ergative's reviews
925 reviews

2.5/5

I really, really wanted to like this book more than I did, but-- like Dreadnought --I think its core audience was not me. The author is a trans woman, and the main conflict in the book revolves around whether a trans girl can count as a female witch or not. The heros and villains line up entirely according to whether they are terfy or not-terfy, and the conversations around the main conflict recapitulate all the conversations that have been happening on twitter over the last five years as JK Rowling decided to make terfiness trendy, without adding anything to it, or even changing any of the arguments to fit them into this world with apparenty gender-binary based magic. For example: Witches and warlocks traditionall align with gender binaries, but witches tend to be stronger. Some witches hypothesize that there might be a genetic component to 'Gaia's gift', as they call magic. But this falls apart when you consider trans witches, whose power levels align more with cis witches than with cis warlocks. So it seems that Gaia's gift is not based on genetics (or gender assigned at birth), but something else. Cool. What is it? Is it purely identity? What happens with a gender-fluid magic user? Do their powers wane on days when they feel more masculine and wax when they feel more feminine? The fact that the difference in magical strength is more a tendency than an absolute seems to resemble the differences in height and strength that align with mundane gender binary physical traits, but if it aligns with trans people's true identities, then the parallel breaks down. I felt annoyed and irritated by the lack of exploration of the ways that magic-gender alignments in the book could be extended beyond real-world identity politics, enriching and expanding the world-building. Instead, it felt like it was too glued to the real world struggles, and never let the primary conceit breathe on its own.

This too-rigid adherence to real-world culture wars also has consequences for characterization. Without in any way wanting to take away from the importance of recognizing that trans women are women, and the importance of combatting terfs, I just don't think 'she's a terf' is a satisfying villain motivation.

Helena was introduced as a real character with agency and history and her own internal complexity, so having her turn into a villain halfway through purely on the basis of 'she's a terf' felt lazy. It's the new 'kick the puppy': how do we signal this person is a baddie? You can trace this approach throughout cultural history: 1950: He's a nazi! 1960: He's a communist! 1970:He's a misogynist! 1980: He's a white supremecist! 2000s: He's a homophobe! 2020s: She's a terf! (#feminism: at least women get to be primary villains these days.) In this book, terfery is all that is needed to classify our villain as a villain, so the need for further development or depth or characterization is entirely dropped. Helena's character becomes shallower, her family history and cultural and political connections to the magical world fade into insignficance.

All that remains to motivate her is terfiness, and so all the scenes from her point of view added nothing to the story. If we're going to get plot from the villain's perspective, I'd like that perspective to be more interesting than 'rawr i hate trans girls i evil now'. She becomes less menacing; more petty; and her eventual downfall seems boring because of it. 

To be sure, I speak from the position of someone who has never suffered from transphobia, and I imagine watching

Helena

get what's coming to her would be much more satisfying and cathartic for people who have. That's why I say this book's core audience is not me. And if that's the kind of thing you're here for, then this book will probably be great! Because, aside from the fight-the-terfs plotline that didn't land for me, the rest of this book is very engaging. It does a great job with world-building and culture building. It managed to convey the temporal setting -- the medium-term aftermath of a catastrophic magical war -- without leaving me feeling like a much more interesting story had happened before the book began. I also rather enjoyed the structure of the plot: it could easily have been a YA-type story, centering as it does around a traumatized teenager who is possibly the world-ender of prophesy, becoming best friends with another teenager who has only just discovered that she's a witch. And yet what we get is that same story told solely the perspective of the adults, who have a much more nuanced understanding of how the magical world works, what caused the war, what remains undone, and where the friction points still are. 

This depth of history worked well for personal and political characterization too (aside from Helena). On the personal side, we have a really skilled portrayal of the complexity of childhood friendships and enforced closeness that change as people grow into their adult selves. This worked especially well as we saw how Elle interacted with Niamh and Leonie, and how she approached her relationship with her husband. On the political side, the book does a great job capturing the complexity of ingrained civil service bureaucracy of Her Majesty's Royal Coven and the sloppiness of nascent alternative organizations that try to fill in the gaps that institutions are too slow and conservative to address. And I loved the description of the town of Hebden Bridge, which seems to have been created to push all of my buttons for idyllic places to live.

So: for people who want to see the anti-terf struggle structuring their fantasy plots to satisfying and cathartic effect, this book will be terrific. For people who get a little restless when the real world struggles are transported a little too directly into their fiction, eh.

