The month of March was definitely my most successful reading month so far this year! I made it back up to six books read, rather than the four that I was stuck at for January and February. I feel a lot more mentally recovered, finally. My focus seems to be back to normal-ish!
In March I read…
(I like this cover.)
Point of Dreams by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett
Book 3 of
Astreiant2001
Fantasy/Mystery (m/m) - ebook novel
3.5/5
After their previous investigation, Nicolas Rathe and Philip Eslington have landed in Point of Dreams, the district of Astreiant devoted to entertainment and performance. Here, Rathe has been promoted to Adjunct Point, leading criminal investigations in the district. Philip has managed to get a position helping to choreograph the fights for an upcoming epic play, set to be performed for the queen.
Astreiant is a city ruled entirely by astrology, where the alignments of stars at one’s birth and at any given time will define their aptitudes, fortunes, relationships, and what possibilities are open to them. The play that Philip has been hired to work on is astrologically ordained: it must be performed as planned for the continued health and prosperity of the queen as she prepares to select an heir.
The play selected for the annual performance is based in part on a famous work of literature,
The Alphabet, a rumored book purported to contain the instructions to create arrangements of flowers that can magically coerce almost anything someone desires, from compelling love to causing death. While many alleged versions of the book have been published, all have been works of fiction, novelties with no genuine power behind them.
When people attached to the play begin to die, many under unexplainable circumstances, Rathe’s investigation points to not only a conspiracy targeting the play, but something far more dangerous: a legitimate copy of
The Alphabet, one that actually works.
My way-too-extensive thoughts, some spoilers:
This was mostly pretty good, though it felt like it took quite a while to get through, and there were some aspects I did not love. This was included as part of the Pride storybundle I purchased last year. It is book three of a series (though book two was actually published later, so for story chronology it’s book three, but by publishing order it’s the second.) I’m not always a big fan of bundle deals that include middle books from series, unless they also have the first, though I’m willing to give them a shot… but am not necessarily going to purchase the prior books just to “catch up” beforehand; I sort of expect they should stand alone, if they’re included. So I have not read the first book, and I do acknowledge that some of my complaints may be due to that, but I honestly don’t think so.
The good!
This is a really interesting setting. I like the concept of astrology being very real and actively a part of every aspect of society. The social structure we get to see is really complex, too. There are aspects that are similar to real-world historical settings, but a lot of ways in which it differs from anything I’ve seen before. The setting is queer-norm, but in a way that feels fairly plausible to a world that still places importance on families passing down property and names and such via biological children.
One interesting detail is that the whole society is subtly matriarchal, even though most of our primary characters are male, and gender is mostly not a plot point. Families and inheritance is matrilineal. “She” and “her” are the unmarked “neutral” pronouns for when someone doesn’t know the gender of a particular or hypothetical person. I’d typically use singular they in the same situations, but it was interesting how different it was to read feminine-as-default, the way masculine-as-default is frequently still used. It was a subtle reminder of the setting and the worldbuilding, and one I hadn’t seen before.
The plot itself is also really unique, I think. A play about a book that theoretically doesn’t actually exist… except for apparently a legitimate copy that leads to evil flower arrangements being used for revenge murders is pretty rad.
One thing that I definitely came away feeling was that the world and the characters are extremely complex, and it feels very fully realized, as if there’s just as much (and far more!) off-page as we’re seeing on-page. A lot of the information is stuff that the reader is left to glean from context, without a lot of time being spent hand-holding or providing explanations, which really is my preference as opposed to exposition dumps.
The less good:
There is a fine line between “complex” and “convoluted,” and this feels like it waltzes across that line. I genuinely do like the fact that this feels like a very fully-realized world that the authors know everything about, and there are ways in which that makes the story feel extremely realistic… but sometimes to a degree that (to me) got in the way of being an enjoyable story. Yes, in real life not every random thing winds up being relevant to a major event that’s going on, but some of those tangents wound up feeling unnecessary to me as a reader, when what I want is to enjoy a story. There is seriously so much I left out of the summary, just trying to create a somewhat coherent idea of the main plot.
There’s an absolutely outrageous dump of text at the beginning when a character goes to get an astrological reading. At that point, with no context, it is pages of completely incomprehensible jargon, and honestly there is no reason to have that at the very start. If this hadn’t been part of a bundle that I’ve committed to reading, it could have made me soft-DNF. (The astrology in the book is also fictional, so it’s not even like this is something you could understand with the right knowledge base.) I realize that some of it winds up being relevant, but it was not a good way to start.
