Jessica

I just couldn't really manage to get interested in this story about the secret romance between a Palestinian man and a Turkish Jew in Jerusalem. It's very slow, and the story seems to meander a lot. The height of Elias and Lila's romance really happens early in the book, and then everything after that is about how hard their lives are, and how they can't even see each other for 19 years between 1948 and 1967. If anything, I found the character of Nomi a bit more interesting, and how she came from an utterly dysfunctional family to a (seemingly) rewarding career trying to place kids from the foster system with sympathetic families.

The other thing that kind of bothered me about this book is that it was very one-sided about the cultural background it sought to portray. The blurb and a number of reviews described this book as being told from Elias' perspective, but if so then why is Palestinian (oh sorry, “Arab”... I don't think this book uses the words “Palestine” or “Palestinian” even once) culture reduced to just tea and spiced food and, apparently, going along with it when your parents arrange your marriage to someone you barely know? Towards the end, Elias is all like, “I don't even believe in culture or religion,” and I have to wonder if that was mainly to make him more palatable to a largely-Jewish readership, because certainly none of the Jewish characters ever talk about Jewish culture or Judaism being meaningless. The book is, at least, critical of Israeli policies in Jerusalem (like the expropriation of all Palestinian-owned properties in West Jerusalem) as well as of the idea that Israelis and Palestinians can't live alongside one another (praising coexistence in Jaffa, for example). But that feels like the bare minimum that this book should've done, you know? It's almost like the author was implying that Israelis and Palestinians can coexist, just so long as Palestinians don't stand out or do anything too “Palestinian-y”. Maybe that wasn't the reason for the oversight, and rather it was just that Talshir didn't know very much about Palestinian culture (unlike her own, obviously) and either didn't want to do the research or didn't trust herself to depict it authentically or thought (since this book has been translated from Hebrew) depicting Elias' culture would set her readers against him. But eh. The imbalance was something that irked me pretty much throughout the book.

Night Shift Dragons is the final instalment in a trilogy that has mainly gripped me with its kick-ass futuristic fantasy setting, the Detroit Free Zone. If you like, you can read my review of the first book or my review of the second book before coming back for this one. While I did enjoy it, I felt like this final instalment was the weakest of the lot, mainly because the awesome setting took a backseat and its dystopian nature was really walked back. Note that from here on out this review will contain spoilers for the previous books.

Following on from the end of Part-Time Gods, Opal Yong-ae has spent the last two months in a pocket dimension of sorts, in hiding with her comatose dad, the fearsome dragon Yong of Korea. She's also started training to become a priestess of the Detroit Free Zone, as in a sworn servant of the deity who is the actual city itself. What these two things mean is that we see a lot less of the city than we did in previous books (even once she leaves hiding, she doesn't travel around too much) and yet we also see a lot more of the DFZ at the same time, because the deity spends at least half the book talking to Opal in her mind. The capriciousness and willingness to sacrifice citizens on the altar of the free market that we have come to associate with the DFZ is mostly gone; instead, we get a lot of justifications about how if the worst excesses were just toned down a liiiiiittle bit, the DFZ would actually be great because it's a city of “freedom”. I found this pretty hard to reconcile with the criticism of neoliberalism in just the last book.

There were definitely some good things, though. Opal comes across as substantially more mature than she was in the first two instalments, almost as though two months of learning how to use her magic properly has given her the assurance she needed that she can be a competent adult after all. Her relationship with her dad definitely takes priority here over her emerging romance with Nik, which didn't bother me, but seems to have disappointed some other viewers. On the other hand, while I was fine with the place where her relationship with her dad ended up, I did feel like we got there way too easily. I mean, this is the guy who's spent two books trying to ruin her life with a bad luck curse, and he was convinced of the error of his ways within a few pages?! It felt like it mainly worked out that way so the tension between them couldn't be a problem as they dealt with the main plot of this book.

That plot involves a fighting arena that is unquestionably one of the worst excesses of the DFZ. Basically, this Gamemaster convinces people to sign up for fights to the death, particularly preying on the homeless and vulnerable. These fights attract huge crowds, huge enough to sustain not only on-site gambling parlours but also brothels and strip clubs?! A worthy villain to fight against, but it really seemed like Opal and the DFZ wouldn't have bothered if not for having a more selfish motivation to go in. I dunno, I guess there's nothing much Opal could have done alone, but all the DFZ's excuses for her inaction were annoying, and then Opal's excuses for the DFZ's excuses...

I've got distracted while typing this up, so I'll try to boil things down to the essentials. Like the first two books in the series, Night Shift Dragons is a fast-paced romp of a read. Opal Yong-ae did grow as a character and her storyline ended up in a good place. However, I was disappointed by the lack of exploration of the city in this book compared to the first two, and even more disappointed by the justifications for free-market callousness where previously this was called out. Three stars from me.

I came across this book a while ago, and promptly added it to my “Want to Read” list, intrigued by its Middle Eastern setting and use of Islamic mythology. Unfortunately it then languished on that list for much longer than it deserved to. Well, not any more! Finally I've taken the plunge into The City of Brass, and despite the slow first half, I ended up riveted and really excited to read the second book.

The plot itself, if you reduce it to the essentials, is perhaps not the most original. It begins with Nahri, a professional con artist in nineteenth-century Cairo, with magical powers of healing and no recollection of her childhood. One day she's attacked by malevolent demons called ifrit, and saved by a haughty magical being named Dara, and through this discovers she's actually some kind of long-lost Chosen One to a magical society she knows nothing about. Dara insists that, for her safety, he he has to take her to the city of Daevabad (and then her storyline slows right down because the journey takes up a huge fraction of the book).

The other POV character is Ali, a young prince (second son of Daevabad's king) who wants to help the oppressed shafit, residents of the city who are of mixed magical and human descent. He's a devout Muslim, someone who (at least at the start of the book) wants to assume the best in everyone, and painfully naive. He ends up feeling caught between loyalty to his family and his sense of justice, and I found him a really compelling character.

So you know, Chosen One outsiders to hidden magical societies and junior royals with consciences are not the most unique fantasy characters out there (not that lacking uniqueness would make them unenjoyable). However, the setting and world-building of this story are just incredibly absorbing. I'll admit that the world-building can feel very dense, especially if you (like me) are not very familiar with Islamic mythology, because then you have that to absorb on top of the history and politics of the kingdom of Daevabad. That said, I think it's well worth persevering! The book's last section is action-packed, and since all the groundwork has now been laid, I'm excited for how eventful the next instalment might be without so many hold-ups to explain the lore.

S.A. Chakraborty wanted to pursue an academic career in Middle Eastern history before life intervened and she eventually turned to writing, and I think that background is evident in the richness of the world she's created here. On top of the mythology she draws upon, there's also a lot of interesting stuff in the different tribes of Daevabad, the tensions between the different groups living in the city (which I could imagine mirroring other cities with long histories of diversity, like Jerusalem or Istanbul), and so on. I came to really enjoy the character of the king, calculating and ruthless, but you can follow his tyrannical logic, too. In fact, despite Ali's efforts, this is not really a story about good vs. evil at all, but about power. A lot of Nahri's story, too, becomes about how she can play the game before the other players play her.

So, I think I've made it clear that despite some slowness in the first half, I really enjoyed The City of Brass. If you like worldbuilding-heavy stories, I think this is well worth the read.

