Jessica

There were some (scant) moments when I almost liked this book, but overall, it is so slow and one of the POV characters in particular (María/Sabine) is so unlikeable, holy shit. Alice was much more likeable, but even her chapters were filled with boring flashbacks to seemingly every single thing that ever happened in her childhood in Scotland. Personally I felt like the second half of the book was better, because María/Sabine's chapters got replaced with Lottie's, and Lottie was a more sympathetic character on the whole (although she definitely lost me when she decided to kill her lover, Penny, after María/Sabine turned Penny into a vampire. It's one thing to be like, "I don't want to turn my lovers into vampires like me because while it might be an immortal life, it's a cursed life" and another thing to be like, "however if one of them does become a vampire I will instantly murder her even though I just spent twenty chapters ramming home how much I really really hate killing innocents"). I mean okay, an extremely unsubtle point in this book, which I believe multiple characters explicitly repeat, is that vampirism is not eternal life; instead you rot from the inside out, steadily losing your humanity, until you are such a hollow, devouring shell that you get stupid and careless and something kills you. So maybe that explains Lottie… María/Sabine was always fucking terrible, though. It was not clear to me why María couldn't refrain from killing the original Sabine when that Sabine was in the process of making her a vampire, when no one else in this entire book seemed to have that issue. I guess the intended answer is really just "María sucks" but in the moment it seemed to be more of a "loss of self-control in such a primal moment as the moment of death" thing, which seemed like it could happen to anyone. As a result of this happening fairly early in the book, I expected vampires to be more aware that siring further vampires was a risky endeavour, and it was bewildering to me that they were not.

Anyway, what more can I say? It's one of those books where most of the story is backstory so I can't really criticise it for that, but a lot of it was overly belaboured and extremely low-tension. Some of the present-day chapters were like this too – there was one towards the end which was like three pages of "Alice went outside and took some deep breaths" and SERIOUSLY this book needed an editor to NIX THAT. There's also a lot of unsubtle repetition of this story's vampire lore. It just felt like it took so long to get anywhere. The ending was actually okay though – Lottie tricked Alice into killing Sabine (with a very obvious lie…). Alice did that, and then also killed Lottie, knowing that Lottie was going to kill her just like she did Penny (and, again, despite this story's love of overexplaining a multitude of points I really do not feel like it explained Lottie's 180 on killing innocent people). Then Alice got a phone call from her dad and the conclusion seemed to be that, while María and Lottie completely vanished from their old lives when they became vampires, Alice didn't have to and wasn't going to. Obviously that's no long-term strategy but I guess it might work for a while (until people start to question why she still looks eighteen when she's definitely much older than eighteen), and a while is a good start. I guess she might run into problems if "trying to lead a normal life" requires her to do anything during daylight hours, too. Anyway, whatever, I'm glad I'm no longer stuck on this book!

Well, what you see is really what you get with this book. It's a fictionalised retelling of the life of Uruguayan ex-president José Mujica, from his youth through his revolutionary guerrilla days and his time imprisoned (and tortured) by the dictatorial regime to his life in retirement as an old man. And it imagines that during his years in solitary confinement he engaged in conversation with an annoying talking frog, because why not, I guess.

Where this book really loses me is with the political argument that it makes, which is basically, "Just vote, for liberal candidates, and everything will be fine." It conflates the very idea of revolution with an armed struggle by a self-appointed minority, and thus dismisses it as an impractical dream and tells us, as I said, to Just Vote. Like those are the only two options. Politically it's crap, which makes me pretty unforgiving of it as a work of literature. This is a shame, because I've liked all of de Robertis' previous novels. I would recommend any of them ahead of this, but I guess particularly "Perla", if you were interested in the "South American dictatorships" theme.

Really enjoyed this, in large part due to the shining beacon of chaos that is Tennalhin Halkana. At the start of the book he's in hiding for unspecified reasons, but making use of the time to go on a self-destructive bender. But as it turns out, his aunt is the legislator, which seems to mean the ruler of this corner of space, and to get him out of the way and make him stop embarrassing her, she arranges to (illegally) conscript him into the army… and Tennal's smiling defiance of military authority is one of the best things about this book.

There's a lot more to it, of course. There's the legacy of sinister "neuromodification" experiments, by which the government created a number of "readers" (who can read others' minds) and "architects" (who can psychically control other people). Tennal is a reader, and then Surit, the other main character, is an architect. Surit is a good character, too, very caught up in his sense of propriety, and trying to escape the shadow of his mother (who was a traitor to the regime). As the novel progresses, a political struggle takes place between the legislator and another contender for absolute power, which Tennal and Surit find themselves involved in. There's a lot of Weird Space Stuff, which actually reminded me a lot of the narrative-heavy game "I Was a Teenage Exocolonist" with its wormhole. So if you enjoyed one, you might well enjoy the other, idk.

