sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: alternate earth

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!!

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.

Over on mastodon I'm participating in a group readalong of TGCF, one chapter per week, and a few weeks ago we finished the first volume of the official translation so I might as well crosspost all my thoughts over to here as like, my book review? Yeah okay here we go! Putting it all below a cut to save your reading page

( Read more... )

I mad the fatal mistake of not writing down my initial impressions immediately upon finishing the book, so this review must rely on my inconsistent memory. Can I remember the things that struck me that are worth talking about?! Tune in to the rest of this post to find out.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath is a wonderful alternate-earth historical fantasy novel, with a main character from a culture based on post-colonial Indigenous people in North America. In this context of trying to maintain their way of life despite the devastations of disease and colonial rule, Anequs is a teen who finds a dragon egg and bonds with the new-hatched dragon. By the rules of the colonial government, all dragoneers must attend an academy to learn how to safely control their dragon's powers, so Anequs must leave her home and immerse herself in a culture and a schooling system that were not designed for her.

The author does a wonderful job of showing the many different ways indigenous people respond to the impossible situation they're put in, post-colonization, with no good answers; and the many different big and small manifestations of racism that they face, by people both well-meaning and malicious. Anequs finds both friends and allies, but even within these people she is often having to deal with their own internalized racism.

And I loved the worldbuilding! Although different language and symbols are used, because latin is not the language of science and education in this world, it is clear that the power of a dragon's breath is to break down anything into its constituent elements and rebuild them according to the direction of their person or people. So Anequs in learning vitskraft is basically learning chemistry, and the symbology that can be used to safely direct the power of a dragon's breath to create only the things you want.

And it's fun, too, to see a version of the world where a viking style culture is the one that is dominant in the colonial era instead of british culture, and the ways in which it does and doesn't change things.

(I do think that if one were to carefully draw out all cultural ramifications there would be even more differences between that world and our own history -- eg the clothing would NOT be our world's 19th century western fashion! -- but I do understand that that might be too big a project to undertake, to make every single thing make sense within the internal logic while still making it recognizably 19th century to the reader.)

Anyway I found it a thoroughly enjoyable book with a satisfying ending, but also it's clear from the book that there's more coming in the series and I only wish I could read the rest IMMEDIATELY. But that is not how linear time and recently-published books work!

A future sci-fi story about what it means to have grown up in a radical militaristic doomsday cult in space - it does an amazing job of writing something incredibly readable from the pov of a horrible person. Kyr was raised to believe in the cult's values wholeheartedly so she is awful but she cares so MUCH about the things she believes in, and is so sure she's doing the right things, that the reader is drawn in anyway.

( cut for spoilers because there's a lot to talk about that's spoilers! )

A romance novel parody of Harry Potter written in response to jkr’s transphobia. A good-hearted t4t story of trans joy that combines things making no sense with things that are actually wonderful and fascinating worldbuilding (of a world which is distinctly NOT the world of the original hp novels), with delightful fourth-wall-breaking aspects. There are a lot of typos, and the style is very consciously romance-novel-esque with lots of epithets and things, so it took me a bit to get into it, but once I was in I was honestly hooked.

Also the author, Chuck Tingle, is out here on the internet openly being his wonderfully autistic self without shame, and encouraging everyone to live a life that centres love and the knowledge of everyone's intrinsic worth, and I really admire that!

So thanks Chuck. LOVE IS REAL.

Whew, I'm done reading TGCF!!! I read the first half in the officially published translation, and the second half in a fan translation since the official one isn't all published yet, but let me tell you I am ABSOLUTELY going to be rereading the whole dang thing once the official tl is all out.

Anyway! What a book! What a lot of book in which a lot of things happened! I've been reading this thing for over a month, fairly consistently, and it took me this long because I gather the english translation is something like 750,000 words long?!? That is Long.

But what this means is that I feel like I do NOT remember everything that happened well enough to feel like I have a good grasp on the Things that the book is trying to do as a whole. How do all the themes tie into each other? What ARE the themes? This is hard to say when I had trouble even keeping track of who was who amongst all the different secondary characters, because a book this size can fit SO many secondary characters in it, and most of them have at least two completely different names if not more.

