how some people talk about it. For real though, some people think this book is like some super deep intellectual masterpiece. And my dudes. I am concerned for you. This is the wikipedia version of formal logic. I know extremely little about this field and I can still tell that. It is not deep. This is not an insult, it’s just, you gotta be able to recognize a spade when it’s in front of you.

This was not really for me, but maybe one of her other fantasies will be, someday.

Content notes: Misogyny, a lot of suicidal ideation, ableism, sexual coercion, murder, gore.

The Hexologists and A tangle in Time

3.5/5. A pair of fantasy mysteries set in an industrializing city and featuring a married couple detective duo.

These are fun, a little briskly funny, and correctly not pretending to have any real there there. The mysteries are twisty, the world building is interesting, the jokes are decent, and the protagonists have an entertaining dynamic (she does the magic and most of the mystery solving, he does the cooking and carries her bag and occasionally punches someone).

I did get annoyed with the metronomically predictable action scenes, which arrive every few chapters whether they are needed or not. It has that vibe where the author doesn’t trust the reader to stay interested without some running about and shouting and getting into plot-irrelevant peril. I think he would be better served by putting just the tiniest scrap of there in here, problem solved.

Also, I think the villain in the second book is ( spoiler I guess ) but YMMV on that.

Lady Hotspur

3/5. What if Henry IV (loosely) but make it epic fantasy and make most of the major players women, and make most of those women queer.

Yes, there is a prequel book that I did not read, because I do what I want. This would probably be richer if you read in publication order, but it’s one of those situations where the prior book is set several generations before, so, you know.

Anyway, yes, the premise sounds great, and large portions of this book are wonderful. This manages to feel Shakespearean, and I don’t mean that it feels tragic (though it has that mode). It’s bawdy and political and deeply concerned with how history turns upon character, and how people stand or fall on their flaws. It also has a tremendous sense of the numinous and, getting somewhat less Shakespearean here but also not in another realm or anything, a wonderful touch with multiple shades of queerness and how that functions or doesn’t in monarchist systems.

However, while I’ve read books that were too long, I can’t remember the last time I read one that was at least a hundred thousand words too long. Phew. That is truly impressive bloat. I would be rating this higher if it were like 40% shorter (which would still make it a damn long book, to be clear). I lost patience with this multiple times. I always came back and found something to enjoy again, but man.

Read if you really like queer lady knights, women running the world, that Shakespeare feeling, and a book that feels as if it is tremendously slow even as many things are happening.

Content notes: Murder, war, references to child abuse, miscarriage, cancer.

Betrothed to the Emperor and Emperor's Wrath

2/5. M/M fantasy romance about the royal twins raised to kill the emperor of the encroaching empire, except when they are presented, the emperor chooses the brother to marry, not the sister as planned. And then stuff happens.

I got sucked in based on the trope set, even though I knew damn well this was not going to satisfy. And I was right. There’s something extra frustrating about someone doing tropes you’re into, but with such limited skill that nothing really lands. Here, for example – the books are trying to do fake/pretend relationship but whoops it’s also real, but they’re so incoherent about it and so impatient to get to the porn that I couldn’t keep track from one scene to the next whether we were treating it as real or not. These books also do that thing where our first person narrator totally misses that the guy is into him, but it’s done so clumsily here that it just makes him look incredibly, pathologically stupid.

/cranky

The Incandescent

4/5. The Director of Magic at an elite British magical boarding school deals with students, the demon-incursions that come with them, her own history, and the hot lady cop on campus.

I took this book kind of personally because (1) I have had a ‘magic school from the perspective of faculty’ book in the back of my mind for about 15 years; and (2) I literally just this year wrote a book about a wizard who is an unreliable narrator of their own life and who gets their world rocked. Tesh and I are on a wavelength, I guess. Her magic school from the perspective of faculty book is better than mine would be, for the record, since she is an actual teacher, and it really shows. The kids are great (I mean, they’re terrible and terrifying, so great) and the teaching content is great and the demons are great. Yes, sure, the demons are like three different metaphors, but they all work.

I liked this a lot. It’s one of those books that concludes a sort of story by the 50% mark, and you’re left there going ‘hmm, how is she going to undermine everything that has just happened?’ Which she does do, and I liked it. Though personally, I would have liked our protagonist’s worldview to get rocked even harder than it was. I get why this came out the way it did, but our protagonist is coming from a place of enormous privilege, and she is deeply blinkered about a lot of it, and in even deeper trauma emotional lockup, and that is a lot of stuff to unpack in a relatively slim book. And therefore some of it gets pretty short shrift, notably most of the privilege stuff and the cops-on-campus stuff. But I still found it to be satisfying.

Content notes: Demon possession, threats to young people, a past teenager death.

Stone and Sky

4/5. New Rivers of London book. Rated for nostalgic fondness as much as for the book itself. This one takes Peter – and most of the main cast, including the kids – to a community on the North Sea to either vacation or solve a weird magical mystery, depending on whom you ask.

