Jessica
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.
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.
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.
This book had me rapt. It was full of political intrigue and scheming, in a way that reminded me of the best aspects of A Game of Thrones (but honestly this series is more enjoyable). With all the world-building groundwork having been accomplished in the first book, this one can afford to be much faster-paced, and is all the better for it.
Much of this book revolves around the main characters' efforts to do the right thing (mostly struggle in support of the oppressed shafit, and against blind tribalism) when they live in a society filled with powerful people who want to thwart every such effort. King Ghassan is, like in the first book, ruthlessly tyrannical, but the forces conspiring against him are just as bad. It makes for compelling reading and I'm very keen to move on to the third book now, to see what happens next.
I don't want to waste too much time talking about why this book was bad, but in essence: Why was the dialogue written without contractions?! Why does the supposedly 26yo protagonist fall head over heels into giddy irrational infatuations at the slightest thing? Why do so many characters do complete 180s and change their entire course, only to do a 180 back to the original course approx two chapters later? Why did I have to sit through sooooo much infodumping, only for most of it to not really matter at all? (At least I assume it didn't matter because my eyes glazed over and I didn't really register it, and never felt like memorising all the eight houses of the Realm had been necessary.) Who actually was the villain, and what were the motivations behind anything that he did? And like, just to reiterate: How did this book get to the point of being published with the dialogue all so stilted and awful?! Even assuming it was a self-pubbed effort, was there literally no beta reader or anybody to be like, “Hey, characters are allowed to use words like ‘don't' and ‘isn't', it's cool.” Really?? I just can't. This was well below the standard I usually expect even of self-pubbed books.
Contemporary YA romance is pretty far outside my usual wheelhouse, but I had a few days left on my Kindle Unlimited trial and this book caught my eye and I went, “Well, why not?” Very glad I took the punt, because I really enjoyed this book.
The main character, Sugihara, is a 16yo Zainichi Korean, which is to say he's an ethnic Korean whose family has been living in Japan for two generations. They still don't have Japanese citizenship – they have to choose between North Korean or South Korean nationality. And the book is quite an insightful glimpse into what it's like (or was like, in 2000 when the book was first written) to grow up as part of such a marginalised community – having to report regularly to the police station to be fingerprinted, not having access to “good” jobs, having the authorities capriciously make decisions against you, etc.
But the book is also a romance: at a party at a nightclub, Sugihara meets Sakurai, a remarkably confident girl who moves quickly to woo him, and so starts a surprisingly fun-to-read teenage romance. They talk about music and book and films and Sakurai fills Sugihara in on all the dating advice being given to teenage girls, which he kinds of responds to with a cute, “oh, OK...” attitude. It's nice. The only real obstacle to their love is that Sugihara is scared that Sakurai won't want to be with him any more if she finds out he's Korean.
I will say that the book is somewhat violent. Sugihara is a bit of a delinquent who gets into fights all the time at school, and his father is an ex-boxer with the same tendency. Even his mum can be prone to flying into violent rages in this book. But the way it's written is sort of cartoony, almost for laughs, which I think a lot of readers will find inappropriate. At any rate, that's the one real reservation I had about this book. Overall it was a pretty fun, quick, easy read.
Obviously I picked this book up because I thought I might like it, but I've been completely blown away by how much I liked it. Rarely has a slow and meandering book like this been such a page-turner for me (indeed, perhaps this is the first time it's ever happened). Even though the story is full of sorrow and hopelessness, I found it addictive and enlightening about a country I knew little about, Kazakhstan.
In the main, this is a story about the man-made ecological disaster that is the disappearance of the Aral Sea. The Soviets decided to divert the grand rivers that fed this vast salt-water lake into irrigation canals, to water rice and cotton crops. The shoreline receded, exposing tons of intensely salty sand that blew away in the fierce winds, ruining the farmland that was barely viable in the first place. It would be bad enough if that were the only environmental disaster facing the region, but it's not: the salty sand is also full of highly toxic waste dumped into those rivers over decades when they still flowed; the nuclear weapon test facility in the east of Kazakhstan has left much of the land saturated with nuclear pollution, causing sky-high rates of birth defects, infant mortality and cancers; and the pesticides and fertilisers smothered over the cotton crops to make them grow at all leech their own toxicity into the environment. This book reads like an account of the apocalypse: the ocean's fish dying, the people all living with varying degrees of poison in their system, domesticated animals going wild and running off with feral packs, vicious sandstorms battering the fools still living around the sea...
The ongoing theme of this book is “man” thinking he knows better than nature, and as such destroying everything. The book does have religious overtones to it, with one of the main characters, Nasyr, being a mullah who prays continually to God to save Sinemorye, and wondering in despair whether it is God who has forsaken humanity, or humanity who has forsaken God. But you don't need to be religious to appreciate this book (I certainly am not); if you respect nature, and shudder in horror at how governments and corporations around the world wreak immense environmental destruction that would take nature thousands of years to recover from even if the damage wasn't being continually compounded on, this book will make an impact on you regardless.
