Review: Who Fears Death

Title: Who Fears Death

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Post-Apocalyptic/Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death, violence, genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery (mentions), blood, gore, pregnancy, rape (graphic), attempted rape, infidelity, sexual content, sexual content between minors, animal death, excrement, body horror, murder, parent death, child death, romantic partner death, major character death, suicidal ideation, incest (mentions), child sexual abuse (mentions), medical content

Back Cover:

In a post-apocalyptic Africa, the world has changed in many ways, yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. After years of enslaving the Okeke people, the Nuru tribe has decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke tribe for good. An Okeke woman who has survived the annihilation of her village and a terrible rape by an enemy general wanders into the desert hoping to die. Instead, she gives birth to an angry baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand. Gripped by the certainty that her daughter is different—special—she names her child Onyesonwu, which means “Who Fears Death?” in an ancient tongue.

From a young age, stubborn, willful Onyesonwu is trouble. It doesn’t take long for her to understand that she is physically and socially marked by the circumstances of her violent conception. She is Ewu—a child of rape who is expected to live a life of violence, a half-breed rejected by both tribes.

But Onye is not the average Ewu. As a child, Onye’s singing attracts owls. By the age of eleven, she can change into a vulture. But these amazing abilities are merely the first glimmers of a remarkable unique magic. As Onye grows, so do her abilities—soon she can manipulate matter and flesh, or travel beyond into the spiritual world. During an inadvertent visit to this other realm she learns something terrifying: someone powerful is trying to kill her.

Desperate to elude her would-be murderer, and to understand her own nature, she seeks help from the magic practitioners of her village. But, even among her mother’s people, she meets with frustrating prejudice because she is Ewu and female. Yet Onyesonwu persists.

Eventually her magical destiny and her rebellious nature will force her to leave home on a quest that will be perilous in ways that Onyesonwu can not possibly imagine. For this journey will cause her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture, and ultimately to learn why she was given the name she bears: Who Fears Death?

Review:

Note: This review discusses rape in several places because rape is an essential plot point. If rape is a trigger for you, take care of yourself and skip both this book and this review.

I was not all that excited to read this book. In fact, I passed over it several times because that back cover just didn’t sound appealing. But then I read The Book of Phoenix, which happened to be a prequel to this one. I loved The Book of Phoenix, so I decided I might as well give Who Fears Death a shot.

I have a lot to say about this book, and most of it has to do with the book overall. The details were, for the most part, strong. One of the best part of all of Nnedi’s books are the africanfuturism settings that beautifully combines technology just advanced enough from what we have to make it sci-fi with enthralling small villages and great deserts in near-future Africa. The worldbuilding is absolutely stellar.

Where it struggles is everywhere else. The story here feels very much like one of Nnedi’s “woman who is hated and feared for some aspect of how she was born goes on a long journey to nowhere in particular” plots (see Noor and Remote Control), just with more setup – Onyesonwu doesn’t leave the village until over halfway through the book. But this book attempts to give Onyesonwu’s travels in the desert a destination and a purpose. The purpose makes the desert-wandering feeling seem incongruous, and the desert-wandering feeling makes the purpose feel cheap and unnecessary. I just didn’t think it worked.

That’s how the book felt overall – like the story was trying to smash together two very different approaches and not succeeding at either. It took ideas for a plot-focused book – a uniquely powerful main character with a unique appearance who learns to use her innate magic to fulfill the prophecy that she will end the great evil plaguing the land – and tried to shove them into a character-focused story.

I’m using “character-focused” in the loosest sense of the term, because the focus is on only Onyesonwu’s rage. She very clearly has every right to be angry, but that is the only thing that seems to matter in this book. It glosses over interesting plot happenings and interesting character development alike. The story is driven by Onyesonwu getting angry, doing something incredibly stupid (which she usually recognizes was stupid as soon as she calms down), and then having to deal with the consequences.

Who Fears Death is also unrelentingly violent. It’s said right on the back cover that Onyesonwu was born from rape. What isn’t mentioned is that that rape is described in graphic detail multiple times, as well as several other rapes and one attempted rape. There’s also murder, genocide, physical violence, and more, all described with vivid, bloody thoroughness. (There was also some fairly graphic consensual sexual content between two minors, which wasn’t actually violent but still very uncomfortable.) It was very hard to read in many places, but in some ways it felt like that was the point. I mean this in the best possible way, but it felt a bit like the author was using the process of writing this to work through some stuff. There’s a scene in the book where Onyesonwu is trying to convince her village that genocide is really happening and they need to act. Nobody is listening to her, so she uses her magic to broadcast her mother’s experience of being raped to every one of them. In a way, this book feels a lot like it’s trying to do the same thing. There was a strong sense of “All of this has happened to real people in other places, the least you can do is read about it.”