Again, the complexity of the characters and their pre-existing relationships to each other is often a strength… but it felt like there were way too many character names that came up, either in passing or as characters with bit parts. This is partially user error, my own failure to recall every detail, but the cast is just too damn big. Frequently a name would come up, and I’d have to search the ebook to find out whether this was someone I was supposed to know or not. Sometimes they’d been mentioned before, sometimes not. (There’s someone that two characters refer to within a few paragraphs of each other, and I’m still not 100% sure if that was a character, a nickname, or a god, because the name never came up again before or after.) There are also a bunch of characters who are sometimes referred to by first name and sometimes by last name, which led to the discovery more than once that two people I thought were different characters turned out to be the same one (but not in like, a clever “a twist!” kind of way.) Then, with SO MANY characters mentioned, it feels inexcusable for the ultimate resolution of the plot, and some of the side culprits, to have NOT ever been mentioned before they show up at the finale.
The mystery plot was fine, but ultimately to me felt fairly obvious.
I was disappointed that I never really felt much chemistry between the leads. I think their relationship was established in the first book, but it still seemed relatively new, and then For Reasons they end up living together. There are some very tame mentions of them sharing a bed, and an occasional thought about “does he really want to be with me, or is he just letting me live with him out of obligation?” but it felt… like barely a subplot. I didn’t expect it to be a huge part of the story, but it felt like it could have been completely removed with zero impact, when I expected it to at least feel like the relationship existed. Toward the end, when they try to make a point to the villain about how much they love each other, it felt disingenuous.
There were a few too many instances of a character noticing something, or finding a clue, and then deliberately “deciding to ignore it for now” or saying they “would come back to that later.” Not putting something aside for later could have chopped out a very large section of the plot, and it felt contrived, especially after it happened a few times.
The points are the city’s police force, so one of the characters is basically a cop. I’d say it comes across as a little more pro-cop than I personally love, though this is very much not our real world, and doesn’t have to inherently have the same issues our real world does. However… there is [SPOILERS] a plot point in terms of the villain’s motive, where someone they loved was murdered and the murder wasn’t properly investigated, which is speculated to be because the points were paid off or simply caved to pressure from the perpetrator to not look into it. The points acknowledge this, but just sort of… ignore it, despite the fact that the same sort of thing nearly happened during this book. (The other Melissa Scott book I read, Trouble and Her Friends also ended on a weirdly pro-cop note, where the main character gave up her life of being a principled, super cool cyberpunk criminal to… become a cop.)
Somewhat weirdly, I feel like the absolute best incarnation of this story would be as a video game. Being able to investigate the clues given, to have conversations with the absolutely bonkers-long list of characters to find out more, discover who might be lying, deal with their other motives… getting to maybe actually experiment with the arrangements in different versions of The Alphabet to find out which ones work and why… using the constant presence of astrology to learn things based on the current signs and the birth signs of the people you’re talking to… I can see that being really interesting and dynamic.
Not really anything to do with the book itself, but Lisa Barnett was Melissa Scott’s long-time partner, though she died of cancer several years ago. It’s sad to me, because it feels like this was probably a world that they were mutually very passionate about. While the series has continued intermittently, with the most recent coming out last year, this was the last one that Lisa cowrote before her death.
(Honestly, I wish these were not the covers I have, haha. But when I was little the fact that they were a ~boxed set~ was very exciting, and they are indeed the covers I've got.)
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
1966
Fantasy - physical novel
4/5
(How do I write a summary of a pretty foundational classic of the genre?)
Thirteen dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield, set off on a quest to The Lonely Mountain. Under guidance from the wizard Gandalf, they decide to take on a fourteenth member in order to start with a more auspicious number. Selected is Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit. Hobbits aren’t typically adventuring types, but he ends up agreeing to go along as their supposed “burglar.”
Hundreds of years before, a dragon called Smaug attacked and took control of a mountain and its riches from the dwarves who claimed it as their ancestral home. The now-fourteen intend to reclaim the mountain and its gold as their right.
The party faces trolls, goblins, elves, beast men, giant spiders, and far more, all before they even reach the dragon-guarded mountain.