The weakest element of this book was probably the romance between Tennal and Surit. I feel like the potential complications of any romance between them were developed pretty well, and then the whole issue got pushed to the backburner as so much else was happening in the story. Their inevitable hooking up got relegated to the epilogue because there was just no room for it any earlier. I have no constructive suggestions for how it could've been done differently… I just feel like it wasn't ideal, the way it was. Still, there was a lot else to like in this book. Four stars!

I never really got into this book because the first two POV characters (Miryem and Wanda) were just so cold-hearted at the beginning, even though they were both described as having rough upbringings (in different ways) that made them that way. As the book went on, they both developed an ability to care about a wider layer of people than just themselves and their mothers, so that was good. And you could say that I complain all the time about fantasy feudal settings that idealise feudalism, and at least this novel depicts feudalism as brutal and hard... which is like, yeah it does... but maybe what I really want is to not read books about feudalism at all, I dunno.

Anyway, the book engaged me enough to read it to the end, but in addition to the hard-to-like characters, I did find it fairly complicated with a lot of overlapping subplots and POVs (not all of whom had very distinct voices – I confused Wanda with her youngest brother Stepon more than once, since the book never uses chapter headings or anything to tell you whose POV you're about to read), and in the end I did not even understand the magical process by which the villain was defeated. I wouldn't say this book is bad, just that it never grabbed me, which was disappointing after how much I loved "Uprooted".

This was fine. I’ve really appreciated this series’ world-building, but as time has gone on, I’ve less and less enjoyed the directionless, tension-free narratives (although admittedly they are punctuated by bad things that come out of nowhere before they’re swiftly resolved again). I gather that the boring “slice of life” stuff is a large part of why this series is so popular, and I’m not here to tell anyone not to enjoy what they enjoy, but… it doesn’t do it for me.

Anyway, this instalment in the series is set at what is basically an interstellar truck stop, where a few travellers from diverse alien backgrounds are forced to stay a few days after some satellite-related disaster that cuts comms and grounds all transport. There are some misunderstandings resulting from their different backgrounds, and given the low-stakes nature of everything up to that point there was the genuinely shocking almost-death of the adolescent Laru when he was JUST TRYING TO DELIVER SOME CAKE, but (almost) everything gets worked out in the end and everyone is happy. If I’m honest there was one character in particular that I found frustratingly unrelatable (well, her just wanting to spend her few weeks of leave fucking her boyfriend was quite relatable. everything else about her was not) and it still kind of rankles with me that Unrelatable Character was too racist or something to recognise how bad it is that Speaker’s entire species has no inhabitable planet of their own, being totally dependent on spaceships and spacesuits for survival, while her own species keeps colonising new planets like there’s no tomorrow. There was definitely some moral in there about sometimes people have political disagreements with us but we should be friends anyway which seemed a bit meh. I also wasn’t keen on Ouloo’s “I don’t want to care about politics, I just think everyone should be nice” which was framed like some radical truth when actually it’s naive as hell, lol.

Look, probably I could keep going on nitpicking minor things that annoyed me, but the truth is that the book is okay. I managed to read the last two-thirds in one day, mainly because I really wanted to make sure to finish it this year so I didn’t have to adjust my 2025 reading goal again, but I couldn’t have done that if it weren’t at least easy reading. And I genuinely do find the world-building interesting, and once the single most shocking event of the book happened I wanted to keep reading to make sure the affected character would be OK, so obviously I got invested to some extent. Like I said, the book was fine… I just don’t think, having finished this series, I’m going to read much else from this “hopepunk” genre because it’s clearly not for me.

Despite a slow start, this proved to be a fun book. Amina al-Sirafi herself is a great, unconventional, adventure hero. She's a forty-something mediaeval Muslim woman, a single mother, and at the novel's beginning a reformed character: a retired pirate captain who's given up the grog and her past habit of making poor choices in men. But of course she gets sucked back into the game, and basically in the form of a fantastical heist novel, she gets the old crew back together for one last mission... which turns into the first of five last missions because this is the first instalment of a series.

So, in this instalment, Amina is offered a more-than-life-changing amount of money to retrieve the teenage grandchild of a fabulously wealthy woman, who has apparently been kidnapped. As if the money weren't enough, the teenager is also the child of one of Amina's former crewmates – one who died in some horrible gruesome way that Amina feels is ultimately her fault, because the culprit was her husband. Of course there are twists and turns, and the supernatural comes to play an increasingly large part in the storyline, drawing on Arabic mythology familiar to me only from Chakraborty's previous series, the Daevabad trilogy. But whereas that series included a lot more political scheming, this book was much more straightforwardly swashbuckling adventure.

