sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: future

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.

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.

This is a murder mystery novel set in space in the future, but among other things the sheer quantity of classic cocktails all the characters drink made me wonder what was going on with its vibes, and the answer appears to be that the book is based on a 1960's movie. Which explains a lot, tbh.

It felt to me like it was trying to have 1960's mystery vibes while also updating its general social consciousness, but for me personally, the way this particular book did the mashup did not work. It gave me the feeling that it simultaneously wanted to be like, "I understand about prejudice and oppression and intersectionality!" and also "this is an unexamined power fantasy about being rich!" and the two did not mesh nicely with each other.

also..... the heroine is a tech billionaire named Tesla travelling to Mars. I couldn't help being reminded of a certain other billionaire in the news a lot these days.

Anyway, I didn't feel the worldbuilding was strong, and I didn't particularly like or care about any of the characters, and I wasn't intrigued by the murder mystery, so all together there wasn't a lot for me in this book.

Some readers may appreciate though that the main character is someone who lives with disabling chronic pain and PTSD, which are regularly kept at the forefront of her experience of life. However, she also has a service dog for her PTSD and the sheer quantity of time she spent releasing the dog to say hi to other people and get petted.... I think the dog spent more of the book off-duty than on. Not at all, from my understanding, the usual priorities of people with service dogs.

Overall, I expected better from this author given the other things I've read from her, and I'm not sure what happened here. Hopefully this is just an off book and not the beginning of a trend for her!

A timey wimey book about spaceships! Aww yeah. Thank you

skygiants for reviewing it last year, so that I heard about it!

In this book: a bunch of people get stuck all together on one spaceship in a rift in space separated from the two time periods the people are from. Each has different histories, perspectives, motivations, and goals. Most of them don't like or trust each other or even want to work together, multiple of them have fraught histories with each other, and I was rooting for ALL of them.

One group of people is the ragtag crew of 5 aboard a ramshackle smuggling ship called the Jonah from the middle of a massive war between humans and an alien species. Of those five, three are the actual crew, one is a paying passenger trying to escape authorities, and one tried to hijack the ship.

The other group of people are paid employees on a major corporate-owned research vessel from a time 150 years into the future, the war a distant memory except for the legends of the Fortunate Five, the crew of a small spaceship called the Jonah who singlehandedly brought about peace and ended the war. But the people in this Jonah that the corporate vessel found with them in the rift don't match what they know about the Fortunate Five.

What's going on with the rift? Who are the crew of the Jonah? Is there any way for them all to make it back to their own times safely? Will this whole encounter change history and result in humans losing the war after all?

All of this was extremely fun, and I loved all the different characters, and seeing their backstories as they got slowly doled out to the reader over the course of the book. And the ending was so satisfying, and I definitely got emotional.

And I particularly enjoyed that one of the most important relationships the book is investigating is the complicated friendship between two men. Yes! Friendship IS so important! And learning how to be a better friend!!

I did have a couple complaints though, which I'll put behind a spoiler cut.

Click here for spoilers

Ok first of all, multiple quotes on the back of the book refer to it as a "mystery" and it just doesn't seem that mysterious to me? But the book did seem like it was set up to be mysterious!

See, it felt obvious to me from the very beginning that what was happening wasn't all of them changing history, it was them making history happen exactly as it had happened the first time. But no, almost the entire time, everyone's like "all these things that are so different from how we always understood the Jonah's history, how concerning, really hoping we aren't breaking history as we know it!!"

I just wish that SOMEBODY had brought up the possibility of this being how history actually had happened, even just to be immediately shut down as ridiculous. But no, it isn't even raised as a thinkable interpretation until very nearly the end, in a way that makes it feel to me like the reader isn't supposed to be thinking of it as a possibility either. So then instead of feeling like I was in on a secret with the narrative, I felt like I was being condescended to by the narrative, almost.

Second....I spent an enormous portion of the book genuinely wondering if this was going to turn out to be the kind of sff book where Everyone Is Het. One character being queer is made clear in the back half of the book, thank goodness, but honestly the vibe throughout continued to be pretty het-flavoured in terms of the narrative focus tbh. Which like, sure whatever fine, but I do like a little more exuberantly expansive queerness in my specfic these days.

