sophia_sol | Entries tagged with anent: book thoughts 2

Today I listened to the audiobook of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, rereading the book for the first time since I read it four years ago. It continues to be a very good book, and it's one that's very well suited to listening to as an audiobook, given the nature of the story it is telling.

But. This is not a review that's intended to convince other people to read the book. (Though you should! it's great!) Rather, I have a burning need to talk about spoilers, with people who have already read the book too and have opinions on some stuff.

Click here for the spoilers

Ok so. There's clearly SOMETHING going on with the identity of Rabbit vs In-yo, right. But I'm not clear on what???? Are Rabbit and In-yo one and the same person? Did Rabbit and In-yo swap places and swap identities, and if so, at what point in their lives? If there are hints that I'm missing here I would LOVE to hear more!

Ok one other note on the book, while I'm here and talking about it, actually.

right I suppose this is spoilers also

I really appreciate that it's a story about monarchy/royalty/empire that makes the ruler compelling in a way that gets you on her side while also being unflinchingly real about the death and destruction that inevitably comes from such a ruler and such a person. Impressive! I love it.

But really I want answers to the questions in my first spoiler cut!!

You may or may not remember the news story of the birder in central park who was confronted by a white woman and threatened with police because he was black, in May 2020. This book is that black birder's memoir.

Overall, a good book, and one I'm glad I read. Christian Cooper is much more than "just" a black man and a birder. He's gay, he's a nerd, he's an activist, he's pagan, he loves travelling, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are a part of his life and shape who he is and how he reacted in that viral moment.

I really appreciated how he put that central park story near the end of the narrative, contextualising it in the rest of his life -- and then following it with a story about a similar confrontation in the same place just one year later contextualizes it even further. And also, that's not the end of his story. And I love how it ends! Tn the delight of always being able to see something new and learn something more about birds, no matter how long you've been a birder, and always being ready to throw yourself into the moment for it!

I do think the momentum in the book dragged a bit in the middle, plus I found it awkward how he made multiple references earlier in the book to the central park incident that made him famous; it makes the book feel too much of-the-moment, when a lot of what he's saying in this book is that that moment wasn't actually a bizarre outlier in his life as a whole.

But Cooper has led an interesting life, and I enjoyed hearing about it, and learnint about his time working for Marvel comics especially. He was part of the team working on Alpha Flight when the superhero Northstar came out as gay!

I listened to to this book as an audiobook, and Cooper narrates it himself. I like how his enthusiasm comes through in his reading, though whenever he tries put on a voice when doing dialogue for other people, it often comes out sounding loudly exasperated when he's aiming for high energy or high emotion, which is irritating.

One fun thing that the audiobook format allows is that at the beginning of each section of the book, there's an audio clip of birdsong, for a bird species that will be featured in that section of text! I really enjoyed trying to ID the bird from the song and then listening for when it would come up in one of his stories.

Overall, though it's not a perfect book, I am glad I read it and I think it's worth reading.

A nonfiction book I listened to as an audiobook. I went into it with the understanding that it's a memoir about a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on the perspective that spending SO many hours around the same pieces of art over years gave him. And it is that!

But it's also about more than that: what kinds of things led him to become a museum security guard, and about what the job of museum security job entails, and about people-watching and people-interacting. And, over all, about the huge impact of grief on a person's life. The author's brother died as a young adult, and it was in the aftermath of that loss that he decided he needed a job with less pressure than the kind of promising office job he'd had, one that would allow him time to process.

It's a beautiful book, thoughtful and meaningful and interesting. His reflections on art really are good! As is everything else! I loved it.

Edit: but also

pauraque has a really good point about the unexamined privilege in the pov the author is coming from in their review

I listened to this nonfiction book as an audiobook, which was a great way to spend time with the history of silk as I went about working on various fibre arts crafts myself! (no silk in my crafting stash, though. not in my budget!)

There was a lot to enjoy about the book - engaging writing, that covers many interesting stories from the history of silk. And it talks about much more than just the silk of the classic silkworm, too. People have gotten silk from other related types of moth cocoons, from certain shellfish (which use long silken strands to anchor themselves into sand), and from spiders, who create many different kinds of silk for different purposes. I particularly enjoyed learning about the many species of wild silk moths in India which have a long history of being harvested for their silks.