(Mu Qing and Feng Xin were particularly bad for this because they go by those names, and also by Nan Yang and Xuan Zhen, and ALSO by pseudonyms where they're pretending to be their own underlings. I absolutely 100% could not keep track of them by all these different names and as a result have very little sense of which is which between them, which I can tell is Problems!)

Anyway anyway! This is a chinese danmei webnovel about a guy who becomes a god (and then stops being a god, and then goes through that cycle a few more times...), and about heavenly politics between all the different gods, and also about the ghost who loves him. And I LOVED it.

There were some parts that got a bit tedious (some of the fight scenes went on a bit long, I will not lie, but then I think this about MOST fight scenes, lol) but overall it was remarkably moreish for the entire very long length.

It's a book about how choices make you who you are, I think, and about the importance of having people in your life whom you can love and trust and rely on. And the way these themes are intertwined with the love story between our hero Xie Lian and the ghost king Hua Cheng is just completely delightful. I adore Xie Lian as a main character and a viewpoint character. He's so endlessly fascinating! He's 800 years old by the time of the main events of the novel, and he's been through a lot (understatement), and he's made very definite and deliberate choices about what kind of person he wants to be. But at the same time, he's spent most of those 800 years living a life where he prioritizes the well-being of pretty much everyone except himself, because he sees that as his job - and in his relationship with Hua Cheng, he finally is introduced to the idea that it doesn't have to be selfish for him to allow happiness into his life, and to have someone prioritize him. I love them both very very much.

I feel like there's a whole enormous thread of another theme I cannot comment on though because I do not know enough about either a) Chinese cosmology or b) cultivation novels as a genre. Which is that although it seems to be the goal of all cultivators to cultivate successfully enough to ascend into godhood, in this book godhood does not uhhhhhhhh seem to be that great. Heaven is full of petty squabbles, a lot of the gods kinda suck in an exciting variety of ways, and you still have jobs to do and paperwork to complete and roles to live up to and asshole coworkers to try to get along with, and so on and so forth. Basically: it doesn't seem to be any better than ordinary human life, except that you get fancy palaces and exclusive access to Brain Twitter (dubious prize). There definitely seems to be questioning of like, why is this the goal? Is this worthwhile? Should we be aiming for something else instead? But again! I do not have enough context for this entire thread of questions to be sure of WHAT it's saying with all this!

Other characters in this book I had strenuous feelings about:

- Ling Wen! I find her FASCINATING. A civil god who is really really really good at administrative work, such that when she rebels, the entirety of heaven is kind of lost without her! It was sooooo funny that when she and Xie Lian are fighting at one point, Xie Lian automatically goes to update Ling Wen about the situation because as the administrative manager of heaven she needs to know, and then is like. Uh. Right. She knows because she's HERE. FIGHTING ME. But we get remarkably little of her internal life and I want to know more about what's going on with her!

- He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan. Obviously! Beefleaf!!!!! God their story is so deliciously painful. One of those things where there is no way for there to be a happy ending but you can't help hoping anyway.

- Guzi - the poor kid! I spent so much of the book being like, auuuughhhhhhh this is so horrible that he's so attached to his dad but that asshole qi rong is possessing his dad and so he's running around after QI RONG endlessly, and then you get just this tiny info drop near the end that actually his dad was the worst and he's so attached to qi rong as his father because qi rong is actually the best dad he's ever had? (low, low bar) Anyway I still hate qi rong but. I want guzi to be able to have a better experience of family :(

I've been in a bit of a reading slump, so I pulled out T. Kingfisher's latest, because you can't go wrong with a Kingfisher.

This one, Illuminations, is a children's book about rival magic families in an alternate universe Italian city-state, which of course gave me inescapable dwj vibes, but this one is doing its own thing!

It's a very good and charming book, with solid themes, but I found the first lengthy part of the book very stressful since it involved everyone thinking badly of the main character with her unable to defend herself because of secrets she has to keep. And people spend a good while not trusting each other and not talking to each other. But thankfully the book recognizes that this is a problem, and sets out rectifying it much more promptly than it would have in another book, which I appreciate! Still meant though that I spent more of the book than I like being stressed rather than enjoying myself.

