ergative's reviews
925 reviews

 This was such an impressive feat. So short, so tight, and yet telling a tale of an underclass revolting against a dystopian oppressive government on a capitalistic nightmare of a generation mining-ship that other authors might well have taken 500 pages to tell. The compression of plot, setting, and above all the highly abstract metaphorical (?) descriptions of the nature of viewpoint characters' development demands a lot of attention from the reader. Details that look like aesthetic world-building (e.g., children's games; previous research projects thought about in passing by the professor) turn out to underpin the key realizations of the climactic moments. Everything is important in a book like this. And if you open your mind enough to attend to it all, then the last line is deeply satisfying. 

 I enjoyed this so much! It felt very old-school fantasy in its conceit: secretly special orphan boy gets the attention of powerful man, goes to academy, does political intrigue, cool magic system, etc. But unlike old-school fantasy, there was no knee-jerk misogyny (although a bit of a cis-het normative perspective). The pacing was good, the plot was exciting--I definitely stayed up late reading last night in a way I don't often do these days, and the ending was satisfying, while still making me want to plunge into the sequel as soon as it's available. I'm not thrilled at the hints that we're going to be ending up with a multiverse-type situation (I've gotten quite bored with multiverses), but Islington has made me trust him enough that I'm confident he'll do something good with it. 

 Yikes. Oh, jeez. So YA. Protagonist was foolish, plot was simplistic and melodramatic, the whole magical-tea-brewer competition was wildly dumb, romance was stupid, ending was a contrived cliffhanger that really wasn't in the slightest bit necessary. The plot threads were already in place for a sequel. And yet--see, here's where I think I'm just a curmudgeonly fart. Because I can imagine someone who doesn't mind simplistic obvious contrived plots finding a lot to love in this book. The tea magic was very beautifully evoked, the descriptions of food were incredible, and the pacing was perfectly fine. And it was very steeped (heh) in Chinese culture, with names and images and descriptions of decor and dress and hair and politics solidly c-drama affiliated. The audiobook narrator took pains to pronounce every proper name with the appropriate tones. This is a bit of representation in fantasy that I think is good and necessary, and I think that fourteen-year-old girls need rousing stories like this, of plucky teens fighting to do court intrigue and wield magic. Just because I found it juvenile and tedious doesn't mean everyone will. It just means I've aged out of this book's demographic.
 

 I was surprised by how much I ended up liking this. I found the beginning a bit hard to take, with the tedious crush on the dumb girl who needs help and the incredibly clumsy use of future space!slang. But the plot itself was great! There was a great mystery at the heart of it that developed really well once it got moving, and I found myself fully engaged by the end. This is one of those books that I wouldn't have finished without the motivation of bookgroup, but which I'm glad I finished in the end. But also I won't be reading any more by this author. Because in a world where everyone has cybernetic implants, I simply don't believe that only the engineers have recording functions.

 Like book 2 of this series, I found myself getting a little bit restless throughout. 

I enjoyed it, but the artificial constraints of the murder-and-intrigue-on-a-boat felt a little... constraining. Various conflicts ran the risk of either turning deadly or else being prevented from feeling real because there were always safety measures: the baddies won't want to make a fuss in front of passenger witnesses. No one can get into the goodies' stateroom, so it's a kind of home-base in a shipwide game of tag. The stakes and drama didn't feel as real as in the first book.

 This has all the hallmarks of Slatter's other Sourdough novels: Supremely confident female characters wielding power in a richly realized world, leaving corpses in the wake of some extremely unhealthy family dynamics. This one in particular has a bit of the flavour of a mirror-universe Lancre, in which the tropes are played straight. In the town of Silverton, the Briar family of witches has held sway for centuries, under the benign dictatorship of the Briar Witch, supported by her Steward and her Marshall. Silverton has prospered; the priests (god-hounds, a delightful term) are kept at bay, and all is well. Except that a generation of Briar witches has been lost to plague and madness, and the new generation finds that it is not straightforward to step into their forbears' shoes. In part that may be because the incoming steward, Ellie Briar, is not, herself a witch. For some reason or other, the Briar magic has passed her by, and she must carry out her responsibilities with no other power than mundane competence. Or perhaps it is that Ellie's cousin Audra, the new Briar Witch, is too reliant on her magic and neglectful of her mundane dutues. Or perhaps it is that there is a string of disappearances and sudden deaths which, coming hard on the heels of the sudden demise of the previous Briar Witch looks much too suspicious to be a coincidence. And then the ghosts are returning, for the first time in 300 years.