However, the further I listened in the book, the more striking it became that nearly all of the stories were told from a European perspective, about European priorities, even though most of the silks discussed are not European in origin. ( Read more... )

So as a whole I'm a lot less enthusiastic about this book now than I was when I was just starting it, which is really too bad. Read for the fun stories it does tell, but be aware going in that you are not actually getting the full world history of silk.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book, going into it. It's a nonfiction book about underworlds, but what did that mean, exactly? What approach was the author going to take?

It turned out that the approach was: Macfarlane, over a number of years, went and visited 10 different places where the human world intersects with the world beneath our feet, and used that to talk about the human relationships with those places, and why we use them and what for, and what the experience is like, and the history of them. Each chapter was on a different place, and was a deep dive into that place in particular, and then the cumulative effect of these different places was built up together to say something bigger.

It's a remarkably beautiful book, caring far more about the artistic qualities of the prose than most non-fiction books I read. It's so evocative and thoughtful at the same time! In each chapter he's so careful about building the narrative landscapes for each chapter, in the details he does or doesn't choose to include. I was surprised to discover in one late chapter that the author must be a birder, because he kept on referring to so many different kinds of birds he saw there, specifically by species name, but it had never come up before because birds weren't thematically relevant details in previous chapters!

The chapters include things like salt mining, cave art, tunnels beneath Paris, melt-holes in glaciers, and more. All of it was fascinating and thought-provoking and carefully researched, too.

My one and only point of disjoint in reading the book was in his chapter on nuclear containment, because in my opinion he seems too optimistic about the likelihood of containment methods working for the span of time they'll be needed. Like. Ten thousand years is an astoundingly long time! I have concerns!

But other than that, this is truly an excellent book, and I recommend it highly.

This month I read two non-fiction books by Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and Salt: A World History.

Both books are excellent at providing lots of historical details to give the reader a good sense of how vital each of these commodities was, and the scope of their effects on human cultures and industry. I particularly loved the book on cod, and it really made me want to try eating salt cod sometime to see what it's like!

I felt that the salt book was somewhat weaker, though. Sometimes the book was presenting information generally chronologically, sometimes it was focused on a particular location, sometimes it was following a particular product or trade over time or over space. It made it feel a bit jumbled and disorganized, going back and forward in time and hopping around the world. The cod book had a bit of that as well, but by the nature of the subject the issues were more limited so it wasn't as big a deal.

The salt book also had multiple particular details that got my back up.

One was the old chestnut about x species having not evolved for x number of millions of years, when talking about sturgeons. No, that's not how evolution works? like, yes sturgeons have maintained the same basic form for about 100 million years, because it's an extremely successful strategy for their context and continues to be so, but genetic changes will still happen in a population over so much time! probably if you took a modern sturgeon and a sturgeon from the cretaceous they would not even be able to interbreed!

The other was

palestine

that in a chapter about salt in Israel from ancient times to today, Palestinians weren't mentioned at all?! wtf, author!

Huh. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting from this novella, except that I expected it to be something I wasn't expecting bc it's Tamsyn Muir of Locked Tomb fame, but it still isn't quite what I was expecting!

Anyway it's a story about the fairy tale trope of a princess who's locked in a tower by a witch, and her efforts to be freed.

It's also about the. relationship???? between Floralinda (the princess) and Cobweb (a fairy, who hates her and also helps her). and about growth and change and potential and becoming a different kind of person.

It's odd and surprisingly emotionally affecting and I was very into it.

Disclaimer: this book is written by a friend so I am biased going in. But on the other hand this book is amazing and I'm not biased at all in saying that!! (I am, for better or for worse, the kind of person who Will always have honest critiques available to offer on request.)

Lady Eve's Last Con is set in space in the far future. Our viewpoint character, Ruthi, is a con artist infiltrating high society in order to get revenge for the way her sister was treated by one of these rich dudes. Too bad the older sister of the dude she's conning is so compelling!

