Review: Strike the Zither

Title: Strike the Zither

Series: Kingdom of Three #1

Author: Joan He

Genre: Fantasy (YA)

Trigger Warnings: Death, injury, blood, violence, war, parent death (mentions), terminal illness, alcohol use (mentions), child death (mentions), vomit (mentions), animal death (mentions)

Back Cover:

The Chinese classic Three Kingdoms reimagined with a lady Zhuge Liang.

The year is 414 of the Xin Dynasty, and chaos abounds. A puppet empress is on the throne, and three warlordesses each hope to claim the continent for themselves.

Only Zephyr knows it’s no contest.

Orphaned at a young age, Zephyr took control of her fate by becoming the best strategist of the land and serving under Xin Ren, a warlordess whose loyalty to the empress is double-edged—while Ren’s honor draws Zephyr to her cause, it also jeopardizes their survival in a war where one must betray or be betrayed. When Zephyr is forced to infiltrate an enemy camp to keep Ren’s followers from being slaughtered, she encounters the enigmatic Crow, an opposing strategist who is finally her match. But there are more enemies than one—and not all of them are human.

Review:

I didn’t realize when I picked this up that I’d already read one book by this author before – or at least attempted to read, as I DNF’ed Descendant of the Crane in 2021. But the back cover on this one sounded much more interesting, and I didn’t DNF the other book for being bad, just because I wasn’t able to get into it – which could very easily have been more about my mood than the book itself. So I gave this one a shot.

And at first, I was really glad I did. I didn’t love the world-building – I’ve read too many fantasies set in actual ancient China, so this Chinese-inspired world felt like a discordant mishmash of ideas instead of a cohesive world, but I could live with that. What I did like was Zephyr, who was clever, calculating, always three steps ahead of everyone else (a trait I love in a character), and some intriguing combination of dedicated to her warlordess and desperate to prove herself useful. And even though the plot involved a lot of politics, it wasn’t slow and managed to involve a fair bit of action and intrigue along the way.

The back cover really doesn’t tell you much about what’s in the book. The infiltration happens almost immediately, and while Crow is definitely an antagonist, he’s not really a major player in the story. Just about every bit of the story you think you’re going to read wraps up in part one. Then in part two things go way off the rails, and that’s where I started to really struggle.

My big criticism of the story itself is that it sacrifices background for speed, and that blunts any potential emotional impact. I don’t disagree with the choice – a long setup would have done the story a disservice. But often the reader finds out about crucial pieces of information the moment they’re supposed to be connected to an emotional moment, so the emotions have to share my attention with the process of mentally putting this new information into the overarching picture of the book. This also makes the big revelation at the start of part two feel unexpected, but in a jarring, random way. I may have had a different experience if I’d read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese classic that this series is based on, but I haven’t. So maybe this is true to the original, but it was still difficult for me.

The problem I had with part two, and the reason I won’t be continuing the series, is definitely a case of it’s not the book, it’s me. A major event at the end of part one and a character’s response to it at the beginning of part two resulted in one major character ending up in the body of another major character. I do not like body-swapping. I can’t even really explain why, it just makes me extremely uncomfortable. It’s worse if the body-swapped characters try to pretend that they are the person whose body they’re in, which also happens here. So I spent most of part two wanting to leave the situation but also hoping that the characters would get back to the right bodies, because I was sure I would start to like it again once the body-swapping thing was fixed. But based on the ending and reading the back cover for the sequel, I think the characters are likely to stay in the wrong bodies until near the end of book two. And I do not want to deal with that.

On the whole, this is not a bad book by any means. It had a lot of aspects that didn’t do it for me, personally, but that’s not a judgement on the book itself. I’m having a hard time expressing any sort of overall opinion about it because the biggest thing I didn’t like about it (and quite possibly the smaller thing I didn’t like as well) were all matters of personal opinion. I like the ideas, it’s well-written, and it kept my interest despite being fairly politics-heavy. It just has some elements that aren’t for me, personally – but might be for you.

The Kingdom of Three Duology:

1. Strike the Zither
2. Sound the Gong

Review: The Genesis of Misery

Title: The Genesis of Misery

Series: The Nullvoid Chronicles

Author: Neon Yang

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: War, death, violence, unreality (severe), injury, sexual content (consensual, minimal descriptions), terminal illness, parent death, religious trauma, religious bigotry (mild), mental illness (delusions/hallucinations), confinement, involuntary sedation with drugs, medical content (mentions)

Back Cover:

An immersive, electrifying space-fantasy, Neon Yang’s debut novel The Genesis of Misery is full of high-tech space battles and political machinations, starring a queer and diverse array of pilots, princesses, and prophetic heirs.