I finished reading this not because I particularly wanted to, but because by the time I got around to thinking about switching to a different audiobook, I was two hours from the end and I figured I might as well finish. The whole story felt flat – not as in without depth or emotion, but as in without variation. There was no rising and falling action, no moments of heightened conflict or moments of respite. Onyesonwu’s rage was constant, the pace was constant, the violence never stopped, and the climax didn’t even feel like a climax because the pace and rage and violence were exactly the same as the rest of the book. I found the ending profoundly unsatisfying, for reasons that include spoilers: Onyesonwu attacked the antagonist twice with magic and spent half a year walking across the desert just so she could use her rage and her magic to kill him, only to fall in a terrified sobbing heap the instant she saw him in person, leaving her romantic partner to do the thing she went all that way to do.

What I wanted from this book was something plot-focused. More about Onyesonwu learning to use her magic and the strange spiritual world of the Wilderness, magic as a weapon and a tool with more details about its possibilities and limitations, the prophecy leading to a quest-style journey, a climax that involved a great magical duel between Onyesonwu and the antagonist. I also would have accepted something that made magic and prophecies the backdrop to a friends-to-lovers romance, complicated but unbreakable friendships, an antagonist-to-surrogate-father relationship with her magic teacher, and self-reflection and love and advice from friends leading to personal growth and fewer rash actions. But Who Fears Death tried to do both at the same time, and ended up making something that wasn’t satisfying on either level.

Review: The Waste Lands

Title: The Waste Lands

Series: The Dark Tower #3

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Low fantasy post-apocalyptic horror Western with portal fantasy elements is my best guess on this one

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of animals, death of children, mental illness, forced institutionalization (mentions), gun violence, body horror, injury, child emotional neglect, drug use (mentions), sexual assault, rape (explicit on-page), excrement, bodily fluids, suicide

Spoiler Warning: This book is third in a series, and reading past this point will expose you to MAJOR spoilers of the previous books.

Back Cover:

Several months have passed, and Roland’s two new tet-mates have become proficient gunslingers. Eddie Dean has given up heroin, and Odetta’s two selves have joined, becoming the stronger and more balanced personality of Susannah Dean. But while battling The Pusher in 1977 New York, Roland altered ka by saving the life of Jake Chambers, a boy who—in Roland’s where and when—has already died. Now Roland and Jake exist in different worlds, but they are joined by the same madness: the paradox of double memories.

Roland, Susannah, and Eddie must draw Jake into Mid-World then follow the Path of the Beam all the way to the Dark Tower. But nothing is easy in Mid-World. Along the way our tet stumbles into the ruined city of Lud, and are caught between the warring gangs of the Pubes and the Grays. The only way out of Lud is to wake Blaine the Mono, an insane train that has a passion for riddling, and for suicidal journeys.

Review:

Only Stephen King could put a fantasy version of a Wild West gunslinger, a heroin addict from the 1980s, and a disabled activist with multiple personalities in a riddle contest with a sentient train and make it feel like horror. And not just horror, but really good horror.

After The Drawing of the Three, I really wasn’t enjoying this series all that much. I only read book two to discuss it with a friend, and said friend (and a spoiler he gave me after I finished book two) was the main reason I picked up this book.

And I’m so glad I did, because I actually enjoyed this one.

I think a large part of that was the setting. Instead of desert in The Gunslinger and an interminable beach in The Drawing of the Three, Roland and company actually went to some interesting places in this book. They spent some time in a forest, traveling across a grassland, and in a small village entirely populated by elderly people. But the most interesting place to me by far was the city of Lud.

Lud has a very post-apocalyptic feeling – even though it hadn’t gone through one singular apocalypse, it’s been devastated by years of war, two different factions fighting each other within the city walls, and terrifying technological happenings that take on a supernatural element because no one understands how or why they work. Considering that the gang was just passing through, I got to see a remarkable amount of the city, but I wish I had been able to explore it more. I love the idea of a long-lost people creating great architectural and technological marvels and the people living with them now not comprehending what it was that the ancient people actually did.