(the back cover of the book says Sol is Esteban's YOUNGER sister but the cover copy writer is wrong. She's older. and she very much has older sibling vibes, and that's important.)

Anyway I adore both Ruthi and Sol, and their relationship with each other, and their relationship with their respective younger siblings. And also the worldbuilding, of the specific satellite where the action is taking place, and the broader universe it's situated in!

The connection between Ruthi and Sol is so palpable, and you really believe in why they would be interested in each other, despite everything else going on between them. And each of them stand out so well as Very Specific People with their own foibles and drives and values and interests. And the secondary characters are great too - really their own people as well.

And there' some delightful stuff about the bias of pov, even though the book is all through Ruthi's pov. Through much of the book you see Esteban very much through Ruthi's eyes and she doesn't like him at all -- but you hear a bit nearer the end about what Ruthi's sister saw in him, and he's the same guy but with a different lens of interpretation put on things and you can see why someone would love him!

And the way Ruthi imagines herself versus the way her sister sees her omg! SIBLINGS.

There's great class-related content, and great jewish-identity content, and great lesbian con-artist content, and great space content.

and the way it's written is just so funny and delightful and heart-felt and well-phrased, and and and.

I wish I'd written this review more promptly after finishing the book because I feel like I did have other elements I would have enjoyed talking about more fully! but I did not, so this is the review I have for you. I loved it wholeheartedly! Highly recommended.

An f/f fantasy romance graphic novel, with lovely art in limited palettes. I found it difficult to follow in places, especially in the parts where it's light on words and dialogue. Its ending is also pretty didactic; it's definitely something along the lines of a parable, with an intended meaning to take from it. But there were parts that were definitely touching and powerful nonetheless. I think for people who have stronger abilities than me at reading visuals, this could be a worthwhile read.

I decided to read Dungeon Meshi because I kept seeing people on tumblr posting about the new anime adaptation, and it looked fun and cute. And although I don't watch much tv, there was an entire manga I could read instead! So I did.

The basic premise: in a world where adventuring parties going on dungeon crawls is a thing that happens, one guy has a dream: to be able to cook and eat all the different kinds of monsters in the dungeon, to be able to find out how they taste!

And because his party needs to be able to head deep into the dungeon to rescue a party member who was left behind, and they don't have the funds or the time to collect supplies, all of a sudden they have REASON to need to eat monsters. They're going to forage and hunt for all their meals as they make their way down.

So using that as the basis, the manga goes on to explore the worldbuilding, the interrelationships of the characters in the party, everyone's backstories and reasons for being there, a developing plot, and of course, the ingredients and nutritional composition and flavour of every meal they eat.

I absolutely adored every bit of this!!! The main characters are all a delight, and it's the kind of story where the author sees and shows you the inherent personness of all characters, including antagonists. And the world created to make sense of the dungeon's existence is fascinating, as are all the ways the ecosystems within the dungeon are expanded upon to make sense of the creatures living within it.

And it's a story that knows what its themes are, too, and is able to tie them all together in extremely satisfying ways in the climax of the narrative!

I had this moment leading up towards the ending where I was like:

cut for thematic spoilers I guess

ohhhh it's about....everyone being part of a balanced ecosystem of life and death where everything sustains everything else! the various human species included! and I was filled through my very soul with this feeling of connectedness myself.

Anyway it was amazing and I had a lot of feels.

And as well as enjoying all of that, I also just really loved our main characters! We start out seeing them all fairly shallowly but over the course of the story as more aspects of them are revealed they're all just.....I love every one of them.

I did struggle with a few aspects of the manga, but none of it significantly affected my ability to enjoy the read:

1. It kept adding more and more characters, and I got rather lost occasionally trying to keep track of them all. But ultimately it's not vital to remember every tertiary character to get a good read out of this, so it's not as bad as it could be.

2. In the mid to later parts, it became a lot more plot focused and actiony than I'd really been expecting, in a way that made it harder for me to follow, since fight scenes in sequential art are challenging for me. And occasionally it drew back more than I wanted from its focus on food. But it refocused eventually!

