Review: How to Not Always Be Working

Title: How to Not Always Be Working: A Toolkit for Creativity and Radical Self-Care

Author: Marlee Grace

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Divorce (mention)

Back Cover:

Part workbook, part advice manual, part love letter, How to Not Always Be Working gently ventures into the liminal space where phone meets life, helping readers to define their work (aka what they do out of a sense of purpose), their job (aka what they do to make money), and their breaks (what they do to recharge, to keep sacred, to feel connected to themselves). The book delves into the discussion of what happens when your work and your job are connected or the same, and how to figure out how much is to much, and get the best use of your time.

For the corporate lawyer who is always on email as well as the bread-baker trying to something that’s just for themselves, How to Not Always Be Working includes practical suggestions such as getting a phone box and sleeping with your phone in a different room, and more philosophical prompts that invite readers to ask how they burn themselves out and why they’re doing it. A creative manifesto, this book is above all inclusive – insisting that deep breathing and yoga aren’t just for the 1 percent, and inviting any and everyone to create a scared space in their lives.

Review:

I don’t think the title of this book could have called to me any more if it was titled “Jay Needs To Read This Book.” I am generally always working. Most people assume it’s because I have three jobs. But though I do actually need two jobs to pay the bills, the third one is optional and voluntary. I have the time to not be working if I actually knew how to not always be working. I just have some sort of compulsion towards always doing something, and that something is almost always some variety of work.

I was so excited about the premise of this book that I actually paused when I got to the first exercise to do the exercise (which I’ve only ever done for one other book – generally I read books all the way through and then come back to any exercises). But that actually became the problem here. The first exercise was to write out a list of things that are your work. My list included items like “mending clothing,” “social media” (because, as one of my jobs is digital marketing, I’m hardly ever on social media if I’m not getting paid for it), and “most activities that happen in the kitchen.” Then I looked at the sample list Marlee provided, which included items like “balancing the books,” “posting on Instagram about a new product,” and “uploading a new podcast episode.” And realized that I had fundamentally misunderstood who this book is actually targeted at.

This book was not really written for people like me, who take extra jobs even though we don’t need them and who are always working because we have an undefinable, insatiable, irrational drive to always be “productive.” It’s targeted towards people who are self-employed in creative or hobby businesses or influencer-type gigs and who have a hard time drawing the lines between “I’m doing this for work because X is my job” and “I’m doing this for me because I enjoy X.” It is, fundamentally, about figuring out how and where to draw boundaries when your life and your hobbies are your work. (This is, obviously, not my situation. Besides reading, I don’t really have any hobbies. I was hoping this book would teach me how to change that.)

I’m sure this book would be valuable for people in that particular situation. I did finish it, and though it’s definitely influenced strongly by Marlee’s New Age-style witchy spirituality, a lot of the advice is very good and the exercises are practical. Honestly, I would probably find some of the exercises helpful anyway. But I haven’t done any besides the first one yet because I’m just so disillusioned with this book. I really love the principle and the idea and the concept and the call towards not always working. But I didn’t expect such a narrow focus on specific types of work. I probably will take the time to go back through the exercises and see what ideas I can extract and re-shape to fit my life. But sometimes you just don’t want to have to do that work, you know?

Review: Hild

Title: Hild

Series: Light of the World #1

Author: Nicola Griffith

Genre: Historical Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Death, injury (major), blood (major), sexual assault (mentions), violence, war, child death, pregnancy, childbirth, parent death (mentions), animal death (mentions), religious bigotry, incest (mentions), sexual content

Back Cover:

Award-winning author Nicola Griffith’s brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild.

In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king’s youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.

But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world—of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next—that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her.

Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the king’s seer. And she is indispensable—unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future.

Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early Middle Ages—all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith’s luminous prose. Working from what little historical record is extant, Griffith has brought a beautiful, brutal world to vivid, absorbing life.

Review:

This book has been in the back of my head for a while. I saw it somewhere, possibly a bookstore when it first came out, and the idea stuck in my head. I’m not sure if it was the idea of a fictionalized story of a saint’s childhood, or the idea that it was set in a place and historical period that I know nothing about but is far enough back to be interesting to me, or the concept of a young girl in a very man-centric society gaining power and influence through her own cunning. Or possibly it was the cover, which is not all that spectacular but for some reason grabbed me. Whatever it was, Hild has been lodged in my thoughts for a long time, and when it finally resurfaced again I decided to give it a shot.

It took me a long time to get through this book. Not because it was slow or boring or anything, but because it’s long and dense with detail, and also because I read it as an ebook which is not the best format for me to actually get through books quickly. I didn’t realize before picking it up that it was written by the same person who wrote Spear which I DNF’ed last year. But I think my issue with Spear might have been format-related, because Hild is told in an almost identical style – straightforward and unadorned, heavy on telling over showing – and I enjoyed this book so much.