I was enjoying this for the first three-quarters or so, but then it rapidly got too squicky for my tastes. It starts out as a rumination on preteen/early teenage girl life, with Lizzie and Evie as close as close can be until the latter suddenly goes missing. So far, so similar to The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone (which I only read a few months ago, and did a great telling of this kind of story). However from there, The End of Everything morphs into something more reminiscent of Lolita, with a steadily increasing amount of emphasis on pubescent girls getting inappropriate attention from fully-grown men (not wanting to spoil too much). But see, in Lolita, the whole point of the story is that Humbert Humbert is completely fucking delusional in his belief that Lola has knowingly seduced him. The End of Everything has missed this point, and plays its story straight as one of mutual attraction and seduction.

Now, Megan Abbott's storylines are usually pretty dark and twisted and I certainly wouldn't say enjoying this one means you must be a bad person. It was just too dark for me. However, I do think the blurb did the novel a disservice by not making it clear what the core theme of the novel was. No one sells Lolita as, like, an odd couple fugitive novel, and in being more disturbing this one needs the warning much more! Some people in the comments of other reviews have claimed that if you warn people what the central theme is then that's a “spoiler”, but wtf, people need to be able to make informed decisions about what they read too.

This is not an objectively bad book - indeed, if you don't think your sensibilities will be offended by the major theme then you can expect the reward of a well-written thriller with some real relatability for anyone who's ever been a 12-13 year old girl. But also know that if you are interested in that kind of story, The Van Apfel Girls does a very similar thing without the Lolita element, and I thought it was better.

I've shelved this as science fiction, but what struck me as I was reading it is that it really comes across as a psychological horror. The protagonist, George Orr, has an ability that he considers a horrible curse: when he dreams, sometimes, he wakes up to find the dream has come true. Having got in legal trouble for misappropriating/misusing dream suppressants, he is sent to a psychiatrist, Dr Haber, who sees this ability as an enormous boon. He uses hypnotherapy to put George under and instruct him to dream all manner of things – which, then, become reality.

The novel examines all kind of dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios: war against extraterrestrials, a pandemic that kills most of the world's population, volcanic eruptions, and above all a recurring theme of heavy-handed state control over people's lives (and life and death itself). And it does all this with a tone reminiscent of that kind of nightmare where you're dreaming horrible stuff, and you think you wake up, but then realise you're still trapped in the nightmare. Dr Haber represents a brilliant villain, outwardly effusively charming but coercively keeping George under his control. And, of course, like many a classic villain he has grandiose, noble ambitions – world peace! an end to overpopulation! full health for all! – but no real qualms about the sinister ways he would achieve them.

Overall, a really good, dark little book, especially for those who enjoy the theme of creepy nightmares.

I was wiping away tears by the end of this book, it moved me that much. I had to have a bit of a giggle when I got to the acknowledgements and it said something about how flattering it was that one of the early readers cried at the ending, because it was like, “Hey! Me too!” This is definitely one of those books that got me invested emotionally – which shouldn't be that surprising, because the first one, Long Grows the Dark, completely sucked me in with the tension between its four main characters.

So ordinarily I wouldn't dream of rating a book that got me to cry any less than five stars, but Slow Wanes the Night did have one flaw, which was that the first half felt so slow. Like, so slow. I suppose it was purposeful, dwelling as it did on the loneliness of the main characters after the bittersweet ending of the last book, making it incredibly exciting when the barriers between them started falling away in the second half. And it's not like nothing was happening, either. Things happen. Everleigh was battling to gain respect as Starford's new ruler, and also investigate some supernatural menace; Gwendoline and Niles were trying to search for four lords of the land, while the emotional distance between them grows to become a yawning crevasse. There was good stuff there, it was just a bit too slow to hold my attention reliably.

Thankfully, like I say, everything switched gears in the second half. The main characters have to actually start dealing with some of the fears and resentments keeping them apart, as their enemies become much clearer and more threatening. The atmosphere electrifies! There's a skin-crawling scene where the “baddies” reveal themselves, and then an incredible sex scene shortly after. The climax (which takes up the last fifth of the book) is all so tense and unpredictable, it had me glued to my screen for the hour and a half it took to read it. And then, yes, the epilogue reduced me to tears. I'd hesitate to call it “bittersweet”, but there was a real note of sadness to the happy ending that I found very moving.

Overall, this is a worthy follow-up to Long Grows the Dark, even if the first half demanded a little persistence from me. The ending is just brilliant, making this a must-read if you enjoyed the first book.

I wasn't completely sold on this novel in the beginning, but man did I get more and more sucked in. This is a novel about time travel, and in particular about how an amoral bureaucracy has established a hardline monopoly over time travel. In this the book is somewhat similar thematically to The Psychology of Time Travel, which I also really enjoyed. However, in Here and Now and Then the emphasis is less on the world-building and ensemble cast and more on one singular POV character and his emotional turmoil as the bureaucracy's bungles and subsequent callousness put his family into jeopardy.

At the outset of the story, Kin Stewart is apparently an ordinary suburban dad, happy husband to Heather and devoted dad to 14yo Miranda. The secret he's hiding, though, is that he's actually a time-travelling agent from 2142, stranded around 20 years ago after the equipment that had been supposed to return him home broke, and the agency he worked for failed to pick him up again when they were meant to. The agency's protocol stated that he was supposed to lie low and remain uninvolved with the world until they could collect him, but come on – for 20 years?! Kin gave up on all hope the agency would retrieve him, and let himself live his life. In what is described as a survival mechanism (because, in this book, human psychology can't handle remembering two different eras of time as “the present” without medicinal aids), Kin forgets all about his life in 2142, but doesn't forget his semantic memories about being a time traveller, working for the agency he works for, the internal policies and hierarchies of that agency, etc. Or at least, not immediately. Concerned that he might be forgetting some of it, he writes down everything he can in a journal. He is also beset by strange headaches and black-outs, which he passes off to his family as untreated PTSD.

But then, one day, a strange man (Markus) appears to return Kin to his “home” era in time. Kin is, as you'd expect, extremely reluctant to go home. However, since Heather fails to be persuaded to uproot their lives to go into hiding from some mysterious threat, and Markus assures him that his abrupt disappearance from the 2010s will be “clean”, Kin acquiesces and lets himself be taken home.

What follows is a story that really surprised me with its emotional strength. In his home era, Kin is reintroduced to his fiancée, Penny, and even though his memories of her come back, the emotional intimacy and warmth is something Kin has to rebuild from scratch. From his new desk job, he can't resist looking up what happened to his family after he left, is horrified by what he discovers, and then concocts a scheme to intervene through emails without his employer finding out. When his employer inevitably does find out and sacks him on the spot, he is forced to intervene through even more drastic measures.

Overall, this is a really compelling story about a man trying to do what's right by everyone he cares about, coming up constantly against the unfeeling coldness of the bureaucracy he works for. The book doesn't set its expectations too high – Kin isn't trying to bring down the whole establishment, he just wants to save his daughter – which gives it all an intimate feel. And the characters feel realistic and I surprised myself by how strongly I cared about them by the story's end (except Markus, that guy pissed me off to no end). If you like time travel plots with an emotional punch, this is a good choice.

I first learned about this book during my honours year in 2014. One of my classmates was working on a translation of this book, which at that time hadn't had an official English translation released. She gave a presentation where she talked about the book and a little about the political history surrounding it, and I was like, “Wow, I have to read that someday!”