My thoughts, I guess some spoilers for a book older than I am:
Not going to lie, it’s a bit hard to provide much of a review, because this is such a classic. This is also the Tolkien that I can most properly call a reread, even though it’s been decades. (I feel like I only read the Lord of the Rings on a technicality, barely skimming it while wishing I was having the better time I knew I should be experiencing.) The Hobbit on the other hand, I did read, and a couple of times, though it was when I was a kid.
I have also not watched any of the Hobbit films that came out (minus the old animated one, also decades ago, lol.) I was sort of conceptually opposed to padding this story out into a runtime longer than the Lord of the Rings films (which I did and do love) and so I just never watched them. So my recollection of the whole story was definitely not terribly complete!
A handful of things I had forgotten:
- How much of a trickster sort of figure Gandalf is.
- The entire bit with Beorn.
- Thorin’s heel-turn after they get to the mountain!? (Literally how did I not remember that?)
- How long the span of the story actually is, in that it’s months and months of travel.
- That the fourteen are basically not involved in actually bringing Smaug down, lol.
Good things that particularly stuck out:
The episodic nature of the story does make it feel like a story being told. It feels like a story to tell a child, or to entertain friends. (Obviously this is deliberate styling, including asides to the audience.)
It was a way faster read than I was expecting. I read through it in fewer days than almost anything else I’ve read this year (minus some much shorter novellas.)
“…the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.”
The journey itself being both wonderful and terrible. Parts of it are amazing! But there are also so many times where Bilbo is justifiably miserable and missing home. And of course, a common theme but a fair one: the bittersweet tragedy of the journey changing you to the extent that your longed-for home can’t be what it was before.
Neutral/interesting to me:
The forward (the same one also included with my copy Fellowship of the Ring) by Peter S. Beagle, written in the 70s, feels like it could have been written today. He talks about the importance of fantasy, and Tolkien’s works in particular, in seeing a better world as we realize the failures in this one… “…the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unliveable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly.” And he’s talking about the audience connecting with the books in the 60s, having grown disillusioned after the 50s, but it feels completely true for today as well. Which isn’t the book itself, but the point about how the story (The Hobbit and LotR) feels to read stands really well. “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”
While this is obviously an older fantasy work, it feels like a subversion to just have a straight up evil dragon, haha. I love dragons, so I’m not sad that they’re usually now good or at least neutral/complex figures in fantasy, but it’s kind of interesting to see one that’s just the bad guy, full stop.
Now I much more obviously recognize the very specific influence that this had on later fantasy works. (And I’m sure this is even more true of Lord of the Rings than The Hobbit alone.) But like… I loved the Redwall books as a child, which isn’t the same sort of high fantasy that I mostly think of when I think of “clearly influenced by Tolkien.” But I can’t imagine the fantasy-adventure-journey stories of that series existing without these books.
Less good:
I’m not going to say any of it is bad. There are the typical criticisms that have been talked about pretty extensively at this point… The world is almost entirely dudes, with very few female characters at all, and no particularly significant ones. The concept of good vs evil races of being is an iffy concept in general. I don’t really feel the need to harp on those things.
I found the silly elf songs a little too silly.
There are some frustratingly weird typos, which makes me feel like I’m being too harsh on all the times that pisses me off with more modern books.
Pretty mild complaint, but with how episodic the story feels, some “episodes” were certainly more exciting and interesting than others.
(I feel kind of neutral toward this cover. Nothing wrong with it.)
Butterfly Effects by Seanan McGuire
2026
Book 15 of
IncryptidUrban Fantasy/Science Fiction (m/f) - physical novel
3.5/5
Sarah Zelaby is a cuckoo, a member of a parasitic species of humanoid wasps that are primed to infiltrate other populations. After unwillingly becoming a cuckoo queen—a process that gave Sarah nearly incomprehensible powers to bend space and other aspects of reality—even her own human and cryptid family struggles to trust her. Sarah doesn’t even fully trust herself, perpetually blaming herself for the accident that erased the mind and personality of Artie, the man she loved. Her attempt to recreate him from the memories of those who loved him created a new person, Arthur, but did not succeed in bringing Artie back.
Then representatives from Johrlar, the dimension the cuckoos originated in, arrive. They want to hold Sarah accountable for the crime of becoming an unsanctioned queen, bringing her back to their home dimension to stand trial. They also kidnap Arthur to serve as evidence of what she’s done.