I normally am not much for historical fiction because I usually find it boring. But a lot of that is because I just don’t find the time periods from the 1700s-ish on to be all that interesting – I much prefer ancient history. The British Isles in the 600s was far enough back to find interesting, and Nicola Griffith clearly did her research. I easily got wrapped up in the day-to-day of life in this world, which was richly detailed, fascinating, and not really what I would have expected. Though it wasn’t a central conflict of the book, there was always a simmering undercurrent of struggling against the land and weather for survival, which I suppose might have been an accurate feeling for the time period.

I know that this is a novel and therefore it’s hard to figure out the line between “accurate to research” and “made up for a better story” and therefore probably not accurate to say that I learned something. But in addition to being absorbed in a good story, I do feel like I learned something. Whether or not the wars and political machinations are true to history, and even if the details weren’t necessarily how things would have happened, I feel like I have a sense of what life, on the whole, might have been like in this time and place. And that was really cool.

I’ve been going on about the world for a while now, and that’s because everything that happens in this book is grounded in the reality of land and geography and the peoples who inhabit it. But what really made this book sing for me is Hild herself. She’s both an interesting, engaging character in her own right and a type of character that I really love to read about. It starts with her as a very small child, suddenly the only heir of a threat to the throne, being guided (or some might say manipulated) by her mother into a very specific role. But she is clever and observant and carves out a place for herself in the seer role. As the reader, I got to see inside her head and her thought processes and I know that everything she “sees” is just a prediction based on other patterns she’s observed. But even from her own point of view she comes across as a strange and uncanny child and young woman, and even though I know there’s no magic involved, I completely understand why others call her a witch. She inhabits the strange space of a child who had to grow up too fast, who is always in danger and must stay three steps ahead of everyone else to protect her life and the lives of those she loves, and who therefore acts and reacts in ways that someone on the outside might describe as strange and fey.

I think what I loved so much about this book, though, is that it covers so much. There’s not particularly a central plot. Hild’s driving goal is to keep herself and her loved ones safe from all the dangers the ever-shifting alliances and machinations of the power players of the day. She claws out as much agency as she can under the circumstances, but the context in which she acts is within the court of Edwin Overking, whose goal is to be king over all the kings of the land that will eventually be known as England. There are conflicts and challenges and small periods with defined goals, but overall it unfolds much as life does – piece by piece, event by event, with little in the way of a structured plot.

But the story opens with Hild as a young child, maybe five, and ends just as she blooms into an adult. And through it all, the world changes around her, and she grows and changes – from a child working hard to fit into the seer role and please the king to a young woman with her own agenda. I loved her grow into her role and then beyond it, pushing the boundaries. I loved her for her in-between-ness, a woman taller than most men, deft with healing herbs and spindle and equally deft with the war dagger she wears at her hip like the king’s fighting men. I loved her for the way she refused to take anything sitting down, determined to understand what had happened and what might happen, taking every opportunity she had to turn the situation her way.

This review is already absurdly long and I haven’t even touched on everything I could say about this book. It’s very long but it’s exactly as long as it needs to be. It is rich and atmospheric and so steeped in something undefinable and deeply engrossing that despite everything happening being completely earthly, there’s a mystic feeling that gives the whole story an air of being some kind of fantasy. I didn’t know going into this that there was a sequel, but there’s space for one and I want it. This book was so good and so much; I want to see where Hild directs the world next.

The Light of the World series:

1. Hild
2. Menewood

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: He Who Drowned the World

Title: He Who Drowned the World

Series: Radiant Emperor duology #2

Author: Shelley Parker-Chan

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Violence, blood, injury, death, bullying, self-harm (graphic), grief (severe), sexual content (explicit), misogyny, ableism, sexual assault, miscarriage, infidelity, murder, child death, parent death (mentions), suicidal ideation, body dysmorphia, homophobia, that complicated sexual trauma where you have sex when you don’t really want to as a means to get something else

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of the first book, She Who Became the Sun.

Back Cover:

How much would you give to win the world?

Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high after her victory that tore southern China from its Mongol masters. Now she burns with a new desire: to seize the throne and crown herself emperor.

But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor in the south, the courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband—and she’s strong enough to wipe Zhu off the map. To stay in the game, Zhu will have to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the talented but unstable eunuch general Ouyang, who has already sacrificed everything for a chance at revenge on his father’s killer, the Great Khan.

Unbeknownst to the southerners, a new contender is even closer to the throne. The scorned scholar Wang Baoxiang has maneuvered his way into the capital, and his lethal court games threaten to bring the empire to its knees. For Baoxiang also desires revenge: to become the most degenerate Great Khan in history—and in so doing, make a mockery of every value his Mongol warrior family loved more than him.