One of the elements of this book that stood out to me was Amina's demonic estranged husband, Raksh... from the moment he came back and the narrative started to emphasise how unimaginably attractive and incredibly good in bed this guy was, I was like, "Oh no, they get back together, don't they." And they don't, really (although they do have sex again, in a scene which is elided over) but it is obvious that this guy is going to reappear in future books, with tension arising from his unreliability as an ally as well as how attracted Amina obviously still is to him. So yeah, that's a thing. I will say that once he came back, he didn't seem nearly as awful as he'd been built up to be in that first half of the book. I thought he was going to be some kind of out-and-out sadistic abuser, but he's not really. He's flighty and deeply selfish, and more to the point he's a demon, so when people "jokingly" offer their souls to him he can't resist. It's a bit unserious but I guess the alternative would've been a reconciliation plotline with a sadistic murderer, and that might be a bit dark for this style of book.

Something else that I think is worth mentioning is just how refreshing it is that this book doesn't pander to Orientalism at all. Lots of people in the West have this idea that the Islamic world is somehow fundamentally different from us: eternally backwards, bound by tradition, with people who are somehow not driven by the same human nature that drives all of us (you know, where people like merriment and sex and having some degree of agency in their own lives). While this novel is very much rooted in its mediaeval Indian Ocean setting, it also tells a story using (mostly) realistic characters instead of Orientalist caricatures. Amina is (in her own words) not a "good Muslim", what with her weakness to booze and men. There is a gay character, and a trans character. While the book doesn't try to glorify that time period either (there are numerous references to slavery, extreme poverty, various manifestations of sexism, interreligious violence, and so forth), it reflects the fact that there have always been people defying traditional norms, and that a life of piracy on the open sea is a pretty liberating, if dangerous, choice for such a person in that time period. Muslims have never been inherently more pious or traditional than anyone else, and in fact most people throughout history have been much less devout than we're typically told they were in school. I mean, the novel is also a swashbuckling fantasy adventure, so it's not very realistic in the sense that most people throughout history didn't have personal dealings with supernatural creatures, but still.

Having said that, the strongest character in this novel by far is Amina herself. Now, there are practical limits on how much the rest of the characters could've been fleshed out, because there are a lot of them and there's also a lot of plot to get through. But certainly the villain is pretty 2D, and you know, it just felt worth noting, even though it seems in keeping with this kind of adventure novel.

Overall, I enjoyed this. I'll definitely be reading the next one.

Really enjoyed this, although it’s not without its flaws. It combines a kind of tropey gay romance (as in, they start in an arranged marriage that becomes a real romance, and they spend way too much of the book not communicating about how much they really like each other) with court intrigue. The main characters, Kiem and Jainan, have to unravel the mystery of why Jainan's first husband was killed, and of course poking their noses into the conspiracy sees the two of them come under attack. It is one of those books where virtually every named character is a royal or a noble or a general or a diplomat (plus one professor), or an assistant to one of the above, but I enjoyed it in spite of its fixation on the ruling class.

Loved this book! I'm such a sucker for the character archetype that “the Dragon” represents, kind of harsh and menacing but ultimately on the side of good. I really enjoyed the dynamic between him and Agnieszka, the protagonist, where she's initially his prisoner but a sexual tension develops as she learns magic and the two learn to cast it in harmony with each other. The main storyline, involving court intrigue and the struggle against the advancing Wood, was good too (and I appreciated that this was NOT a “feudalism was great, actually” fantasy book) but it was really that scintillating relationship that kept me engaged.

Probably the best novel I've read all year.

Almost as soon as I started reading this book, I was relieved: it's much better than the last one. Where The Dragon Republic disappointed and frustrated me for depicting Rin as a hero when many of her actions (like genociding the Mugenese) are so clearly evil, The Burning Godimmediately makes clear that Fang Runin is a real villain-protagonist. I was so thrilled by this reframing that my renewed enthusiasm kept me going for a good long while.