This book also reveals some more details about Roland’s world and why it is the way it is (giving no answers but raising plenty of questions), a bit about Roland himself, and a lot more about Jake. It gets Eddie on board with the “find the Dark Tower” quest, but it still doesn’t explain what the Dark Tower does or why Roland wants it so badly. There’s several encounters with terrifying ancient technology that were really interesting, and it’s definitely leaning harder into horror than the previous two books did.

I can’t call this one of my favorite books, but I actually enjoyed it. I was already planning on reading the next book, and then this one went and ended on a cliffhanger. As annoying as that is, it makes me glad I’d already decided to continue the series. If nothing else, this world is finally getting interesting.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: Severance

Title: Severance

Author: Ling Ma

Genre: Satire/Post-Apocalyptic/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Death, body horror, terminal illness, zombies, blood, gore, bodily fluids, existential horror, sexual content (minor), guns, death of children, pregnancy, confinement, death of parents, drug use (mentions), suicide, suicidal thoughts, car crash (mention), child abuse (mentions), religious bigotry, alcohol use, vomit (mentions)

Back Cover:

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

Review:

I barely skimmed the back cover before picking this up. I’m trying to read more broadly. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly read a satire, it’s by a Chinese author featuring a Chinese protagonist, and looked to be satirizing the meaninglessness of modern work culture (relatable) and post-apocalyptic fiction (I’ve read a lot, could be interesting).

This was published in 2018, but I had to check. I think it was supposed to be satire of the modern millennial life in NYC or modern work or the post-apocalyptic genre or all of the above. In 2018, maybe it was. But in February 2022, nearly two years into a deadly global pandemic that varies only slightly from the “epidemic” of the book, Severance isn’t satire – it’s prophetic.

This book is told out of order, altering back and forth between Before and After. Before and After what isn’t obvious in the book, but it’s clear to me. I can’t pinpoint a particular event or moment, but my life has definitely divided into Before Covid and After Covid. As Candace says, “It seemed to happen gradually, then suddenly.” Candace keeps going into work as everything slowly crumbles, keeps trying to do her job even though there’s less and less job to do, until suddenly it’s After and nothing is the same.

I am not going to talk about the After timeline. It has its own emotions and its own kind of horror, but the Before timeline is what mattered most to me.

I didn’t think I had much if any of that “collective pandemic trauma” people talk about. Then I read Severance, and it turns out I do. When Candace’s job started requiring N95 masks, I felt a sinking familiarity. When a character first said the phrase “these uncertain times,” it felt like a punch in the gut. This book pulls on the trauma of living through a pandemic and the horror of surviving an apocalypse and combines them into something vividly repulsive and hideously possible. It evokes the visceral terror of being in a place usually full of people and discovering you are alone; the agonizing helpless realization that even if you survive this, there is no future; the despair of knowing that even if the world is ending, the only thing you can do is get up and go to work.

I read this as an audiobook at work, my mind lost in the horror and despair of this barely-fictional world while my hands, nearly independent of the rest of me, did my job. Scan the box. Open the box. Take out the bag. Label the bag. Put the bag in a new box. Label the new box. I repeat the same process over and over again, just like the epidemic victims in the book. I think that – the monotonousness and mindlessness of modern work – is what Severance is supposed to be satirizing. But that is not what I took from it.

If there is an apocalypse, it won’t be like any of my post-apocalyptic novels. If it’s like any work of fiction, it will be like this. And if that’s the case, I don’t think I want to survive. I took several books off my to-read list. I have no more desire to read any post-apocalypses. I am too afraid of surviving the end of the world.

I’ve never legitimately described a book as life-changing before, but Severance is. I feel like I’ve just realized the world is about to end and can’t understand everyone continuing on and worrying about unimportant stuff. After I put the book down I felt off-kilter, like my life (or my psyche) was in a box that just got knocked off a table and nothing inside can ever be the same again. I feel like I have to sit down and figure out what actually matters because most of the shit I’m doing now just doesn’t.

Severance feels terrifyingly, painfully, imminently possible. If no one ever recovered from covid, we might be living in the world of Severance right now.

This book is not satire. It’s psychological, existential horror.

Review: The Ever Cruel Kingdom (DNF)

Title: The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Series: The Never Tilting World #2

Author: Rin Chupeco

Genre: Fantasy/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, fire, cannibalism (mentions), violence, suicidal thoughts (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 35%

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of book one.