It’s a story you think you know: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war.

But Misery Nomaki (she/they) knows they are a fraud.

Raised on a remote moon colony, they don’t believe in any kind of god. Their angel is a delusion, brought on by hereditary space exposure. Yet their survival banks on mastering the holy mech they are supposedly destined for, and convincing the Emperor of the Faithful that they are the real deal.

The deeper they get into their charade, however, the more they start to doubt their convictions. What if this, all of it, is real?

A reimagining of Joan of Arc’s story given a space opera, giant robot twist, the Nullvoid Chronicles is a story about the nature of truth, the power of belief, and the interplay of both in the stories we tell ourselves.

Review:

I picked this up for two reasons: a nonbinary protagonist and the idea of Joan of Arc but in space. And you know, this book definitely has both of those things. Misery is most definitely nonbinary. And there definitely are Joan of Arc-type elements to the overarching plot (although you probably have to know that’s what it’s supposed to be to spot them – it’s definitely more “Joan of Arc-inspired” than “space opera retelling of Joan of Arc”).

But if you go in expecting just that, you are not at all going to be prepared for what The Genesis of Misery is going to throw at you. Because like I said, those elements are there, but they are definitely not the main thrust of the story.

Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Misery for a moment. (I’m going to be using she/her pronouns here, because while Misery uses both they/them and she/her, the narrative primarily uses she/her.) She’s an interesting character by herself. She’s a bit of a troublemaker – not for the sake of making trouble or being rebellious, but because she just has other priorities that rank higher than “obey the rules.” One of those priorities is self-preservation. Born with the disease that killed her mother, and experiencing the delusions and hallucinations that the disease causes, her driving motivation at the beginning of the book is survival. And the best way to do that seems to be to convince everyone that the symptoms of her terminal illness are actually symptoms of being god’s chosen messiah. All of that makes for a very interesting character. Her tenacity, resourcefulness, and general focus on prioritizing what matters to her over what people around her want her to do made her compelling and enjoyable to read about.

I haven’t read many unreliable narrator stories – not intentionally, that just hasn’t been a big aspect of my reading in general. Misery definitely qualifies as one, though, and in a really interesting way. She’s unreliable because she experiences hallucinations and delusions as a symptom of her illness, and she is very aware of that fact. So I may not be able to tell if the narrative is telling me the truth, but neither can she. In fact, she was so unreliable that I ended up believing the exact opposite of whatever she believed. At the beginning, she was 100% sure it was just hallucinations and she was faking the messiah thing as a survival strategy. At that point, I figured the twist would be that she was really divinely chosen after all. But as the story goes on, she began to slowly begin to think that maybe she was god’s chosen after all – and I began to doubt that she really was the messiah, or even that this deity existed in the first place. It wasn’t really an unpleasant experience, but it was weird to basically switch opinions with the protagonist throughout the course of the book.

This review is already pretty long, and I haven’t even gotten into the plot. But honestly, the plot is not really all that important here. In fact, you could argue that there really isn’t much of one. Misery’s people are at war with the Heretics, who have rejected their god and are trying to invade. Misery is playing messiah (or growing into the role of messiah, depending on who you believe) to cover for the fact that she has a fatal disease. A lot of people are doing politics and such around Misery and have big plans for this and that, but for the most part Misery is doing her best to 1. Stay alive, 2. Stay not imprisoned, and 3. Convince people that the weird stuff about her is from messiah-ness instead of mind-altering space disease, in that order. Sure, there’s some Pacific Rim-style mech battles in space, but those don’t come in until quite a ways through the book and they’re not what it’s about anyway.

