groofay

This is a humbling and chilling book. I don't know how, but Mowat in the course of this slim volume managed to write an incredibly readable book about government incompetence and savagery, biology, and a single expedition that reveals how humanity has made itself alien from the planet we presume to call home. Many of the conclusions made in this book are going to stay with me for a long time.

This might be one of my favorite books I've read all year so far. There's a poetry and heart in this novel that is hard to find elsewhere, and it comes from a place of absolute naturalness. It's been over a decade since I read Steinbeck in school, and I think I'll have to read, really read, more of his work soon. This little book got to me.

I don't know how he did it, but Brandon Sanderson turned the characters he set up in Alloy of Law–easily my least favorite Sanderson book to date–into people I empathize with to the point that the last part of the book emotionally wrecked me, almost out of nowhere.

So screw you, Brandon Sanderson, for making me feel something. But also thank you for making your characters so gloriously, horribly human.

I might leave a more "proper" review after a reread or two, but suffice it to say that I've rarely been so drawn in by a love story as by this novella, nor have I ever read a science fiction story that so adamantly ignores the details of an epoch-spanning time travel war in favor of using it as a vehicle for some of the most swoon-worthy epistolary passages I have ever read in fiction. This is a modern masterpiece.

I am absolutely reeling from the end of this book. I never thought I would like military fantasy quite so much as I've loved the Poppy War trilogy so far, but as the stakes keep rising for characters I've grown to...not exactly “love” so much as know as if they were real people since book 1, this entry is setting the stage for something equal parts epic and horrible in the conclusion.

That said, shit, I need a breather before continuing. This one was exhausting.