All the contenders are determined to do whatever it takes to win. But when desire is the size of the world, the price could be too much for even the most ruthless heart to bear…

Review:

This is a hard book to review. Not because it was bad, or even because I’m ambivalent about it – on the contrary, it was spectacular and I loved it. Even having read the first book nearly two years ago, it didn’t take me long to get back into the story. It kept me engaged throughout and even got my heart speeding up in a few particularly tense scenes. It was, above all, astonishingly good.

And I think that’s a large part of what makes it hard to review. I can’t share all the emotions it made me feel by writing about it. To get the full experience, you have to read it yourself. It’s vivid and intense and full of twists I didn’t see coming but probably should have and the kind of book that leaves you completely exhausted at the end because you’ve been feeling so much along the way.

Another part of what makes this hard to review is how utterly dark it is. The first book was dark, too, don’t get me wrong. Zhu is not a good person. She is ruthless and ambitious and claims she is willing to sacrifice anything to reach her goal, and this book puts that to the test. This is also a book where Zhu starts to challenge the bounds of a likeable character. In the first book, she was ruthless and ambitious and violent and did a lot of really horrible things. But in the context of a world that would rather let her starve than inconvenience a man, it didn’t seem unreasonable. In this book, she had reached some measure of security – though still under threat, she was one of the four dominant military and political powers of the area. But her ambition to be the greatest kept her pushing onwards, even as she destroyed others in the process. She was still a dynamic, compelling character and I never really stopped rooting for her, but as the book progressed I found myself repeatedly confronting the reality of her actions and not really being sure how to feel about them. In some ways, it feels weird to even apply moral judgements here, though I can’t fully explain why. But eventually both I and Zhu were looking at the consequences of her ambitions and wondering if it was really worth all that.

(Yet another thing I appreciate about this series: None of the women in these books – whether or not you want to count Zhu and her ambiguous gender identity as a woman – are shamed for their ambition or treated any worse than the men for their crimes. The society is blatantly misogynistic, but the narrative refuses to be.)

General Ouyang was a major player in the last book, and he still is in this one, but to a lesser degree. Some of that is because of his arc. Following on the events from the climax of book one, his is an equal but opposite story to Zhu. While Zhu’s ambitions propelled her to further heights, Ouyang’s relentless pursuit of revenge drove him to further lows. Zhu’s resolve clarified as Ouyang’s mind descended into chaos. I found myself mainly feeling compassion as he destroyed himself on the teeth of his own self-loathing. I wish he could have had a better ending, but he was so far gone that I think he got the best he could.

This book, being the last in the series, was an ending for every character, though not all of them died. Writing-wise, their endings made sense, fit with their arcs, and felt narratively satisfying. On a personal level, so many of them deserved better. Xu Da deserved better. Ma deserved better. Ouyang deserved better. Even Baoxiang deserved better (he deserved better last book, and even before – he is yet another case of an antagonist who I really just feel bad for).

And this brings me to the final reason this book is so hard to review: There is just too much to say. I haven’t said anything about Baoxiang’s story, even though he was a point of view narrator. I haven’t talked about the gender politics involved in this story, or the absolutely spot-on depictions of that very specific and hard-to-define type of sexual trauma where you have sex when you really don’t want to or with someone you don’t want to have sex with as a means to get something else, or the theme of being seen in a gendered body (and, to a lesser extent, a visibly disabled body), or how it’s paced so well that it feels like so much is happening without ever feeling rushed or monotonous, or the really awesome historical setting, or the ghosts.

If I talked about every amazing thing in this book, I could go on forever. But I’ve focused this review mainly on the characters, because despite all the action and adventure and ghosts and politics and invasions, this is a story about these characters and how their actions, good, bad, or otherwise, shape (and often end) the lives of the people around them and, ultimately, the course of history. This feels like a book (and, honestly, a series) that you could keep re-reading and discover something new every time. (It helps that these books are long.) So few sequels live up to their predecessor, but this one does – but it’s also unique to the point where I can’t say whether She Who Became the Sun or He Who Drowned the World is better because they’re both so good for different reasons and in different ways.

I’m running out of eloquent ways to say “this is an amazing book, you should read the whole series,” so there you go. This is an amazing book. So was the first one. You should read both – especially if you like stories that show your emotions no mercy.

The Radiant Emperor duology:

1. She Who Became the Sun
2. He Who Drowned the World

Review: Messiah (DNF)

Title: Messiah

Author: Gore Vidal

Genre: Classic/Satire

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia (mentions), internalized acephobia, death (mentions), suicidal ideation/suicide/death viewed as a desireable thing, alcohol use (mentions), car crash (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: DNF on page 136

Back Cover:

When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Gore Vidal’s deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

Review:

I really thought a book about a guy supporting the founder of a modern death cult would be good. I thought at least it would be interesting. I like reading books with excessive details about fictional religions, and the more weird, oddball, and cult-like the fictional religion, the better. I was excited about this book!