It's taken me a number of years, but finally I've got there. And even better, I've really enjoyed my time with this book. I think I'd best describe it as a decidedly contemplative read: it devotes a lot of time to describing things like the smells and the tastes of Indonesian food, the atmospheres of Paris and Jakarta, and the tension between different groups of Indonesians, particularly the two camps in Paris (those allied to the New Order dictatorship, and those who fled in fear from it). Another strong thread running through the novel is love – romantic love, familial love, platonic love – with so much of the book spent showcasing the myriad close relationships the different characters have in their lives.

The story begins with Dimas Suryo, a journalist who was abroad covering a conference in Santiago when the 1965 carnage began, with the government slaughtering suspected leftists. Unable to return to Jakarta, he and a number of other exiles in the same position find their way to Paris. There they establish new lives for themselves, centred around running the Tanah Air Restaurant, and Dimas marries a gorgeous Frenchwoman (Vivienne) and has a gorgeous daughter (Lintang), and even after his divorce the three maintain a close bond. However, despite the life he's caved out for himself in Paris, he still longs to “go home”, even if only to be buried there.

There are other perspective characters, but the second main character is Lintang. Born and raised in Paris, she decides to take a trip to Indonesia when her film professor rejects her proposal to make a documentary about Algerian immigrants in France, and tells her he wants to see a film where she explores her own roots. Lintang's never considered visiting Indonesia before, because with her father being a proscribed undesirable she presumes she'd never be granted a visa. However, with the help of her boyfriend Narayana – who belongs to the “allied to the New Order regime” part of Paris's Indonesian community – she is able to get the necessary visa and travel to Jakarta for the first time. There she meets all the relatives and family friends who she and her uncles have only been able to keep in touch with from afar, and she gets involved with a group of young activists working to bring down the dictator Soeharto – and one activist in particular, the dashing Alam.

Maybe it's not a perfect book; it's not the kind of novel I've been excited to pick up and start reading each day, even though I've enjoyed it every time I have picked it up. It had a couple of weird quirks, like having to describe every major character's breathtaking attractiveness. The ending also feels like it could have been filled out a little more. But overall, I found it such a powerful story about dictatorship and exile, about the longing for home, about the bonds between people, about history and the way it can be twisted or forgotten to serve the interests of the powerful.

This was addictive reading. Immediately after I finished, I went to read reviews because it was the closest thing to talking about it with someone that I could do. As such, I've read a number of less-positive reviews of this book, and honestly, many of the issues they highlight are things I totally see. A number of massive plot points from the last book fizzle out to nothing, forgotten, and a couple of characters seem to have done unexplained dramatic 180s in terms of their attitudes to Jude. However, I did not notice or care about any of those things while I was actually reading. I was swept along for the ride.

So why did I enjoy this book so much? Honestly, just lots of great character moments. Jude's confrontation with her father figure, Madoc, felt so high-stakes and thrilling. I liked how the Jude/Cardan thing played out. It was satisfying to see Jude outwit her enemies. For me, it was a rewarding follow-up to the brilliant The Wicked King, and certainly leagues ahead of the first book. Maybe not the tightest-plotted novel ever, but still so fun.

I enjoyed this book just as much as the second one in the trilogy, Adulthood Rites (which you can read my review of here). Taking place perhaps fifty years later, this book follows another of Lilith Iyapo's children, Jodahs. Like Adulthood Rites, it's basically a coming-of-age story where the protagonist is not fully human, but a “construct”, half human and half Oankali. Not only that, though, but Jodahs is also neither male nor female – he turns out to be the first-ever construct ooloi (the Oankali third sex).

Not only is Jodahs a sympathetic character whose story is pretty interesting, but the book continues to deal with many of the same issues that the trilogy as a whole has. Is humanity doomed to tear itself apart, no matter what “fresh starts” we're given, or can we be better? Are the Oankali doing the right thing by tinkering with our genetics and cross-breeding with us to eliminate those authoritarian, destructive instincts, or is that wrong regardless of the outcomes, like the resisters believe? And also, while it's not quite as explicit about it as a book like The Left Hand of Darkness, there is some discussion of how difficult humans find it to comprehend the concept of ooloi, of someone who's not a he or she but an “it”. (I feel like these days the concept isn't quite so foreign, and singular “they” has entered into wider use, but there are still a lot of people who don't understand, and might even be hostile to, non-binary people.) Of course here there is the whole non-human aspect to it as well, where the hostility stems from a fear of difference.

Overall, this has been such an excellent, thoughtful series, ruminating on humanity's failings as well as presenting a unique and well-developed alien civilisation. The first book was a bit slow and heavy on the exposition, but the second and third have tied it all together well. Highly recommended.

2.5 stars. Honestly I was going to rate this three stars, but then the story just abruptly ended when my Kindle said I was 86% done, and I felt SO RELIEVED that I realised this probably wasn't a three-star book for me, unfortunately.

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane starts in rural China in the early 1990s, following a young girl, Li-yan, who belongs to the Akha ethnic minority. Her early life is thoroughly miserable, with her elders reminding her constantly that she's a worthless, unwanted nuisance because she's female, and her mother exasperated and frustrated because she can't even get on board with the ritual murder of babies she'll be required to perform if she's to succeed her as a midwife. In her adolescence, she's supposed to be concentrating on school because her teacher thinks she could be the first person from her village – or even from the general area – to ever make it to university. However, she gets distracted when a tea merchant from Hong Kong arrives in her village, seeking out a particularly exquisite brew from the area. She helps him out, translating for her non-Mandarin-speaking village and even providing extra-special tea leaves from a super-secret grove that her mother tells her not to pluck for this man. She also gets distracted from school by a boy in her class, San-pa, on whom she has a crush and who she manages to get pregnant with before he leaves to look for work in Thailand.

She can't raise a baby out of wedlock – only a few years earlier, her mum would have made her sacrifice it in a ritual baby murder – so she surrenders it to an orphanage in a nearby, bigger town. That baby goes on to be adopted by a white American couple and raised in Los Angeles, under the name of Haley. As for Li-yan, things with San-pa don't work out, but she does become a highly successful businesswoman in the tea industry, and ends up moving out to Los Angeles herself.

There are some good things about this book, so don't let my lack of enthusiasm discourage you if you think this book is a great fit for your interests. My own favourite aspect was probably how it depicted the rapid changes in rural China between about 1990 and 2010. Li-yan goes from spending her childhood in abject poverty to being able to make webcam calls over her laptop when she visits her village, as one example. It's the kind of thing where like, sure you could read a Wikipedia article or something about China's economic growth, but reading concrete examples of how people's lives have changed, even in fictional form like this, helps to drive it home.

But unfortunately, there were also parts of this book that I found kind of displeasing, for lack of a better word, and the good things about this book just weren't enough to overcome that. Clearly I found the murder of babies really distasteful (I know there are reasons why small human societies faced with overwhelming, harsh scarcity had such practices, but it doesn't mean I'm chomping at the bit to read visceral accounts of it!), and the vehement hatred of women and girls shown by the village elders in the early part of the book was pretty tough to stomach, too. Then later on, the book acquires a very different problem of existing in a world where everyone is a multi-millionaire with multi-millionaire concerns. There was a romance that just didn't have enough meat on it to be enticing, and even the central plotline – Li-yan's separation from her biological daughter, and their attempts to find each other – just felt underwhelming. The last chapter randomly being from Haley's perspective also felt befuddling, and I had no real sense that the book was winding its way to its ending earlier than like, one page before that end.

Overall, I felt like the other Lisa See book I read recently, The Island of Sea Women, was just a lot better, even though I wasn't in the right frame of mind to read it when I did. The story was tighter, and the historical detail (compared to, in this case, information about tea) struck me as more interesting. I'm not trying to say this was a bad book though, just one I personally didn't find the most enjoyable.