Also the backstory for one of the main male characters involves a fridged female love interest. His backstory would still have been personally tragic for him if she'd stayed alive and simply left him for good! The fridging felt unnecessary, and tbh felt honestly to me like it lessened the, like, personal responsibility sense of having lost her because of his bad decisions.

Three characters actually had a Dead Important Person in their backstory. Dafnë the fridged love interest, a dead brother, and a dead female student. So at least not all of them are female; that's something. But still! It kinda bugged me.

Third, Shaan felt to me like she came across as way too young for the age that she had to be in the story. She's someone who went through some intensive schooling, became a teacher, taught a number of students, had her Traumatic Loss experience, and is 6 years out now from that experience. Like she must be 30 at least, I would think! But I spent most of the book convinced she was much younger than any of the other characters, until enough of her backstory was revealed that I realized what her age must be. It just felt jarring to me. And maybe that's just about the way she personally responded to her trauma, but that's not really how it came across to me in the writing. Unless I missed something here, maybe?

Finally, of the Fortunate Five, I felt like we spent almost no time really with either Jaxong or Kva-Sova, and I thought they were both super interesting and wanted to know more! Tell me more about illegal peace activists! Tell me more about smart science women! Tell me more about the fashion for body mods!

Anyway, despite the complaints, I did still thoroughly enjoy the book for what it was doing, and I'm glad I read it. I am always here for explorations of what history means via the trope of time travel, especially when it's about history that isn't actually real life earth history!

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! )

This is the first time in my life that I have gotten to hold in my hands a real actual published book written by a friend of mine, and let me tell you, it is a GREAT experience and also this book lived up to absolutely everything I hoped for from it. Five stars, would collapse into a puddle of emotions again. And I say this without bias! I would have loved this book even if I didn't know Becca!

So The Iron Children is a scifi novella about cyborgs warriors and a robot nun and one squishy human traversing a treacherous landscape together in the midst of war, and also is about questions of identity and religious ethics and duty and kindness and freedom. I loved EVERYTHING about this, I adored all the characters, I loved the worldbuilding, I loved its careful pacing and the way it built on its ideas, I loved that it managed to pack so much into such a short book without ever feeling like it was overcrowded.

The book is told through three different POVs: the squishy human, Asher, who's a young nun-in-training getting thrown in over her head; Barghest, the leader of the cyborg warriors, whose dedication to duty is above and beyond the call of duty; and a character whose identity is a mystery until partway into the book but is definitely one of the other cyborg warriors. The first two characters get their POV sections in third person, but the mystery character's sections are in first person.

I have gone on record in the past as stating that I find it irritating when there's multiple povs and some of them are, for no reason, in a different person than the others.

BUT the key here is that there IS a reason in The Iron Children, and when there's a reason it works! It's got a destabilizing effect, to have one of the three in a different person than the other two; it shows that character as other, as separate. It works thematically! (Okay and incidentally it lets the name be hidden to allow a reveal later on as to which character this one is, which is convenient!)

And now let me go into the realm of spoilers because I have to to talk about everything else I love.

( Read more... )
ANYWAY read this book!!!

This is a fascinating novel about first contact with aliens in the relatively near future, that's doing great things around ideas of what we owe to the Earth in terms of mitigating the environmental harm we've caused through climate change and other destructive actions. Not everything about the book worked for me, but I think it is still overall very worth reading.

The basic set-up: in the near-ish future, much of the earth is now organized not around countries and nationalism, but around "dandelion networks" where you belong to the network of whatever river you live in the drainage basin for. Within that network everyone has a voice – all humans, but also their communication technology is set up to provide voices for the natural environment as well, so that any decisions properly take into account the needs of the ecosystems around them. The dandelion networks are closely entwined with their local environment and feel a great deal of pride for the way they're managing to turn things around and make human life on earth sustainable long-term. However, not everyone is part of a dandelion network; there's still some nation-states hanging on to existence, though with much less control, and also corporations have been stripped of their power but are not gone and have become basically their own little nation-states as well.

