effingunicorns's reviews
376 reviews

Honestly there's this weird pervasive nihilism that makes me feel like, in light of Rice's subsequent born-again Christian phase, Akasha is the main Anne Rice insert in this book. There's a lot of other stuff to unpack, of course, and frankly Stan's poetry wasn't doing it for me, but the high-density worldbuilding and laundry list of POVs after spending a whole book with Lestat was a nice change, I still broadly enjoy the story of the origin of vampires, and I have to give this book credit for being the one where the gay shit was finally outright stated instead of strongly implied.

I am absolutely not continuing past this point in the series this time around, though. I have better things to do with my time!

I genuinely wanted to like this book as a counter to all the shenanigans, but... well, some things just aren't meant to be. The vocabulary feels like it was only recently divorced from those lists that convince innocent young writers that "emerald orbs" is a suitable replacement for "green eyes", the narration is clunky and repetitive, and I've read and watched too many stories about witches to buy into the conceit of potion-brewing being a uniquely dangerous form of magic. I wish Ms. Baptiste nothing but the best and hope she finds many loving readers, but this book is just not for me.

I don't know how much of this is a function of my own expectations rather than the writing itself, but Naranpa's arc felt a little... off-rhythm? compared to the others. Like it had more steps to cover in the same amount of time, so some of those steps were getting glossed over despite being actually fairly important to the overall journey. Otherwise the story was very good once again, though!

There were many excellent things about this book, but

the fact that Robert more than once wondered at the larger dragons' ability to fly in the first place, only to not even see how it was accomplished when he finally got the chance,

makes me feel like we're on the same wavelength, at least a little bit. It's a world of magic! Things should be magical!

Just realized I've been caught up to this series for a decade now, so that probably accounts for some of my growing distance from it in recent years. I can't say it wasn't nice to see what Tybalt was actually up to over the course of the previous book and finally get a proper bridge between the beginning of that one and the end of the one before it, but my favorite parts were

The Great Costco Heist

and

Tybalt & Company Discover GPS

, both of which were far too brief. The story otherwise felt repetitive even when it wasn't trying to be--with so many characters who had to be brought up to speed, this was a perfect opportunity to experiment with more natural exposition, but instead it felt like we got double the reminders about nearly every person and situation that came up.

I plan to stick with the series for a while longer, but unless the next one really tightens up, I think I'll be less concerned about reading them as soon as they come out.

Main character: hyper-competent, clever, insightful, level-headed, nigh-unflappable.

Also the main character: overthinks things so much she invents elaborate political machinations and a glove fetish to explain a cute guy showing interest in her.

Anyway, so far this series is a solid mix of cute romance with social drama that's petty and horrible without being overly grimdark. I want to see how things progress!

This wasn't bad, but it wasn't quite landing with me, either, and I can't decide whether it's just that I've grown tired of YA, I didn't feel like there was enough of a horror vibe, or some combination of the two. I think all but two stories were either explicitly or implicitly set in small American towns, too, which frankly flattens the potential of a folk horror anthology.

It's been so long since I read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that I forgot about the strange, wonderful realness Susanna Clarke writes magic with. It mostly takes a back seat to the slow snowballing revelation of Piranesi's true circumstances, but it lingers often in the periphery.

This didn't go one bit how I thought it would, but the nice thing about saying that here is that I can think back to the previous two books and figure out the seeds of The Angel of Indian Lake, as opposed to the out-of-left-field bullshit we've all encountered a time or ten. A part of me wishes there'd been a little more telegraphing of The Ultimate Culprit, but another part of me was just like "yes, of course", a third part of me was satisfied by the cultural comeuppance, and then a whole fourth part of me just went straight to,

"Did you know that most non-indigenous North American folk magic has ties to Christianity?"

Anyway! Wonderful end to a wonderful trilogy. Easily as gory and brutal as the previous books (maybe more, really, my brain doesn't really register that sort of thing the first time around), deeply ruthless but not as ruthless as I feared, and the things that mattered the most, I think, all got resolved by the end.

Also Jade got a sick-ass superpower for all her suffering, so she's not allowed to argue anymore that she was never the final girl.