A really cool fantasy novella. It starts in the present day, where the 119-year-old Ayla (known to most as “Gran”) is hospitalised after a fall, and with the hospital staff warning that she's not really expected to recover, great-granddaughter Cass sits down to listen to one final family story – one that Ayla promises that Cass hasn't heard before. That story begins in Turkey, shortly after Turkey's War of Independence. A British soldier, enamoured with the country, is wandering around it to put off going home. At some point he becomes a farmhand on the small property of a humble, but warmly welcoming couple. Going off in pursuit of a “werewolf” that keeps picking off their flock and is undeterrable by fences, he crosses paths with a jinn and a twisted love story unfolds. It's a compelling read with surprises in store right up to the end, and easily finished in an hour or so! I'd certainly recommend it.

I didn't get around to reviewing the first book in this series, The Cruel Prince, but it's OK because I've now finished this one and this one is better!The Cruel Prince is an easy read with some good stuff in it (particularly in the third act), but I also felt like it took a long time to get going: there was a lot of going to school, and getting bullied by the prince and all his bratty friends at school, and boy drama as one of the bratty friends seems to be secretly nice and seductive but it turns out he was just pretending and is actually still awful, and so it goes. It was a huge relief that despite the short time gap between the two novels, Jude here has matured so much, now in her new position as seneschal of Faerieland.

For me the most enjoyable part of this book was the dynamic between Jude and High King Cardan, who she installed on the throne against his will at the end of the last book, as part of a broader scheme. Cardan hates the position Jude has tricked him into, and is scheming against her just as keenly. As the book unfolds, for the most part they have to work together because their short-term interests align. There's a ton of sexual tension between them, too. But even as they collaborate and flirtatiously tease one another, there's also that awareness that ultimately they're opposed... it's a really addictive love-hate dynamic.

Of course there are also other things going on. In the last book, Jude thwarted the schemes of her sort-of dad (who murdered her real dad) Madoc, and in this one he's keen to repay the favour. Jude's relationship with her twin sister, Taryn, is strained after the boy drama mentioned in this review's first paragraph. Her younger brother, Oak, is safe in the mortal world with her big sister, Vivi, but Vivi's relationship with a “regular person” is showing “Willow and Tara in season six of Buffy” levels of dodginess. The book plays with power dynamics a lot, as well as with loyalty and lies, and I just found it a really compulsive read. Even though I wasn't that big a fan of this trilogy's first instalment, I'm now really keen for the finale, The Queen of Nothing.

I liked the first book in this trilogy, Dawn, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this book so much more. To give credit where it's due, this is probably because Dawn did all the grunt work laying the foundations for this story. It had to introduce the Oankali, their very alien biology, technology and social structures, as well as a large cast of characters which (many of them) remain relevant in this instalment as well. Now that the reader is already familiar with all of that, Adulthood Rites can move on and just tell the story. It also helps that, where the protagonist of the last book was the somewhat prickly Lilith Iyapo (not that you would blame her or anything...), the protagonist here is the somewhat more likeable Akin, her son. Akin is the product of the Oankali's plans for humanity: with two human parents and three Oankali ones, Akin is a hybrid of both species, uniquely placed to understand the outlooks and concerns of them both.

So, since the end of the previous book, the action has moved to Earth. On the one hand, there are villages of humans and Oankali living together, building the new kind of society the Oankali had envisaged. On the other hand, there are villages of “resisters”, who are determined to live without the Oankali. The Oankali have mostly left them alone, except that they have sterilised them, because they believe it would be immoral to allow humans to pass on the “gene” that makes them commit violence against each other.

Because the resisters can't have their own children, they have resorted to abducting hybrid children who look mostly human, which doesn't really make sense considering their entire goal is to have nothing to do with the Oankali, but you get the impression that Butler is making some commentary on how humans regularly try to “solve” problems with solutions that make no sense. (See: “our society is damaging the climate so badly that the long-term stability of our food and water supplies is in doubt... let's stick our finger in our ears and keep electing governments who pledge to keep on doing it!”) So, the real jumping-off point for this story is when a group of brutish resisters kidnap the very young Akin, intending to sell him for a high price to some resister family. He winds up in the care of Tate and Gabriel, who figured prominently in the last novel. They won't let him go home to his own village, and no one from his village comes to retrieve him, so he is left to grow up for a number of years among the resisters.

The beauty of this novel is the tenderness and emotional nuance with which it portrays Akin's situation. It pains Akin deeply to be separated from his family – especially from his closest sibling, who he is supposed to be near during a critical bonding period – and there are some residents of the resister village who are all kinds of nasty and terrifying. But Tate is always caring towards him, and through his bond with her he comes to empathise with – even if not agree with – the resisters' position. They don't want to live at the sufferance of the Oankali, who are so convinced they know better than humanity what's best for us that they treat humans with the same condescension that we might reserve for bratty children. They want to live free, including free to make mistakes if they want. Although Akin eventually returns to his home village and the Oankali, he does so in a unique position: he has the insight into the resisters' motives that the Oankali lack, and the ability to speak to the Oankali and be listened to that the humans (including non-resisters, like Lilith) lack.

Just like the first book, this is not a story about “goodies” and “baddies”. It's sharply critical of human society, and human nature itself (or at least human nature under capitalism...), and in many ways it makes you think humanity would be better off if it gave up and acquiesced to the will of the unbearably smug Oankali. But, as in many of her other works, Butler here seems to suggest it is better to be free, to not be under the control of any other party, than it is to act in your own self-interest.

So, what will happen in the third and final book, Imago? I would guess that some kind of conciliation will have to occur between the resisters and the Oankali, perhaps brokered by the growing generation of hybrids, but it remains to be seen. I'm sure I'll be picking up the next instalment to find out sooner rather than later.

The previous instalments in this trilogy, Embers of War and Fleet of Knives, have been some of the best space opera I've ever read. Of course they deal with a future where humanity is stretched across a vast expanse of space and relies on highly advanced spaceships, but they do this without ignoring more familiar parts of the human experience: love, family, abandonment, grief... Perhaps it's a sad indictment of most space opera that this alone impresses me, but whatever, this kind of humanist far-futurism is absolutely my jam.

In Light of Impossible Stars, we are introduced to Cordelia Pa, who initially seems nothing more than an unfortunate street urchin on an impoverished, far-flung world near a wormhole called the Intrusion. Of course, it turns out that she's much more than that: her long-absentee father returns to thrust command of a spaceship onto her, and through a convoluted series of events it becomes clear that Cordelia is much more important than she thinks: in effect, she was born to be the key to save humanity.

We are also, of course, reunited with the Trouble Dog and her crew: Captain Sal Konstanz (now battling some heavy grief), mechanic Nod the Druff (now the proud parent to a small army of little Druffs)... and also many of their acquaintances from the last book, like “Lucky” Johnny Schultz and Lucy's Ghost, the spaceship in the form of an eerie young girl. At the book's beginning, crippled by the Fleet of Knives and still pursued by the former poet Ona Sudak, they're gliding and in need of a power source. Through their search, and meanderings in the vicinity of the Intrusion, they cross paths with Cordelia Pa and join forces to tackle the threats facing them.

