Core
Contains spoilers
I'm a fool, I thought this was standalone... and the second book isn't out... Anyway, this was fun! It took me a while to get into - the world is def not a standard fantasy world, so the first few chapters I was mostly trying to get my bearings, and it also spends the first 30% or so in a quest fantasy-ish mode, which is not my favourite. On top of that I was also slumping when I picked it up so that was an unfortunate combo, oops. But once it got going for me - around when Lumi's team starts crossing the south pole and when Alrik reaches Canalas - it became a breeze to read. There's still a lot of worldbuilding, but I felt like I got more room to breathe as a reader to really invest in these characters.
Which I did! The characters actually surprised me multiple times, which is something I look for - especially Lumi, who I ended up really liking. She's allowed to be rather unlikable at times: she realises multiple times she's fucked something up, she often tells herself she has different motivations than what really seems to be driving her, and she will often say something without thinking it through under duress; in short she ended up feeling really well-developed. The frank way her narrative handled sexuality also felt believable and refreshing. I liked the other POV, Alrik, too, but he didn't surprise me as much (aside from the scene when he ends up shooting a robber in the head, which also sets the tone for the rest of his narrative) - but being a biology nerd who cares about conservation made him easy for me to root for, and that's a cool perspective you don't often get in fantasy.
Aside from that the prose is generally good - in a lot of self-pub I pick up I tend to notice it often, but not so here. My biggest criticism there is really on editing: I think I tend to notice these things more than most, as they often pull me out, but I noticed a fair few typos; most egregious was probably one in the first chapter (iirc) where the verb to a very important sentence was missing. (edit: I can't find this now so I might be making this up. my bad if so...) I generally noticed these issues less as the book went on though. (Other nitpicks: things like interludes and epilogues didn't have separate chapter headings in my edition, instead being inserted in the middle of another chapter; and I wish there had been a map.)
By the end a fair few plotlines are still not resolved, leaving a lot of room open for things to explore in a sequel. The ending also leaves the cast in a really interesting place and I'd like to see where it goes from there (when the sequel does come out): now that they've ousted the Crown and Ketterman has left, they're left to pick up the pieces, so I'm hoping to see them try to find out how to rebuild Cinura. In short: took me a while to get into, but by the end it was a lot of fun! I'll probably pick up the sequel when it comes out (TBR willing).
Finished A Shadow of All Night Falling (Dread Empire #1), and it's what you might call... a solid 2/5! And yet, I'm definitely going to read more Glen Cook down the line.
The world was pretty bland and the pacing was downright bizarre, but there's something there that has the potential to be great. The last 30 pages, after a whole lot of meandering, suddenly turned into something genuinely compelling, as our main characters showed their worst sides when facing their own corpses, and one will have to be left behind without resurrection. There's also several other, potentially more interesting books happening in the sidelines of this one, which is absolutely bizarre. There's genuinely a chapter in here detailing 100 years of history in 10 pages - and it's a more compelling narrative arc than the actual story Cook is telling!
I really wish we'd actually spent more time breathing with the characters, because when we finally did right at the end it was great. But so much of the story was told as summary, with important plot points being relayed so tersely that the stakes are gone. The kidnapping at the very core of the second half of the book happens off-screen - Cook, that's good drama, why won't you show it to me 😭
Very enjoyable, simply due to the amount of concepts it's willing to throw at you. The tendency not to explain them, but to let you extrapolate from them what you will is exactly what I want from this kind of ideas-driven sci-fi. While hard sci-fi tends to explain in minute detail how everything works, PKD is perfectly happy to throw out psionics, inertials, coin-operated doors, half-life, etc. without explaining at all the whats and hows and whys. I'm still not really sure what the inciting incident is about, but I have my ideas, and that's how I'd like to keep it!
On the downside, the characters are all incredibly lifeless, and I didn't care about a single one. For one, Joe seemed generally inconsistent to me - he ended up caring a lot more about Glen than I was first led to believe, considering he seemed quite severely underpaid. Maybe I'm missing something, but I think PKD doesn't really care about writing strong characters, and for the genre he's working in, that's fine by me.
(Finally, I'd like to add that the silliest concept in this book - everything requiring small amounts of coins to function - is basically the utopia imagined by web3 crypto enthusiasts. I don't know if PKD expected this concept to ever be more than a fun joke, but it ended up being the most prescient part of the book!)
Covid read #3 – which reminded me why I mostly stopped reading YA.
I'm glad the genre in general is very focused on dealing with queerness and mental health (or at least this segment of it is). It's why I still pick these up now and then. However, the characters tend to be pretty flat for me; all their nuances are made very explicit in the text, leaving no room for me to actually grow curious about them. I don't think this is really a failing of the genre itself, it's just my taste having changed.
On the other hand, that flaw is actually perfect when I'm sick, so it was still enjoyable!
Picked up as a light read while getting through Covid – perfectly fit for purpose!
Maybe a little too nudge-nudge-wink-wink for me at times with the meta jokes and trope subversion (which I suppose is what I signed up for), but the characters were enjoyable enough in a sort of breezy YA way that it was still a nice read.
Juvenile writing style, tell don't show. Reads like a list of tropes w/o any fat and texture to actually round it out into something real and authentic
Maybe I'll try again later, but right now, this is just too similar to NP and CwT for me to enjoy it, even though I really liked those books.
