ergative's reviews
925 reviews

So weird. So deeply weird. But so confidently weird. Just as Ben has to trust the path and keep on going, I had to trust the author and keep on reading. And I really enjoyed the ending, which I had difficulty imagining could work in any satisfying way after the weirdness. But it did. So weird. I would never have picked it up for myself without the book group prompt, but I'm really glad I did.

This started out well, but it was too long, and suffered rather a lot from--as it turns out--being book X in a very long set of connected tales. The references to all the bits I found fascinating and intriguing and inventive---the Red Company, Fitzroy Angursell, the 9 worlds before and after the Fall---were all shunted into the background in this book (because they're covered in many other series in this universe). And instead we got a long, thoughtful, personal reflection on what it means to leave behind your people and your culture to pursue a better world, only to be met on your return home with family and friends who fundamentally cannot understand what you've done or why it's important. And I think that would have been a really lovely 350 page book. It did not need to be a 900 page book. There are only so many times we can see Kip having emotional conversations with his family about how they don't understand him before it feels repetitive; there are only so many times his colleagues and his emperor can sing his praises to his family on his behalf; there are only so many times people in his home city can be ignorant of how important he is in the capital of the empire before it starts feeling entirely unrealistic. Given how close-knit the home city is and how quickly news and gossip travels, I just can't believe Aunt whatserface is truly ignorant that her nephew has been second in power too the emperor for years at this point when she complains about the arrest of her son for corruption. 

I did rather like the writing style and world-building. I don't know that I'll read more in this particular sequence, but I am curious to know if the other ones combine the bits I liked about this with some actual plot.

 Alas, alas. Full review (in extreme length) goes up on Nerds of a Feather from 18 August, 

http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/08/microreview-gods-of-wyrdwood-by-rj.html

There's no point in giving a star rating to a Chuck Tingle story. I read it as a joke for my book group, but also I'm very glad to have experienced the Chuck Tingle phenomenon. I get the joke, yes, but I kind of wish Tingle had committed to it more. Surely there are ways of extending the metaphor of a giant sentient monetary instrument into a sexual encounter without just jamming a penis on it? Can't the penis be a manifestation of the unexpected consequences of Brexit that were perfectly obvious to anyone who thought about it, but still came as a surprise to the Brexiters? E.g., 

'Your cock is enormous! I had no idea it was hiding in there!'
'Just like you had no idea you'd have to queue in the non-EU passport control line, right? But if you'd looked at my bulging package before I took off my pants, you might have foreseen this consequence. Anyway, bend over.'

Or, you know, something like that.

 I was so surprised by how much I liked this! It's a quirky mix of fairy-tale magic and scifi: space ships and space stations and colony worlds and interplanetary politics combine with fairies giving magic gifts at namedays and in place of science and physics we have alchemy and arithmancy. Every chapter begins with a dry, entertaining philosophical meditation about the nature of politics or history or arithmancy or fairy gifts, told in the a slightly tongue-in-cheek voice of a historian narrating the events in question from a centuries-future perspective. Wonderful character work: Rory Thorne has a genuine personality, and the characters of her two mentors are beautifully counterbalanced with each other. Terrific politics. Just plain fun. I immediately started the second book. 

 This was up to Polk's usual standard. Wonderful sense of setting--clothes, decor, dialogue--and I was very engaged by the plot. Not entirely clear on why Haraniel wanted Helena to go to the 'hospital', since all that Helena learned there was already known to Haraniel. Maybe they were just riding along with Helena in the hopes of learning the identity, rather than the nature, of the killer? Also, I kind of guessed about Haraniel in essence, if not in detail. The hints were pretty obvious. Not poorly done. Just me preening and patting myself on the back and feeling smart. Good title. Very appropriate. 

 I was very disappointed by this one. It's probably me, and not Vo, but the previous two books in this series had a lovely frame narrative + internal story construction, and I so I came in here expecting to get that. But, like Chih themself, I got teased by possible stories, a couple of shortish stories, one of which was too long to be properly integrated in as dialogue but not long enough to serve as the central internal story, and the main narrative didn't seem to integrate with the stories as well as the other two books. Something something we make folklore as it happens something something be in the moment and see how it will be seen as others tell the tale later, exactly as you tell tales yourself of your predecessors something something you can adjust the details about how beautiful someone was as you like. I think I get it. I just didn't find it as interesting or well constructed as the previous two, and because they were so good, this suffered all the more by the contrast. 