I think this novel is perhaps the weakest of the trilogy, but not in any way that significantly dampened my enjoyment of it. I just felt like some developments/revelations in the story happened a little too conveniently. Regardless of that, Light of Impossible Stars retains many of the strengths of the first two books: the philosophy of the Druffs, some of the history of the House of Reclamation (a neutral force whose mission is to help all space travellers in danger), the strong pack mentality of the Carnivore-class warships (of which the Trouble Dog is one), their unshakeable loyalty, and the visceral pain they feel at the loss of their pack mates... all of this was just real good stuff. Powell captures the emotions of all different kinds of beings, from all different kinds of societies and upbringings, really well.

Overall, what can I say? If you like science fiction, especially space operas, and you like great characterisation, you NEED this series in your life. It is just incredibly excellent.

If you need more convincing, you might also want to read my review of the first book, Embers of War or my review of the second book, Fleet of Knives.

It's been a few years since I read the only other book of Megan Abbott's I have read, Bury Me Deep. That book was a very love-hate book for me (love the last third for being amazing, hate the first two-thirds for being so slow), but seeing as the other reviews were to the effect that Abbott had written better, I resolved to read another book by her. It's taken a long time, and in that time Abbott has stopped writing noir and started writing more mainstream mystery/thrillers, but man am I glad I did.

This is probably the most compulsive book I've read so far this year. Although on the face of it it's a murder mystery, really the most compelling thing about it is how it delves into one family, the Knoxes – their secrets, buried resentments, breakdowns in communication – and the world of competitive gymnastics. It's told from the perspective of Katie Knox, a thirtysomething wife and mother to two children – 15-year-old gymnastics prodigy Devon, and the oft-forgotten 10-year-old Drew. After a gruesome accident with a lawn mower when Devon was three, Katie and her husband, Eric, decided to enrol her in gymnastics classes to help her regain confidence in her body. Devon turned out to actually excel at gymnastics, and so Eric and Katie have come to sacrifice hugely – taking out a second mortgage on their crumbling house, or (in Katie's case) spending hours upon hours at the gym every day watching Devon practise – in the hopes they're giving her the best shot they can at making the Olympics.

But things start to unravel when Ryan, a charismatic young man who does odd jobs around the gym, is killed in a hit-and-run. It's not so much that the mystery is a real head-scratcher (it's not), but the way this event exposes so much dysfunction within the family and inside the “booster club” of “gymnastics moms” (and Eric) who fundraise for the gym. There's a ton of middle-class pettiness between the mums, vicarious competitiveness and snide put-downs made against one another's daughters. Within the family, you have Katie beginning to wonder whether the “win at all costs” mindset of competitive gymnastics is really good for Devon, while Eric becomes (from the perspective of Katie) increasingly unhinged insisting that it is. And all the while there's Drew, suffering from a fever for most of the book, noticing things that no one else feels they have the time to hear about.

So for me, what made this such a page-turner wasn't my desire to find out whodunnit, but the fact that I wanted to know what happened next. As chaos started setting in all around, I had to wonder: What was going to happen to this family?! To Katie? To Devon? Or even with some of the side characters, like Ryan's mum or his girlfriend, Hailey? That's what had me frantically flipping pages to the end.

It's not a book full of likeable characters – they feel realistic, but it's largely a world of self-absorbed people making utterly selfish decisions. That might be a turn-off for some people. I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed by the ending, although I'll admit it was built towards over the course of the book.

Regardless of that, though, I really enjoyed this book. In its skewering of “teens doing competitive sport at high levels” culture, it treaded some of the same themes as Barracuda, and with its dark tone and treatment of domestic dysfunction it couldn't help but remind me of Gone Girl, either. All good books, and I'll definitely be back to read another one by Megan Abbott.

I've fallen behind writing reviews of the books I've been reading this year, so I thought I'd try to write some shorter reviews just to catch up.So, Imagining Argentina is one of the books Goodreads has been recommending to me for yonks, because I've read a number of other novels set in South American dictatorships in the same period – [b:Of Love and Shadows 16532 Of Love and Shadows Isabel Allende https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386919975l/16532.SY75.jpg 205630], [b:Senselessness 2635557 Senselessness Horacio Castellanos Moya https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1406349559l/2635557.SY75.jpg 2660267], [b:The Story of the Night 193897 The Story of the Night Colm Tóibín https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347773763l/193897.SY75.jpg 1441368], and most of [a:Carolina De Robertis 2740834 Carolina De Robertis https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1566398184p2/2740834.jpg]' work – and those are all fantastic reads if you're considering picking up this. This book, obviously, deals with many of the same issues as those: political repression, disappearances, torture. But it also has a bit of a different feel about it. It certainly has some magical realism vibes, with the main character, Carlos Rueda, blessed with some clairvoyance enabling him to reveal the fates of many of Buenos Aires' disappeared. But it's also, if I can say it, a little less engaging than the other books I've mentioned. The many vignettes within are, I think, emotionally impactful in isolation... but they're all rather disconnected from each other, so the novel feels a bit disjointed and lacks a compulsive, “must read more!” quality.I want to be clear that I did like this book, and it's as good a reminder of the regressive bloodlust of right-wing regimes as anything else. Parts of it have certainly stuck in my mind: there is a subplot where one of the fates Carlos Rueda reveals is that of a boy who “disappeared” in Nazi Germany, which has stuck in my mind, and some of the commentary on how the Argentine regime saw it as their duty to “purify” the country of all “subversive”, left-wing influences before they could leave the way clear for a restoration of democracy. Really, lots of parts. It just wasn't the kind of book that keeps you reading anxiously to the end.

It surprised me that I ended up enjoying this book; even at the halfway mark (300 pages in!) I was grumbling that it was so dry and unengaging that I thought it'd barely scrape two stars. However, the more advanced the spider civilisation became, the more interested I became in the story, and by the last third or so I found it a real page-turner.

It's also one of those cerebral books that tries to provoke thoughts more than it does entertain. Children of Time is set deep into the far future, and is mostly about humanity's tendency towards self-destruction. At the very beginning, Doctor Avrana Kern is attempting to begin an experiment on a terraformed world, whereby monkeys will be infected with a nanovirus to hasten their evolution, in the hope that this results in a version of humanity without the same flaws. The experiment is sabotaged by a member of her own team, so the monkeys never land, and instead the planet is populated by ants, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies – with the nanovirus taking root in the spiders. Avrana Kern herself manages to make a getaway while everyone else on her team is killed, and places herself in suspended animation, anticipating rescue.

Rescue never comes. The conflict that destroys her team ends up also destroying Earth, and nearly all of it – just excluding a thin band around the equator – is covered in ice. Humanity's numbers dwindle precipitously, and as day-to-day survival takes up so much of their time, they lose the cultural and technological knowledge that Kern's generation had. Once the species stabilises enough that they can build their technological base back up again, they cause global warming and discover that the permafrost had been covering oodles of nasty poisons. To escape that, they have to put as much of humanity as they can into suspended animation, and send them out into the stars in pursuit of a new, habitable planet, on a vast ship called the Gilgamesh.

The half of the book that focuses on the humans details the struggle of the Gilgamesh's crew to find a planet they can land on. They find Kern's planet, but the AI of the computer keeping Kern's suspended body alive denies them permission to land. And so they remain in space, generation after generation, with the egotists on the crew plunging them into a series of petty, destructive conflicts and with the machinery of the ship slowly but steadily deteriorating beyond the ability of the crew to repair. The main perspective here is that of Holsten, a classicist who periodically comes out of suspended animation to despair at how humanity is falling back into the self-destructive habits of the Ancients before going back into deep sleep again.