Yet somehow, this book about a modern suicide/death cult that becomes the biggest religion in the world was just dull. I got almost exactly halfway through it (136 pages out of 275 in my edition) waiting for it to pick up, and it never did. When I stopped, the promised TV appearance had just happened. Most of the story has been setup and backstory, but not about the mortician-prophet John Cave and his philosophy, or even what was going on in the world that would make the majority of people accept a death cult as the primary religion. Instead, it was about Eugene’s struggle to write a biography of Julian, the parties he went to and the people he talked to there, how the machinations of one acquaintance brought him into contact with John Cave, and his general skepticism about the whole thing.

And now a moment for some not-really-relevant character notes I think are worth mentioning: One side character claims to be over two thousand years old and nobody seems to think of that as anything more than a dubiously-plausible, but not impossible, oddity. It was a discordant magical-realism element in an otherwise classic-contemporary-satire story. Also, Eugene is on-page what we today would call asexual – explicitly not interested in sex, but still experiencing romantic attraction to women. Unfortunately, he views this as something “broken” about his ability to have relationships.

There’s also a secondary story set in the future. This book is written as Eugene, the protagonist, telling the story of how he met John Cave and helped him found his new religion, interspersed with snippets of his life as he is writing the story. But both are unfortunately dull. The future sections make it clear that Eugene had some kind of major split from the new religion of Cavesword and has spent several decades living in Egypt, where the Muslims work hard to keep the Cavite religion from entering. But that section was even less interesting, as Eugene is now an old man and spends most of his time tottering around his apartment and by turns talking with and avoiding a Cavite missionary recently arrived in the country.

There were a couple of reasons I think I struggled with this story. One is not at all the story’s fault – the edition I read appears to be from some kind of small independent press, which lead to a lot of small but annoying errors like missing closing quotations, missing periods at the end of sentences, and the occasional “I” replaced with “1”. A second reason is that the book was published nearly seventy years ago, and the style is definitely an older, denser, slower style than I’m used to – which is not necessarily a bad thing, but added an additional layer of distance to a narrative I was already struggling with. A third is that the story doesn’t write down anything John Cave actually says – there are scenes of him speaking, but the scene and mood of the audience is described in lieu of any actual words, and his ideas are filtered through others before being passed on to the reader. This guy is described as a hypnotic public speaker, a guy who can convince everyone he talks to that being dead is better than being alive, and yet his persuasive powers are filtered entirely through other people.

But I think the biggest issue was that the protagonist lacked passion. It’s told in first-person, and yet there wasn’t a single thing that made Eugene feel an emotion. I can understand being skeptical or disillusioned, but there was no feeling behind it. When John Cave spoke and what he said thrilled everybody, Eugene says that it is mesmerizing without ever seeming mesmerized himself. The story covered both before he got really involved in Cavesword and after he had his falling-out with it, and it’s clear that he got deeply involved at one point, but neither narration indicates that he was anything more than a bored observer who drifted in because his close acquaintances were involved and then drifted back out again. As someone who has left a religion I wholeheartedly believed and was deeply involved in, I didn’t get the sense even from the future narration that Eugene was ever much more than a moderately disinterested but useful observer to this forming cult.

The ideas here were good, but the story felt flat and lifeless to me. I think the idea of a death cult becoming the dominant global religion is fascinating. I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief that everyone would buy that immediately, so I think there needs to be some more societal context there. I also think it would have been better with a more dynamic, passionate protagonist, or at least a protagonist who felt like he actually believed in the new religion’s teachings. Or it could just be that I’m not very experienced with reading satire and I’m totally missing everything. Regardless, I don’t find it interesting enough to continue.

Review Shorts: Wayward Children Stories

I am a big fan of the Wayward Children series. My only problem is that the series is still ongoing, so I have to wait for the next book to be published before I can read more. So imagine my delight to discover that not only are there three Wayward Children short stories, they’re all available to read for free on Tor.com! Here’s some mini-reviews of the three of them – plus links to where you can read them for yourself.

In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children #2.5) by Seanan McGuire

See it on The StoryGraph here

Read it on Tor.com here

Jack seems to get an inordinate amount of time in the Wayward Children series, but I really don’t mind because she and her world of the Moors are great. This story is very short and incredibly atmospheric, and really reminds me of the early books in the series (which, since it’s meant to be set just after book two, makes perfect sense). It feels like a single scene of how Jack met her girlfriend Alexis that Seanan just couldn’t make fit in Down Among the Sticks and Bones but that she liked and thought was important, so she added some context and rich descriptions to the beginning and called it a short story. And personally, I think it worked very well. The Moors are fascinating anyway, and this reveals some details (or just reminded me of details that I forgot) and provides some more characterization for Jack’s mad-scientist mentor. It’s a fast, dark, and wonderful read and I enjoyed it very much.