What a fascinating glimpse into Wodehouse's development as a young writer! This is one of his very early novels, and it shows the transition point between his (thankfully) short-lived exploration of Serious Literature into the lighthearted comic whimsy that was his real genius. This book is the tale of a young couple, Ruth and Kirk, who get married and have a baby, and must navigate conflicts arising from income and family background and child-rearing, and do so in a desperately boring, tedious, predictable, stupid way. Every bit of narrative relating to their conflicts and struggles is so tropey and tiresome. There is nothing of Wodehouse's wit and sparkle in it. It's like every other stupid, portentous, moralising bit of twaddle from the 1920s, complete with some ingrained racism that comes with the era: Ruth and Kirk's baby is nicknamed 'The Great White Hope' by his prizefighter godfather, Steve, a nickname arising from all sorts of problematic origins. Ruth's aunt is also an enthusiastic proponent of eugenics, and although she's not presented as someone to admire, the nature of her demerits arise more from her overbearing pushiness---rather explicitly connected with her feminism and belief in the equality of women--than from the actual content of her eugenic philosophy. I had to work pretty hard to make myself believe that the perpetual references to 'the future of the race' in the context of eugenics meant 'human race' and not 'white race', because, to be honest, it could just as easily have been the latter as the former.

The plot itself is ridiculous and stupid and depends on characters changing their fundamental nature and relationship with each other for absolutely no reason other than that Wodehouse needs to insert conflict here and resolve conflict there. It also seems utterly blind to the wild amounts of privilege that allows him and his characters to proceed in complete ignorance of the actual challenges he presents them with. 'I think it will be rather fun being poor again,' says Ruth at the end, completely forgetting that back when they were poor they were so broke that her husband had to go away for a year to Colombia, where his best friend died, and in his absence his son got sick and almost died himself. Things were genuinely quite grim! But the plot demands that they recognize the evils of wealth and embrace poverty, and so they conveniently forget that poverty brings its own evils--and, crucially, evils that you are powerless to control. Rich people can decide not to be dicks. Poor people can't decide not to starve. It's ridiculous and stupid.

I should note here that later Wodehouse plots are also ridiculous and stupid. But they know that they're ridiculous and stupid, and indeed, they lean into the ridiculous stupidity intentionally. The characters are good-hearted, well-meaning youngsters, to be sure, but they are all impetuous and more than a bit dim, so when they make dumb decisions for the sake of the plot, those decisions are consistent with their characterization. It's all in the service of generating entertaining chaos. Here, by contrast, characterization is twisted in knots to serve a plot that Wodehouse didn't really know how to write, and which would still have been boring and tiresome even if a better writer had written it better.

And yet this book is not a complete failure, because Wodehouse is Wodehouse, and no matter how much he wants to write a Deep, Thoughtful Morality Tale, he can't help including entertaining chaos in little scenes dotted all over, where his future strength starts to peek its head around the corner. When we're dealing with the side characters, rather than tedious boring Ruth and Kirk, all sorts of delightful details begin to come to the fore. Steve's dialogue is full of 1920s slang that perplexes everyone he speaks to. William Bannister Winfield, the titular baby, is very good--not because he himself is an adowablw baby, but because of the way the narrative presents his perspective in a sort of understated straight-man manner that somehow highlights all the absurdities inherent in babies. Take this bit, where we learn about the preparations for a visit from Steve and Bill  to reconcile Ruth's father, Mr Bannister, a wealthy, stodgy grump of a Wall-Street financier. Mr Bannister did not approve of Ruth's marriage, but Steve is convinced that once he sees Bill, he will come to his senses:

Perhaps the real mistake of the expedition was the nature of its baggage. William Bannister [the baby] had stood out for being allowed to take with him his wheelbarrow, his box of bricks, and his particular favorite, the dying pig, which you blew out and then allowed to collapse with a pleasing noise. These properties had struck his parents as excessive, but he was firm; and when he gave signs of being determined to fight it out on these lines if it took all the summer, they gave in.

(It's the 'collapse with a pleasing noise' that gets me.) Throughout the following interview with the grandfather, already entertaining in the contrast between Steve's highly colloquial, increasingly flustered slang and the grandfather's curmudgeonly crusty unfriendliness, Bill's interactions with these toys are all used to exquisite comic effect. Perhaps recognizing that he was on to something good, Wodehouse gifts us towards the end of the novel another outstanding set piece featuring Steve and Bill in the countryside of Connecticut, which is as good as anything he wrote in the rest of his career. Really, if he had re-written the entire book from the perspective of Steve, it would have been terrific. It was only the decision to center boring old Ruth and boring old Kirk, and make the primary conflict a boring old trope, where the acquisition of wealth makes you a bad person, and in order to become a good person again you must lose all the money. 

In sum, entertaining chaos is Wodehouse's real forte. When the goal is to write a moralising tale about the dangers of excessive wealth, he flounders and fails. When the goal is to write an absurd romp about young twits being dumb, he excels. Nowhere is that so obvious as in this book, where the moralising tale about Kirk and Ruth is a slodgy puddle of muck, while the absurd romps surrounding Steve and Bill are sparkling delights.