Meanwhile, on Kern's planet, a sophisticated arachnid society is emerging, and flourishing. Like I said, I found the first half of their plotline, where they're mainly fighting wars against ants, really boring, but they got exponentially more interesting once they had an actual civilisation going. The spider society is no utopia – one of the major threads running through the book is male spiders' struggle to be given respect and authority on par with females (or at least enough that the females will stop killing them after mating for sport) – but the depiction is sympathetic. Honestly, it's remarkable how well Tchaikovsky has depicted this society which is profoundly non-human, but still made them understandable, and even relatable, for an obviously human readership.

There are definitely some aspects to this book that some readers will find unsatisfying. The ending is a bit of a conceit, if a conceit set up from early on in the book – despite what the cover might suggest, this is not “hard sci fi” in a scientific sense. Most of the human characters are extremely unlikeable. The universe it presents is, mostly, bleak. And overall, its merits are way more that it stimulates the mind rather than grips you by the feels... so if you prefer books that you have more of an emotional investment in, this is not ideal. It is, nonetheless, a very accomplished book that I'm glad to have read, even if it was rough going a lot of the time.

Not a conventional mystery novel – while the first chapter describes two young girls going missing, every chapter thereafter is from the perspective of a different person on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula. Most of them don't know the girls at all, and as such the news of their abduction becomes just part of the background noise to these many different characters' lives (until the last chapter, from the perspective of the girls' mother).

There is in fact a resolution to the mystery, but that's not the main reason to read this novel. Its real strong point is its elaborate depiction of this remote and troubled part of the world. Through its wide range of perspectives, a number of different issues are touched upon: misogyny, racism, the legacy of the Soviet period and the post-Soviet economic crisis, homophobia, elitism, the difficulties of being young in a remote area (the lack of job opportunities, or a large enough pool of people to date that you don't “have” to settle for a less-than-ideal option...). It's very interesting and skilfully done. Don't go into this expecting a real mystery novel, but if you like literary fiction exploring social issues in different parts of the world, this will make a great read.

Dawn is, in many parts, an uncomfortable book to read. Butler really does not want to give the reader any easy answers, but instead makes us grapple with some tough dilemmas. The prose is deceptively easy to read, because the real struggle is trying to work out who you're “barracking for”, or what you want to happen.Dawn is set in the aftermath of an all-consuming war which has wiped out human life on Earth. Lilith, the protagonist, wakes up aboard a spaceship – not for the first time – on which she's been woken up and put to sleep, and woken up and put to sleep, over and over again and put through a range of weird experiences over these bouts of wakefulness. At last, her captors present themselves to her, and explain what's happening.Her captors are aliens, a species known as the Oankali. They perpetuate their own species through genetic engineering, basically hybridising themselves with other species they encounter in the galaxy. Seeing that humanity was just about the wipe itself out anyway, they've rescued as many of the survivors as they could, and now plan to splice those humans' DNA with Oankali DNA and (eventually) set those humans free to repopulate the Earth. Through their tests, they've determined that Lilith has the ideal personality to learn all about the Oankali and their culture, teach other survivors about the mission, and ultimately lead a new human society on Earth.There is a fundamental flaw in the Oankali's plans, of course, which is that Lilith and pretty much every other human in the book abhors the idea of having their DNA tampered with and producing not-fully-human offspring. Although the Oankali are kind and well-intentioned in many ways, they refuse point-blank to consider the humans' autonomy in this regard, no matter how many times Lilith tries to explain things to them.But as I said before, Butler couldn't make things as binary as “Oankali evil meddlers, humans good freedom-seekers”. Many of the humans who appear in this book are actually not very nice – there are incidents of rape and murder – while most of the Oankali are very caring, if prone to patronising behaviour. Oankali society is communal and theoretically non-hierarchical; extended Oankali names convey how you're connected to the broader society. They're far more disgusted by violence than humans are, and eat exclusively vegetarian diets. They have the ability to heal humans' wounds through touch (and give them pleasurable sex-analogue experiences); it confounds them that most humans find this alarming and terrifying, when in their minds they're only trying to do good.But the overarching point that Butler seems to be making is that even if Oankali society is “better” than humans', humans must be free to decide their own fate without outside interference – even if, as the Oankali point out, that decision was apparently to wipe out the entire species in nuclear war. That position seems a bit dubious, but on the other hand you can't deny that the forced impregnation, DNA tampering, etc. that the Oankali go ahead with is icky, too (and has a real-life parallel to chattel slavery, when slavers felt entitled to treat other people as livestock and “breed them” accordingly). Lilith tries to take a middle position, where she's on good terms with individual Oankali and helps them out wherever possible, while still planning to bail on them and vanish into the jungle as soon as they let her loose on Earth. Most of the other humans hate this strategy though for being, in their view, too soft.This is a many-layered story; there is also commentary on gender, the difficulty of falling in love in an environment where you have little control over your life, and more. The dominant themes are shared in common with other Butler books that I've read, like Anyanwu's efforts to escape Doro's clutches in [b:Wild Seed 52318 Wild Seed (Patternmaster, #1) Octavia E. Butler https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388462753l/52318.SY75.jpg 1330000] or Teray's conflict between being compromised but safe or free but endangered in [b:Patternmaster 116256 Patternmaster (Patternmaster, #4) Octavia E. Butler https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389456750l/116256.SY75.jpg 1119636]. That said, the reason I've rated this book lower than those two is mainly that I was not so emotionally invested in it. Intellectually invested, sure, but the characterisation wasn't as gripping. Still, this might improve over the rest of the trilogy, and I'm still interested to see how things play out from here.

I've compared the previous two instalments in this trilogy ([b:Ack-Ack Macaque 13547332 Ack-Ack Macaque (Ack-Ack Macaque, #1) Gareth L. Powell https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344396179l/13547332.SY75.jpg 19128070] and [b:Hive Monkey 17571741 Hive Monkey (Ack-Ack Macaque, #2) Gareth L. Powell https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1382111437l/17571741.SY75.jpg 24511595]) to the TV show Doctor Who: they're fast-paced, campy romps with just the right balance of science fantasy absurdity and empathetic characters who convince you to soldier on with it. Continuing on with that metaphor, Macaque Attack is a fairly typical RTD-era series finale (or even the finale of your average two-parter)... it's where the showrunners have decided to just do everything, all at once, to the point that you can no longer follow what's meant to be happening and some overwrought emotional scenes can't really make up for the fact that the characters have long since been overwhelmed by “plot”.Anyway, the good news is, at the end of the book we discover that none of the events that took place in this trilogy were real anyway. So I guess it doesn't really matter that I struggled to follow along. Sort of a disappointing way for it all to end really.