Back Cover:

After a treacherous journey and a life-shattering introduction to a twin neither knew she had, sisters Haidee and Odessa expected to emerge from the Great Abyss to a world set right. But though the planet is turning once again, the creatures of the abyss refuse to rest without another goddess’s sacrifice.

To break the cycle, Haidee and Odessa need answers that lie beyond the seven gates of the underworld, within the Cruel Kingdom itself. The shadows of the underworld may hunger to tear them apart, but these two sisters are determined to heal their world–together.

Review:

I went into my Currently Reading shelf on The StoryGraph to clear out a few books I’d finished, and I was genuinely surprised to discover that I had started reading this book. And that, I think, is the most damning criticism I could give it.

Book one, The Never Tilting World, was good. Not spectacular, but good. I was curious enough about the world and what really happened to break it that I was willing to pick up this one. But it didn’t grab me.

To be fair, not all of this was entirely its fault. This wasn’t a “Must read it now!” read so much as a “This could be interesting.” And picking it up so long after book one, I had a difficult time reorienting to how the magic worked and the details of the world. This would not have been an issue if I’d read it directly after book one.

That said, there were some issues in the book itself. Mainly in perspective. The story is still told in the alternating perspectives of Haydee, Odessa, Lan, and Arjun. Four narrators is hard enough to balance in any book, but since all four of them were in the same place doing the same things together, it was really hard to keep track of who was talking. The multiple narrators worked when there were two on each side of the world, but got confusing when everyone was together.

It also didn’t add much to the story. The only thing I remember about the characters from book one was that Odessa’s parts were a first-person account of a descent into madness, and that was interesting. In this one, they were all bland. There was Haydee the energetic sister, Odessa the quiet sister, Arjun, and Lan. This, again, probably would not have been an issue if I’d read this book directly after finishing book one so these people were fresh in my mind. But with several months between books, The Ever Cruel Kingdom didn’t bother to tell me why these people were worth reading about.

But I didn’t pick this up for the characters. I picked it up because I wanted to find out what happened. Why the world broke, why the two older goddesses each have one of the younger and told her that her sister was dead, what the truth really is. But 35% in, we’ve made almost no progress finding out the truth. The only people who know are the two older goddesses, and they flatly refuse to give any answers. I thought from the back cover that they might be going to the underworld and find out the origins of the whole goddess system. But they’re mostly just scrambling around in the desert (the least interesting of the two setting options), trying to get Haydee’s mother to give answers that she obviously doesn’t want to with very little indication that they might try another strategy later. The world was my favorite part of book one, and this one neither explores it nor gives me more information about it.

This isn’t a bad book. I didn’t hate it. If I’d read it right after book one I might have kept reading, and if you loved book one you’ll probably love this one. I just found it uninteresting. If I can forget I started it, I don’t see much of a point in finishing it.

The Never Tilting World series:

1. The Never Tilting World
2. The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Review: The Gunslinger

Title: The Gunslinger

Series: The Dark Tower #1

Author: Stephen King

Genre: No idea. Post-apocalyptic low-fantasy western?

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, gore, gun violence, excrement, death of animals, sexual content, misogyny, infidelity (minor)

Back Cover:

Beginning with a short story appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1978, the publication of Stephen King’s epic work of fantasy — what he considers to be a single long novel and his magnum opus — has spanned a quarter of a century.

Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, The Dark Tower series is King’s most visionary feat of storytelling, a magical mix of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that may well be his crowning achievement.

In The Gunslinger (originally published in 1982), King introduces his most enigmatic hero, Roland Deschain of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting, solitary figure at first, on a mysterious quest through a desolate world that eerily mirrors our own. Pursuing the man in black, an evil being who can bring the dead back to life, Roland is a good man who seems to leave nothing but death in his wake.

Review:

I am not the biggest Stephen King fan. He’s definitely a good writer, but I’m not very into the horror genre and that’s what he’s famous for. I didn’t know what this book was about going in or even if it was horror or not, but one of my friends has been going on and on about how awesome this series is and I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I have yet to see a description for this book that actually says much about what the book is about, instead of something like “the first volume in King’s magnum opus” or some other such praise that tells me nothing about the story. The story is about the gunslinger, whose name we later learn is Roland, tracking the mysterious “man in black” across a desert wasteland. Along the way he reflects on his past and tells some of his story to people he meets, so you slowly put together some of his backstory, what this world is, and why he’s chasing the man in black, although the book ends before the puzzle is anywhere close to complete.