To the extent that I didn't enjoy this book, it was mainly because it was very long, and there was a constant whirlwind of neverending but repetitive activity to fill the pages. I'll admit, as I said in the last review, that some of this is on me for reading a military fantasy when I'm not keen on military strategy. But then there was also – without wanting to spoil anything specific – the long, sorry situation with Nezha, multiple rounds of trusting people before inevitably being betrayed... while I was reading it (for most of the book) I was happily along for the ride, but at the end I look back and just feel overwhelmed by everything that happened. A lot of individual characters had arcs that finished unsatisfyingly. The ending also suffered a bit from pacing – there was a “fake climax” just close enough to the end that I thought it might've been the real climax, so then everything afterwards felt like a really drawn-out and overlong “falling action” section, until nearly 100 pages later it became clear there was going to be another, real climax. Then once we got there, I had very mixed feelings about that real ending. On the one hand, I think it's perfectly fitting for the character of Fang Runin that even once the war is over she can't get over her paranoia, or turn her mindset to reconstruction. On the other hand, it did make the events of nearly the entire book feel pointless, if she was just going to hand control over the country to Nezha so easily. What was all the destruction for, then?! But you know, I guess the core of the trilogy is Rin's rise and fall rather than the state of the land around her.

I want to be fair, though. Pretty much everything that I said I wanted to see in my review of the last book was, in fact, present. For the majority of the book, I was deeply engaged and clicking through pages like nobody's business. And it's also notable that this book puts a very Chinese spin on the fantasy genre, with a wonderful skewering of Western, Christian colonialism in the Hesperians, and drawing extensively on Chinese history, culture and geography. Everything to do with the setting, including the magic system and the gods, was super interesting to me. And overall, I think this has been the best-written and most enjoyable instalment of the trilogy (not quite enough for me to give it a higher rating than the three stars I gave The Poppy War, though). If you've read the first two books, you have every reason to finish the series off.

Review originally posted on my homepage.

This is a fantastic book, and should be much better-known than it is. Set in a township near Pretoria in the tumultuous 1980s, it tells the story of Tihelo, a young teenage girl living with her mum and older sister. At first she's no fan of the protests and disruption, only wanting to go to school so she can become a journalist and escape the township. However, the brutality of the apartheid regime is inescapable, and her need to defend and get justice for her loved ones pushes her into the resistance. It's a powerful story which goes to some dark places, and I think it gives a good insight into what South Africa was like at the time (at least, speaking as someone whose own knowledge of that time is cobbled together from year 11 Geography classes, conversations with my partner's South African family, and what I learned from the Hector Pieterson museum in Soweto). It's notable as a South African novel actually written by a Black person, which is bizarrely difficult to find considering the demographics of the country. And I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to get into reading novels about South Africa, as indeed it's been (BY FAR) the most engaging of all the ones I've read. Enjoyable, significant, and deserves to not be so obscure.

This is the kind of book that'll be to some people's taste but not others, and sadly it wasn't to mine. Neither the characters nor the setting were very well-developed, and it was hard to feel invested in anything when it was all depicted in such a shallow way. The people who love this book seem to love it because of the flowery, poetic language, but for me that just made it even harder to get into because it's so over-the-top. If it does actually get made into a TV show, that might be a lot better for it because I assume they'll be forced to come up with an actual plot and an internally coherent vision of what the characters look like.

I found Amberlough hard to get into at first; there are a ton of names – of people, places and political groups – and while I picked them up before too long, it took a lot of furrowed concentration at the start. The good news is that so long as you're willing to do that, you'll be rewarded with a fantastic spec fic thriller, set in an analogue for Weimar-era Germany as it succumbs to Nazi rule.

The main characters are split between spies and burlesque theatre folk, most of them gay, and the rest dead broke (my god how refreshing it is to read a book where not everyone is rich!!). The characters are all far from perfect people, but especially Cyril, whose flaws are so glaring and decision-making skills so horrible that his chapters made me squirm to read at times. That said, despite their flaws I found them all compelling to read about, the way their stories crossed paths and had them sometimes allied and sometimes working against each other. That was neat.

There is a palpable sense of dread over the course of the book that gets sharper and heavier the closer you get to the end. The real theme of it is the way that the impending seizure of power by the Ospies (Nazi equivalents) forces people into some nasty dilemmas where every option sucks, but it still matters what option they choose anyway. I'm looking forward to seeing how that develops over the rest of the trilogy.

As an aside, I also appreciated the depiction of Amberlough itself – the many districts, from genteel to bawdy and everything in between; the public transport routes; the sights and smells of the city parks; the sounds of the different accents of its residents... it was just clearly a book from someone who loves urban life and can put into words all the things that make cities great. It made for an immersive environment as all the politics and scheming were underway. If this book sounds like anything you might be interested in I encourage you to give it a try, because it really gripped me.

Considering it was only 46 pages long, this novelette did a truly astounding job introducing a setting (fantasy Cairo c. 1920s), interesting characters, different types of mythical creatures and a compelling mystery that takes exactly as long to wrap up as feels appropriate. Really enjoyed this.