The Well of Ascension didn't exactly go in the direction I was expecting, which is a little disappointing, but what I got is a good book too.In this follow-up to [b:The Final Empire 68428 The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1) Brandon Sanderson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1480717416l/68428.SY75.jpg 66322], Sanderson introduces us to further elements of this world that we didn't, or barely, saw before: we learn more about Feruchemy, an alternate form of magic that co-exists with the better-known Allomancy, as well as some magical beings called kandra and koloss. The plot largely revolves around Elend (now the beleaguered king of Luthadel), Vin (Elend's partner, famous for her role defeating the Lord Ruler, and revered by a huge part of the city as a religious figure), and Sazed (who is trying to get to the bottom of some troubling historical and religious texts), as Luthadel is besieged by three competing armies.Just like the first book, the plot unfolds very, very slowly, up until the last quarter where everything falls into place for an electrifying finale. If I rated books on finales alone, both these instalments would've got higher ratings than I've given them, but... well... it's hard to set aside the fact that I spent a week struggling through chapter after chapter of characters lamenting how sad the situation is that they find themselves in, interspersed with brief action sequences that never really seem to shake up the stalemate of the siege.If that description of this book sounds harsh, it's because it is harsh... there's a lot of great world-building and character moments in here as well, and (in retrospect) a ton of groundwork being laid for the shocking cliffhanger ending. It's just, man, these slow-paced long books are not the easiest for me to get through.So. At the end of the previous book, Elend Venture stumbled into the role of new king of Luthadel. He tries to set up a quasi-representative democracy with eight seats each reserved for the nobility, the merchant class, and the skaa (you might notice that this leaves the vast majority of the population with only one-third of the seats). In order to continue as king, he is dependent on this institution to keep lending him their support, which proves challenging because half the ding-dongs representing the nobility and the merchants just want to hand the city over to one of its enemies.See, rumours have spread far and wide that Luthadel contains great stockpiles of atium – an almost incalculably valuable metal that allows Mistborn to see a few seconds into the future. As a result, multiple armies march on the city, each one led by a noble who's determined to seize these reserves of atium for himself.Meanwhile, there's something going wrong with the mists. In his travels, Sazed encounters villages which have been attacked by a mysterious force, with the villagers themselves insisting that the mists have been shaking people to death. Sazed immerses himself in his studies. It was foretold, over a thousand years ago, that a Hero of Ages would come to defeat the Deepness. The Lord Ruler had made out that he was that Hero, but the characters are sure that he's not; nonetheless, these mists – which Vin becomes increasingly sure is the Deepness referred to in the historical texts – are clearly a rising threat.Vin herself spends most of the book struggling with her insecurities. Does she deserve the way the skaa have lionised her as the heir to the Survivor of Hathsin? Is she worthy of the love she shares with Elend, or should she randomly ditch him for a weirdo named Zane who keeps stalking her at night, just because Zane is a fellow Mistborn? (Honestly, that love triangle subplot was pretty poor... I don't think Sanderson intended for us to ever have a shred of doubt.) Her main arc over the course of the book is learning to overcome these doubts, to trust her instincts... and obviously to try to save the world.There are other characters who I probably enjoyed reading about more. Vin's kandra, and the friendship that blossomed between the two of them, was wonderful to read about. I also liked Tindwyl, another of Sazed's people – her no-nonsense, tough-love kind of attitude to life, and also the relationship that developed between her and Sazed as they tried to get to the bottom of all those ancient texts.Elend was a bit more eh. In the first book, he had a bit of roguish contrarianism about him. Here, he's just found a way to convince the skaa to be happy with the minutest of incremental reforms, and isn't even able to leverage that to stop the more traditional elements of the nobility trying to oust him. I spent a lot of this book missing Kelsier, just because I know he wouldn't have been as satisfied with Elend's toothless reform agenda as Vin was.In many ways, this was a very traditional “middle book” (and not just because it feels like a bit of an awkward transition): where the first book ends at a point where the main issue of the novel has been dealt with, but there are lingering doubts about where to go next, this book just ends with a full-on cliffhanger. Obviously, having read this far, there's no way I could stop here and never find out what happens at the end! But I do think I wouldn't mind having a little break and reading something else first. I just need to read something faster-paced so I can remind myself what that feels like.Sanderson does have a lot of strengths: the world-building is great, and the way he lays all these clues so they can all suddenly come together in a mind-blowing ending is top-notch. I also think that the prose here is a little better than in the first book, without sacrificing the accessible simplicity of it. He also clearly has a veritable ton of subplots all unfolding here, and the fact that some of them didn't hit the mark for me doesn't negate the fact that others were really good. I mean, Sazed and Tindwyl studying old texts didn't exactly make for the most action-packed of chapters, but man did it pay off at the end. Just wow.Overall, I enjoyed this book, despite some flaws. I feel like if you've read the first instalment and don't really know whether you can be bothered continuing on, this book probably won't convince you that yup, continuing on was totally the right idea. A counterpoint, though, is that if the last book felt like a set-up book, this one also feels like a set-up book. So maybe the conclusion to the trilogy is going to be really, really big.

3.5 stars. Really, the first two-thirds were about a 2.5 star read (halfway between “it's okay” and “I like it”), but the last third was where it all came together into a solid four-star read. That makes this a three-star read overall, I guess, but with me having a high confidence that now we know all the world-building and info on the magical system and all that, the next book is gonna be good.

So if you haven't yet read the Mistborn trilogy, you might be reading this post because you want to know: should you? And the answer to that is, of course, it depends. It is a work of epic fantasy, so it's very long with a slow build-up. But the core story seems good. This first instalment, at least, follows Vin, a petty thief who trusts no one and lives in filth in dire poverty, as she discovers she has ultra-rare magic powers and becomes enmeshed in a scheme to overthrow the tyrannical and immortal Lord Ruler and liberate the downtrodden masses (the skaa).

See, Vin comes from a world where there is a dominant form of magic called Allomancy. For Allomancy to work, you have to ingest some of a specific metal, and then (if you're attuned to that metal) you can burn it to unlock whatever power to carries; once the metal's burned through, you'll have to ingest more of the metal to fuel further use of that power. In theory, only noblemen could possibly be attuned to any metals: there are strict laws by which noblemen may have sex with skaa women if they want, but only if they kill them promptly afterwards, to eliminate any risk of allomantic powers being inherited by a skaa child. But even then, the vast majority of allomancers can only burn one metal to use one magical power; only a tiny majority indeed are what's known as Mistborn, able to draw on all the powers if they have access to the metals.

It's an interesting system of magic, notable in my mind for how strictly limited it is: you need fuel, you can only do a limited range of things, and most magic users can't even do the majority of that limited range of things. It's also interesting that it's resulted in such a strongly hereditary form of class domination, whereby the nobility (who aren't all magical, but certainly have access to allomancers within the members of each House) keep the masses subjugated through magically manipulating their emotions to keep them pessimistic and devoid of hope.

Vin, however, is the product of a nobleman's blunder: her mother was a skaa prostitute who this nobleman failed to have killed after he'd impregnated her. By the start of the story her family is all gone, and she's only aware of a small part of her powers, which she calls Luck. It's when she crosses paths with Kelsier – another skaa-born Mistborn – that she's recognised for what she is. She joins Kelsier's crew and he begins to mentor her in how to use her powers.

Now Kelsier himself is an interesting character. He's also known as the Survivor of Hathsin, for escaping from a hard labour camp (a mine) that no one had ever survived before. He despises the Lord Ruler and all of the nobility for condemning the vast majority of the population to live in such misery. I found it interesting that as Vin became more knowledgeable about the political situation and her abilities, she started disagreeing with Kell on some things – like where Kell considered every noble to be an oppressor of all skaa and deserving of death, Vin thought there was a role that “class traitor” nobles could play in the uprising. With Elend emerging as the new king at the end of the book, I am curious to see who the narrative depicts as being more in the right: will we see a “good noble” coming to lead a benevolent absolute monarchy, or will we see the skaa rightfully angry about having their rebellion twisted into channelling power to a new nobleman, such that they still lack political power and justice for themselves? Sanderson has put so much work into crafting this society that I'm really intrigued to see how it all plays out – I just think he's laid too much groundwork to be on the road to disappointing me.