What really makes this story work is the religious aspect. This society has one god, the one true god, who agreed to help the humans who dispersed among the stars. This deity chooses saints, identifiable by their iridescent hair, who have powers to activate and control special types of stone that are used for all kinds of things through this society. This religion is integrated so deeply with the society that they never actually talk about a religion or name the faith – knowledge of this deity, following religious observances, the way the saints’ ability to control special stones make society function, it’s just part of how things are. At the beginning, despite being raised in the church, Misery doesn’t even believe in this deity. But ideas of heresy, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, paying lip service to religious rules while doing what you want anyway, the difference between ethics and religiosity, power structures, belief, and fanaticism are wound throughout the whole story. I don’t really know how to describe it. As someone raised in a religion that was big into fanaticism, private hypocrisy, and ignoring the spirit of the rules where possible, I found it both strange and sci-fi while simultaneously intimately and painfully familiar. Watching Misery start to believe that maybe she was the messiah had a similar ring – it was nearly the same process as my journey out of religion, but the opposite direction. It left me feeling a bit disoriented – which is, honestly, an appropriate feeling for this book.

I don’t think I have adequately expressed yet my overall opinion of this book. It’s good. It’s very, very good. But it’s an uncommon type of good. Some really good books hype you up. They get your adrenaline pumping, leave you emotionally exhausted at the end, and make you want to yell from the rooftops that everyone should read this book. (Honestly, as much as I liked it, if you’re not up for a book that’s heavily about weird space religions, you probably won’t enjoy it very much.) Instead, it’s a much quieter kind of good. It makes me want to slow down, savor the story, and appreciate the richness of the world and the journey. It makes me want to think and linger over all the religious elements, both thematic and emotional. There’s some bittersweet tones as I understand exactly why Misery is doing what she’s doing but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be painful for her. I can already tell I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while.

The Nullvoid Chronicles:

1. The Genesis of Misery

Review: Bronze Drum (DNF)

Title: Bronze Drum: A Novel of Sisters and War

Author: Phong Nguyen

Genre: Historical Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood (mentions), confinement, injury, sexual content (not described), colonialism, suicide attempt

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: Page 184

Back Cover:

Gather around, children of Chu Dien, and be brave. For even to listen to the story of the Trung Sisters is, in these troubled times, a dangerous act.

In 40 CE, in the Au Lac region of ancient Vietnam, two daughters of a Vietnamese Lord fill their days training, studying, and trying to stay true to Vietnamese traditions. While Trung Trac is disciplined and wise, always excelling in her duty, Trung Nhi is fierce and free spirited, more concerned with spending time in the gardens and with lovers.

But these sister’s lives—and the lives of their people—are shadowed by the oppressive rule of the Han Chinese. They are forced to adopt Confucian teachings, secure marriages, and pay ever‑increasing taxes. As the peoples’ frustration boils over, the country comes ever closer to the edge of war.

When Trung Trac and Trung Nhi’s father is executed, their world comes crashing down around them. With no men to save them against the Han’s encroaching regime, they must rise and unite the women of Vietnam into an army. Solidifying their status as champions of women and Vietnam, they usher in a period of freedom and independence for their people.

Vivid, lyrical, and filled with adventure, Bronze Drum is a true story of standing up for one’s people, culture, and country that has been passed down through generations of Vietnamese families through oral tradition. Phong Nguyen’s breathtaking novel takes these real women out of legends and celebrates their loves, losses, and resilience in this inspirational story of women’s strength and power even in the face of the greatest obstacles. 

Review:

I struggled with this book from the very beginning. And normally when that happens, I decide to stop fairly early on. It’s part of my whole “only read books that I enjoy” goal – if I’m not enjoying it, why keep reading?

The problem here is that I really wanted to like this book. It’s such a fantastic concept. I had never heard the story of Trung Trac and Trung Nhi before, but a pair of sisters who raise an army of women to drive out the people occupying their country is such a fantastic story. Even better, this is based on real historical people and events! My knowledge of Vietnam is extremely limited, so I was excited to learn more about Vietnamese traditions and values. And not only is Vietnam an awesome setting, this is specifically Bronze Age Vietnam, which, as someone who finds ancient history much more interesting than anything that happened less than a thousand years ago, I found especially appealing. There are so many good ideas and good concepts and things I really, really wanted to love and immerse myself in.

However, it ultimately ended up being disappointing. Some of that was stylistic. The writing was very a folktale, oral tradition type of style – narrative heavy, switching perspectives with no warning, not identifying particular “main characters,” and telling you everything that goes on instead of actually showing you. Though there wasn’t an explicit narrator, there was a strong sense of the story, the setting, and anything that might have made it feel vibrant being mediated and muted through the lens of an omnicient storyteller. The characters and world, though interesting in concept, struggled to rise off the page.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes this storyteller-narrator style could work – and it’s not an inherently bad choice for a story based in oral tradition like this is. It wouldn’t be easy to make it work in a 400-page novel, but it’s possible. In fact, I think it could have worked if it weren’t for this book’s second major problem: Nothing happens.