That’s really all there is to the plot. Roland is traveling across the desert wasteland and we the reader get stories and flashbacks to orient ourselves to the world (and the characters, to a point) as we go. Even the mysterious Dark Tower that gives the series its name doesn’t get mentioned until the end and I have no idea why Roland wants to find it so bad. I actually have very little idea about Roland himself – the book contains a lot of things that he did or that happened to him, but very little about who he is as a person. He kept his thoughts and feelings tightly under wraps and that prevented me from connecting with him as a character. I didn’t dislike him, but I didn’t know enough about him to like him, either.

The Gunslinger grabbed me right out of the gate with questions: who this gunslinger is (he doesn’t get a name until quite a ways in), why he’s chasing the man in black, who the man in black is, and whether the gunslinger is just traveling through a desert or if the whole world is some apocalyptic desert wasteland. But then it doesn’t make much of an attempt to answer the questions. Even though it’s long enough to be a complete novel, the whole book feels like the first bit of a longer story – the part where the protagonist may have a goal but everything is relatively normal, and the reader is getting oriented to the world before everything goes sideways and the plot starts. I have to imagine this was intentional and Stephen wanted to make the whole series feel like a single story split into multiple volumes, but it was absolutely bizarre to read a whole book that felt like a beginning. It technically is a self-contained story, but the whole book had a feeling of waiting for the plot to start.

If I was just reading on my own, I probably wouldn’t continue the series. This book was reasonably interesting, but it wasn’t enough to grab me and leave me begging for book two. But I had a great time discussing this book with my friend, and my library has the whole series on audiobook. So I’ll probably read book two eventually, if for no other reason than discussing it with my friend.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: The Never Tilting World

Title: The Never Tilting World

Series: The Never Tilting World #1

Author: Rin Chupeco

Genre: Fantasy/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, murder, grief, gore, rape/sexual assault (mentions), sexual content (explicit), body horror, chronic illness, physical abuse, emotional abuse, forced marriage (mentions), injury, fire/fire injury, trauma

Back Cover:

Generations of twin goddesses have long ruled Aeon–until one sister’s betrayal split their world in two. A Great Abyss now divides two realms: one cloaked in eternal night, the other scorched beneath an ever-burning sun.

While one sister rules the frozen fortress of Aranth, her twin rules the sand-locked Golden City–each with a daughter by their side. Now those young goddesses must set out on separate, equally dangerous journeys in hopes of healing their broken world. No matter the sacrifice it demands.

Review:

I am having a really hard time figuring out what to say about this book. I think it’s a case of my experieincing self and remembering self differing – I very much enjoyed this book while reading, but looking back I’m having a hard time saying exactly why. I think I mainly enjoyed the world and the plot and the creative mythology involved, because trying to write about the characters, I’m realizing that in retrospect they’re all pretty bland.

There are four alternating perspectives in this book – Haidee and Odessa, the young goddesses, and Arjun and Lan, the goddesses’ love interests and traveling companions.

Odessa, the goddess of the eternal night side of the planet, is the most memorable because of the great first-person narration of a character going mad. She’s not unlikeable at the beginning – when the book opens, she’s sheltered, bookish, trying to rebel a little against her mother’s control, and not at all sure what to do about her crush on Lan. But Rin Chupeco does an absolutely stunning job with first-person narration of a person losing her self and not even realizing as she becomes darker and more unhinged. She became not at all likeable as a person but absolutely compelling as a character.

Lan, Odessa’s love interest and one of her traveling companions, is traumatized. I really can’t remember much else about her. Well, that and she’s there to provide perspective to how unhinged Odessa gets as the story progresses. Lan led an exploring expedition, everyone except her died, and she has a lot of trauma around that. The trauma is handled really well, but it also seems to be her main personality trait.

Haidee, the goddess on the eternal day side of the planet, is Odessa’s complete opposite. She enjoys engineering and mechanical tinkering, is full of compassion for everything and everyone, and embodies the bright sunniness of her side of the planet without going over the line into scorching desert. She wasn’t a stand-out character, but she was definitely likeable – not a fascinating person or a charismatic personality, but honestly the only character in the book that I would want to be friends with.