On Johrlar, Sarah is pulled into political machinations that she has little interest in being a part of, as some citizens wish to rebel against the nearly all-powerful hive mind that rules them.
But Sarah’s grandparents, Alice and Thomas, her cousin Antimony, and Antimony’s fiancé, Sam, are following both her and Arthur. Even if they don’t fully trust her, and if Arthur is something of a stranger, they’re family, and they want to bring them home.
My thoughts:
This book was enjoyable! I like getting a bit of a conclusion to everything that happened with Sarah and reaching the queen instar.
Good things:
I liked the way the hive mind worked, and a lot of the worldbuilding for Johrlar! I love the way color and colorblindness was used. I liked the Johrlac characters that we met. Along with the worldbuilding, I appreciated that as awful as the hive mind itself is, and the horror of the system in which people are born into roles they will never deviate from, the culture isn’t presented as solely evil, though the current corrupt form of it is worse than it could be. There’s a lot of collective care, and making sure that the individuals within the hive are properly taken care of, which truly is a good thing, and even the idea of knowing you have a path predetermined for you can have some appeal… just not at the cost it represents. That sort of relativism is a part of the series in general, allowing different species to have different priorities and values and such. That said, it really is very horrific, even outside of individuals being forced into predetermined roles. The hive mind being able to take any individual over and immediately punish dissent is awful!
Mark! Love our surprise cuckoo king, and hope that (despite his intentions and desires) he will return as a character.
I do like good things happening for our characters! I don’t want to spoil the specific thing, but I am really interested to see what happens with it going forward.
Neutral things:
The books about Sarah in particular, as much as I enjoy them, really have kind of altered the scope of the series. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
umadoshi mentioned the same thing, ha.) While the concept of interdimensional travel has been present from the start, including Alice’s overarching quest for Thomas, the actual dimension-hopping now feels very different from where the series started. Some of these feel far more sci-fi than urban fantasy, and have really drifted away from the “family of cryptozoologists, interacting with the intelligent cryptids of the world, in the quest to study and protect them.” I have really liked Sarah’s books, and some of the characters we’ve gotten out of them, but I also feel like I miss the series we started with.
As much as I do like good things happening to our characters, and am happy for them that they’ve had a lot of big problems solved… It feels a little too good to be true, or like it’s a little too fixed? (Or like there’s a bit of weirdness of how this is fixed but the bad things other character groups are facing likely cannot be fixed.) We’ll see how it goes —it could also be an excellent way to introduce some new problems.
Less good things:
I feel like I had a hard time with the kairos? I have been so longing to find out more about them, and what they mean for the whole Price family having kairos blood in their ancestry, and how that serves the story function of placing them in the way of coincidence and luck… and I was a little underwhelmed. Turns out, I liked it when they were a mystery cryptid instead of being more dimensional aliens. (I think the cuckoos being sort of the anomaly in terms of being from a different dimension was cooler for them, too. The Crossroads were also already accidental dimensional hitchhikers, and having that be unique to them was a neat way to make them extra threatening.) I also didn’t adore the “double agents” thing.
It makes sense and is fine, because this plot arc is very separate, but I don’t think the Covenant was mentioned at all in this book, except for obliquely by referring to something they did. It felt like Antimony’s books were leading up to a lot more with the Covenant, and while we had a big move against them a few books ago, with the hope of halting them, it also still feels like it’s just kind of… stopped.
(I do really like these covers.)
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
2019
Book 1 of
The Locked TombScience Fiction/Fantasy (f/f) - physical novel - read with Taylor
5/5
Gideon Nav wants nothing more than to escape the Ninth House, the grim, cult-like society she’s grown up to be a servant of. She has plans to do just that, her 87th attempt at escape, until her escape shuttle is stolen. Harrowhark Nonegesimus—Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, and Gideon’s sworn nemesis—has been summoned by the universe’s god-emperor. He has invited the heirs of the Houses to compete for the opportunity to become Lychtors, immortal members of his inner circle. Harrow is a talented necromancer, but every heir is required to have a cavalier: sword-wielders who serve as bodyguards. Harrow does not have a cavalier… but Gideon is a swordswoman, if not exactly the refined, bonded servant that a cavalier should be. Despite their mutual hatred, they strike a deal: Harrow will help Gideon leave, if she pretends to be Harrow’s cavalier for the duration of her time in the challenge.