3. It turned out to be pro monarchy in the end, which isn't my fave, but it's not like a major theme of the manga or anything so I could overlook it.

4. I kept expecting it to have at least a little bit of textual queerness, and there wasn't any as far as I could see! Even various background relationships or depictions of people's attraction was m/f. But uh. Falin/Marcille, anyone? There are some powerful vibes there. (I'll also accept Laios/Kabru)

In conclusion, I highly recommend it, and if you want to read it, you can read the whole thing online for free in English translation here: https://dungeonmeshi.com/manga/dungeon-meshi-chapter-1/

Yes a third book review in one day, all of books I read ages ago. Can't believe I didn't post about any of them when I read them! In fact I'd actually managed to forget about this one entirely in the interim. Good thing I wrote this up back then.

This is a fun, silly danmei webnovel with a translation that seems stalled out at chapter 79 of 112.

The main character Chi Muyao is a transmigrator but honestly it never really feels like he is one, it's just like for plot reasons or whatever. A bit of a baffling choice to me, since it never seems to actually make much difference! But oh well.

I like Chi Muyao's friendship with his shijie and with the second male lead, and I really enjoy how much his poorly-regarded sect just genuinely loves spirit animals and doesn't care about anything else. He's not as interested in spirit animals as them but he dedicates himself to what his sect needs nonetheless, and they appreciate what he does. it's all very wholesome.

And I do genuinely enjoy the romance arc as well, as silly as it is.

The book is overall very full of details about spiritual roots, and the stages of cultivation, and the various pills and objects and techniques and places that can bolster or hinder one's growth. Feels a bit silly to me also tbh but not a big deal to read past it!

At the point the extant English translation ends, we're in a plot arc about getting backstory on the main villain. Prior to this I was like, why does this story even need a villain, Chi Muyao and Xi Huai are doing great at thwarting their happy ending on their own. But I found myself enjoying this backstory too!

It would be nice to get the end of this story sometime, but I think I started reading this one because it felt low pressure for me to have opinions on it, because it's not done yet. So like. I enjoyed myself in the reading of it, but I'm also not feeling heartbroken about being denied the ending tbh!

If you're interested you can read it yourself here: https://peachblossomcodex.com/novel/tdvswd/

I thought I had taken more detailed notes on these books to be able to write up a proper book review! These are three volumes in an ongoing manga series which I think is based on a webnovel? but I might be wrong about that. Many things are confusing to me.

Anyway! I saw this recced as a fun transmigration story that had similar vibes to moshang from svsss, and I was like, sold.

The premise:

Our main character, Kondou, gets accidentally sucked from our world into another realm along with a teen girl who is the special chosen one with amazing powers who's the only one who can save the world. Kondou, who isn't supposed to be there, is meanwhile like: "Welp. Better find some way to keep myself busy if I'm here." And volunteers to join the palace accountancy department.

The love interest, Aresh, is a handsome but taciturn captain who takes it on himself to save Kondou from his own self-destructive tendencies.

The first volume felt to me like it was mostly set-up, and it had promise but I didn't really feel like I had a good handle on the characters or their relationships.

The second volume started getting into the good stuff! However this is where my notes oh so helpfully stop, and I read the these multiple months ago so I remember approximately nothing of substance, lol. The relationship vibes are cute, I enjoy that Kondou and the chosen one do still feel a sort of friendship connection with each other since they transmigrated together even though they're very different and end up in very different spheres in this world, iirc the plot/worldbuilding development started to go somewhere in book 3, etc.

I like it and I'll be interested to keep reading! assuming I remember to keep on top of it as it comes out, lol. Which like. it's me. no guarantees.

Whoops I wrote this review ages ago and forgot to post it! Here you go.

Sohla is a chef and I've loved following her youtube career on various channels for the last few years -- she has such presence, vibrancy, obvious skill and passion. She seems to enjoy deliberately giving herself higher bars to reach, greater challenges to figure out how to work through, and it's such fun to watch.

And this recipe book has a neat premise -- it's not just a collection of recipes, but is designed to lead you through developing various skills in the kitchen as you work your way through the book. I enjoy that this means the recipes are organised by technique instead of by what stage of the meal it's to be eaten at; a different way of organizing a cookbook than the standard, but I think it makes just as much sense this way!

