ergative's reviews
925 reviews

 The power of titles is such that, although I knew perfectly well that it was a mere accident, an incidental alignment of the stars, that this book's title so closely resembled The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, I was nevertheless expecting some similarity. Some trace of the weird, some trace of the macabre, some trace of mystery or the fantastic. Some trace of murder. Some trace of the imaginative inventiveness that made Evelyn Hardcastle so much fun.

Nope: Hollywood star has Feelings about her career and sex and womanhood, and journalist whose utterly tiresome connection to her is revealed as a revelation!twist in Act III has Feelings about writing her life story. Yawn. I mean, I finished it. It wasn't offensive. Just very disappointing. I even shelled out for the fancy binding as a gift to myself. The binding is the only reason I'm considering keeping the book. It's a very nice binding. 

 NB: This is mostly about Black Sails, rather than the book itself.

I read this to be a better-informed viewer of Black Sails, so already the book was a little bit at an unfair disadvantage. So many of the characterizations are already wildly misaligned from what they are in the show, that the book--despite being the OG text--felt wrong. To be sure, the show does make quite a song and dance about constructing an image of oneself to be feared, and quite a bit can happen in 20 years, so there's room for the characters to shift and leave stories behind that match what we get in this book, but still. Poor Billy, especially, turning into the old drunkard who dies so miserably in the first chapters. I do, however, absolutely believe that Silver ends up as we see him here: sly, manipulative, turncoating, and teaming up with Max (??). I don't see them actually living as husband and wife, however they present their relationship to the rest of the world, but I absolutely see them working together very effectively. As, after all, they've done before.

What I'm most fascinated by are the hints about how the show is going to end with the relationships between our main characters. Flint, who died (they say) as a raving drunk in Savannah, I may or may not believe. It's only what people say they saw, so what actually happened could be anything. I fully believe he's capable of killing six men while he goes to bury his treasure, not to keep the secret, but for some other reason. Not fully sure I believe him using one of the corpses as a pointer. That's a bit too cute for Flint. I'm fascinated by the claims in the book that that Billy ends up terrified of Silver, and Silver is the only man that Flint ever feared. (Billy and Flint's relationship is never fully explored.) I can see the relationship between Silver and Flint turning into the kind of antagonism that might end up where we find it in the book, but given that, at the end of S3 at least, Billy and Silver and very well aligned, I have more difficulty seeing how Billy woudl end up terrified of him. And, to be honest, it's rather a disappointment to see that, after the events of Black Sails, they end up back in England. Clearly--clearly--their lives are in Nassau.

Anyway, I'm glad I have this book in my head as I embark on the last season of Black Sails, but it's not a terribly good book. 

 Meh. Meh meh meh. Teenage romance is boring. Forced historical misogyny is very hard to do well, and it was not done well here. There was a massive leap between the clues and the eventual culmination of the mystery that really didn't follow. The horse stuff was very wrong (a terrifyingly tall stallion is probably not an Arabian. A horse is probably not going to respond to a friendly stroke on the flank with 'an affectionate whinny'.) The anatomy/medical history stuff was quite good (author's note cites Lindsey Fitzharris's excellent 'The Butchering Art' and Eleanor Herman's delightful 'The Royal Art of Poison', among others that I should probably track down, given the recommendation that springs from their association with their fellow citations.) Apparently there's a sequel coming out next year, and while I'm very happy for Dana Schwartz, I have no intention of reading it. 

 As entertainingly written as the rest of the Cabal books. Makes heavy reference to all the books and short stories, but weaves them all together quite skillfully, so references feel coherent, rather than jammed in. The snarky narrator, in between haranguing the reader for being so foolish as to start this book without having bought and read the previous ones (plus everything else the author's written, relevant or not), reassured me that I didn't need the stories, but that they would be helpful, and he was correct: I do rather wish I had read the stories before this one. I really, really want to know more about Zarenyia, dibs, and fish.

The title is definitely a troll on the reader. I find the repeated use of 'this isn't real' for the various scenarios presented by the Five Ways a slightly frustrating way of avoiding stakes higher than the purely personal, but then many of Cabal's adventures take place on the outskirts of reality (Dreamlands, the traveling carnival), so it wasn't unexpected. And he is an arrogant, self-centered little shit, so why shouldn't books about him center on his own personal concerns? I loved Zarenyia; Horst, as always, was charming, and overall a satisfying ride. 