I'm not sure who the translator was for the edition I read, but I feel like they weren't one of the better ones... the prose in this was just stilted and maintained some level of distance from me; it wasn't the kind of engaging prose I'm used to reading. So a large part of my low rating is really because of the poor translation.

This is obviously considered one of the big books of Russian literature, and I certainly appreciated some of the snark and the sending-up of Soviet society. But the story itself was kind of incoherent, like a 500-page dream sequence where you can't expect any kind of continuity to last too long and there's a lot of seemingly unrelated things happening. (The closer you get to the end, the more related they turn out to be, but I endured a lot of confusion first.) It's also not really a book for character development... it's more like the kind of traditional tale where the characters represent things, rather than be people. Which is fine, there's still value in those kinds of stories, I just don't find them the most enjoyable. As for rewarding, I think this book could have been that, if I'd taken it slower (like one chapter a day) and had a reading guide or something to explain all the references. So, if you're not a habitual reader of old classics, that's the approach I'd recommend with this one... it's just not accessible enough to read straight through and expect to enjoy.

This was a phenomenal book, something of a political thriller combined with ruminations on the construction of historical memory and the seductiveness of empire, particularly how they use cultural output (books, film, etc.) to make themselves sympathetic and attractive even to the very people they threaten to devour. The main character, Mahit Dzmare, represents a small space station of 30,000 people which is at serious risk of being conquered and subsumed by the Teixcalaanli empire... but Mahit herself has been raised on Teixcalaanli media, is entranced by their culture and almost intoxicated by the excitement of being able to go and live in the heart of the empire for real. I found it an interesting internal conflict and that is, of course, only the very beginning of the story.

The other part of the story is the political thriller part; Mahit Dzmare is sent as a replacement ambassador after the previous one died in suspicious circumstances, and immediately has to try to work out what exactly her predecessor was up to and who of the many political players in this book she can trust. This aspect of the book was pretty dense, and I'll admit that I kept notes as to who of the many named characters was who, but it was also effectively maintained suspense and I was completely engaged by the story throughout. The setting is also intricately depicted and fascinating, with an evident Aztec influence. It was another one of those worlds I'd love to see depicted in a movie or TV show, because I think it would be visually spectacular.

There are a number of other things I could praise about this book too; I loved how language actually plays an important role, in that while Mahit is clearly fluent enough in Teixcalaanli to be the ambassador, it still takes effort to speak all the time in a language that isn't her native one and other characters sometimes underestimate her intelligence because she sounds like a foreigner speaking Teixcalaanli, which she is. I thought the imago-machines, and the different perspectives Stationers and Teixcalaanlitzim have on them, were intriguing. I liked the glimpse we got of how working-class and politically subversive Teixcalaanlitzim live (you know, away from the glitz and glamour of the central districts). I appreciated the major characters, and thought they were crafted well. Really, I have nothing to complain about in this book at all.

At first I thought this was going to be similar to You Will Know Me, just from the teen's perspective instead of the mum's and about competitive cheerleading instead of competitive gymnastics. Very quickly, though, I realised I was going to be disappointed.

Overall, I just don't think the characters or the world of this book made sense. Like, the cheerleading coach seemed to think she was one of the students, and I did not believe for ONE SECOND that this woman was qualified to teach in schools in any way. (Unless you're telling me that sports teachers don't need any kind of training or qualifications, and schools are allowed to hire total randos to ply students with booze and have sex on school property?) I didn't understand why all the cheerleaders' parents seemed to not exist (except Addy's dad once left her a note, and Beth's mum turned up at the very end). I didn't get what all the military people's actual jobs were, except that one of them's was apparently to hang out at the high school all day every day in the hope a student might want to spontaneously enlist. It was like every adult in the entire book had been replaced by some shapeshifting impersonator that just didn't understand WTF human adults were supposed to do.

So, yeah. Really unimpressed. If you're getting into Megan Abbott I would recommend trying literally any other one of her books, but I do remember that You Will Know Me specifically was pretty good.

I thought this novella had a unique and interesting setting. The part of the story about Binti leaving home (secretly, because she knows it would enrage her family) and trying to cling on to her people's traditions in a part of the galaxy where she's the only one of her people there, that was interesting. But overall, I felt like this book was rushed and inflicted emotional whiplash so strongly that I just disconnected from the story.

I ended up quite enjoying this, even though it does have a major flaw, which is that it takes way too long to get to the hook. For the first 40% of the novel, I was like, “Well, I guess I'm getting a feel for what it was like to live in 1980s Zimbabwe, but this isn't really much of a story.” Then there was a major twist and things got so much more interesting.