The pair arrive at Canaan house, a mansion on the world of the First House. They meet the heirs and cavaliers of the other Houses who have been summoned. The puzzles and trials the necromancers are given to complete are difficult and dangerous, and the challenge quickly turns deadly. Something or someone in Canaan house is killing off members of the teams. As things escalate, it seems that some of the challenges may be hinting at some terrifying truth about what it means to become a Lychtor.
My thoughts, trying to be spoiler-free:
Okay, I put off reading this one for a long time. So did Taylor, but as soon as they did read it, they turned around and decided that was the next thing we were reading, ha. Somewhat frustratingly, as good as I kept hearing this book was, I didn’t read it specifically because every time I saw someone ask for a description, or why it was so great, fans of it (or at least the ones I kept encountering) would just fall back to the “It’s lesbian necromancers in space!!” tagline. Which like, it is, and that’s cool, and indeed all of those things are selling points for me, but after about the fifth time of hearing “What more do you need to know than that!?” I had pretty much decided I wasn’t going to read it, if that was ALL anyone could say about it. Then I’d hear someone I generally agreed with in terms of taste talk it up as being pretty good, and I did start to hear more praise about clever writing and humor done well… and someone else would bring up LESBIAN NECROMANCERS IN SPACE, WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED? and I’d lose interest again.
Regrettably (not really)… I did really like it, and it’s a shame that the fans who WANTED people to read it are what kept me from reading it for a pretty long while.
The good:
The writing does manage to be funny and clever in a way that worked for me. I often emphatically do not like “humorous” writing (so to be fair, hearing that as one of the only other things people would say about it also turned me off), but the type of humor worked for me and didn’t feel like it was trying too hard to force a joke. The humor also didn’t detract from some genuinely pretty creepy aspects of the setting and plot, as well as actual emotional stakes, and instead managed to highlight them. (There are a couple spots where like, a stupid joke does “ruin the moment,” but it’s also extremely intentional when that happens.)
In general I would say that everything feels very intentional, and that is one of my favorite traits in writing, when it feels like all the disparate aspects of the plot and characters and setting are very deliberate. That is theoretically the case for most works, but sometimes it feels more true than others, and this one certainly felt it.
Along with that… so much foreshadowing! (I am given to understand that this grows even more obvious with at least the second book, and so I assume also the third.) I LOVE good foreshadowing, and I know I didn’t likely catch even a fraction of it. (Taylor would periodically make faces when they caught a bit they were just now noticing on a reread.)
Gideon is a fantastic unreliable narrator, which is also a delight. A lot of the humor comes just from her voice as the narrator. She’s snarky and irreverent, but again, in a way that worked for me without feeling like it was trying too hard. It’s also great to watch her be wrong about stuff, ha.
I am always a fan of genre blends, and so having the fantasy aspect of necromancy blending with the sci-fi setting of interplanetary travel and a creepy gothic mansion mixed with differently-creepy lab settings absolutely works for me. I really enjoy that necromancy IS the magic that exists; there are a lot of different aspects of it, the different Houses use it differently, but it all falls under that heading.
There is a lot to foreshadow it, but the end reveal about Lychtorhood is a gut punch, and one of those things where I started figuring it out riiiiight before the characters do, which is, I’ve said before, one of my favorite way to experience a reveal.
The twists around which characters were doing what are also great! All of it felt earned, to me.
THE ENDING. I will not spoil which thing I mean, but it made both Taylor and I flail about it because it reminded us of another favorite work… but I can’t say which one, because that is sort of inherently a spoiler. I am also EXTREMELY impressed, because I managed to avoid being spoiled for said ending, ha.
I am already looking forward to an eventual reread, because I know I’ll catch even more of the foreshadowing.
The less good:
Honestly… not much, and I fully believe that the main issues I had were completely “user error.”
I am not good at audio processing. Audiobooks in general do not work for me at all, and I struggle to listen to things like podcasts unless I’m reading along with a transcript. Taylor read this one aloud to me, and while they are always willing to reread a bit if I feel like I missed something, there are also bits where I’m not sure I realized that I missed things.
The main thing for me… I struggled a little to keep track of some of the characters. More specifically, I realized too late that I had conflated a few of them, and then I had a hard time figuring out which was which and separating them. I do not believe this would have been an issue if I had been reading it instead of listening; I am better at distinguishing words on the page than I am words that I hear.