 I loved loved loved the Inda quartet, and quite enjoyed the Banner of the Damned. The world-building in those was rich and complex, and the interplay of history and politics and culture and language were so complex and skillfully manipulated that I was very happy to return to the world in this book. However, those were conventionally published, and so had had the benefit of professional editing. This books was, I think, self-published, and it showed. The plot was meandering and lacked any driving force; the characters spend a lot of time talking about the events and consequences of events of the previous books; and events are introduced and then dropped and never picked up again, as if the author were publishing each chapter serially, without the benefit of going back to rejigger and reconsider earlier things that turned out not to be relevant to later developments. There were, to be sure, some very skillfully done bits, especially the build-up to the Night of Four Kings, in which hints and set-ups came to fruition very satisfactorally. Indeed, I think if the book had ended after that, it would have been quite a successful novella set in this world. But things then keep on happening, and there doesn't seem to be any swell or primary conflict in sight. What happened to Wolf's daughter from his first marriage? Is Lavais actually going to cause trouble? She sure was set up as if she wanted to cause trouble, but then she just goes away again, having thought the better of it. Even Connar's grooming as the 'true king' never really goes anywhere, and that's the most constant thread through the second half of the book.

Yet the depth of world-building and the richness of the politics and intrigue--even if they never really go anywhere--have a certain verisimilitude. I can easily imagine someone who deeply loves this world and these people revelling in pages and pages and pages of just life. Not everything has to be a world-threatening epic. Sometimes you just want to hang out with the king and queen and Academy and runners and live in a fantasy realm for a while. Things happen, plots are conceived but never executed, shenanigans take place, people grow and learn and talk and live their lives, and talk about the events of the previous books that you've already read and loved. If that's what you want, then this book does it beautifully. This desire is exactly what motivates so many billions of words of fanfiction. Indeed, this book feels like a very long work of fanfiction of the author's previous books.

I myself am left just a bit unsatisfied, though. I find myself wanting to go back and re-read the Inda quartet, because that offers all the world-building richness and depth of this book, but it also has a plot that goes places.

But maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe the second book will pick up all the threads that feel dropped and incomplete, and weave them into something astonishing. Given what Smith did with the Inda quartet, I know she has the ability. I will read book 2, for sure. I'm just a little bit doubtful going into it. 

This was quite a lot of fun. Good intrigue, good world-building, and the way the characters' backstories emerged organically, while allowing each character to have a unique contribution, sometimes at quite pivotal moments, worked very well. I also liked how they didn't start as a cohesive crew, but had to build that cohesion through the events of the book. It was like the origin story for an established ensemble, except we start with the origin story, rather than go back after the franchise is established. A bit of knee-jerk dude-bro-ness: Only the one single token-girl (I don't count the golem) on the crew who's not like other girls, and Frey really is quite the asshole when it comes to relationships. But then, it's clear from the narrative that he's a complete asshole, that it's a character flaw and not some virtue that he's such a ladies-man. Easy story, and I'll definitely read more in the series.

2.5/5

The world-building was imaginative. I liked the way the character of the various locations was described, and I did quite enjoy the sense of the wilderness being a proper wilderness, except populated by mechas and robots and forgotten bits of unexploded sentient ordnance and cyborg animal things, rather than purely organic, natural creatures. The feeling of exploration and wildness from pre-industrial tales was still preserved in this extremely post-industrial future. That was cool. 

But the problem is that, despite the very nice vibes of the world, there's not all that much story here, or character development. Some people are hired by a robot to fix another robot. Various bits of necessary tech are conveniently assembled through coincidence or contrivance, with not a little ominous foreboding that fixing the robot will be a bad idea. But then they fix it, and nothing happens. It could have been bad, but it wasn't. Everything's fine. The end. The vibes are all that there were, and that's just not enough to keep me entertained.

 What an odd duck of a doorstopper! So ingenious in its creativity, so playful, so confident in its narrative voice, so self-assuredly sprawling, and yet so skillful in how it rewove and returned all the various threads together in an elaborate fractal dance. Sam and Bryony were quite passive in the various events, leaving it to the huge cast of entertaining secondary characters to make events happen, but there were so many characters, and so many events, that it seems churlish to criticize. 

I liked this better than Carter and Lovecraft, in large part because it took place in the 'unfolded world', which was a concept I quite enjoyed. It felt like it was leaning more into the mythos and less prosaic in its setting. I'm not a huge fan of all the gun porn, though, and I still think that the Arkham of this book is not nearly is fun--despite the entirely blasé attitude towards weird deaths at Miskatonic University--as the Arkham that holds the portal into the Dreamlands in the Cabal universe. I'd probably read more of this series, but there aren't any, and to the extent that that's an indication of Howard realizing where his real strength lies, it's probably just as well.