The book is an enjoyable tale, with a distinct mood. I found the attention given to show Ellie's logistical competence very pleasing. Something about slice-of-life fantasy where the slices of life are treated as genuinely important, with real consequences, rather than pleasant fluff to line the next of cosy fantasy, is always satisfying to me. And I really  enjoyed how a particular decision not to share knowledge turns out not to be a tedious way of spinning drama out of forced ignorance, but in fact serves to resolve a problem, rather than create or perpetuate it. But I still found myself getting a little bit restless as the book progressed. I didn't quite have a sense of what the plot actually was. There are hints at mysteries, but they're never foregrounded enough to drive the plot; and indeed I had guessed who was behind it early enough that the lack of development made me feel as if things were dragging. Too much reactivity; not enough praction. Even the ready profusion of fresh corpses failed to juice events into action. Corpse-based narrative worked quite well in other books, but not quite as well here.
 

 This was really a book of two parts, which could have worked better if they were better balanced. The first part was the story in which the titular Amina Al-Sirafi, a retired pirate captain, has her arm twisted into taking one last job, for which she must get the old team back together. One of the points of this narrative is to explore the nature of parenthood, aging, retirement, and one's legacy (especially since piracy was bunch of fun and a bit of a wrench to give up). In this part of the story, there was an awful lot of navel gazing and conversations about how different members of the old crew were approaching these issues. Intellectually, I appreciate what Chakraborty was doing, but boy did it slow down the plot. She writes a ripping good yarn, but she doesn't really have the subtlety of touch to engage with these issues in a way that doesn't feel heavy handed or clumsy (much like her commentary on gender roles, slavery, queerness and other ways to put socially acceptable progressive values into the worldview of a 12th century Arab lady pirate captain). 

However, once the adventure is properly assembled, with supernatural creatures and settings in place and playing their respective roles, things picked up a lot. Wonderful descriptions of all of magical mysteries and settings and discoveries and objects and lore. Raksh was a great source of unpredictability as events unfolded. So I liked the book better by the end than I did at the beginning, but I worry that future installments wiill make the same mistake, and waste wordcount on pseudo-profound attempts at thoughtful navel-gazing, when I just want to watch some marids throw their tentacles around.

 I really quite enjoyed this! Very good ensemble cast, with distinct personalities and specialisms, and the plot construction managed to combine political first contact, emergency survival on an alien world, and xenobiological-linguistic science in a satisfying way. The interpersonal relationships in the science crew also worked very well--especially Minnie and John. It would have been so sloppy and easy to make their tensions and disagreements revolve around the pre-existing romantic ties (Minnie is dating John's ex-wife), but instead the two of them approach their situation like goddamned professionals who nevertheless get on each other's nerves because Minnie's quite a jerk. And when events forced them to become closer, there was not a hint of tiresome romantic ties growing between them, but instead respect and support. The other characters, too, are a masterclass in how it's not bad to have people take on stereotypically gender-matched roles, as long as there are enough people to show that it's not the only option. So one woman is the nurturing mother, sure, but we've also got a wacked out weirdo with delusions of godhood, an abrasive alien wilderness-survival expert, and a timid shrinking flower who is also an innovative project manager. Likewise with the dudes: we've got the classic human ambassador on an alien world, all tall and bold and commanding, but we've also got the freaked out anxious tech expert, the competent medic, and the leader who struggles with feeling inferior to everyone else because he doesn't have enough expertise in anything: he's only the leader, he thinks at one point, because there's no other useful role for a generalist. 

I also loved the alien sociobiology. The deadly misconceptions about the Threck and the Hynka are the inevitable result of just observing the society and making assumptions about how they work developed the plot in very exciting sci-fi ways. And Siemsen really doesn't hold back in the gross bits! The scene where Minnie is looked after temporarily by a Hynka who finds her freezing in the wilderness was disgusting and delightful in the best possible way. 

This felt like very classic science fiction, but without a lot of the knee-jerk misogyny and white savior bits that make some of the classic stuff so disagreeable to the modern reader. I might not seek out other books by Siemsen, but if I saw them in the library I'd probably check them out.
 

 

 First of all, the hardcover of this book (and its predecessor, City of Last Chances, although this stands alone perfectly well), are absolutely GORGEOUS. 

Next: This felt like a very skilled construction by someone who is very good at constructing such constructions. The characters all occupied well-defined roles, displaying personalities, expertises, and hidden depths with clockwork precision. The plot felt a little directionless until everything snapped into place at the end, revealing that in fact what looked like aimless swirling throughout the first three quarters was in fact a hurrican pulling itself together. The ending was surprisingly satisfying, for that reason. However, possibly because of the skill and precision of the book, I never really felt like the characters were real. I couldn't quite get behind their arcs and journeys, because the craft of it all was so skilled it felt like it drew attention to itself. Not in a 'I am super-clever' kind of way (none of the infuriating smug cleverness that characterizes, say, China Mieville), but just--I don't know. I did not rejoice or grieve any of the characters' fates, and the satisfaction I felt was the satisfaction at seeing a puzzle come together, rather than pleasure at having gone on a journey with the book. It's good. But it's sort of distant.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Inasmuch as I can tell, it did not affect the content of this review.