The back cover establishes that the death of Trung Trac and Trung Nhi’s father is when the story actually gets started. When I stopped reading, he was still alive. Nothing truly interesting happened until 150 pages into the book. The first 184 pages (and possibly more) were more like a slice of life in that time period. Trung Trac and Trung Nhi walked in the gardens, practiced fighting forms, learned from their tutors, fell in love, argued with each other, made occasional stupid decisions, had complex relationships with their parents, and generally just lived as Vietnamese young women under the Han invaders. Again, in itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If done right, having such a long period of “setting the scene” can make the rest of the story feel more important and impactful.

The problem is that this book tries to do both. With the storyteller style, the reader isn’t getting a lot of emotional connection with the characters, so it needs to have a stronger, quicker-paced plot to make it work. To keep a long period of setup from getting boring, the reader needs to create strong emotional connections with the characters. But by doing both, the narrator/storyteller style toned down the emotions and kept me from forming a connection with any of these characters that would have engaged me in the minutiae of daily life, and having such a long period of setup left me with no plot or major central conflict to get invested in.

This is a really difficult book to review because I desperately wanted to like it. I really wanted to read this story about warrior sisters in Bronze Age Vietnam! But the telling made two choices that both individually make sense (storyteller style to emphasize its oral origins and long setup to familiarize Western readers with the place and time) that combined to make it dull. Not unreadable, definitely, but not really enjoyable either. I wanted so much to like this. I just didn’t.

Review: Dream Runners

Title: Dream Runners

Author: Shveta Thakrar

Genre: Portal Fantasy (YA)

Trigger Warnings: Memory loss, violence, blood (mentions), death, parent death (mentions), grief, panic attacks, confinement, forced marriage

Back Cover:

Seven years ago, Tanvi was spirited away to the subterranean realm of Nagalok, where she joined the ranks of the dream runners: human children freed of all memory and emotion, charged with harvesting mortal dreams for the consumption of the naga court.

Venkat knows a different side of Nagalok. As apprentice to the influential Lord Nayan, he shapes the dream runners’ wares into the kingdom’s most tantalizing commodity. And Nayan has larger plans for these mortal dreams: with a dreamsmith of Venkat’s talent, he believes he can use them to end a war between nagas and their ancient foe, the garudas.

But when one of Tanvi’s dream harvests goes awry, she begins to remember her life on Earth. Panicked and confused, she turns to the one mortal in Nagalok who can help: Venkat. And as they search for answers, a terrifying truth begins to take shape—one that could turn the nagas’ realm of dreams into a land of waking nightmare.

Review:

I didn’t have high expectations when picking this one up. It gave me “mediocre YA romance” vibes, and I can’t really explain why. But I am a sucker for books featuring mythologies I’m not super familiar with, and for as interesting as Indian mythology is, I don’t know a whole lot about it. So I decided to give it a chance.

In many ways, this book does fall a little flat. The narrative assumes a base knowledge of Indian terms and phrases that I just don’t have, so I was frequently nudged out of immersion by an unfamiliar term and have to either Google or guess at the meaning. The descriptions were largely limited to color and shape, and occasionally size and shininess, making a visually rich world that lacked the multisensory richness that would have made it feel truly engaging. Aside from Tanvi and Venkat, the characters were well-rounded but largely uninteresting. And I guessed the big devastating twist really early.

But most of these things I only really noticed in retrospect. I read through Dream Runners fairly quickly and stayed engaged the whole time. And that’s because there is one thing this book does spectacularly well: emotions. Tanvi and Venkat alternate narration and both had different but vivid emotions they were going through. Tanvi especially, as she went through confusing, painful emotional process of emerging from the dream runner mental state and regaining her memories, had such vivid, realistic, engaging feelings that they covered over a multitude of confusing terminology and lifeless descriptions. The sheer emotionality of this story hit the perfect balance – it was sharp and intense without tipping over into corny and melodramatic. Regardless of the other flaws in this book, the emotional aspect is spot-on.