Trigger Warnings: Death, child death, mental illness, body horror, romantic partner death (mentions), emotional neglect

Juice Like Wounds (Wayward Children #4.5) by Seanan McGuire

See it on The StoryGraph here

Read it on Tor.com here

In my review of In an Absent Dream, I complained that the book was too short because one of Lundy’s friends straight-up died and you only find that out in dialogue after the fact. I guess Seanan McGuire heard my complaints, because this is the story of the great quest that lead to that death. As anticipated, it was wrenchingly sad, although I think it would have had even more impact if I’d read it directly after In an Absent Dream. It was also very lyrical and heavy on the feelings of being a child – specifically the invincibility and belief that nothing truly bad is going to happen to you – but significantly less atmospheric than I expected. Which is a disappointment, because I love the goblin market that Lundy goes to and I wanted to spend more time there. But this is a short story, not a full book, and for what it is it really works. Fantastical and heartwrenching, as every Wayward Children story tends to be.

Trigger Warnings: Injury, death, child death, blood, body horror (mild)

Skeleton Song (A Wayward Children Story) by Seanan McGuire

See it on The StoryGraph here

Read it on Tor.com here

Christopher has been in several of the Wayward Children books so far, mainly the ones set at Eleanor West’s actual school, but he’s never been a major character. I mentioned in my review of Come Tumbling Down that I wouldn’t mind if he got his own book. But he got his own short story and honestly that’s good enough. His adventure in Mariposa, the world of music and dancing skeletons, is very straightforward and follows the pattern of the other stories set in the magical worlds – though it was light on how and why he came through the door in the first place and focused more on what he found there and how he fell back out. Every wayward child’s world is a place that connects to their struggle in our world, but Christopher having an illness heavily implied to be terminal and walking through a door into a world where death is not only not to be feared, but is a beginning of something better beyond the bounds of flesh, is the most obvious one so far. This is like a shortened and condensed version of a full Wayward Children book and I think it could have easily been made longer, but it also works as a short story. And if you’re missing your Wayward Children fix, it’s definitely worth reading.

Trigger Warnings: Death, body horror (mild), terminal illness (mentions)

The Wayward Children series:

1. Every Heart a Doorway
2. Down Among the Sticks and Bones
3. Beneath the Sugar Sky
4. In an Absent Dream
5. Come Tumbling Down
6. Across the Green Grass Fields
7. Where the Drowned Girls Go
8. Lost in the Moment and Found

Review: Lost in the Moment and Found

Title: Lost in the Moment and Found

Series: Wayward Children #8

Author: Seanan McGuire

Genre: Portal Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Parent death, gaslighting, threatened child abuse, threatened child sexual abuse, pregnancy (mentions)

Spoiler Warning: This book is eighth in a series, but it is essentially a stand-alone adventure and neither the book nor this review contain spoilers of previous books.

Back Cover:

Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go.

If you ever lost a sock, you’ll find it here. If you ever wondered about favorite toy from childhood… it’s probably sitting on a shelf in the back. And the headphones that you swore that this time you’d keep safe? You guessed it….

Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she finds that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not be as simple as it sounds.

And stepping through those doors exacts a price.

Lost in the Moment and Found tells us that childhood and innocence, once lost, can never be found.

Review:

The Wayward Children books are fundamentally not happy stories – despite the magic and often whimsy of the magical adventures, the stories are underscored by trauma. As the series goes on, it seems to lean even further into those underlying traumatic aspects. Where the Drowned Girls Go explored the trauma of getting spit back into a world where there is no place left for them, and Lost in the Moment and Found explores the other traumas – the things that made them go through the doors in the first place and the things that happen to them on the other side.

One of the most remarkable things about previous books in the series was how remarkably relatable they were. Lost in the Moment and Found was not to that level of extreme relatability. I think some of that might be me, though, as most of Antsy’s experiences in this book are just not ones I share. If you have experienced similar things, she’ll probably be more relatable. I did feel like Seanan McGuire nailed the experience of being a child as usual, but I didn’t find it quite as immersive this time around.

Unlike earlier books in the series, this book spends much more time on the trauma than on the cool magical worlds. (And as fun as I think it would be to explore the Shop Where the Lost Things Go, it’s not nearly as fun to read about.) It’s sad, poignant, and heartbreaking, and about the literal and metaphorical loss of childhood to trauma as well as brief meditations on the nature of loss and being lost in the first place. There also are some interesting details about how and why the doors actually work, which was quite interesting.