One of the things it's doing is the classic children's book thing of depicting important lessons about friendship, and you know, this is one of the things I love about children's books, that they DO highlight the value of friendships and the work needed to be a good friend to someone, and how worthwhile that is. Learning how to navigate jealousy in a vital yet platonic relationship in your life is key actually!

Overall: maybe not my fave Kingfisher, but a quick read and a solid book.

This isn't exactly a book review, since it is kind of hard to review just volume 1 of an 8 volume novel, but I just wanted to check in to register how much I love Xie Lian already! There's clearly A Lot that we don't know about him yet, but from everything we see of him he's just....I love him. I'm looking forward to finding out more, both about him and about Hua Cheng (even more of a mystery so far!!!!) and also about all the other characters beloved by fandom who haven't had a huge showing just yet.

Remember how I was unmoved by the first two books in the Scholmance series? Well joke's on me, this is the third and final book and I was moved! I nearly gave up on it multiple times ("why am I reading this book when I didn't like the last two in the series?" I thought to myself, as I rolled my eyes over the opening section that was basically nothing but extended nothing-happens-but-mourning-Orion scenes) and only persevered because a friend of mine really wanted to talk about it with me, and I'm glad I did!

The first two books in the series were, ultimately, a) school stories, and b) monster-fighting stories, and I was bored. This one is about what you do with yourself when you survive past a point you never thought you'd survive, how you figure out who you are and what you want to do with yourself, and making it happen. I was into it!

Also now that we're out of the school, we got to explore some of the worldbuilding in more detail, and some of it was genuinely interesting. And I got more into the female friendships that were portrayed. And the main character, El, turns out to be bisexual and had a very interesting thing going on with another girl who she had complicated feelings about, which I loved. And we got to see more of El's complicated family dynamics!

HOWEVER. I loved all this.......which means that I'm even more frustrated about the things that I feel the book fell down on. I was invested! You had me, Novik! And I was let down!

( yeah, significant spoilers follow )

I recognize that this is the third book in a trilogy and I have not read the first two, but this is what the hugo packet provided unto me for judgement for the best series nomination, and the first book had a lot of holds on it at my local library, so here we are!

I'd heard of this series on and off since the first book came out, but never bothered putting it on my to-read list, because it didn't seem like the kind of thing that I would vibe with.

But the hugos get me to read all kinds of things I wouldn't ordinarily prioritise so here we are! There are some great things about this book, and I love that it's a book about ordinary people doing community activist work to achieve a better world for the oppressed persons in their country, with a background queer romance. And a book that recognizes that a monarchy is bad because complete power is bad, EVEN IF the monarch seems willing to allow for some movement in the direction of reforms! But....I guess my main complaint is that Soulstar felt too simplistic. A lot of things were just brushed over, that should have been issues, I felt like!

There was not enough attention given to Robin and her spouse Zelind trying to rebuild a relationship after 20 years apart while Zelind was imprisoned and mistreated; they have, like, one fight but other than that things are basically fine and remarkably little attention is given to their relationship, or to Zelind's healing.

How did a group of activists manage to organise a country-wide analog election, in a country that's never had public elections and with a government that's against them, with only one month's lead time???? No attention is given to this either, or to any of the other difficult logistics problems that are inherent in the things the activists are doing. Robin is good at organising things, and that's the only thing we hear. What do she and the rest of the folks she works with on this actually DO? Who knows!

How did Zelind manage to come up with a non-witch-based source of aether SO quickly and easily, when this is clearly something so desirable but nobody's ever come up with it before? Is it really that easy? Or is Zelind unusually perceptive and bringing something to the table nobody else is able to in order to figure out the answer? It is not made clear.

And then the happy ending where they succeed at all their goals feels unearned, because I never really felt the truth of how hard it would have been to achieve the things they achieved! I felt more like "well, yes, obviously this is how things would end, because it's that kind of book" rather than feeling like "YEAH!!!! They did it!!"

It's fine! It's a fine book! But. Eh.