Unfortunately a lot of the recipes turned out to be ones I have no interest in, whether featuring ingredients I don't enjoy eating, or ingredients I'm not willing to pay for, or having processes that require owning a stand mixer. As a result I can't go through the book as she intended. So I ended up just skimming through it and then putting it aside, though I did save a few recipes to try later.

I think that if you're a person with more interest than me in seafood and/or dairy, this could be a really good book for you! And from what I see I think it does a very good job of teaching various skills. But as it is, for me, I'll go back to just watching Sohla on youtube.

one

I was fascinated to learn (from merriam-webster) that "themself" used to be the only reflexive form for they/them pronouns, and "themselves" only started being used in the mid-1400's, and eventually dominated the scene almost entirely, making "themself" an extreme rarity.

"Themself" is making more of a comeback these days and APA says that either "themself" or "themselves" is acceptable for singular they, although "themselves" is still more common.

But I'm all for "themself" for singular they. It just makes sense!!!

two

It suddenly occurred to me that although volunteering to write fic for fan auctions like Fandom Trumps Hate doesn't feel doable for me, I COULD offer book reviews. But it is too late to sign up as a creator for this year's FTH!

Ah well. In future years maybe. Throw money at a good cause and I will read a book of your choosing and write a review of it.

Actually I might be willing to do that outside of an official framework like FTH? Hit me up for more details if this is something you want, I guess!

three

As of this week it's been two years since I posted my first mxtx fic?! Genuinely does not feel like it's been that long!

Also holy shit that fic has over 800 kudos, when did that happen, that's so many people who read and liked it.

Another historical romance novel by Courtney Milan, an author who's one of the few on my will-always-read list. And as usual I loved it! This is the second in her Wedgeford series, set in a village in England with a high percentage of Chinese residents in the 19th century.

Naomi is a young woman who grew up in Wedgeford her whole life, and feels stifled and small but is determined to find ways to do the things she wants to do. Kai is the son of a habitual con man who had tricked Wedgeford's residents out of much of their money when Kai was a young child before disappearing, and now Kai is returning with his own agenda. Because of reasons, they pretend to be engaged to each other!

I loved both main characters so much, and their relationship with each other and with the other people in their lives. Both of them are deeply affected by being raised by the parents they had, and the environments they grew up in, but in very different ways from each other, and both have to learn how to how to update their perspectives on some aspects of it. And there are also many other people who have been important to them in various ways, whether they've been able to see it or not!

I also loved how much passion they both had for the things they do in their lives. I think this is one of the things I love about Milan's romances -- how much and how deeply her characters always care about the things that are of importance to them. they have passions and obsessions that they throw themselves wholeheartedly into. For Naomi it's taking an ambulance course (a multi-day first aid course, to learn how to deal with medical emergencies before the professionals are able to get there), and for Kai it's pottery.

I wanted more about the ambulance class than the book actually ended up giving me, which was disappointing, but I remember seeing Milan write somewhere online about how much of what would have been taught in a class like that in that era was bunk or an outright dangerous bad idea, so she didn't want to focus on that. Which is suuuuper fair!

But we get to hear lots of Kai's opinions about pottery and I loved every bit of it. You cannot get this guy to shut up about his pottery opinions once he gets going and he feels so strongly about it and it's GREAT. In the author's note Milan talks about how she ended up learning how to do pottery herself in the process of researching this book and you can tell how much Milan knows about the kinds of opinions a really good potter might have, including some more idiosyncratic ones. I'm endlessly charmed by it all.

But also it's a book about learning what it is to be seen by someone who sees you as who you truly are, and loved for it, and learning how to trust, both trusting others and trusting yourself, and that's beautiful too.

cut for some spoilers

Like the first Wedgeford book, this is another one that doesn't have the traditional romance novel beat of the climax where everything seems to be falling apart and the romantic leads break up or are separated or mistrust each other or accuse each other of something, and again you can see how the book COULD have gone that route and deliberately was written not to, and I like it so much. It's so much less stressful a read! There are still tough things they have to deal with in their relationship before getting to the happy ending, but it never feels manufactured, or like there's an idiot ball being passed around to make the plot work.