I should have suspected that this is the direction the series would end up heading after Where the Drowned Girls Go, but I guess I still think of the series as mostly dark whimsy like the earlier books. Lost in the Moment and Found isn’t bad at all. It’s just significantly more intense and down to earth than I was expecting. It’s dark and sad and definitely not my favorite Wayward Children book just for lack of that intense relatability that many of the others have, but it was absolutely good and wroth reading regardless.

The Wayward Children series:

Wayward Children short stores

1. Every Heart a Doorway
2. Down Among the Sticks and Bones
3. Beneath the Sugar Sky
4. In an Absent Dream
5. Come Tumbling Down
6. Across the Green Grass Fields
7. Where the Drowned Girls Go
8. Lost in the Moment and Found

Review: Harrow the Ninth

Title: Harrow the Ninth

Series: The Locked Tomb #2

Author: Tamsyn Muir

Genre: Science Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Body horror (extreme), injury (extreme), blood (severe), gore (severe), unreality (severe), grief, child death, murder, parent death, mental illness/psychosis, suicide (mentions)

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

Back Cover:

She answered the Emperor’s call.

She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend.

In victory, her world has turned to ash.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath ― but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her.

Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor’s Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?

Review:

It’s been three months since I read Gideon the Ninth, so I was prepared for it to take a little bit to get back into the story. I was also expecting it to be a little less enjoyable at the beginning because I wasn’t a huge fan of Harrow last book and I knew she would be the main character this time. So I was prepared to have a rough start.

What I was not prepared for was absolute incomprehensibility.

Some books feel like giant puzzles where the story keeps handing you pieces and it isn’t until the end where you figure out how they all fit together. This book does not feel like that. This book feels like it handed you a large box full of pulpy sludge, then at 74% of the way through the book it casts the spell to turn the sludge into puzzle pieces at which point they come together fairly easily.

If 74% feels like an oddly specific number, that’s because I checked. I looked at the time stamp for when the book started to make sense, because it took a very long time. The first three-quarters of the book are almost entirely incomprehensible. They go hard into the unreality and “unreliable narrator is unreliable because she can’t remember and isn’t sure what she’s seeing is real.” It goes back and forth between Harrow’s new life as a Lyctor and a retelling of book one where Gideon doesn’t exist. The timelines are all mixed up. It’s hard to tell when events are actually supposed to be taking place, and I’m pretty sure both timelines are told out of order anyway (but there’s no temporal markers so it’s hard to tell). It’s a crapshoot if you can figure out who’s speaking or even in the scene at the start. And the bulk of it is told in second person, which really threw me for the first few hours and never stopped feeling weird and jarring.

And after all that, can you guess the moment that made me pause the book and stare into space asking myself if I really just heard what I thought I just heard? It wasn’t the unexpected betrayal, or the murder attempts, or the body under the bed or the weird blood river or the fact that God’s name is John. It was the moment where God was explaining a potential galaxy-ending apocalypse to Harrow and, right in the middle of a serious conversation, made an absolutely serious none pizza left beef reference. Out of all the incomprehensible nonsense that came before, that was the moment where I stopped the book, reconsidered my reading choices, and started wondering what kind of person Tamsyn Muir is to put a fucking meme reference in her elaborate and serious book.

Once I was paying attention, there was a surprising amount of memes and internet culture referenced in a gory and intense drama about necromancers in space. These included a “She wants the D” joke, a pun on the word “barista”, an honest-to-goodness “Hi, _, I’m dad” joke, and references to bone hurting juice and Miette. Am I supposed to be taking this seriously? Every single other thing in the book is very serious – and yet there are no less than five meme/joke references. What am I supposed to think?

I very nearly DNF’d this early on. Gideon was my favorite character and she wasn’t there. I didn’t really like Harrow that much in book one when she was badass, and I liked her even less when she was spending much of her time unconscious and not doing anything when she was awake. The other Lyctors were mean, standoffish, and incredibly unlikeable, and the Emperor was stiff and bland whenever he was on page. And even though I was spending a lot of brainpower trying to figure out what the hell was going on, there was zero plot whatsoever. Harrow wasn’t even doing anything – other people around her did stuff, but she did nothing except walk around, be confused about her own memories, and see things that weren’t there, interspersed with retold scenes from book one, except they were the scenes where very little happened and had no Gideon. There wasn’t even any interesting settings to explore, since instead of cool and creepy planets, this book takes place almost exclusively on a largely nondescript spaceship. Up until about halfway through, I really didn’t like this book.