There is more in terms of characters and world-building that I could have touched on here, but it would be more time-efficient just to say trust me, the novel is rich in those things. As for Sanderson's prose, I don't know that I'd say it's my favourite ever – it's functional, more than anything else. Characters don't speak in some artificial, high-falutin' style, which I appreciate, and he does enough to help me visualise the world (the grim, colourless streets, the skies permanently red from ash...). At the same time, there are a lot of action scenes and some of them drag out well beyond the point that I can keep track of where all the people in the brawl are supposed to be, and there are some weaker bits of description that stood out just because I'd have fixed them up if I came across them in my own writing (like, “smiled evilly” is a bit of a twee choice of words in my view). That said, somehow I feel that Sanderson has sold enough millions of copies of this book that he would not care about me nitpicking his prose.

Overall, this is a good book, but it also feels like a set-up book, like things are about to get way more interesting. If you like the sound of anything I've written about it here, and don't mind a longer, slower-paced read, you could definitely go further wrong than picking this book up.

I'm not even sure I can write a review that does justice to the brilliance of this book, but I'll do my best. Cantoras – a word which means ”female singers”, but is also older slang for same-sex attracted women – tells the story of five lesbian women living under the Uruguayan dictatorship. Wanting to escape the suffocating surveillance of the city, the women go out to a remote town on the Atlantic coast – Cabo Polonio, where they can be their true selves amidst the waves, rocks and sand dunes.The characters are all really strong and gripping, forming an excellent ensemble cast. From the beginning, we have Romina, a left-wing Jew who's been arrested and tortured for past involvement in communist activity; Flaca, a third-generation butcher who broke Romina's heart by hooking up with someone else while Romina was imprisoned; Anita “La Venus”, a frustrated housewife and Flaca's new lover; the quietly enigmatic Melena; and the youngest of them all, sixteen-year-old Paz. As the novel unfolds over a number of years, you become swept up in the stories of these women's lives and loves. There are victories, and there are awful tragedies, with the book as a whole concluding in an uplifting if bittersweet kind of way.I really enjoyed how, even when the characters came in conflict with each other, all their perspectives came across as equally understandable and sympathetic. You can see why Anita would leave Flaca for the exciting, vibrant singer Ariella, but you can also feel Flaca's heartbreak at being left. Similarly, when Romina ends her passionless relationship with Melena for the Paraguayan artist Diana, you can understand that too... and although that results in tragedy for Melena, it's hard to agree with Flaca that Romina made the wrong decision for herself, you know? It's also wonderful to see how their friendships endure and mature over time, that their bonds run much deeper than whatever fallings-out they have in the short term.But along with reading about these wonderful characters, reading Cantoras also has you reading about Uruguay, and an extremely dark, violent period in its history. The fear of “el proceso”, the torture meted out against left-wing opponents of the regime, is palpable in this book, as is the rage and indignation of characters like Romina who've endured it. In this Cantoras shares something in common with de Robertis' early books, and especially [b:Perla 12303508 Perla Carolina De Robertis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1333576681l/12303508.SX50.jpg 17280681], which talked about the cruelty of the Argentine dictatorship on the other side of the Río de la Plata. There's a part where soldiers descend on Cabo Polonio and take over the lighthouse, and you can really feel the women's frustration at having their “safe space” taken away from them.But Cantoras also makes the point that it wasn't just the dictatorship grinding gay people down; it was much of traditional Uruguayan society, under the influence of the Catholic church and patriarchal value systems. There's a grim flashback to a gay conversion clinic in Buenos Aires, and there are also many references to the “esposas”, the handcuffs, which supposedly bound women to the role society demanded of them. Girls having to clean up after their brothers, so their brothers could enjoy the free time; how even the communists had women thanklessly doing all the food prep and cleaning; how women were expected to find husbands, and how profoundly weird you'd be – to the point of attracting suspicion from the regime – if you opted not to marry. But this, too, changes over the course of the book. By the last chapter, same-sex marriage is legal in Uruguay, Paz has long been running a gay bar in Montevideo, and Cabo Polonio has become a tourist attraction for those interested in Uruguay's gay history. The women do joke a bit about how “women getting married” is a concept that seemed an absurdity in their youth, and wistfully lament how the next generation think the word cantoras is amusingly quaint, seeing as they can now openly describe themselves as lesbianas or bisexuales. They're wistful, but overall they have to be pleased that young women who love women don't know the fear that they used to.So, to cut a long story short: read this book!! Great characters, an interesting time and place to be set in, Carolina de Robertis' standard beautiful writing, and a pageturningly brisk pace.

I came across this book after reading the first two instalments of the author's DFZ series, [b:Minimum Wage Magic 42385018 Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ #1) Rachel Aaron https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1539872062l/42385018.SY75.jpg 66054725] and [b:Part-Time Gods 46252905 Part-Time Gods (DFZ #2) Rachel Aaron https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1560197632l/46252905.SY75.jpg 71235070]. This series was written earlier, under a different nom de plume, and belongs to a slightly different genre (action sci-fi as opposed to the dystopian science-fantasy mix of the DFZ series). There are definitely some similarities though – a young female protagonist doing a dangerous job, with the same writing style.Fortune's Pawn follows Deviana “Devi” Morris, an ambitious mercenary who accepts a security job on a notoriously dangerous ship to try to fast-track her path into some kind of elite paramilitary unit. Aboard, she meets an array of curious characters, including the devilishly handsome cook, Rupert, the ruthless captain with unclear objectives, Caldswell, and Caldswell's quiet, chess-obsessed daughter, Ren. And of course, once the crew's journey is underway, mysterious things start happening: on one stopover, Devi's attacked by an invisible creature; aboard another ship, she falls under attack only to be saved by a mysterious black scaly alien; and she discovers that the video recordings her armour makes are being tampered with...There are plenty of things that I enjoyed about this book. I definitely got engrossed in the mystery and kept reading hoping to find out more (except most of it clearly won't be revealed until later in the series). I liked the romantic subplot between Devi and Rupert. There were some hints of interesting world-building.Unfortunately, there were also some aspects that weren't quite to my taste. I tend to zone out if an action scene goes on too long – I feel like long action scenes are better suited to movies – and this book definitely has a few long ones. It was also hard to read this book without comparing it to the DFZ series, with Devi here being a very similar character to Opal there, down to the recklessness and anthropomorphising her equipment... and I felt like the setting and the storyline were just a bit better in that series (although, in turn, I think I preferred the characterisation here). The world of this book is definitely not portrayed as vividly as the Detroit Free Zone.Honestly though, the thing that probably cemented me giving this book three stars instead of four was the ending. After Devi gets a bit of context about what's happening from a villain, Caldswell wants to kill her for “knowing too much”. Rupert decides instead to save her life by getting Ren to wipe her memories from the day, and instilling in her a deep, automatic revulsion to seeing him. It felt like it didn't quite work with the first-person, past tense perspective – she fluidly goes from describing events she should have forgotten to explaining how she didn't remember any of the events she just described – and also, I dunno, seemed a bit ill-fitting. The whole manoeuvre seemed very presumptuous on Rupert's part – not just manipulating Devi's mind, but also assuming he can change the facts to get the captain to cancel orders he's aleady issued – and I don't know what this event will mean for Devi's character in the next instalment, but it does seem to have undermined her strength.Overall, if you loved everything about the DFZ series and are looking for something similar, this is a reasonable choice. In my opinion, though, it doesn't benefit from as awesome a setting, and the plot is a bit more generic and action-heavy. If you haven't looked at the DFZ series yet I'd recommend you check that out first.