Arjun, Haidee’s traveling companion, was definitely the weakest of the four perspectives. That doesn’t mean that he was bad, I just found him less compelling. He was a lot of the “orphan grows up with a bunch of other orphans raised by one adult and gets good at fighting and living a hardscrabble life” stereotype, with a few interesting additions that just barely keep him from being cardboard. He didn’t have much motivation, though, which I think is why he was the least compelling. I also think his perspective got the least page time, but I didn’t count pages to see if that was accurate.

I didn’t hate any of these characters, but it was really the concepts that made me enjoy the reading experience. The magic system is really interesting (even if I didn’t fully understand it), I loved the idea that the world is ruled by women who are supremely powerful goddesses and yet are mortal and every so often must be replaced by their daughters, and there are a lot more layers around the Breaking – when the world stopped spinning and divided into two kingdoms of eternal day and eternal night – and how it happened than appear on the surface. Even the settings are interesting, from a frozen fortress to seas full of krakens, golden cities protected by glass domes to creatures swimming through oceans of sand instead of water, there are a lot of really fascinating and creative fantasy things in this world. For me, the characters were more of a vehicle to explore this world and uncover its secrets, and that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Reading book two isn’t high on my priority list, but I do intend to get to it eventually. The characters weren’t stellar, but they were perfectly okay, and I wouldn’t object to spending another book with them, especially since I have so many unanswered questions about what happened to break the world and what secrets Odessa and Haidee’s mothers are hiding. And the broken world was such a cool setting, I’m excited to explore it more in book two.

The Never Tilting World series:

1. The Never Tilting World
2. The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Review: Archivist Wasp (DNF)

Title: Archivist Wasp

Series: Archivist Wasp Saga #1

Author: Nicole Kornher-Stace

Genre: Post-Apocalyptic/Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, dead children, ghosts, physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse

Read To: 25%

Back Cover:

Wasp’s job is simple. Hunt ghosts. And every year she has to fight to remain Archivist. Desperate and alone, she strikes a bargain with the ghost of a supersoldier. She will go with him on his underworld hunt for the long-lost ghost of his partner and in exchange she will find out more about his pre-apocalyptic world than any Archivist before her. And there is much to know. After all, Archivists are marked from birth to do the holy work of a goddess. They’re chosen. They’re special. Or so they’ve been told for four hundred years.

Archivist Wasp fears she is not the chosen one, that she won’t survive the trip to the underworld, that the brutal life she has escaped might be better than where she is going. There is only one way to find out.

Review:

There is a remarkably long list of things in this book that generally I really like in books:

• Badass girls with badass names who are good at fighting
• Being chosen to do the holy work of a goddess, especially if said holy work involves said fighting
• Characters visiting underworlds on quests
• Ghost hunters
• That hint that Archivists are maybe not as special as they’ve been told for the last four centuries
• All of this is also in a post-apocalypse world

And yet there were just too many things I couldn’t get past to enjoy the story.

The story opens with Wasp in a fight – well, actually at the end of a fight. She lets her opponent live for unclear reasons, and I was already a little off balance trying to figure out why Wasp was letting this girl live when it’s made very clear that she’s killed at least nine people before and not seemed to have any issue with that. It was a very confusing move from a character I had literally just met and I didn’t understand Wasp’s world or motivations enough to figure out what exactly was going on here.

It turns out not killing her opponent is a really really big deal because all the spectators want to see someone die (maybe because that’s what happens in these fights?) and There Can Only Be One. There is only one Archivist but a bunch of “Upstarts,” and every year three Upstarts fight the current Archivist one after the other. If the Archivist kills all three Upstarts, she stays Archivist another year. If she dies, the Upstart who kills her becomes the new Archivist.

That was really the part that I couldn’t get past. It’s an incredibly ineffient system. The goddess apparently wants the Archivists to capture ghosts, learn as much as they can about pre-apocalypse life from them, then send them on to the afterlife. But there’s only one Archivist at a time, she could very likely be killed and replaced every year, and the only one who actually knows how to do anything with ghosts is the current Archivist who explicitly doesn’t tell anyone. Even with all the notes the Archivists take, that’s not at all an efficient system.

Also, the Archivist and the Upstarts all seem to be under the authority of a priest of the goddess, who is violent, cruel, and physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive seemingly for the joy of hurting people he hates and knowing he’ll get away with it because he has nearly complete authority over them. I couldn’t figure out why he hated them so much, though, and that made his hatefulness seem excessive and gratuitous.