I know I missed a few important details at the start, because the first day Taylor read some of it to me was when I was still recovering from surgery, and I was falling asleep at the drop of a hat… which I immediately did. This is not the fault of the work, and is another reason I look forward to an eventual reread.
It wasn’t an issue for me, but I guess there’s a bit of “it just works like that” to the worldbuilding. Like… why are there necromancers in space? There Just Are. But for me, it still felt like that was grounded enough to work; it’s a consistent aspect of the world(s), and the way it works is consistent, so didn’t strain my suspension of disbelief.
Bonus comparisons that Taylor and I made to the Zero Escape franchise, which does contain major spoilers for both:
Note that these comparisons are mostly aesthetic, or narrowed in on specific details. The stories really don’t have much similarity to each other, except… it’s a lot of details, lol.
- Nine. Nine is a significant number.
- Oh, it involves finding and getting through specific doors? With keys that mean not everyone can necessarily enter the same rooms? Providing incentive for people to maybe do some murder to get those keys?
- Ah, we found bodies (/remains of bodies) that apparently belong to people who weren’t originally included in the ‘game’?
- The facility involves creepy fucking labs and unethical experimentation?
- Some of the puzzles being solved involve one person mentally transmitting information to another person in a different location? Nice morphogenetic field reference.
- In spaaaaaace.
- Really? The somewhat frail love-interest girl who keeps swooning and getting mysteriously sick is actually Behind It All?
- An incinerator is upsettingly relevant.
- Strong as fuck ice mummy??
There were maybe more, and this was really just included for posterity and my own amusement, haha.
(I love the covers of these books.)
What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
2024
Book 2 of
Sworn SoldierHorror (subgenre: creature/supernatural) - physical novella - read with Taylor
4/5
Returning to kan* homeland of Gallacia isn’t Alex Easton’s preference—ka would rather stay in Paris—but ka and kan attendant Angus travel to the Easton family hunting lodge, where their friend, English mycologist Eugenia Potter, will join them. When they arrive, they discover the lodge abandoned, the caretaker dead under possibly mysterious circumstances that the local townsfolk are reluctant to discuss. Alex hires a local woman, the Widow Botezatu, and her grandson to come to the lodge to take care of the cooking and cleaning, as they were the only ones willing to take the job. They soon find out what’s keeping the townsfolk away: there is a belief that the caretaker was killed by a moroi, a folkloric creature that visits her victims in their dreams and steals their breath.
Alex of course dismisses this as mere superstition… until the Widow’s grandson grows ill with a sickness that they can’t seem to treat. Then Alex begins having strange dreams of kan own. The symptoms and nightmares grow rapidly worse, and no one can survive the moroi forever.
*Alex’s native language has many sets of pronouns, including ka/kan, which is used exclusively to refer to soldiers, and supersedes any other pronouns kan may have used.
My thoughts, slight spoilers:
I did just read this one back in January, so I don’t have a lot of new thoughts. It was nice to read it in a more condensed fashion this time instead of with a big gap in the middle.
The good:
I still love Alex as a character. Ka has a strong voice that’s different from a lot of protagonists I read, and I find it very enjoyable. Getting to see kan homeland of Gallacia is also nice; ka isn’t all that much of a fan, and that’s also sort of a fun aspect.
The nightmares that the moroi provides are deeply horrifying! (I still think I identified with that experience of horror and misery and time dilation the first time around because of one really bad night in the hospital, ha.)
I like a potentially sympathetic monster… with it still being a monster that cannot be reasoned with.
I did mention it last time, but I like Alex’s conception of the past as a place. It’s not a time that has passed, but a place that still exists.
Previously I mentioned that Alex’s PTSD was present, but not extremely prominent… but it’s actually something that comes up a lot more often than I remembered from the first time. The portrayal still works well for me, but is more of a continuous throughline than I remembered.
The meh:
I don’t find this one quite as engaging as the first or third books. I enjoy the “based on an existing work of classic speculative fiction [Poe or Lovecraft], reimagined as some sort of scientific, if very speculative, cryptid” more than the more straightforward folkloric creature. Still, that’s praising with faint damnation; it’s still not BAD.
Like I’d mentioned before, I do think that the foreshadowing in this one had less subtlety than the first and third books, where there were really good examples of a detail having a meaning in the moment where it’s introduced, but also having relevance later, which provides great setup for some eventual resolution without the initial detail seeming obvious. There is a moment like that in this book, but it felt like it was much more obviously telegraphing that it was going to be important… and it was exactly what I thought.