I don't know. A lot of things felt like they just kind of....happened, instead of feeling like they had the weight of reality. I wanted to feel like even if the reader doesn't actually know everything, the background context DOES exist and does make sense.

I did consider whether the things that were a problem for me in this book were due to me not having read the first two books in this trilogy, but from what I understand, each of the books has been from a different character's perspective, and each character had different priorities, and the first two were MUCH less about revolution than this one was. So I don't think it's that all the context and depth of world that I wanted was simply present in the previous books. But if I'm wrong about that, please do let me know!

(I also don't love that at one point in the story it's the "right" thing for our hero to pressure Zelind into seeing kher estranged-for-very-good-reasons mother on a weekly basis. Yes, there are good reason for it. Yes, Zelind agrees. Yes, this doesn't end up actually happening. But like. Yikes.)

The last of the books I'm planning to read from the Hugo novella list for the year!! There were a lot of really good things about this one: the feeling of tension and unhappiness and like there are no good choices; fearing your lover's anger and your mother's anger and feeling like there's nobody with whom you can be at peace and uncomplicatedly yourself. The alternate-history Vietnam-like setting. All the important female characters.

But, like the last de Bodard I read, I struggled with the romance. I feel like I needed to see more between Thanh and Giang. And it feels awfully abrupt that Thanh is open to trying something with Giang so very very soon after everything went down with Eldris. I think the book just needed to be a bit longer than it actually is!

A short story collection by my favourite writer of short stories! This is a recently re-released and expanded collection; the original was published by a smaller press back in 2014, which I loved, but now it exists with Extra Stories so obviously I had to buy this version too.

Most of the stories in this collection are old familiar friends to me, but there were a few stories I've never read, and they were also excellent. Cho really excels at writing about the intersection between the supernatural and the mundane, and at writing about people who have all the quirks and foibles and irritating habits of real people but are still people you like and care about. This peaks in her skill at writing ghost grandmas/ghost aunties but really everything she writes is great -- every single story in this collection is worth reading, which I find is a rarity in short story collections!

This is a truly brilliantly written example of the kind of book it is, but although I admired it all the way through, it is not nearly as much my kind of thing as the other Tasha Suri book I've read (Empire of Sand). Idk. It's....it's a bit too grimdark for me, I think, the kind of book where characters conclude that they must become bad people in order to accomplish what they need to accomplish in an oppressive world. The characters are wonderfully multifaceted and complex, and the context in which they exist is believably created, and it's definitely not just grimdark for the sake of grimdark; it's saying something deliberately with what it's doing and I respect that. But it's still not the kind of book that I get true pleasure out of reading.

(also it's well over 500 pages long and reads like it's simply the introduction to the story. I know I say this as a fan of the famously long Les Miserables, but I think this book may be too long?)

A middle grade novel about a girl who deals with an anxiety disorder by drawing a lot. But then she's pulled into a world of myths and plucky rebel kids which was created by her drawings, and because of her role as creator of that world she's the only one with the power to defeat an evil being who can use her drawings to escape into the real world! It's a fun concept and has some good details and ideas. But the tone of the narrative made it all feel a little too unreal, keeping me from being able to care about the characters and the stakes. So overall a quick and easy read that I'd certainly recommend to kids, but not one that ultimately spoke deeply to me.

Okay now THIS is how to end a book in a way where it's clear there will be sequels that you want to read, but where the narrative of the individual book is still solidly and satisfyingly concluded.

Vespertine's pitch is that it's Venom but about a nun and a spirit in a medieval setting. It's also kind of Joan of Arc in nature? And clearly written by someone for whom the Sabriel-Lirael-Abhorsen books were formative (or if they weren't, then this is a person who clearly needs those books in her life because they'd be perfect for her!).

Anyway Artemisia is a young woman who's been scarred by her past and is very happy with the idea of just continuing quietly in a retiring role as a nun in a backwater and hopefully talking to as few people as possible, but circumstances conspire to make that not an option for her, and instead she's sharing her body and mind with a wildly dangerous being who could control or destroy her easily, but with whom she works out an uneasy alliance to achieve what they each want.