But I stuck it out, mainly because I wanted to see if I was right in my suspicions (and hopes) that the end of book one would get undone in some way. And around the halfway point, I warmed up a bit to Harrow and the barest hint of a plot kicked in. So I felt mildly validated in pushing through the first half (which was about 10 hours, it’s an almost 20-hour audiobook) and kept reading.

Then the book hit the 74% mark and went from zero to sixty over the course of a few minutes. The book cast the spell that turned my box of fibrous sludge into puzzle pieces, I started slamming those pieces together as fast as my brain could whir, Harrow started to actually do things, a plot (of a sort) finally kicked into gear, and the last 26% of the book was absolutely fantastic. I loved it. I got some of the answers I wanted from book one, I got some answers to questions I didn’t even know I had that just added more twists, there was action, there was drama, there were surprises, some of my suspicions about book one’s ending were validated and some of them were not. It was great.

Was it worth the first half being unenjoyable and another quarter being mediocre? I don’t know. I really don’t know what to make of this book. The last 26% was amazing. The first half was terrible. The book seemed to skip engaging characters or intriguing plot and go straight for “if they don’t understand what’s happening, they’ll want to read on and find out,” but then overdid it so hard that it tipped over into obnoxious and frustrating. But also that ending answered a lot of my questions from book one, which is a large part of what I wanted out of this book, and came with some really stellar action sequences towards the end.

This review is very long because this is a very long book and I do not know what to make of it in the least. I think the first three-quarters could have been cut down to half its length, easily, without harming the story and probably making it better. I pushed through reading the whole thing and I don’t know if it was worth it. The confusing thing is that I definitely didn’t dislike this book. I don’t think I liked it, either. And I’m not even ambivalent about it. I’m having some kind of feeling about Harrow the Ninth, but I have no idea what. My opinions are about as incomprehensible as the majority of this book. I don’t know if I’ll read the next book. Maybe? I’m gonna need some time to untangle the disaster of whatever I feel about this one first.

The Locked Tomb series:

1. Gideon the Ninth
2. Harrow the Ninth
3. Nona the Ninth
4. Alecto the Ninth

Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

Title: The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Author: Peter Zeihan

Genre: Current Issues

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), climate crisis, existential dread, war, genocide (mentions), animal death (mentions), natural disasters

Back Cover:

2019 was the last great year for the world economy.

For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days – even hours – of when you decided you wanted it.

America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going.

Globe-spanning supply chains are only possible with the protection of the U.S. Navy. The American dollar underpins internationalized energy and financial markets. Complex, innovative industries were created to satisfy American consumers. American security policy forced warring nations to lay down their arms. Billions of people have been fed and educated as the American-led trade system spread across the globe.

All of this was artificial. All this was temporary. All this is ending.

In The End of the World is Just the Beginning, author and geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan maps out the next world: a world where countries or regions will have no choice but to make their own goods, grow their own food, secure their own energy, fight their own battles, and do it all with populations that are both shrinking and aging.The list of countries that make it all work is smaller than you think. Which means everything about our interconnected world – from how we manufacture products, to how we grow food, to how we keep the lights on, to how we shuttle stuff about, to how we pay for it all – is about to change.

In customary Zeihan fashion, rather than yelling fire in the geoeconomic theatre, he narrates the accumulation of matchsticks, gasoline, and dynamite in the hands of the oblivious audience, suggesting we might want to call the fire department.

A world ending. A world beginning. Zeihan brings readers along for an illuminating (and a bit terrifying) ride packed with foresight, wit, and his trademark irreverence.

Review:

I don’t remember if I knew what this book was actually about when I put it on hold at the library. The library had a multi-month wait, and if I ever knew, by the time it was my turn for it I’d forgotten. I thought it was going to be about climate change.

The tone of this review is very calm, but after reading this, I am anything but. (Please picture me curled up in the corner and sobbing “It was supposed to be about climate change, it was supposed to be about climate change …”)

There is so much in this book. Economics, demographics, geography, politics, geopolitics, oil, shipping, transportation, global trade, energy, agriculture, manufacturing, military, industrialization, colonization … this is a book about how the world is ending and climate change doesn’t even come in until 89% of the way through. The world we know is in the process of ending and climate change isn’t even a major factor.

I knew the situation was dire in a vague, faraway sense. The only real threat I was aware of was climate change – where scientists can never seem to agree on how long it will take to kill us – and a vague concept of “unsustainability.” This book made it real. I didn’t realize how badly, how thoroughly, and how imminently the world is screwed. Climate change barely comes into play in this examination. There is so much more poised to go wrong – and it’s already started.