Still quite good, and remained so on a reread.
(This does have a gorgeous cover.)
The Map and the Territory by A M Tuomala
2022
Fantasy (subgenre: steampunk, apocalyptic) (m/m, asexual female character) - ebook novel
2.5/5
Returning from a scientific expedition mapping waterways, Rukha sees strange lights over the city she was heading toward. When she arrives, she discovers apocalyptic destruction, with much of the city fallen into the ocean, and hundreds, if not thousands, dead.
Rukha—now calling herself Fern—helps survivors to investigate the ruins, where she meets Eshu, a wizard who falls through a mirror when Fern uncovers it. Eshu was traveling through the Mirrorlands, a dimension that wizards are able to use to move from place to place, when the destruction occurred, and he was trapped without an exit.
Fern and Eshu set off to try and reach their respective home cities, but the apocalyptic damage seems to have struck every city they find, though the impacts are different in every location, leaving sometimes bizarre devastation in its wake. The damage to physical and magical infrastructure isn’t the only challenge that makes their travel difficult. They also have to contend with survivors, and the wildly different ways they’ve chosen to respond to the disaster. Looming over them and their concern for their families is also the fear of the event itself. What caused it, and will it happen again?
My thoughts, some spoilers:
This was another book from the Pride storybundle.
This is one I definitely came away with mixed feelings about. There were some bits that were really neat, and that I really enjoyed… and unfortunately a lot of stuff that did not land for me. I wish I had enjoyed it more, because the good bits were really good. I just couldn’t quite get past the parts that I didn’t care for, and those aspects started to bother me more once I thought about it.
The good:
A lot of aspects of the world and the plot are really cool.
I love having a cartographer main character.
The presence of gods as apparently voluntary figures that just come hang out sometimes was very cool, and I liked the few of them we got to see.
The different presentations of the apocalypse are all really creative and quite horrifying.
Some of the descriptions of setting, especially of decorations like textiles, like tile mosaics, as well as some of the more natural areas they travel through, sound lovely and really stood out. There were some beautiful things to picture.
I do love a fantasy that is very much not European-based, especially in terms of food and fashion. It makes for a much more interesting and unique setting (or many settings).
The tension between science and magic is an interesting one, embodied by our two main characters, and I like the ways in which it’s beneficial to mix the two.
Neutral:
I think the apocalypse with the mirrors is a bit of an allegory for global warming? It’s discussed in similar terms, with it having been secretly known by those in power to be a risk, but one they were willing to inflict on the world in the hope that the consequences would be someone else’s future problem, and their decision to continue with the risk because it brought personal gain. Partially this works for me. Partially it feels a bit… convenient? Convenient that there’s an evil group of wizards who all know that this could happen, but the one (arguably two) wizard(s) that are good guys we like seem to have not been in the know, even though it appears to have been relatively common knowledge otherwise.
The less good:
The pacing was a little iffy. The first half felt very episodic as the two main characters travel from place to place, trying to discover what’s going on. The second half stops being so episodic, and is instead set in one location with one main throughline. Both parts had their strengths, but it was a bit of a jarring change. Some of those early “episodes” felt a lot more relevant than others. A couple seemed like they could have been skipped entirely without any bearing on the plot or characters.
A lot of our chapters or sections alternate perspectives, but Fern and Eshu’s voices seemed extremely similar. I couldn’t always tell the difference between their sections, which seemed like a missed opportunity, since they’re theoretically very different people.
While I enjoyed the science, and Fern being a scientist, and I can tell that the author really cares about scientific concepts… the real-world scientific terms were super jarring. Typically I try not to get hung up on word choice too much, and I find people who get really bent out of shape about “why would such and such word exist in this world without such and such influence” to be tedious. (I genuinely do not care if a work uses the word “goodbye” despite not having monotheistic Christianity.) HOWEVER. The words “diatom” and “bilateral gynandromorphs” threw me the fuck out. Not that the concepts can’t exist, or wouldn’t exist at roughly the scientific time period they’re dealing with, but the terminology was super jarring to read in context.
There were other aspects of language that felt far too modern at times. Mostly swears. Telling a monster “I’ll fuck you up!” or “We’ll fuck their shit up!” about an enemy group, or that something “means fuck all” to a character.