It's incredible. I was a little dubious going in, because it's very catholic imagery in a way I often find tired and overdone, but the more I read the more I was there for everything this book is doing.

The relationship between Artemisia and her revenant! And the one between Artemisia and Marguerite! and Artemisia and Leander! and Artemisia and her horse! and tbh the Divine and [uh, spoilers] too, and also everything about Mother Dolours, and and and. Love it. A whole bunch of people doing their best in miserable circumstances, and not always getting it right (sometimes drastically wrong, in fact!) but TRYING.

I love this book and I love the ending and I cannot wait to read more books in this series.

I've read one book by Rogerson before, her debut novel, and though I largely enjoyed that one, I still had some fairly significant quibbles with it. Not this time. I think she's really leveled up as an author since her debut! Love to see it.

Oh boy. Really not sure what to think about this one. There are many things about it that are brilliantly done, and up to halfway through the book I was absolutely in love with the book and the things it was doing. It's a historical fiction involving alternate history and time travel, and the way Pulley introduces this alternate world to the reader is beautifully done, and then the narrative kept on going to wilder and weirder places than I was expecting and I was loving every minute of it, and loving everything about these sad broken people who had been traumatized by war and by slavery. (and it does SUCH a good job of making it clear how horrible naval battles really were, instead of glorifying them the way historical fiction often seems to!) I especially loved the horrible painful sibling bond between Agatha and Kite, the way they've immeasurably hurt each other even though they love each other, or even because they love each other.

However. The emotional weight given to various aspects of the narrative seemed off to me, in places, and it meant that the second half of the book just started feeling more and more wrong to me. ( cut for spoilers )

Well....I liked it better than the first book in this trilogy. Unfortunately still not my thing though! Like, is it doing lots of things that SHOULD be my thing? It is!

It contains:
- really competent people
- people trying their best to do what they think is the right thing
- a belief in the importance of community to help each other out, even if they don't like each other personally
- someone who hasn't had a lot of experience in friendships learning how to have friends
- weirdo outsiders finding a place
- fighting against what seems like fate/destiny or inevitability
- a nonhuman inanimate entity that is its own person with its own priorities

HOWEVER. Even with all these elements, in a book written by a very competent writer who knows how to put a story together, I just.... wasn't there.

I wonder if it is that I just cannot make myself take the premise seriously. The level of danger posed to all magical children in this world is so outrageously over the top (outside of the magic boarding school, 95% of magical children die! inside, your chance of survival goes up to 1 in 4!) that it just feels silly to me. I can't believe in the danger. It felt obvious at all times that I was reading a made up story about a made up world and made up people, instead of being able to sink into the reality that the narrative was attempting to create. And that kept me from emotionally connecting with things, beyond a few moments here and there.

Also: I just don't care about monster-fighting? and there are a lot of fight scenes of people fighting monsters. It really bogged me down in the middle of the book and made it slow reading for me.

It's really too bad! Because the themes the book's exploring ARE good ones! Sigh.

(also the book ends on a cliffhanger gdi, I hate when books do this)

This book is set in the same world as some of Clark's past works - a novella and a short story. I absolutely adored the novella (The Haunting of Tram Car 013), and the short story left me cold (A Dead Djinn in Cairo). A Master of Djinn is the further adventures of the hero of the short story, so I was a bit apprehensive going in that it might be more similar to that short story than to the novella. Unfortunately I was right!

That's not to say that there's nothing to like about the book. I enjoyed seeing more of the world Clark has created, and a dapper lesbian main character IS an inherent pleasure.

But unlike Tram Car, the stories focused on Fatma seem to be of the major, potentially-world ending variety with lots of excitement and murder and intrigue and heroics. Which is all well and good but not inherently as interesting to me personally, and I just don't feel like the character of Fatma is herself well enough fleshed out for me to enjoy the book just for the pleasure of hanging out with her.

Also......the book lauds Fatma as being amazing and wonderful and capable and admired, but she was SOOOOO slow to figure out ( uhhh spoilers for some of the mystery I guess )

If the book were deliberately portraying her as someone who is very good at some things but not at other things, that would be totally fine and good, but instead it seems to me that the reader is expected to take it at face value how great she is at her job without any complications to that understanding, despite what we see her fail at. Which is really irritating.