There was also an interesting theme of sisterhood and conflict running throughout the book. A large part of Tanvi’s journey as she gets her memory back is her sister – memories of her, her sister as she is now, seven years later, and the ongoing conflict between them. For most of the book, the naga and garuda conflict felt like an irritating distraction from what actually should be an emotional, personal story. But when it comes to a head in the climax, it actually ties into the theme of conflict between sisters.

I also have to briefly mention the romance (because it’s a YA book featuring one female and one male protagonist, there can’t not be a romance). I kept picturing Venkat as significantly older than Tanvi, so it felt a little weird for that. But the romance part was short, sweet, and very, very minor, which I appreciated. It added to the ending, but neither character spent too much time dwelling on it while they were supposed to be doing other stuff, which I think is generally the right way to do romances.

Ultimately, the book as a whole seemed a little flat. It was good, but not great; entertaining, but not engrossing. The world was solid and had good potential, but seemed to be missing a fundamental richness that would make it feel full and vibrant. But the plot on the whole was good, if a little predictable, and the emotions were spectacularly done. It’s certainly not the best book I’ve ever read, but it’s perfectly good.

Review: Shatter the Sky

Title: Shatter the Sky

Series: Shatter the Sky #1

Author: Rebecca Kim Wells

Genre: Fantasy (YA)

Trigger Warnings: Kidnapping, confinement, torture (mentions), injury, animal cruelty (mild), violence, fire, colonization (mentions)

Back Cover:

Raised among the ruins of a conquered mountain nation, Maren dreams only of sharing a quiet life with her girlfriend Kaia—until the day Kaia is abducted by the Aurati, prophetic agents of the emperor, and forced to join their ranks. Desperate to save her, Maren hatches a plan to steal one of the emperor’s coveted dragons and storm the Aurati stronghold.

If Maren is to have any hope of succeeding, she must become an apprentice to the Aromatory—the emperor’s mysterious dragon trainer. But Maren is unprepared for the dangerous secrets she uncovers: rumors of a lost prince, a brewing rebellion, and a prophecy that threatens to shatter the empire itself. Not to mention the strange dreams she’s been having about a beast deep underground…

With time running out, can Maren survive long enough to rescue Kaia from impending death? Or could it be that Maren is destined for something greater than she could have ever imagined?

Review:

Occasionally when I plan to come back to a book, I actually do. This is one of those books. Although to be fair, I gave up on it not because of the book itself, but because the audiobook was so quiet that even on max volume I couldn’t hear it over the background noise at my job. When I put it down, I knew I hadn’t given the book a fair chance, so I told myself I’d pick it up again in a different format.

And I’m glad I actually did. It didn’t grab me immediately, but I wanted to at least get past the setup that I attempted to listen to via audio. And by the time I got through that, the world grabbed me and the inciting incident had gotten the actual story started.

This story starts out really simple. Maren is perfectly happy to play second fiddle to her bold, brave, adventurous girlfriend, and would really rather stay in her mountain village instead of traveling the world. Kaia gets very little characterization besides being bold, brave, and adventurous (and Maren being deeply in love with her). I appreciated the rich descriptions of the village, but I really wasn’t connecting with any of the characters.

Then Kaia got taken and Maren decided she was going to steal a dragon, and the story really started to pick up. Maren’s straightforward plan goes sideways really quickly, as it turns out stealing an entire dragon is not as easy as it seems. Plus there’s a whole lot of other stuff going on, and the reader gains awareness of it as Maren does. What starts as mild racial tensions turns out to be a whole anti-imperialist rebellion. What starts as a simple steal-a-dragon quest turns into learning the truth about how the emperor deals treats his dragons and those who care for them. What starts as a simple goal to rescue a girl taken by the Aurati eventually reveals the significantly darker reality behind the Aurati as an institution.

I blazed through this book in two days because it’s very good. The world is well-drawn, I love dragons, I love the unique and creative way dragons are managed in this world. Maren herself is a great character who does some fantastic growth, and I love the way the slow revelations about what is actually going on are revealed in parallel with her growth – the more Maren comes out of her complacency and takes risks, the more both she and I learned the truth of this world. It was just very well done. Plus, you know, it’s hard to go wrong with dragons.

I didn’t realize going into this one that there’s a sequel, but I’m glad there is. There’s definitely more adventure to be had here, and I want to see where it goes. And of course no YA fantasy featuring a rebellion is going to be complete until the rebellion is done. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.