In this context, an alien ship arrives, landing in the Chesapeake network, who want to save all humans from what they see as an urgently dying planet! Who gets to decide who is communicating with the aliens on behalf of all humans? What will the various groups do to make sure their voice is heard? What values should direct everyone's actions in this fraught first contact? Judy, our viewpoint character, happens to be first on the scene when the aliens land, and ends up being the main liaison from the dandelion networks to the aliens as a result, but Judy and her priorities don't get to stand alone for long.

I love this set-up, and I love the themes the book is exploring. All the nature imagery, and the conscious hard work going into keeping the earth thriving as much as possible, and the history of activism that underlies all the dandelion networks' current work.

And the way that creating relationships is depicted as something requiring work and attention to grow them into something full of trust and understanding. Judy's relationship with her wife, Carol, is shown to be already strong and deep and loving and supportive, but Judy and Carol's relationship with their co-parents, Dinar and Athëo, is still new and fragile. But there's also the humans' relationships with their planet, and the dandelion networks' relationships with their local governments, and with the corporations, and with the aliens – and the aliens relationships within themselves as well. I love all of this! And the smaller-scale and larger-scale relationships are like, thematically resonant with each other in a very effective way.

But I think to talk about this book in further detail I'm going to need to go behind a spoiler cut!

( Read more... )

And okay yes this was a whole enormous pile of words analysing my not entirely positive feelings towards this book, but overall I think what I want to say about it is that it's interesting and thoughtful enough to be WORTH arguing with! I enjoyed thinking about it, I enjoyed spending time with these characters, there were some moments I found genuinely touching and emotional, and I argue because me and the book are both united in caring about things. So I do recommend it! And please come argue with me about this book!

Okay so this is a stand-alone book that is set in the same universe as Everina Maxwell's first novel, Winter's Orbit. It is also about two guys falling in love IN SPACE and it is so much fun!

Somewhere I saw one of those graphs with one axis being Cause Problems - Solve Problems, and the other being On Purpose - By Mistake, and with the main characters of this book placed firmly in the "cause problems on purpose" quadrant and YES and it is SO GOOD. And the best part is that they are extremely different flavours of this, but they work so well together. One of the leads is approximately as chaotic as a person can get, and clearly thrives off of it, he loves the feeling of being like, well what would happen if I did THIS completely bonkers thing on impulse and see where it goes. The other lead is the kind of person who memorizes regulations and can recite them at will, and has a very firm set of principles and morals, and is perfectly comfortable causing problems for other people via unorthodox applications of rules in order to effect what he thinks is right. TOGETHER THEY WILL - well, you'll find out.

And I love how the combination of these two characters making Choices means that the book kept on going in directions I was totally not able to anticipate. I recognized tropes, and then the narrative just zoomed RIGHT on by the expected arc of those tropes to do some other weirder thing!

It's got an excellent balance of relationship building and plot building, too. The author talks in the end-note about how it'll read for people coming it either from the romance genre or the scifi genre, and as someone who loves both, I think its way of integrating the two was perfect.

I also loved how many wonderful secondary characters the book contains, both sympathetic and less so! The sister, the aunt, the dead gen-parent, the previous governor, the governor general, the two rankers....all of them were amazing. (yes I am bad at names, how did you guess.)

And! It is about TELEPATHIC BONDING (and about pretending to be telepathically bonded!). Hot damn.

The funny thing was, as much as the book kept on doing its own thing, I was also unavoidably reminded of two other narratives I've previously read. The alien remnants stuff put me in mind of Tanya Huff's Confederation series, in terms of interacting with mysterious, powerful, and incomprehensible alien objects that can do unexpected things. And the brain powers and forced military mind-bonding to subjugate the powers of a particular type of person thing reminded me very strongly of astolat's Person of Interest fanfic Dangerous If Unbound!

Ocean's Echo is doing rather different things with both of these elements than either Huff or astolat, but it's fun that it still manages to be in conversation with other things I've read.

I thoroughly loved reading the whole thing, and kept on having to pause to like, scream silently inside my head about various aspects. Good times!!!