The main character is Lindiwe, a young Coloured woman in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. The book follows her for about 15 years of her life, starting from when she's a 14yo girl intrigued by the older white boy next door (although with flashbacks to earlier times than that). The narration is rather unconventional, mostly dialogue-based, with Lindiwe not really sharing most of her inner thoughts with the reader and even failing to mention of important plot developments until way later, making her something of an unreliable narrator.

The book is partly a view of what life was like and how it changed in Zimbabwe between the 1980s and late 1990s, as corruption and militarism saw it degenerate into chaos. It's also partly a book about domesticity, about a mismatched and not particularly happy couple who keep on making things work regardless. That latter part was not something I'd really expected (although in retrospect the title kind of gives it away), but I found it stimulating reading. The characters' different racial backgrounds and levels of education cause soooo many arguments. There are also some other subplots and side characters with their own things going on.

In general, I liked the core story of Lindiwe trying to keep her family going in difficult circumstances, framed by all the turmoil in Zimbabwe. However, I didn't think most of the characters were particularly deep (with the exception of Lindiwe and her partner themselves), and it really was an issue that it took so long for an interesting story to come together. Regardless, this is still the best Zimbabwean book I have read (out of three). If you're interested in the country this is worth a read.

I loved the idea of this book – as someone who's set half-written novels aside for way longer than I'd like, how can you resist a novel about the part of hell reserved for unwritten stories? So as you'd expect, I really wanted to like it, but I just didn't. I liked some of the characters – the difficult Hero, prickly Claire – but I found the plot very dense, to the point that I didn't fully understand it. My mind wandered constantly when I was trying to read it, and I wasn't very motivated to pick it up day after day. It's not that there was anything about it that I specifically disliked, but I just never felt like it rose above “just OK” for me. I'm somewhat disappointed, because I feel like I should have enjoyed this much better than I did.

I feel a bit guilty rating this so low, because there were some aspects of this book that I did like. Mostly the actual science fiction aspects: the plague, the scientists trying to get to the bottom of it, and the ultra-powerful AI Black Swan. The last 40% of the book or thereabouts is a lot more eventful (and interesting) than the first 60%. If this novel were like, 400 pages shorter, it could have been an enjoyable read.

The problem is that the things I liked were vastly outnumbered by the things I did not like. The far-right villains are absolutely the most boring pieces of shit imaginable; there is nothing intriguing or compelling about them or the fight against them. Most of the “good” characters weren't very interesting either (except Benji, I didn't mind him). Shana is just grouchy to everyone and I didn't buy the fast and furious progression of her romantic subplot. The Christian preacher guy... I mean, he's so excruciatingly dim that he gets sucked in by the far-right's chicanery (and Wendig is NOT able to suppress his contempt for them long enough to make it even remotely plausible that they, as depicted in this book, would appeal to anyone), and by being around them constantly in his chapters he forces me to have to read about them. The gay rock star past his prime is just kinda padding, he doesn't really do much (except at the very end). I guess Marcy was OK, although I don't know that it was conclusively explained why being around the flock makes her headaches ease up.

So overall, no, I would not recommend this. There was a kernel of a good story in there, but it got buried under mounds and mounds of pointless subplots and cartoonishly evil villains. It is pretty easy reading if you just need something unsophisticated to fill up hours upon hours of your time in a hospital bed or something... but in pretty much any other situation there are much better choices.

This book has been depicted as a huge bombshell of a work, upturning everything “we” thought we knew about Aboriginal societies before invasion. With this in mind, I found this book kind of disappointing, because having studied a mere single unit of Aboriginal history at university... this book was not a bombshell in the slightest. “Well duh, Jess,” you might say, “this book was supposed to be a bombshell to THE AVERAGE AUSTRALIAN, not to people who are already relatively well-educated on the matter.” (Not that a single unit is that much education.) On that, OK OK you might have a point... but then who is this book really for? If you're remotely interested in Australian history, you probably already know the main points of this book... and if you're not interested you'd never read this anyway. Is it for people who are interested but never really got around to starting to learn? I don't know.

At any rate, once I realised the marketing for this book was way overblown, I was able to appreciate it for what it was. Pascoe's main contention is that pre-contact Aboriginal societies were not hunter-gathers, but cultivated the land and waterways in sophisticated ways like agriculturalists, and built permanent villages to live in. In general I think this is pretty well-known, but the book has a ton of specific examples and details that are not all so well-known. For me, that was probably the most illuminating part of the book: learning the different species of grains, yams and suchlike that Aboriginal people used to cultivate, and how could these be cultivated again today as more climate-appropriate alternatives to wheat, rice, barley, etc. (not replacing the Eurasian crops wholesale, just as an alternative, and particularly in more marginal farmland like western NSW that used to grow these native crops perfectly well). Pascoe has something of a side argument about wanting rural Aboriginal people to be able to create collectives to grow these native crops, taking advantage of the popularity of “whole foods” to find an affluent market. This all seems pretty fair and intriguing to me.