There are no solutions here. Peter gives us no advice and no ways forward. He just describes what’s happening, explains how we got here, and predicts what might happen and why. Many of the disasters in progress have already passed the point of repairability. The collapse of our current way of life is real, possible, and imminent. And yet the book is also vaguely hopeful, strangely. Our current way of life and many individuals won’t survive the upheavals, but humanity as a whole probably will. And if Peter’s predictions are right, the worst of it will be over in less than 30 years.

This book gave me a better understanding of economics, geopolitics, and the global supply chain. It shattered everything I thought I understood about clean energy. It made me rethink the future – both the world’s and my own. I’m terrified, but I simultaneously feel a little better about the end of the world. If I can’t do anything about it, at least I know what’s coming.

I don’t know where I, or the world, can go from here. What do you do when you learn the apocalypse has already started? I don’t think there are answers, and even if there are they sure aren’t in this book. Reading this won’t help you escape the coming apocalypse, but at least you’ll feel better informed along the way.

Review: Bonds of Brass

Title: Bonds of Brass

Series: The Bloodright Trilogy #1

Author: Emily Skrutskie

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Violence, death, death of parent, death of child, genocide, war, colonization, sexual content (minor), injury (graphic), burn injury, torture, kidnapping, guns/gun violence

Back Cover:

Ettian’s life was shattered when the merciless Umber Empire invaded his world. He’s spent seven years putting himself back together under its rule, joining an Umber military academy and becoming the best pilot in his class. Even better, he’s met Gal—his exasperating and infuriatingly enticing roommate who’s made the academy feel like a new home.

But when dozens of classmates spring an assassination plot on Gal, a devastating secret comes to light: Gal is the heir to the Umber Empire. Ettian barely manages to save his best friend and flee the compromised academy unscathed, rattled that Gal stands to inherit the empire that broke him, and that there are still people willing to fight back against Umber rule.

As they piece together a way to deliver Gal safely to his throne, Ettian finds himself torn in half by an impossible choice. Does he save the man who’s won his heart and trust that Gal’s goodness could transform the empire? Or does he throw his lot in with the brewing rebellion and fight to take back what’s rightfully theirs?

Review:

I wasn’t sure about this book going in. I picked it up on author alone, because everything I’ve read from Emily Skrutskie so far has been good. By the time I got around to reading it the only thing I remembered was that it was sci-fi and set at some kind of military school, so I went in blind and more than a little doubtful.

I warmed up to the story pretty quickly, though. There was plenty of action, the protagonist is hopelessly in love with his best friend who turns out to be the heir to the empire that destroyed his life, and they end up on the run from people with vastly superior firepower armed with nothing but their wits and their military school education. Said best friend/heir was charismatic, funny, and a good friend and solid love interest. There was plenty of action and an interesting galactic world to explore. I was interested to keep going.

Then the middle almost entirely lost me. The only thing hampering the romance was Ettian’s insistence that it wouldn’t work out, the duo picked up a hanger-on who was teeth-grindingly obnoxious up until the penultimate scene, and at some point the goal “get Gal to his galactic ruler parents where he’ll be safe” became “Gal must return home a conquering hero” for no discernable reason (unless Plot Requires More Complicated Nonsense counts as a reason, because that’s the only one I saw). It wasn’t actually boring – there was plenty of action, plots and counter-plots, and the idea of the heroes leading a revolution turned on its head – but I couldn’t see the reasoning behind the characters’ choices so it all felt unnecessary.

I am also confused and a bit concerned about the themes and message of this book. On one hand, Ettian is a member of a conquered people dealing with the trauma of working for the empire that killed his family and destroyed his life while living in the colonized wreckage of his former world and choosing between bad and worse options for survival. On the other hand, everything else. Ettian allying with the colonial power is not only 100% a good thing but portrayed as the only reasonable choice, and his crisis at choosing the colonizer prince over the remnants of his genocided people takes him like three pages total to get over. The whole trilogy is called the Bloodright Trilogy because everything in this world hinges on blood rights – things pass only from parents to children and what kind of life you have is decided only by who your parents are. This is portrayed as universally a good thing and the best system. There’s even a bit about how crime only happens in a democracy and crime couldn’t exist if everything was based on blood inheritance. I am not sure what kind of message one is supposed to get from all this, but I have the feeling I don’t like it.

(I realize that there is potential for the other two books in the series to break down these ideas, but the message of “colonizers are the good guys and blood inheritance is the best, actually” seems promoted by the narrative itself, not just the characters. If the theme of the trilogy is going to be our protagonists realizing how screwed up this all is, absolutely none of it comes through in this book.)

Despite a pretty good climax and a solid ending reveal (even though I did see it coming as soon as I got how this world works), most of the conflict felt unnecessary contrived, and unless the next two books make some major changes I do not like what this book says thematically. I will not be continuing this series.

The Bloodright Trilogy:

1. Bonds of Brass
2. Oaths of Legacy
3. Vows of Empire