I really wanted to like this book, but the reasonless hatred of the priest and the incredible ineffeciency of the Archivist system killed the suspension of disbelief for me. I can absolutely see how other people would enjoy it. I just couldn’t make it work for me.

The Archivist Wasp Saga:

1. Archivist Wasp
2. Latchkey
3. Currently Untitled

Review: Parable of the Sower

Title: Parable of the Sower

Series: Earthseed #1

Author: Octavia E. Butler

Genre: Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Rape, pedophilia, death, death of children, death of animals, blood, gore, guns

Back Cover:

In 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.

Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.

Review:

I picked this up mainly because I had a PDF copy and I needed a PDF to read at work. It’s written in journal style, presented as entries from Lauren’s journal as she grows up in her neighborhood, survives the burning of the compound, and travels north.

Strangely for a post-apocalyptic book, there’s not a lot of focus on the adventure part of things. Lauren doesn’t even leave the compound until halfway through the book. She’s is smart and mostly philosophical. Her journals focus a lot on Earthseed, the religion she’s … she insists she’s not making it up, just discovering its truths, but it really sounds a lot like making it up. The more developed this idea becomes to her, the more important it is to her. I’m really not sure what the actual message of it is. Some of the Earthseed stuff seems good, but some of it seems a little weird (and kind of like something a 15-year-old would make up), so I’m not really sure how much of it Octavia Butler actually wanted the reader to believe.

And a note on the hyperempathy thing: I thought it meant that she felt emotional pain. In fact, she literally feels other people’s physical pain, just without the damage. So every time she hurts someone in self-defense, it also hurts her, meaning that the more effective she is at defending herself, the more vulnerable she’s making herself.

There’s also a lot of violence and destruction in the book, which makes an almost jarring contrast with the philosophical parts of it. There’s rape, and drugs, and lots and lots of death and killing, all presented in an unemotional way like this is just a part of how things are and there’s no sense getting upset about it. On one hand I get that, but on the other hand, as a very empathetic person, it was a little distressing to see so many people die without our main cast of characters caring.

It did end on a hopeful note, though. And there is a sequel (which I didn’t know about going in). Though paced much slower than I expected, it was a good story, and I’m actually kind of curious to see where the story goes from here.

The Earthseed series:

1. Parable of the Sower
2. Parable of the Talents

Review: The Deadly Nightshade (DNF)

Title: The Deadly Nightshade

Author: Justine Ashford

Genre: Post-Apocalytpic

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, being bitten

Read To: 20%

Back Cover:

The year is 2084, and the world has come undone.

Six years after The War wiped out the majority of the world’s population, nineteen-year-old Nightshade has become a deadly product of the chaotic environment in which she lives. Taught from childhood to suppress all unnecessary emotions—pity, compassion, love, hatred, fear—in the name of survival, she has no trouble defending herself against the gangs that ravage her world.

But when Nightshade is befriended by fellow loner Connor, the flame of humanness is slowly reignited within her. When the duo find themselves pursued by a vengeful gang, they are left with no choice but to seek refuge in a small town and knowingly threaten the safety of its inhabitants. Forced to choose between survival and surrender, with the fate of an entire community in her hands, Nightshade must decide whether to save her own life or her newfound humanity.

Review:

It’s been so long that I can’t actually remember why this ended up on my to-read list. I guess it was a sort of throwback to the dystopian/post-apocalyptic books I loved back in high school. And maybe I saw something good about it online? Who knows, it’s been there for a while.

I didn’t end up finishing it, mainly because it reminded me too much of the books published back when I was in high school – cashing in on a trend, generic and lifeless and formulaic.

If you tried to come up with the most generic post-apocalyptic world possible, you’d have the world in this book. There was a war and bombs destroyed all the buildings, the people who survived either banded into cruel and violent gangs or are individualistic violent scavengers, roaming the ruins to both scavenge canned goods from the rubble and hunt and gather to survive. Nothing creative, nothing unique, and explained mostly by exposition.

Nightshade’s father raised her to be prepared for this world by learning to hunt, fight, scavenge, etc. Which, not bad. I love me some badass female characters. But her father also taught her that emotions were a liablity and she needed to suppress them. Which I was initially okay with, since the back cover said the emotional arc would be about her “regaining her humanity.”