He also talks in great detail (the entirety of chapter three) about the design of Aboriginal villages and the architecture of their houses in different parts of the country. Most of these structures have not survived, and while Pascoe doesn't really spell it out in this book, this is because British settlers purposely destroyed those settlements so as to destroy the evidence they weren't simply settling “terra nullius”. Basically, international law in the late eighteenth century outlined three circumstances in which you were allowed to annex new land: by agreement (like the Louisiana Purchase), by fair conquest (as affirmed by a peace treaty afterwards), or if it was uninhabited (“terra nullius”). The Brits twisted this latter argument, claiming inhabited land was technically uninhabited if the inhabitants were just wandering over it and not laying roots down (like by cultivating the land or building villages). Once it became apparent to the invaders that Aboriginal people were ABSOLUTELY cultivating the land and living in villages, they decided to burn everything down to hide the evidence. Obviously there still is evidence (including evidence of settlers putting it in writing about all the Aboriginal houses they'd destroyed...), but if you were wondering why there are one-star reviews acting like it's laughable that Aboriginal people ever had houses, that's why.

Another important part of this book, of course, is the discussion of how Aboriginal societies were sustainable in a way that capitalism (built on the false premise of eternal growth) can never be. People cultivated the land collectively, were careful not to make radical changes that could have bad consequences for people elsewhere (like downstream) or in future generations, and even made sure to do things like hunt male animals instead of female ones, to have the most minimal impact on animal species' viability. They practised terraced agriculture, cultivated the sweeping grasslands (full of food crops, actually) that the Europeans thought were there just by the grace of nature, used nets that could be swiftly taken down once full to catch only the amount of fish they truly needed... and of course they conducted planned burns in a vastly more sophisticated way than our modern authorities do. They did not believe in private land ownership the way that capitalism holds sacred; they understood themselves to be custodians of the land, there to ensure it would remain in good condition for the next generation. Considering we live in a world where climate change, deforestation, excessive waste, unsustainable mining, depletion/destruction of lakes and waterways, and so on are all gigantic issues, it's certainly worth reminding ourselves that the world doesn't have to be run this way.

What confused me somewhat, though, is that Pascoe seemed afraid to take this argument right through to its rightful conclusion: that capitalism itself, as imposed on Australia by the British and persisted with ever since, is the problem. He even tries to argue that empowering Aboriginal people to return to these practices would pose “no risk” to the economy... when the thing is that of course forcing major corporations to stop destroying the environment for the sake of short-term profit would “pose a risk to the economy” (in that those corporations would cease to be profitable), but this is A GOOD THING, because these practices are insane! Dumping capitalism and returning to more traditional Aboriginal ways of viewing property and sustainability is absolutely what we need to do, so why chicken out of saying that and try to be like, “Well... maybe some Aboriginal-run farming collectives will fix things?” In and of themselves they will not fix things, man. We need to look bigger.

But look, this is really a pop anthropology book rather than a political argument, so my criticisms of its conclusion shouldn't be taken as a big deal. Overall, if you don't know that much about Aboriginal societies pre-1788 this is a good place to start. If you do know a bit, then you'll probably still get something out of it, but don't expect it to be earth-shattering. By raising expectations excessively I think the marketing did this book a bit of a disservice, but it's still good and easy to read. Worth it if you have the interest.

Having now reached the end, all I can say is there's just so much I love about this series. I love all the intrigue and scheming, the complicated web of alliances and grudges. I love how much intricate detail is given of the world itself – even things like the food are described in such sumptuous detail that you'd swear you can smell it and your belly starts growling in anticipation. Things like the clothing and the architecture and the climates of different places are also conveyed beautifully. But the detail never bogs down the story (things do slow down sometimes, but never from description), it's all seamlessly weaved through. Incredibly well-written.

As I mentioned in my review of the first book, it's also refreshing to read a story that doesn't draw on the same old Western European mythology (not that such stories can't also be interesting), but on Middle Eastern legends that I'm not so familiar with. I really loved how, in this book, deities from ancient Egypt and Babylonia made reappearances, and just that neat correlation where they faded in power and influence as belief in them faded (supplanted by Islam). The way all these different mythical creatures and legends and the magical system blended together made for an awesome setting.