This book started out SO strong, with a bunch of space nuns living in a living spaceship grown from a species of slug, each of the nuns with their own personalities and foibles and strengths and weaknesses that make living together in a small, isolated community a fun challenge. And it was so good at this!!! So good!!!!!! But then we went and had plot happen.

( cut for spoilers )

The third book in the Locked Tomb ~~trilogy~~ quartet! I had to reread the first two books because like, this series may be great but it is also MEGA confusing and I already struggle enough with remembering what happened in previous books when the new book in a series comes out! This time I went into Gideon the Ninth armed with an illustrated guide to all the cavaliers and necromancers, which house each belongs to, and what various names/titles they all go by. This helped ENORMOUSLY in being able to follow the dang thing, and I had a much better experience than my first go. And then, having been able to follow the first book made following Harrow the Ninth much easier too! I knew who Ianthe was, for example, and could understand her character better, and was capable of having opinions about her!

So then I felt as prepared as I could be to go into Nona the Ninth.

And it was GREAT. Was it also confusing? Yes, absolutely. Being confused is the Normal State Of Being when interacting with these books, in my humble opinion. But I understood enough! And oh gosh there are many amazing things about it!

Except that the first thing I did upon finishing reading it was go to my rss reader and read through all the tumblr posts, so now I kind of feel like all the important things have already been said by other people, which makes it much harder to write a review. Oops.

But I cared so much about so many characters, and I have so much admiration for Tamsyn Muir's writing (she uses words so deliciously, and also is great at creating imagery!), and I cannot WAIT to find out what happens in Alecto the Ninth!

When I read A Memory Called Empire I absolutely adored it and was blown away by it, and so when this sequel came out I a) bought it immediately, and then b) failed to read it for a year and a half because I was afraid it wouldn't live up to the first one.

And.....hm. A Desolation Called Peace is an excellent book, a five star book, doing many interesting things. The kind of book I want to pick into pieces because it has so many pieces TO pick; it's doing lots of things, and it's interesting and compelling and I care very much about all the characters and what's happening. But I don't love it to the degree I loved A Memory Called Empire.

I think I'm more confused about the ultimate themes that underlie everything this one is doing, is part of the problem. The first book was, among other things, about what it means to always be an outsider for whom belonging and fitting in isn't possible; about degrees of assimilation and whether they're inevitable or not, desirable or not. The sequel both continues some of that AND seems to be trying to say that there are always connections and similarities between people, no matter how different they seem, and that sometimes assimilation is the way forward. And the way they're implemented in this book makes it feel to me like those two themes were working against each other, instead of building together.

I love the thing where everything a book is doing all works together so perfectly that it creates something that's greater than the sum of its parts, and I feel like the first book did that beautifully, and this one not so much, as great as all its parts are. And it's disappointing! I think if I didn't have the first book to compare it to I would be writing a much more gushing review of this book.

I did really love many things! The complexity of the relationship between Mahit and Three Seagrass, everything about Eight Antidote and how he relates to the people around him and to the kind of world he is ensconced in, TWENTY CICADA omg he's so interesting I want to know everything about him, the subversive comic Mahit picks up in Lsel Station (I want to know more about the political teen artist stationers!), and so much more! And Martine is also just really good at writing prose that makes you want to keep reading.

I don't know. Talk to me about this book! If you've read it, what do you think? Did the management of the themes work better for you than it did for me? Am I missing something or misunderstanding something? It's possible that I just haven't cogitated over this one enough, but the hugo voting deadline is end of day TOMORROW so I wanted to get my thoughts up asap!

In a surprising turn of events I actually really liked this book. I often do not get along with Valente's writing, but on rare occasions she manages to write something that works for me, and it turns out this is one!

This book began life as a short story in 2016 (The Future Is Blue), which is now the first 32 pages of the published novella. I enjoyed the short story back in the day, and it was fascinating to see where things went from there, after what was the end at the time!

It's a post-apocalyptic climate disaster story, but told from the perspective of someone for whom the flooded and garbage-filled earth is the only world she has ever known, and she loves her world and her people and her life, even though/even when things are really hard.