The other running theme that I found interesting was the criticism of the Soviet authorities. Nasyr's son, Kakharman, begins the book as a low-ranking bureaucrat whose overriding goal is to convince the head honchos in Moscow to stop destroying the Aral Sea. There are other characters, too, like the scientist Slavikov and his son Igor, who share this goal. But the party apparatus is so stuffed full of careerists that would rather destroy entire ecosystems than admit to any mistakes, that this effort is basically futile. The book also talks about, or at least mentions, many of the horrific things that happened under Stalin's rule, like the Holodomor (where millions died in a man-made famine) and the Great Purge (where a similarly huge number were executed or sent to gulags, and since the authorities considered “criminality” to be hereditary, even children were mistreated in orphanages as “enemies of the state”). There are a number of flashbacks into the lives of minor characters to explore their lives during these times, and these passages are raw and moving. Despite a single brief section where America is described as like so amazing, they would never harm the environment! (bahaha, yeah ok) the criticism largely does not come from a place of, “and this is why the FREE MARKET and American imperialism are so great!” like Western criticisms of the USSR mostly do – instead it is with sympathy for the ordinary person, and especially the colonised person, as Kazakhs were by Russians. It's a very well-written book.
There are some reasons why you may not enjoy this book – it is quite long and mostly humourless, and it's not exactly a book where the animals are having a good time (although, as someone who hates animal cruelty and suffering in books, I wasn't “triggered” by this one – there's no real cruelty, although Kazakh society is definitely not vegetarian, and it's all of nature suffering here, not only the animals). The Kindle version seems bugged, and thinks the entire last 25% of the book is page 483, so be prepared for a book with a real length of ~600 pages or so. But man, what an entrancing 600 pages.
At first I thought I was going to like this book. Roger Smith does a really good job highlighting the massive class and racial divides in Cape Town, and the novel certainly had no shortage of unlikeable characters who you were looking forward to getting their just desserts, like Beverley or Christopher Lane. The book had some weird eccentricities (like constant descriptions of characters' genitals, or the need to tell us the intricate details every single time one of the POV characters went to the toilet...) but at first they seemed overlookable.
However, as the narrative wore on, things just got bleaker and bleaker to the point that I found nothing enjoyable about it at all. I hated the character arc of Louise, who started out as the most sympathetic character in the book before becoming a soulless sadist. It's like the author was trying to say that depression/grief makes you a violent criminal? And yes, describing genitals and toilet trips on every second page is mega-weird. This novel could almost have been called Shit People Go to the Bathroom. Just, yeah. Two stars because the first part had some merit, but after that it all went downhill.
I feel like it's easier for me to explain what didn't work for me in this book than what did. Cruel Beauty is, as many other reviews will tell you, basically a retelling of The Beauty and the Beast mashed up with some Ancient Greek mythology. It takes place within a lost part of Romana-Graecia, Arcadia, which was cursed and locked away in its own pocket universe by a vengeful demon 900 years ago. The protagonist, Nyx Triskelion, was promised at birth to one day marry this exact demon, in exchange for her twin sister Astraia being allowed to live a normal, happy life. Nyx has spent her short life thus far being trained for this event, and when she arrives at her husband's cursed castle, it's with a mission: to destroy him, and probably also herself, to break the curse keeping Arcadia isolated. Once she gets inside, though, everything gets a lot more confusing and complicated.
So... where do I begin? I will say that this is not a book with strong world-building. Arcadia is a real part of Greece, and a lot bigger than the “one village and a castle” than it seems to be in this book. We learned a lot about the differences between the gods worshipped by the nobility (Zeus, etc.) and those worshipped by the peasantry, and a bit about their festivals and funerary rites. What wasn't really that clear was the magic system that kept getting referred to (Hermetic magic...?) – how was that supposed to work? what was it supposed to do? – or who the demons were that were screwing over Arcadia's people and how they all related to each other. The mystery is a large part of the story, but it's never truly answered, imo.
Then there's Nyx herself. She's had a rough upbringing, having been raised to be a sacrifice to the Gentle Lord, and is full of resentments. In the enchanted castle, she has no idea who to trust and ceases to be sure whether to follow through on the mission she's been trained for, or whether something else is a better idea... which seems to lead to the outcome that she changes her mind every five pages. Neither of these things make her a bad character, and certainly not an unrealistic character, but it made it very hard to know what I was supposed to be hoping for. Sometimes plot developments would happen that you'd think would mark a significant turning point in the story, only for them to be completely disregarded. I spent so much of this book confused.
A large component of this book is the romance, of course, but I even found this confusing. I just didn't feel like I'd seen why Nyx started to fall in love... instead, I just had the book telling me that she had indeed fallen in love. So then I was like, well OK, I'll just accept that these two are in love now. (To be fair, it was the kind of dark romance that I really wanted to be able to enjoy.) But then the book threw a huge curveball at me (explanation cut for spoilers) so look, overall, I just don't think this romance had a lot of depth.
The ending had its fair share of confusion, but I actually found it one of the most enjoyable parts of the book. Only here did I really start to see the sisterly love that was supposed to exist between Nyx and Astraia (and I wrote more but cut for spoilers).
This review probably sounds mostly negative, but it's really more that I found this story confusing. When I shrugged my shoulders and gave up on trying to understand things, this book was enjoyable enough. I liked the duality of Ignifex (the Gentle Lord) – the malevolence but also the tenderness. Shade was an interesting character, too. I just kind of wish the story around them – the web of curses and such – had been better explained.