The Shatter the Sky series:

1. Shatter the Sky
2. Storm the Earth

Review: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Title: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Author: Kim Fu

Genre: Short Stories/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Vary by story; see end of review for list

Back Cover:

In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.

Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

Review:

Admittedly, I have not read a ton of short story collections. However, in my limited experience I’ve never encountered a short story collection where every single story is spectacular. But Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century contains twelve stories that are weird, vivid, occasionally disturbing, brilliant, and unforgettable.

Some of them were disturbing or just plain weird (“Sandman,” “Scissors,” “Bridezilla”). Some inspired a lot of emotions, sometimes very intense ones (“Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” “Time Cubes,” “June Bugs”). Some of them left me feeling like there was some meaning just beyond the written words that I wasn’t quite getting (“Liddy, First to Fly,” “Twenty Hours,” “In This Fantasy”). And some were just perfectly good short stories (“#ClimbingNation,” “The Doll,” “Do You Remember Candy”). But all of them were great in their own way.

Personally, I love the off-kilter feeling of the normalized weirdness in magical realism. And even though many of these stories don’t fit into strict magical realism territory (there are several that could be better categorized as science fiction, horror, or even contemporary), they all have that same vibe. They are infused with a feeling that everything is a little strange, a little off, a little not quite what you expected and that you’re the weird one for thinking it’s strange. If anything connects these stories, it’s that feeling, and I loved it.

If I had to pick a few favorites, I would go with “Sandman” (surprisingly emotionally compelling despite being very weird in concept), “Do You Remember Candy” (is there a word for the grief of losing something you haven’t actually lost yet? Because that’s what this story inspires), and “Time Cubes” (vividly sad with a dark but bittersweet ending). (June Bugs” does get an honorable mention for its heart-poundingly realistic depiction of the more subtle kind of abusive relationship.) But like I keep saying, there are no bad stories here. All of them are great in their own way. This short story collection is definitely worth reading.

Trigger Warnings:

• Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867: Parent death, unreality (minor)
• Liddy, First to Fly: Body horror
• Time Cubes: Mental illness, suicidal ideation, suicide
• #ClimbingNation: Death, sibling death, grief
• Sandman: Unreality, body horror (kinda)
• Twenty Hours: Death, romantic partner death, murder, gun violence, infidelity (mentioned as hypothetical), blood (mentions), body horror (mild)
• The Doll: Child death, death, suicide
• In This Fantasy: Domestic abuse, death, blood, murder, infidelity, unreality
• Scissors: Sexual content
• June Bugs: Domestic abuse, emotional abuse, toxic relationship, guns, insects
• Bridezilla: Animal death, ecological disaster (mentions)
• Do You Remember Candy: Loss of senses, strained parent-child relationship

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: Kaikeyi

Title: Kaikeyi

Author: Vaishnavi Patel

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Sexism, misogyny, death, grief, war, violence, blood, abandonment, domestic abuse (mentions), parent death (mentions), infertility (mentions), forced marriage, pregnancy, religious bigotry (minor), animal death, sexual content with dubious consent (mentions)

Back Cover:

In the vein of Madeline Miller’s Circe comes a bold and sweeping debut that reimagines the life of Kaikeyi, the vilified queen of the Indian epic the Ramayana.

“I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions—much good it did me.”

So begins Kaikeyi’s story, that of a young woman determined to create her own destiny in a world where gods and men dictate the shape of things to come. But as she transforms herself from an overlooked princess into a warrior, diplomat, and most-favored queen, Kaikeyi’s will clashes with the path that has been chosen for her family. And she must decide if her resistance is worth the destruction it will wreak.

Review:

I have to start out by saying that I have not read the Ramayana, although it is on my list of things to read eventually. So I had zero context going into this. But I do know I love reading books in interesting settings (ancient India certainly fits that bill) and usually enjoy vilified characters getting to tell their side of the story, especially when said character is a warrior queen fighting against society and the gods themselves to make her mark. I didn’t know if I was going to get an anti-hero or a heroine whose story got told only by her enemies, but I was excited to find out.