And a lot of really hard things do happen to her! But she always finds something to love, something to live for, something to hope for. I loved Tetley, and I loved getting to see the world through her eyes.

It's for moments like this that I work my way through the Hugo lists every year: that feeling when I pick up a book I probably would never have otherwise bothered with, and discover that it is actually 1000% my thing. This book! This book!!!!!!!!!!!

It is a book about the struggles to communicate between people of very different cultures and experiences and frameworks for understanding the world, and about what happens to a colonized planet that is no longer in contact with the rest of the universe, and about being haunted by your past, and about trying to do things and believe in things and make a difference, and about the importance of human connection and the stories we tell. It's beautiful and fascinating and emotional and so, so good.

Highly recommended!!

(also...the Dragonriders of Pern books were my first and most formative exposure to the notion of a planet colonized and then abandoned, and interacting with the technology left by the original colonizers without understanding it -- so throughout the book I kept on being inescapably reminded of how much I once loved the Pern books, except this book is uhhhhh actually good, unlike Pern, lol)

This is a book exactly in line with what one would expect based on the previous works in this series, but somehow this one didn't land all the way for me, and I'm not sure why.

Did I like reading about a bunch of different aliens all dealing with their own stuff but doing their best to be reasonable to each other when unexpectedly stuck together for a multi-day emergency? Sure! But I never felt exactly invested, the way I did for the previous books. It was merely a mildly nice way to spend a couple hours. Which isn't a bad thing for a book to achieve, but is not quite what I hope for out of Chambers. Disappointing. :(

Oh boy. Hmm. Where to start? A brilliant book, but I have some complicated feelings about it, so let's see if I can work through those by writing about it!

In this book, Cara is a traverser, someone who travels between different versions of the world for her job. The reason she can do this: she's dead in most other versions of reality, and you can only go to worlds where you don't already exist. So most traversers come from difficult backgrounds, the kind of lives where you have a lot of near misses with death. Between her history and her job, she has something of a complicated relationship with her own identity, and with the concept of death! She also has a complicated relationship with her handler, Dell, involving flirtation from Cara and a certain degree of mutual attraction, and Dell keeping firm boundaries that make it clear she'll never be willing to respond or act on this attraction.

It's a book with a lot to say about what makes a person who they are, about class dynamics and the huge effects they have on everyone's lives, about what it means to love someone (both platonic and romantic), and about evil capitalist tech bro billionaires.

All of this is GREAT. But I found the book very slow to start; it took quite a while before I was into it. And even after I got interested, it took even longer for me to be really invested. I think this might be because the book is doing enough unexpected things that it took a long time for me to be able to settle into an understanding of what sort of book I was actually reading! Not to say that unexpectedness is bad; just that when I don't know what to expect, I can't emotionally prepare, and so I hold myself at a further emotional reserve from the story.

Anyway eventually I was invested indeed, and cared a lot about everything, and also found it all really interesting! But then I was once again thrown by the ending.

( a bunch of spoilery discussion of the ending )

At any rate, despite the issues I had, I do really think it's an amazing book and I'm so glad I read it. I will be thinking about it for a while, I think!

Content note: Cara is a survivor of an abusive intimate partner relationship, and although that relationship is in her past, it's relevant to her present and so you hear a lot about it.

The marketing for a book does a lot of work in terms of setting up expectations for what kind of a book you're reading, and honestly setting correct expectations is super important. It lets the right kind of readers find the book, and it lets the readers be in the right mindset to appreciate the kind of thing the book in question is doing.

All of which is to say: ( I guess this is spoilers, given that it's information the cover copy doesn't want you to know )

A good book, and a book that I think I would even say I mostly liked, but a book I have complicated feelings about in the end.

So Martha Wells just tricked me into reading a murder mystery, didn't she. I don't read a lot of those! Well -- I read a lot of them by two specific authors and nothing else.

(...wait, were any of the previous murderbot books murder mysteries and I just failed to notice??)