So. Overall, I didn't love this book, which I am sad about. Hopefully whatever Clark writes next will be a return to the things I do love about his writing!

I was inspired to reread this book because of how much I didn't care about A Deadly Education when I read that one. And I love Spinning Silver? So much?? It is GOOD. The themes and the worldbuilding and the plot and the characters are all in harmony with each other, working together to create one story with a whole lot of power. I had remembered I'd loved this book but I'd forgotten just HOW good it is.

I paid more attention to people's expressions of sexual interest (or lack thereof) this time than last time, because of discussion in the comments to my review of A Deadly Education. (Thanks

lirazel for inspiring me to look at this more closely, with your comments on Mirnatius!) And tbh as a book Spinning Silver is fairly uninterested as a whole in people's sexualities! Much more interested in questions of power and privilege and belonging, and sex can be a part of all that, but it's definitely secondary in this book. Which is fascinating to see, given how much priority is given to sex by a lot of books and a lot of society, and I really appreciate it.

I am particularly interested in Staryk sexuality, because the Staryk lord clearly sees sex as a right that is owed to one's spouse. But also something that can be bartered away for something of equal value (equally high value!). How would a Staryk think of the notion of desire? Is it even a relevant concept in their framework? They're so alien in a lot of the ways they arrange their society, why not in this as well!

Specifically about Mirnatius though, I could still come down in multiple directions on whether he's ace or not. He spends a lot of the book very firmly rejecting the idea of having sex with his wife, and also the cousin who's in love with him, and also the idea of getting together with anyone else. And his priorities (when has the opportunity to have his own priorities) do not go in that direction. But there's also this quote, from Mirnatius's pov:

Under normal circumstances, when my friend wants itself a meal, it doesn't usually last long. I just hold my nose and dive deep until the screaming is all over, then cover things over and occasionally send a compensatory purse to the appropriate destination. I have had words with it about snatching up awkward people like noblemen and the parents of small children, to a little grudging effect, but that's only because it's not very picky. Unless I do something stupid like smile encouragingly at a serving-maid or a well-turned footman, even in broad daylight, in which case I'm sure to find their staring corpse in my bed a few nights later.

To me this reads like Mirnatius has been carefully preventing himself from ever letting himself have any interest in anyone, because the demon will take it as reason to immediately kill that person. Now, he might still be ace regardless, he hasn't really had the opportunity to learn whether he's sexually into anyone because he's been the property of the demon his whole life, and the answer might be no! But the answer might also be yes?

And it's also possible that he's only appreciating serving-maids and well-turned footmen in an entirely platonic way, but the corpses being left on his bed, and the smiling at them being a problem even in daylight, at least implies otherwise.

Idk! It's all real interesting though!

(I still feel firmly that the Mirnatius-Irina relationship is not a romance though, or even pointing towards becoming one, despite what I've seen allo people say in reviews. Emotionally intense, absolutely! But the one does not necessarily lead to the other.)

On another note, I wonder what Miryem's cousin Basia thinks of her wedding being crashed by a tsar and a Staryk king having a duel with each other! Not exactly the most auspicious of beginnings there. I hope Basia and Isaac have a nice life after that.

Also, last time I read this book, I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that Miryem using that tunnel to save her Staryk lord from imprisonment means it becomes no longer an option for the Jews of the city to escape should public sentiment turn it too dangerous to be Jewish there in the future. On my first read I was too focused on some other rather pressing questions, like what's going to happen next in this book?!? But like. That is not a minor thing to be giving up!

Even though Miryem and her family have a happy ending, even though Irina is now taking charge of the whole country with the intent to protect everyone, there's still that always-lingering threat of danger to Miryem's larger Jewish community. And Miryem's choices make that threat just a bit more dangerous. Which is of course part of one overall theme of the book, of making the choices you have to make when there are no good options.

Anyway this is all just a bunch of meandering thoughts on points I found of interest in this read-through, if you want something better approaching an actual review of this book then maybe check out the review from when I first read it!