Kaikeyi herself was a fantastic character. As a woman, her purpose in life was to be married off; as a princess, she learned a lot about politics and diplomacy; as a stubborn sister, she convinced her brother to teach her to fight and drive a war chariot. She is also on-page aro-ace, making the eventual marriage an even worse prospect. And she also has a magic that lets her influence others’ thoughts and feelings, which adds an extra dimension to the politics. She wants equality for herself and other women, and she will use all the tools available to fight for it.

There is a lot of politics and diplomacy in this book. Normally that’s something I don’t enjoy, but Kaikeyi’s magic and its uses in getting her way made it tolerable and sometimes even enjoyable. I also love reading about characters who are good at what they do, and Kaikeyi is very, very good at what she does. I’m sure some of it is the magic, but she’s also had a lot of practice and is determined to make life better and more equal for women. Somehow even the fully political parts never crossed the line into dull.

I very nearly did not finish this book, and that is not at all the book’s fault. I’ve been under a lot of stress related to an unnecessarily complicated and frustrating move, and apparently my emotions are a little raw. As the book moved towards the end and things kept getting worse and worse as the climax approached, I nearly stopped – not because I didn’t want to see how it ended, but because I couldn’t handle the emotional intensity. I assumed it would have a sad, tragic, likely violent ending (again, have not read the Ramayana, but “vilified queens” rarely have happy endings in any mythology) and I liked Kaikeyi too much to want to watch that happen.

But I pushed through and I survived (and the ending wasn’t nearly as tragic as I expected). And I am very glad I stuck it out. Even without the context of knowing the Ramayana, Kaikeyi is a great book. I suspect that it would be even more interesting and engaging to someone who knows the original myths of the queen who is reimagined in these pages.

Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author: Gabriel García Márquez (translated by Gregory Rabassa)

Genre: Classic/Magical Realism

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, death of children, mental illness, murder, war, sexual content, adult/minor relationship, infidelity, incest, body horror, religious bigotry, rape

Back Cover:

Gabriel García Márquez’s finest and most famous work, the Nobel Prize-winning One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles, through the course of a century, life in Macondo and the lives of six Buendía generations-from José Arcadio and Úrsula, through their son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía (who commands numerous revolutions and fathers eighteen additional Aurelianos), through three additional José Arcadios, through Remedios the Beauty and Renata Remedios, to the final Aureliano, child of an incestuous union. As babies are born and the world’s “great inventions” are introduced into Macondo, the village grows and becomes more and more subject to the workings of the outside world, to its politics and progress, and to history itself. And the Buendías and their fellow Macondons advance in years, experience, and wealth . . . until madness, corruption, and death enter their homes.

Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel weaves a magical tapestry of the everyday and the fantastic, the humdrum and the miraculous, life and death, tragedy and comedy—a tapestry in which the noble, the ridiculous, the beautiful, and the tawdry all contribute to an astounding vision of human life and death, a full measure of humankind’s inescapable potential and reality.

Review:

I mainly picked this up because I put it on hold at the library during a (very brief) classics-reading kick earlier this year and promptly forgot about it. When it came available, I figured I might as well read it.

This story chronicles six-ish generations of the Buendía family and the small town of Macondo. Family heads José Arcadio and Úrsula, along with a group of unrelated other people, take a long trek into the jungle and build a town. Their family grows, their children have children of their own, and the Buendía family gets bigger – in number, in wealth, in stature in the town. Times change, war happens, the town becomes less isolated, new scientific inventions happen, the family begins to disperse away from the town. The town of Macondo rises, and then falls, with the Buendía family.

This is a weird book, but from my limited experience with magical realism, this is weird in ways consistent with the genre. It’s like the real world, but a little to the left. Alchemy is a thing that works, there’s a side character who may be immortal or may be already dead, one character gets medical treatment from psychic doctors who are thousands of miles away, a character gets taken up into heaven, and nobody views this as at all out of the ordinary. In fact, magnifying glasses and turning metal into gold are treated with equal seriousness and excitement, like the ability to put the right ingredients into a pot and turn them into gold is a neat scientific advancement like curving glass to make things bigger.

The thing that surprised me the most about this book is that for all its century-spanning scale and magical realism bizarreness, it’s remarkably human. None of these characters are great people, but they’re all doing their best in their circumstances. I found something relatable in every character – in Úrsula’s resourcefulness in keeping the family functional; in José Arcadio’s desire to learn all about cool new things; in Fernanda’s rigid adherence to rules; in Amaranta Úrsula’s desire to leave the small town where she grew up and grow in the wider world; in Remedios the Beauty’s … well, let’s be honest, Remedios the Beauty was who I wish I could be. There are six generations of Buendías, each of whom love and lose, grow and die, succeed, fail, make mistakes, and ultimately just are in all their messy glory. It sounds pretentious to say this book is about the human condition, but it kind of is.