Speaking of language, while not a constant problem, there were a couple times where the wrong word was used. The one I can think of was a character saying they were "absconding their responsibility" or something to that effect, when I'm fairly sure the word they wanted was "abdicate."
The morality is very all or nothing/black and white in a way that I do not care for. It felt like nearly every character was either all good or all bad, and if there appeared to be any ways in which there was some ambiguity, it would be sorted out to reveal that there was no ambiguity, actually. I think this was most obvious with the crime family in Kulmeni. Despite having done genuine good for the city since taking over, the instant we find out that their motives are still seeking personal power and enrichment it erases those benefits. Impure motives narratively cancel out beneficial action. The one member of the family who gets redeemed, being Eshu’s love interest, has to renounce his family to the point that he’s happy about their deaths. Even characters like Eshu’s ex… he was a terrible, emotionally abusive partner, but has to ALSO have been aware of the coming apocalypse, and has to be actively trying to screw everyone else over at all times. The airship captain early on is suspicious… and of course it turns out that she was completely evil. And as stated earlier, with who did or did not know about the risk of the apocalypse, conveniently many of the people we dislike for other reasons were aware, but the characters we’re supposed to like were not. Individual characters turning out to be villainous or heroic is not an issue, of course; it was the repeated pattern of it being all or nothing that started to rub me the wrong way.
There is so much self-aware modern-feeling therapy-speak, and it got extremely grating. This is certainly personal preference, and it is simply emphatically not mine.
- “You’re really not treating me like a friend right now,” in the midst of an argument.
- “I think you’re depressed,” one character says to another, when she sees he’s struggling. “So you’re going to cheer me up?” he asks. Followed by her saying, “I don’t know a lot about depression, but I don’t think it works like that.”
- After a reunion where one character wasn’t sure he’d see the other again, and hugs her in relief: “Obviously I shouldn’t have assumed you were in a mood to be hugged.”
- Eshu was in an abusive relationship in the past, and he states repeatedly that he deserves better, and didn’t deserve to be mistreated, and identifies all the subtle ways his ex was controlling and emotionally manipulative… none of that is WRONG, but the way it was stated felt so extremely clinical, and very much out of a “things to say to your friend getting out of a crappy relationship” handbook.
I feel like none of the individual examples really feel too terrible, but together they started feeling very much like the characters were trying to model the perfect Right Thing to say and feel, in a way that really rubbed me the wrong way and didn’t feel natural. Mileage may vary, and perhaps some of these things would feel more validating to other readers, but to me they felt awkward and out of place.
Weirdly (or not), the comp title that comes to mind the fastest to me is Avatar the Last Airbender (and/or Legend of Korra.) Especially the episodic parts early on, I feel like that sort of animated show, which could give visuals to the really strong and interesting settings, would be really great for this story.
This is allegedly book one of a series, though there is no book two yet. This one does not end on a cliffhanger or anything, per se, but most things are not wrapped up. I am on the fence whether I would read a sequel or not. I AM interested in seeing where the story goes, but I just didn’t quite mesh with the writing style as a whole. I genuinely wish I’d liked it more.
A slightly mixed bag on how much I enjoyed everything, but nothing that I’m sorry to have read!
Where I am with my reading goals for 2026:
- Read 50 books (14/50)
- Read more genre classics (Tolkien, Le Guin, Pratchett) (1/x)
- Reread The Murderbot Diaries (0/8)
- Read the 2025 Pride ebook bundle (3/14)
- Read some short story collections (1/x)
Despite not having gotten too far into April, I have finished another book:
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Our Bloody Pearl by D. N. Bryn, which was my ebook side read that took way too long
I am currently reading four books:
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The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (my current main read, likely to be finished tonight)
-
Game Changer by Rachel Reid (my current ebook side-read, just started)
-
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling (reading with Alex, a bit over halfway)
-
What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (reading with Taylor)
My plans for what to read next:
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These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (from the Pride bundle)
-
The Two Towers-
Be the Sea (from the Pride bundle)
-
Return of the King- TBR of choice, for having finished
Lord of the Rings. Leaning toward
The Ballad of Black Tom-
Fallen (from the Pride bundle)
-
A Wizard of Earthsea (reading some Le Guin!)
-
All Systems Red (starting the Murderbot Diaries reread!)
The TBR has reached a total of 704 books. :|
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