Ugh. How tiresome. Very YA, with tedious tacked-on romantic subplot and an inability to use the past participle lain properly. Also, when you entitle your book 'Seven ways to kill a king' (A+ title, no notes), I expect a full complement of seven (7) regicides, and what's more, seven (7) different regicides. We only got five in this book, and they all involved poison. There was an insufficiency in both quantity and diversity of king-slayings here. (I never thought I'd find myself writing that a book had too MUCH poison in it, but here we are.)

Half a star for the title, though. I only wish I could have read the book that this title actually belonged to.

 This was great! I really enjoyed the narrative voice and careful cultural hand-holding to ensure that the reader understands the nuances of insults and cursing across the different languages. The legacy of the goblin wars and loss of horses was very well portrayed--enough so that the hint of hope at the restoration of horses at the end had exactly the punch it needed. Some set pieces went on a bit long--especially the bit with Knockburr--and I wasn't fully convinced by the romance with Norrigal, but overall an excellent bit of fun, and I will happily read a sequel. (I see that a prequel is coming out next, focusing on Galva, but to be honest I find her less interesting than Kinth, and am disappointed that we can't go one with the giants and horses theme that was dominant at the end of this book. Sometimes it's best to leave the historical worldbuilding alone--let it remain history, let it enrich the present. You don't need to unbury all of the things that, buried, made your world work.) 

 This was a slow burn that ended up being utterly enthralling. On its surface it feels like a literary exploration of the dangers and follies of an unripe proletariat revolution, with the cruelties and brutalities that such actions let loose without proper leadership. It is not quite secondary world fantasy--there are references to Rome and Russian and Paris and London and so on--but the city it's set in is clearly invented, as has the country that the city is a capital of. Cultural details--the worship of cats among the working classes, the myths about the origins of cats as the escaped wisdom of the devil---are clearly not part of any location we're intended to recognize. Or perhaps there is an alternate history going on. The technology level is maybe 1920 or so (I suspect that era is not an accident), but there are references to current events like 'The Frankish Campaign' that certainly never happened in our timeline in 1920. It lends the entire setting a rather dreamlike quality.

The revolution is doomed from the beginning. It succeeds even at the startbecause the army is out of the country at the time, and although the revolutionaries can command the city, they have no hope of controlling the whole country. Indeed they're going to be doomed when the army turns around and comes back. The people are cautiously accepting of the new regime at first: The working classes certainly witnessed the appalling injustice--a cold-blooded murder of a potter by a government official that went unprosecuted--that sparked the entire process. But it doesn't take long at all for them to realize that the Provisional Government is entirely out of its depth. Its trio of leaders--- a naive university student, a gruff dockhand, a doddering old playwright who wrote rather disagreeable plays---are simply not able to bring order to the city, and atrocities are carried out without their knowledge.

Against this backdrop, we have Dora, whose actions are mysterious at the start. She was a maid before the revolution, and through the influence of her boyfriend, a lieutenant in the new army, she lands herself the curatorship of the Museum of the Worker. It's an odd job, since no one really cares about museums in the midst of a revolution, and Dora herself had actually wanted control over the INstitute of Psykical research next door, until it turned out to have burned down in the upheval. (Indeed, one of the most striking bits of this narrative is the way it describes both the upheval of the new order, and also the attempts to preserve the infrastructure of the city: driving the trams, selling beer, running the hotels.) Dora herself is a cipher; she's quite hard to understand, and I suspect that this property is behind a lot of the negative reviews on goodreads. You have to watch her actions, be attentive to her decisions, the way she is quietly watchful and attentive to everyone around her, to understand what she's after. 

If you do it right, if you are patient and watchful and attentive, you'll come to the second part of this story, the bit that moves it from literary fiction into fantasy. A ghostly ship starts being seen flying around the city, captained by the murdered potter, and crewed by other people whose lives have been cut short or wasted. (There are a lot of these; Dora's neighbour who's taken up shop at an abandoned embassy runs the office where people go to disappear---one fo those atrocities that the Provisional Government is unaware of, indirectly responsible for, and incapable of stopping.) Triangle symbols are dotted around the museum, and on the wreckage of a burned Institute next door, where Dora's brother used to study before he died of cholera. Mysterious artifacts appear in the museum of the worker, exhibits thaat weren't there when Dora first took over, or that don't always work in the same way to everyone who examines them. 

The way all these plot threads---Dora's quest, the revolution, the Institute, the triangles, the magic cats, the doddering old playwright.--- intertwine in the last portion of the book is really masterful. This is a book that knows how to do multiple things at once: to build a world, to build a plot, to build a revolution and a personal quest. And the cats are impeccable.