I do feel like the conclusion of the book was a bit rushed in the pacing which made it feel anticlimactic instead of satisfying. Always frustrating in a book that I otherwise love! But overall it was still a great read, which involved multiple squeaks of delight as I made my way through it.

Also I want to note that there's secondary character ace rep in this book which is very good :)

Note: I received a free ARC ebook in exchange for an honest review.

This is a science fiction novel from the 1960's, featuring a cast of odd characters wandering their way through interactions with each other In Space. It's mildly sexist in that 1960's way, it's hard to keep track of all the characters, and honestly I'm still not sure what the plot was -- but I still mostly enjoyed the process of reading the book.

I just really enjoyed the writing style! I wish I could articulate what it's doing that I like so much. The prose is pretty pared-down yet expressive, and it does things via odd juxtapositions of ideas and events. It's fun and engaging and it made me want to pick it apart to figure out just what it was doing!

So like....I don't think I particularly enjoyed this book as a book, but I'm still going to hang on to my cheap second-hand copy and maybe refer back to it in the future.

Lud-in-the-Mist is a fantasy novel published in the 1920's, well before the modern genre of fantasy was really established. It's so interesting to read a fantasy novel from that time before Tolkien dropped like a meteor into the genre landscape, affecting everything from thereafter; everything post-tolkien was either written with inspiration from Tolkien, or in reaction against how much everything was written with inspiration from Tolkien, I feel like. But this one is doing its own thing, but in a way that feels to me maturely developed, as if it came out of a long tradition of fantasy novels just like it, even though it definitely didn't.

I've previously heard Lud-in-the-Mist being praised as a perfect gem of a novel, but although I enjoyed it, I would definitely not go that far. I've also heard it be called things like sweet, and lovely, which led me to certain expectations of the tone of the book which ended up to be rather inaccurate!

The novel takes place in a prosaic town in a vaguely British-feeling secondary world, in the country of Dorimare. The town is close, however, to a boundary with Faerie, and fairy fruit keeps getting smuggled in, with great effect on those who eat of it. The book opens slowly, with an exploration of the setting and context of the story, which I found very interesting, but eventually the major characters and plot are introduced. The long and short of it is: how to keep the fairy influence out of their town?

The book is very good at setting and place and atmosphere, at creating a sense of the liminal space between Faerie and Dorimare. The characters all feel fairly realistic and believable also. But I just couldn't bring myself to care much about most of the major characters, which was a real problem! They're mostly fairly unpleasant people, but I don't think that's what was keeping me at a distance. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I think is a book very much in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist, is also a novel about a collection of mostly-unpleasant characters, but I find all of them compelling. I'm not sure what JS&MN is doing differently on it than LitM!

Anyway I'm glad I read it, and I would love to read more books like it...but preferably with characters I like better lol.

Any book by Ursula Vernon (the author behind the Kingfisher penname) will have certain features, and those inherent features are ones that keep me coming back book after book to everything she writes. I love how she does worldbuilding, and I love her practical get-things-done heroines, and I love how everything's always grounded in the odd specific annoyances of what it would actually be like to be in the fantastical circumstances she writes about. And she does SUCH good road trips! So many opportunities to run into fun NPCs and cool regional worldbuilding!

I'm not quite the right audience for her paladin romances, unfortunately -- I think because I just get too irritated by the depth and breadth of their ability to feel guilty about absolutely everything. But I keep reading them because I'm having fun with everything else anyway, and because the wider arc of the business with the dead god fascinates me, and we get a bit more about it every book!

This book, though, feels to me a little less successful than the previous paladin romances in the series. It feels a bit too much to me like several different books squished into one, I think, instead of like multiple strands of the same book, and I just don't love all of those books.

click here for spoilery thoughts

There's the one where Marguerite is trying to get herself free of the Red Sail by finding the missing artificer and leaking the plans for the salt-making mechanism and thereby destabilizing the economy of the whole region, and there's the one with the Dreaming God's paladins and the Saint of Steel's soul-scarred ex-paladins dealing with the demon who wants to be a god, and there's the one about the romance between Marguerite and Shane.