I feel really bad rating this as low as I did, because I found this book extremely easy to read, and I loved the dog. The mystery itself was fine, I guess. Red herrings, multiple suspects, etc. etc. The solution to the extra 75kg in the matter recycling system was a bit too obvious to merit the full two pages of delay in explaining it, plus the drama-enhancing end-of-chapter placement. But, fine, the mystery was fine.

It was the rest of the book that fell flat. I have great difficulty getting behind a main character who is FABULOUSLY WEALTHY and POWERFUL and INFLUENTIAL and is being WRONGED by the current security forces who keep getting in her way in her attempt to investigate murders all by herself and solves most of her problems by throwing money around. Like, 1930s era cocktails and fashion and wealth is a nice kind of set dressing, but if you're putting it in space you can't just import wholesale that kind of obscene power differential that underwrote all those elegant cigarette holders and expect it to be equally charming. The Thin Man was 1934--Great Depression, remember? And our main character is fucking named TESLA of all things . If I didn't know Kowal better, I'd feel like this was written from a place of Elon Musk hagiography--but even back in 2020 and 2021, when the book was being written, I think we all knew Musk was a douchebag, so wtf? 

It's not as if Kowal isn't ideologically opposed to everything Muskish. It was right there on the page--but that, too, fell flat. All of the little additional details that Kowal does to show her progressive bona fides felt forced, rather than natural. The pronouns as part of the introductions, the careful attention to disability accommodations, the way everyone calls out gendered insults as antiquated and tiresome--the seams of the worldbuilding were so prominent that they extended their threads back into the modern world, highlighting the current state of The Culture Wars by the box-ticking exercise in showing how the future no longer contains those problems. I appreciate the attempt---truly, I do---but it didn't work here. The prominent seams just made the clothes itchy.

Also, the repeated bits of sexual innuendo between our newlyweds got very tiresome. Especially because, in multiple occurrences, they're making out in the next room while MURDER INVESTIGATORS are just waiting for them to get dressed. Like, wait for the plot to pause a bit before you start getting frisky!

To be fair, I read the book in a day. Kowal's writing is very easy to read, flows smoothly, and keeps me engaged. It just was used to tell a story I didn't particularly care for.

Great cover, though.

 This was a friendly, comfortable set of essays to pick through in three-minute spurts while I was waiting for the pasta to cook or when I didn't have the focus for anything larger. Walton's love and affection for these books shines through, so even when I've never heard of the book in question, I'm still engaged by Walton's discussion of it. There are some great recommendations here for authors and books I'd be curious to read, but at the same time I'm a little suspicious, because there are also some very favourable recommendations for authors and books I have read and didn't care for. Nothing for it but to take a look and see what I think, I guess! 

Wonderful, satisfying, imaginative story. Very high body count, but usually at exactly the point where I felt like a little bit of murder would be a convenient way to resolve difficulties and move things along. I found myself getting a little distracted during the middle third or so, but then things picked up again at the end. I do wish, though, that those two parallel grand houses had not both been left to molder. Surely the second one could have been put to some more effective use?

 Oof, I would have enjoyed this so much more (at least a 3.5) if it had ended about 10 pages earlier. All the plots within plots and the carefully balanced plotters worked nicely enough, and Ezzedine's desperate loneliness and self-preserving forgetting of his home and faith and identity were heart-breakingly effective. But then the author couldn't, it seems, figure out how to end it, and instead gave us a hand waving philosophizing 'well, take your pick, here's all the endings I brainstormed' meditation on the multiverse. 

 I didn't enjoy this as much as the others, but it kept me very engrossed up until the end. There were some excellent pay-offs that had been set up in previous books, and some very skillful world-building ends being tied up. Some not-terribly-subtle analogies to the evils of late-stage capitalism and climate change, but sufficiently cloaked in the in-world trappings that I didn't feel preached at. (I prefer my books as escape rather than commentary, so if there are analogies, the subtler the better). Overall, I preferred the other books, because I think the inside of the Scholomance is more richly built than the world outside, and the pacing of this particular book didn't quite work as well as the other books. But it was a satisfying end to the series, and it kept me up very late and shamefully neglecting Mr Ergative, so, y'know, it did the trick. 

 I tried. I read up to 70%, and then put it down and when I picked it up again I couldn't make myself care. The motivations make no sense; the worldbuilding seems arbitrary and haphazard; the plot is meandering and desultory. I didn't care about any of the characters. I had no sense of wonder from the magic.