Except I found it so hard to believe that Nightshade had any emotions to regain. There was only one scene where she had any emotions at all, even though this was written in first person. I would have accepted her choosing to be unfeeling because she suppressed her emotions – you know, showing that she still had some. But she has zero compassion or sympathy at any point. Watching a woman get murdered while trying to steal food for her sick boyfriend doesn’t make her feel anything. At one point she helps out a family, not because she has any compassion for them, but because of some weird sort of logic about the daughter looking like her so maybe she can learn to be strong like her, too. I didn’t enjoy being inside her head because there was no human feeling there at all, and she was still the same at 20% into the book.

I gave up at 20% because that’s where Connor was introduced, and I didn’t like him either. He was the opposite of Nightshade – lighthearted, optimistic, relentlessly cheery, and deciding to be friends with Nightshade for absolutely no reason beyond “the plot says so” (or maybe “my one character trait is that everyone I meet is now my friend”). When he cheerily announced “I’m going with you!” to the girl he just met who clearly and obviously didn’t like him, my eyes rolled to the back of my head and I gave up.

I can put up with a lot in a book if one element is spectacular – I’m willing to put up with a mediocre plot for stellar characters, or mediocre characters for an amazing world. But I didn’t like these characters, this plot, or this world, and I’d rather spend my time on better books.

Review: The Swan Riders

Title: The Swan Riders

Series: Prisoners of Peace #2

Author: Erin Bow

Genre: Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, seizures, transhumanism (combining technology and organic life)

Spoiler Warning: This book is a sequel, and this review has spoilers of the first book, The Scorpion Rules. If spoilers matter to you, proceed with caution.

Back Cover:

Greta Stuart had always known her future: die young. She was her country’s crown princess, and also its hostage, destined to be the first casualty in an inevitable war.  But when the war came it broke all the rules, and Greta forged a different path.

She is no longer princess. No longer hostage. No longer human. Greta Stuart has become an AI.

If she can survive the transition, Greta will earn a place alongside Talis, the AI who rules the world.  Talis is a big believer in peace through superior firepower.  But some problems are too personal to obliterate from orbit, and for those there are the Swan Riders:  a small band of humans who serve the AIs as part army, part cult.

Now two of the Swan Riders are escorting Talis and Greta across post-apocalyptic Saskatchewan. But Greta’s fate has stirred her nation into open rebellion, and the dry grassland may hide insurgents who want to rescue her – or see her killed. Including Elian, the boy she saved—the boy who wants to change the world, with a knife if necessary.   Even the infinitely loyal Swan Riders may not be everything they seem.

Greta’s fate—and the fate of her world—are balanced on the edge of a knife in this smart, sly, electrifying adventure.

Review:

This book is intense. It’s not action-packed – in fact, most of the story takes place on a horseback journey across the Canadian wilderness – but oh god, the emotions.

This book has a bigger thematic element than The Scorpion Rules. Now that Greta is an AI, it asks the questions, “What is it that truly makes us human?” and “Can an artificial intelligence become more human?” Which are both very interesting questions to me, a person who is very uncomfortable with and kind of scared of transhumanism. The story leaves the second question ambiguous but does answer the first question – in a way that I liked but still felt a little clichéd.

There is a lot of really cool stuff in this book. There’s a lot more about the Swan Riders, including several major Swan Rider characters, and Talis the head AI is a major character (and actually quite enjoyable). The world and the other characters are all excellently done, and provide an excellent backdrop to Greta’s story.

Like I said in my review of The Scorpion Rules, if you don’t like Greta, you’re not going to like this book. This is very much her story, and not just because she’s narrating. She’s the first new AI in a while, she’s the first one in ages to look at being AI with fresh eyes, and her processing it, learning to deal with it, dealing with feelings of love and caring, and figuring out what it means to be AI and what it means to be human is the story. Sure, there’s a rebellion and some unexpected betrayal that adds tension, but that’s not really what the story is about. The story is about Greta, love, and the nature of humanity.

Which I had no problems with, because I really like Greta.

There were a few minor details I had issue with. The romance from the previous book, even though it wasn’t huge, was abruptly dropped. And a few of the AI-related details at the end got confusing. But the problems were small enough that I’m willing to overlook them – and besides, I was too busy enjoying the intensity of the emotions to worry about it.

I don’t think there’s going to be a third book in the series, and I’m okay with that. There’s room for one if Erin wanted to write it, but the series also wrapped up really well here. The ending is somewhat open, but it still brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. I thoroughly enjoyed this journey.

The Prisoners of Peace series:

1. The Scorpion Rules
2. The Swan Riders