The first one is a perfectly good spy plot, not really my go-to genre of book but fun enough, and I do enjoy the temple of the white rat being willing to meddle in these things.

The second one is FASCINATING to me and I want to think about the implications forever and I want more details!!!

The third one is....yet another guilt-ridden paladin romance.........also featuring a spy who doesn't trust anyone but just KNOWS in her HEART that she can trust HIM and he's the exception to everything about how she's conducted her life. It's just really really not my kind of romance story. Also both of them are extremely allosexual and are continually having their higher brain functions disabled by how attractive the other person is and it just seems comically over-the-top to me, an ace person who Doesn't Get It. (okay I AM charmed by the type of kinky not-quite-bondage that Shane turns out to be really into when Marguerite is like, ok I gotta find SOME way of achieving good sex with this guy who can't get out of his own head about anything.)

I'm sure the romance part of the book is good for some people! but that's um. not what I read Kingfisher romances for, surprise surprise.

So let's go back to the demon who wants to be a god, shall we? I was FASCINATED by Wisdom and by what demons are. And by the implications of what a god is, too, tbh.

Wisdom seems to genuinely care about its followers to some degree, has figured out how to live as a part of the world, has thoughts and feelings and motivations and relationships and goals. It's definitely been doing some worrying stuff, but is it any more evil than a really powerful human can be? What ARE demons, and what makes them appreciably different from gods, in the end, in this world? They clearly CAN have comparable types of bonds with humans if they so choose, and some gods are definitely terrible if I'm remembering stuff from previous books, so why couldn't demons have the possibility of being basically okay.

And what is Hell? It's the place where demons are from, and it's the place where paladins can bind a demon to never be able to leave (if they're powerful enough to manage the binding), and from what little we hear from Wisdom about it, it seems like an undesirable place to be. Wouldn't most folks kind of suck in some respect if their entire prior existence was in a place like Hell?

I really hope this series is going in a direction of non-evil demons tbh! maybe even....some of the major gods today having previously been demons? Maybe the saint of steel was a demon and someone murdered him because of that!

anyway my increasing pro let-demons-be-people agenda means I feel weird at the end of this book about Shane taking up with the Dreaming God in the end, the god who is well known to be virulently anti-demon. Is this god unambiguously a good guy and nothing else?

I'll be very curious to see where this whole plot continues!

I started my reread of Heaven Official's Blessing in September and have been working my way steadily through it ever since. This time I posted my as-it-happened thoughts to mastodon as I went, because there's just SO much book in this book that there's no way I'd remember everything by the end! So now I'm copying all those thoughts over to here for posterity. Warning, this is like 22,000 words of thoughts. But this book is so GOOD it's worth every one of those words and so many more besides! I could talk about this book forever it feels like.

Anyway. On with the liveblog! (originally posted to: https://federatedfandom.net/@soph_sol/tagged/tgcfthoughts)

( Read more... )

THE END.

A short novella attempting to tread the line between mythic storytelling and a closer more personal story, and in my opinion not quite getting the balance right.

The mythic elements felt good, well constructed and each part of the story following naturally from what had come before it to tell the kind of story that myths are made to tell. It had the logic of stories that come from the folk tradition. But it also tried to include more psychological reality for its characters than really felt like it fit the myth logic, and it left me feeling like I never quite got to know any of the major characters as people and yet they didn't embody a Type the way characters in folk traditions often do either.

Also there are a number of extended, violent fight sequences. And yes I'm not the right audience for such things, I'm usually just not that interested, but I also felt like those diluted the focus on the Story and the Themes, like, yes the results of the fights are important to those things but we don't need a blow-by-blow to get what's needed out of those. it felt to me more like those were included because the author enjoys fight scenes tbh.

Idk. Overall there's a lot about it that's very promising, in an early book by a new author, and the story it's telling will I think be sticking with me for a while, but ultimately the way the book's put together just doesn't quite work for me