My biggest struggle was keeping the characters straight. Normally I would blame this on the audiobook format, and it is what caused my difficulty remembering Arcadio and Aureliano were two different characters. But the book itself doesn’t make it easy on me, either. This family reuses names a lot – there are three José Arcadios (and one just Arcadio), three Remedioses, and twenty-two Aurelianos (although to be fair, only four of them actually have major roles). There are also 32 biological relatives and 8 spouses stretching across the century this book covers, not to mention characters who aren’t part of the Buendía family. At some point, I felt like I needed to give them numbers to tell them apart.

I didn’t think I was much for the “sweeping family saga” type of book, but if they’re anything like this, I may have to reconsider. I didn’t get particularly attached to any one character (unless you count Remedios the Beauty, who I mainly loved because she’s #goals), but I enjoyed seeing the high-level view of the rise and fall, fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendías. One Hundred Years of Solitude is, much to my surprise, an enjoyable and remarkably relatable book.

Review: Black Water Sister (DNF)

Title: Black Water Sister

Author: Zen Cho

Genre: Contemporary Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent (mentions), cancer (mentions), injuries, murder (attempted), blood (brief), violence, loss of bodily autonomy

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: 68%

Back Cover:

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she’s decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies. As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.

Review:

I read Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and was mostly impressed by how rich it could have been if it had taken more time to explore the characters and setting. So I decided to try a full-length novel and find out if the extra space would provide a better experience.

The good news is that a longer book made for a much better protagonist and a more interesting (although still not as great as I think it could be) setting. The bad news is, I didn’t particularly like everything else.

Jess herself is pretty good. She hasn’t told her parents that she’s gay, let alone that she has a girlfriend. She feels like a failure, she knows her parents are struggling financially (and emotionally, though her mother’s and father’s problems in that regard are different) and she’s determined to do her best to protect them. This is complicated by the spirit of Ah Ma, her mother’s mother, who is the meanest, most entitled character I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading about, especially since she needs Jess’s body to do anything. If having your consciousness shoved to the back of your head while someone else pilots your body is as triggering an idea for you as it is for me, there are several scenes you are not going to like.

I was also frustrated by Jess’s refusal to tell anyone about anything. This may be a personal gripe, as I’m a huge believer in the power of an open and honest conversation to solve a good 90% of problems, but Jess refused to tell anyone what was happening even when they asked. I do get not wanting to tell certain things to your parents, but at least her girlfriend should have been supportive, even if she didn’t really understand. To a point, I understand not wanting to talk about all of the ridiculousness happening, but Jess’s complete refusal to even ask questions that might provide useful information got frustrating. And the only person she ever did ask, Ah Ma, gave reluctant answers that were sometimes complete lies.

There’s also not a whole lot in terms of plot. It starts out with Ah Ma wanting to stop a sacred grove being bulldozed to build condos, But that goes out the window pretty quick, and all of the sudden we’re dealing with assorted deities, mafia wars, how complicated relationships get when you don’t tell people anything, and Ah Ma’s opinion that a little murder solves a lot of problems. I’m still not entirely sure what the main conflict even was, because after it gave up on the “save the sacred grove” ideas, it just seemed to be a hodgepodge of small problems slowing tearing Jess’s life apart.

That’s not to say it was all bad. I’m always down for stories about gods and spirits, especially ones I don’t know much about. The setting – or at least the bits of it that came through – was really interesting. I wish it could have been more vibrant, as it gives the impression that the author is so familiar with Malaysia that she doesn’t consider what foreigners might want to read about it, but what was there was great. I liked Jess herself, for the most part, and the guy who definitely would have been the love interest if Jess wasn’t a lesbian was a pretty cool character. I think I liked him the best.

There were good ideas here. The concept was solid, and I don’t think I’ve read anything set in Malaysia before (unless you count The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, which I don’t because I thought it was set in fantasy China until I read the author’s website). But Jess’s refusal to communicate anything to anyone and Ah Ma’s hateful disregard for Jess made this story more frustrating than anything.