He is now giving Abigail POV chapters, which I will allow because I like Abigail, and also because this is a vast improvement over the American FBI agent (who he is still trying to make a thing, please stop). Anyway, it’s a pleasant mystery written to formula, complete with local cop that Peter befriends. There’s a lot of formula here, actually – Abigail builds a relationship that has a frankly astonishing amount of Peter/Bev DNA. Anyway, it’s a good time, and it is gesturing towards opening up another arc, which I am in favor of. I think he is intending to draw in some of the international elements he keeps so pointedly raising, but in what direction, I’m not sure yet.

Asunder

4/5. For reasons, an isolated death speaker, who gained her powers through a deadly compact with an eldritch demon thing, gets bound at the soul to a man from another culture. Their attempts to separate take them on a long road trip across this strange fantasy world with a complicated recent political/religious history.

I liked this. It is about many kinds of joining and sundering – social, political, romantic, familial, religious. But the heart of it is the relationship that forms between two people unwillingly joined and forced to trust each other. Our protagonist is the sort who has a really hard time understanding when people are kind to her, because she’s had almost no experience of that. She doesn’t really figure it all out in this book, but she does come a long way.

I will say, there is supposed to be a sequel to this book, but my understanding is that the publisher didn’t buy it. Yet, hopefully? This got a surprise award nomination, so. But my point is, if the sequel happens, then great. If it doesn’t, then this ending is really not okay.

Content notes: Recollections of child abuse/domestic violence, a threat of . . . forced pregnancy by a demon is I guess what you’d call it.

A Drop of Corruption

4/5. Sequel in this fantasy biopunk Holmes & Watson universe.

One of the more successful sequels I’ve read in a long time, in the sense that this accomplishes the task of really blowing up and blowing out the world. I continue to be only middling interested in these characters (and also continue to be puzzled about why this series is first person, aside from the obvious stylistic nod). But the construction of this empire, whose people’s bodies and minds are modified in ways beyond our understanding by methods beyond their understanding, all while the leviathans come ever closer to breaking down the sea walls, is incredibly interesting to me.

I think this book is not as successful in its project of talking about kings and power structures by blood in general. It does that, but our protagonist is not really clocking the implications for his own life as an imperial subject, so it doesn’t quite come together the way intended. The first person gets in the way there, specifically, given our protagonist is not, shall we say, a political or philosophical thinker.

Still, I am way more interested in this now than I was after the first book.

Content notes: Body modification and body horror, threats of infection/contamination.

Metal from Heaven

4/5. Where do I even start? The problem is, attempting to describe this book will make it sound like something you have read before, and I assure you that is incorrect. An industrial fantasy about labor rights and queerness in which our narrator survives a massacre of her factory-working family who dared to strike for better working conditions, including some help for what the fantasy metal they are working with is doing to their kids.

This book has the distinction of containing more lesbians by volume than anything else I’ve ever read. And they’re all—

I was about to say that they are all feral. Which they are. But it would be truer to say that this whole book is feral. It will eat your ideas of good narrative structure and spit out the bones. It is absolutely ungovernable. Punk without the self-consciousness. Bloody and messy and incredibly queer. If you try and shove this book’s ideas of gender or sexuality into a box, the box will implode.

Challenging, frustrating, interesting, different. A giant splatter of a book. A roar of a book. It does revenge and industrial fantasy and fantasy of manners and queer liberation, and there’s a whole section in the middle that gives big Gideon the Ninth vibes. Is it good? I mean, yes, but also no, but also you are asking the wrong question.

Anyway, I liked it, though I suspect this one will be divisive.

Content notes: A lot of violence.

Malice

2/5. Chonker epic fantasy that is the first of four books about a prophesied god war where the avatar of good will fight the avatar of evil. Yeah, you’ve heard this one before.

The booktube girls got me again. They love this. I do not.

Partly, sure it’s the women problem. This book has many points-of-view. They are all men except for one, who is a girl but wait, come back, it’s fine, she’s not like other girls, you see, she likes knives. This is relevant because every single other male POV is drowning in boring warrior culture masculinity issues. Several of them are young, and all of them are concerned with what it means to be a man. And the ven diagram in this book between ‘man’ and ‘warrior’ is a near perfect circle. I don’t caaaaaaare.

Also, I was told that these books were “twisty” and would “make you really think about who is good and who is bad.” Except I got literally a third of the way through the first book, saw the writing on the wall and went ‘oh no, is what they’re talking about this?’ And googled, and, uh. Yep. The book is trying to set up this ambiguity where you supposedly aren’t sure who is the avatar of good and who is the avatar of evil, because their actions are deeply contextual and blah blah, you get it. Which, (1) I figured out who was who plain as day apparently more than two books before I was supposed to; and (2) it kind of offends me. The book is, it appears, trying to trick the reader by deploying some epic fantasy tropes and cliches, and it will then presumably do a rug pull at some point and go “ha ha, I fooled you into believing my cliché of believing in what it means to be noble and a good man, you should be a smarter reader.” Which, okay, fine, but to make that work, you have to write a book that doesn’t entirely depend for its every beat and gesture on boring tired epic fantasy cliches that it takes staggeringly seriously.

Anyway, whatever, I was pretty bored and annoyed from that point on.

Content notes: Animal harm, violence, bullying.