This is so very, very different from Howard's Johannes Cabal work that I was rather disappointed. There was none of that distinctive narrative voice that makes Cabal such a delight, to the point that I was wondering whether it was indeed the same author. By publication date, he'd already written quite a few Cabal books by the time this one came out, and I can understand why he might have wanted to explore other styles, but this lacked the magic of Cabal. Hard-boiled police procedural--even with just a bit of self-awareness of tropes--doesn't thrill me the way Cabal did. Also, his trope-awareness of police procedural detective stories didn't seem to extend to the rather knee-jerk 'cops are good guys' narrative perspective so common among that genre. I'd like to think that, if Howard were writing it today, he might have been a bit more critical. But after I let that go (and got used to the narrator, who isn't so great in this audiobook), I found myself having a rather good time. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill Lovecraftian horror thriller that kept me entertained if not charmed. And I'm quite enjoying the sequel, which is doing very clever things with setting.

 Hmph. This felt like a slightly less preachy Cory Doctorow wallow through a utopian society that rang thoroughly false. 'Does that not become competitive,' Mosscap asks about the system of not-currency that allows everyone to see how many other 'pebs' a person has acquired through benefitting society. 'Why would it?' asks Dex in utter surprise. Really? Because four-year olds compete over how many oreos they can eat! People are competitive. I just don't believe that a society which puts a price on labor and goods, and keeps a record of how much more people have contributed than they have used, would not become competitive. I don't buy it. And because I don't buy the society, I don't really buy into the book. If you want to persuade me of a utopia, it's got to be based on systems that don't require a whole population of people to entirely lack fundamental qualities of human nature.

Also, there was no plot. I suppose if I had read the first book first (I got mixed up as to which came first), I would have cared more about the characters which made up for the lack of plot, but as it was, we have a mopey priest person undergoing some personal crisis of self-doubt whose nature is never clear (I fully recognize I would have probably understood that better if I'd read the first book) guiding a robot through an entirely unrealistic utopia, while everyone congratulates themself on how much better they are now than their ancestors were before robots became sentient.

In a way it actually reminds me of those 19th and early 20th century science fiction books, which have no plots and are simply an excuse to explore a cool setting or idea. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland is one such example that immediately springs to mind. If you like the idea (and judging from reviews, quite a lot of people really did enjoy this cosy utopia), then that's great. But if you don't buy it, the book really has nothing else to offer you. 

Mmph. I really did want to like this more than I did. I love this history of science; I really enjoyed the setting and characters of this book. I learned about Mary Anning discovering the plesiosaurus in my dinosaur books when I was little. A novel about her and Elizabeth Philpot in Lime Regis (starting the same year that Jane Austen was there and actually visited Mary's father for some carpentry repair on her traveling trunk, according to the author's note)--that should vve great! And it was good. Well-written. I read it in a day.

But it gets a little frustrating that historical fiction set in ye olden dayes must necessarily recapitulate the exact conversations that people were having then, as a nod to historical accuracy. Like, yes, of course people back in 1805 had difficulty with ideas of evolution and extinct species and the age of the earth. Yes, they probably did struggle to reconcile it with the bible. I'm sure. I believe that those conversations happened. But they are boring, because those debates are no longer current, and I'm not interested in hearing people have them even in a historical book. 

The book did, I think, as good a job as it could with the sexism of the era, in large part because it engaged with it on a deeper level than 'Argh, I r a sciencer why no men listen?' It would have been so easy and lazy to have Mary and Elizabeth bond furiously over their desire to engage with scientific society and be shut out from it, and have proto-feminism and proto-suffragette sympathies. But instead of this, it engaged with the whole issue of sex in science in a much mroe interesting way. Men did listen to Mary Anning, because they saw that she could help them find fossils, and they bought fossils from her, and commissioned work from her, and paid her. It became her livelihood--but it also caused difficulties for her reputation in town, because she spent so long on beaches with unmarried men. And because of issues of class and education--not just sex--she was forbidden from fully participating in the world of science, and indeed was refused recognition for her work until Elizabeth Philpot--who at least had the advantages of class and education--stepped in. And, indeed, in many cases it was not that the men were unwilling to credit Mary, or pay her for her work. They weren't malicious; just oblivious to the fact that she couldn't afford to buy coal for the winter if they did not pay her for her time. Some of the difficulties facing women sprang from malice, to be sure, but what this book does so well his highlight how much more of it is simply negligent ignorance, stemming as much from class as from sexism.

And then it goes and makes Elizabeth and Mary fight over a man, for fuck's sake. Because women can't just be friends and support each other; they have to fight over men. Goddamnit, the book was doing so well, and then it pulled this kind of crap on me. Argh. Do better, Tracy Chevalier!