Anyway this is the latest Murderbot novella and it is excellent as expected, I love Murderbot and this was a satisfying book to read, and is there anything else really to say? If you love Murderbot then this book is wonderful and it's probably something you've already read or are intending to read. If you haven't read Murderbot yet then start at the beginning because it's truly worth it, but this book is probably not the place to start.

Sequel to Mirage, which I read earlier this year. The strengths and weaknesses continue to be similar. I loved the two main characters and their complex relationship with each other. And I loved that it's a story that's so woman-focused. But the plot is not much to write home about, and the romances--there's two this time--feel shallow and uninteresting to me.

Maram's lesbian love story had some promise, but it's so lightly sketched that when you add it all up there's hardly anything there. I liked the idea of it but there wasn't really anything more than an idea.

And the love story between Amani and Idris is just....meh to me.

The pacing dragged in places too, and I nearly gave up on the book a couple times. In the end I'm glad I didn't, since I do still care a lot about Maram and Amani. But I was hoping to see growth from the author after her first book, and I'm not sure I did, which made this book more disappointing for me than I think it would have been if it had been the first book.

A few years ago there was a novel-length work of m/m original fiction posted to AO3 called "Course of Honour" and I read it and I loved it and then I reread it several more times. And then some acquiring editor with excellent taste purchased it for publishing!

Winter's Orbit is the updated, edited, published version of that origfic and it is even BETTER and I love ittttttttt. It's a delightful addition to my slowly growing collection of queer space opera, and even the cover commits. It is very Bisexual Flag Colours In Space and I commend the cover designer for their choices.

Anyway the book is about an Arranged Marriage For Politics Reasons with a subplot of Who Killed Jainan's Previous Husband And Who Else Do They Want To Kill (For Politics Reasons) and it is delicious. Two people who are very different from each other and wary of their marriage must learn how to get along and how to be supportive of each other, with a timeline of being able to present a good face to the public within a month because of treaty reasons! Both are very competent at very different things and both contribute materially to making important things happen, while doubting their own worth! Also there are a bunch of secondary non-romantic relationships that are deeply important to the main characters as well!

Kiem and Jainan, the lead characters in the romance, are both wonderful and I love them both very much. And I love that even though both of them have a history of not being valued for who they are, they both see in the other a person worth valuing and admiring. And they learn to trust and like each other, and are willing to do so much for each other, and it's amazing. And okay, maybe they get to love a little fast (they've only known each other a month!!!) but they do go through a Lot together in that month so I'm very willing to be understanding.

(Bel, Kiem's aide, is a definite favourite character as well btw. Her arc is GREAT.)

I love that one of the things updated for the professionally published version of this book is expanded quantities of worldbuilding, because the original was honestly pretty light on anything but the (admittedly excellent) feels. I'm always there for worldbuilding, and the added content is great, except now I just want even more. The author has unleashed a hunger within me!

It's fascinating the way that this is set in the context of an empire that annexed a minor planet (Kiem is from the imperial family and Jainan is from the annexed planet), but where the empire itself is small beans in the broader context, being only 7 planets in size, and having basically no power when it comes to the universe-wide political shenanigans; I want to know more about this. I want to know more about the radical Thean students. I would love to know more about the Emperor! Tell me more about the remnants! More about the Iskat planetary ecosystem! More about Thean clan heraldry! Differing perceptions of gender amongst the different cultures that make up the Iskat empire! The culture and history of the other 5 planets in the empire! I am insatiable.

I really enjoyed this book, once I got past the slowish start! It is the author's first book, and there are a few ways in which that manifests, but overall a great read.

It's a scifi/fantasy futuristic YA novel featuring a girl (Amani) from a colonized culture who is kidnapped and trained to be a body-double for the princess of the colonizers, Maram. The complex relationship between Amani and Maram is great, and the way that Maram is clearly a cruel and difficult person but also a teenager who's had a very hard life and hasn't had the opportunity to learn to be better.

( Read more... )

But! I still loved the book! I had a lot of feelings and cared a lot about the characters, and was totally into the things the book was interested in focusing on. And I'm super pumped to read the sequel. (Apparently Maram gets a queer love interest!!!)