But much as I've enjoyed all of this, what really makes this series stand out to me is the characters. They've all grown and gained a lot of richness since the first book. Nahri is so compelling in her determination to end the oppression of the shafit, her dedication to her healing craft, her out-scheming of extremely experienced schemers like Ghassan and Manizheh. I like how, while there are hints of romance in the series, Nahri's priorities are always her people and her own independence. Dara's an interesting character – I don't think I could say I like him, his utterly grim and depressing chapters are coloured by his conflictedness and his guilty conscience in a way that makes for good reading. Ali has grown massively from how naïve and easily manipulated he was in the first book. Then a number of the side characters are great as well – Muntadhir reminds me so much of my partner's oldest brother, Zaynab is another character who's grown massively since the first book, Jamshid is impossible not to like, Hatset's motherly protectiveness is so understandable, Manizheh is an incredible villain and what happens with her over the course of the book is just chilling. But to be honest, it's great characters all the way down. There are a number of even more minor characters I could have brought up here. I think this is an area where books 2 and 3 have been able to ramp up so well from the first one.

The book is very long, and there are points (mostly around the middle) where it bogs down a little – mostly scenes with expository dialogue are the culprits though, which is a tough one to resolve because it wouldn't be the same story if some of these details were kept from the reader. At any rate, it didn't stop me loving the book. Overall, this has been such an impressive series, especially once the ground-laying of the first book was over (and I did like that one well enough!). Very excited to see what further stories S.A. Chakraborty puts out.

Kindred is a very good book, but it's not the easiest book to read. At no point did I ever feel like this book was going to have a happy ending. It is, of course, a novel about slavery in the antebellum Southern US, so you might expect it to be bleak, and it isn't coy about describing the violence and terror that Black people endured – things like brutal lashings, having your children our spouse sold away from you, or even the fact that free Black people were expected to be able to prove their status at all times with a certificate, and if a slaver took it off them and ripped it up, that slaver could then abduct them and sell them on. It's so important for people to know about this history, and as such novels like this play an important role keeping that history alive in the public memory.

The novel is ostensibly science fiction, but only really in getting the main character to the setting where the story takes place – otherwise it's more historical fiction. The protagonist is Dana, an African-American woman living in 1976 Los Angeles, who keeps getting sucked back in time to save the life of her ancestor (a red-headed white boy at the story's start, later a man – and a slave owner). The time travel element is never explained, or even investigated; it's really just a plot device so the attitudes of those living with slavery can be contrasted with Dana's modern sensibilities. Dana has no real control over her coming and going, though, so despite those modern sensibilities she has to find a way of surviving in the 19th century as a slave. This is also the source of a lot of the story's disquietingness; Dana is faced with a number of choices where every possible option is utterly repugnant, and while you might hope she finds a way to short-circuit the dilemma and pull a magical good outcome out of nowhere, she doesn't. Like I said, it's not the kind of book where happy endings ever seem realistic.

The book does share some similarities with other books I've read by Octavia E. Butler. Like them, the prose here is sparing and utilitarian – rather than lush description, Butler's strength is more in the dialogue and character dynamics she brings forth. And Dana here is a very similar character to some other Butler protagonists, particularly Lilith in Dawn, in the sense that a reader can understand but still wish she'd make some different decisions (like here, you wish Dana'd be harder on her slave-owning ancestor, even though you understand why she can't!). These factors might deter some readers, and contribute to me rating this three stars, but it's still a very worthwhile book.

This is a book that Goodreads has been nagging me to read for aaaaages, but sadly it didn't really work for me. The setting felt too far-fetched – maybe it would've made sense amidst the white flight and urban decay of 1970s North America (even though the book was actually published in 1998), but with 2020 vision it's pretty hard to imagine the Canadian/Ontarian governments just abandoning downtown Toronto. None of the main characters are particularly sympathetic; Ti-Jeanne spends most of the book being a fawning idiot over her deadbeat ex Tony, Tony makes terrible decisions at pretty much every turn, and the grandmother, Gros-Jeanne, is a grouchy hardass. Nearly all the dialogue is written in an Afro-Caribbean dialect, which wouldn't be a problem if the book was otherwise engaging but I didn't find it so. And the ending is basically just a deus ex machina.

Even though I didn't like it, I don't think this is the kind of objectively bad novel that nearly everyone would hate. Horror fans might appreciate it more than me, because (despite Goodreads classifying it as fantasy) it's basically a horror novel in a dystopian/post-apocalyptic setting (with lots of explicit gore). Some people might feel that the richly detailed incorporation of Caribbean culture and legends outweighs the book's flaws. So if you really want to read it, don't let this review stop you... but be warned that characterisation and setting are not really its strong suits.