kirisuna
2.25 stars. This was a bit of a slog to read. I had a genuinely hard time getting through this book. I considered not finishing it more than once, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why at any point in time. Just found myself not wanting to open it.
The nonlinear structure was definitely a large part of the problem. This was not simply a story moving between childhood and adulthood. It jumped constantly between Gwen at five, eight, six, eighteen, four, thirty-one, seven, twenty, and so on, often without enough reason for the timeline to be that fragmented. Instead of creating suspense or deepening the story, it made everything feel scattered, overly elaborate, and unnecessarily difficult to follow. At some point in the middle, I felt like I had lost the point entirely.
The book also spends most of its time straddling an awkward line between literary fiction about childhood trauma and a fantasy novel about literal soul-sucking magic. For most of the book, the fantasy is so lightly woven through that when the supernatural explanations become explicit, they did not feel fully plausible or satisfying to me. There are some fascinating ideas here, especially the idea of creativity as something that can be stolen from a person, leaving them unable to write, draw, or create in the same way afterward — then being given to another to make the talentless talented. But we only get a tangible taste of that throughout the book and it’s not really explicitly clear until the last 50 pages or so where it feels kind of like a last-minute effort to tie up the story.
My biggest issue, though, was the damn Children.
First, Guin. Having a traumatic childhood is not her fault. Being emotionally damaged by her mother and losing her brother is not her fault. But Guin still repeatedly chooses to treat the people around her badly, and the book never really asks her to reckon with that.
She keeps Hank in her life despite knowing that she cannot or will not give him what he needs. She “loves” him, but she refuses to tell him that. She uses him as stability while offering him almost nothing emotionally. The irony is that she resents her mother for reducing her and her brother to material, but she treats Hank like a supporting character in her own trauma. She gives him as little as her mother gave her and never meaningfully acknowledges it.
Ennis is just as bad — he abandons her for 20 years to protect her and then just rolls in with some huge grand gesture and suggests to fuck everyone just to serve themselves. And Guin is more than happy to agree, when she had been agonizing over him doing that very thing for 100 pages!
Edith is the person who stole their childhood. Edith stole other people’s talent in order to write the books. Edith used her children as subject matter because she apparently could not even create a god damn plot of her own in spite of that stolen talent. Edith took the little bit of love they got from their father from them, exploited them, and prevented them from ever having normal lives all the while abusively neglecting them.
Some of the readers were obsessive, invasive, and inappropriate, but they were still just readers. They consumed a story Edith chose to publish. They did not steal Guinn and her brother’s childhood. Edith did by being a terrible mother and by using them directly as the main characters in her books.
So the decision to begin siphoning from readers to feed Mother because readers “took so much” from them seemed like totally convoluted and misplaced blame. The readers did not take their lives from them. Their mother sold those lives to the public. Redirecting that anger toward readers does not feel like reclaiming power. It feels like repeating Edith’s abuse using a more convenient target. And for gods sake, they literally already killed her — what more revenge can they take? To some significant degree the misery of their adult lives is on them — not Edith, and not the books. The final scenes in the publishers office seem written with a sense of new found empowerment, like they have finally taken control of the lives they lost, and I could not tell whether they understood how ugly their choices actually were. That they were a huge part of the problem. That they had hurt each other so much over time. And no one was to blame but them for those choices.
Also, side note — Ennis stayed away from Guin for 20 years to protect her “light” from Mother, but then was willing to bring her directly to Mother? What happened to that danger? It had seemed like as kids it wasn’t an option for Guin to become one of Mother’s children because she had a light. What the hell changed? And could he not have shown up earlier then if there was no real danger? Or never left her at all?
There was a point near the end, when the truth started being revealed, where I briefly thought the book might pull everything together. The writing itself is often strong, even if it is wordy and occasionally difficult to follow. But after all of the buildup, the payoff was two deeply damaged people continuing to live badly, hurting others, and choosing to preserve a fake version of a mother who never existed for them. They do not really heal. They do not meaningfully take responsibility. They just find a way to turn exploitation into an inheritance. And pass it on to the readers so they can willfully live in a fantasy world. Honestly it’s just… sad.
I do not think I enjoyed this. I would rather have read The Ninth City.
2.25 stars. This was a bit of a slog to read. I had a genuinely hard time getting through this book. I considered not finishing it more than once, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why at any point in time. Just found myself not wanting to open it.
The nonlinear structure was definitely a large part of the problem. This was not simply a story moving between childhood and adulthood. It jumped constantly between Gwen at five, eight, six, eighteen, four, thirty-one, seven, twenty, and so on, often without enough reason for the timeline to be that fragmented. Instead of creating suspense or deepening the story, it made everything feel scattered, overly elaborate, and unnecessarily difficult to follow. At some point in the middle, I felt like I had lost the point entirely.
The book also spends most of its time straddling an awkward line between literary fiction about childhood trauma and a fantasy novel about literal soul-sucking magic. For most of the book, the fantasy is so lightly woven through that when the supernatural explanations become explicit, they did not feel fully plausible or satisfying to me. There are some fascinating ideas here, especially the idea of creativity as something that can be stolen from a person, leaving them unable to write, draw, or create in the same way afterward — then being given to another to make the talentless talented. But we only get a tangible taste of that throughout the book and it’s not really explicitly clear until the last 50 pages or so where it feels kind of like a last-minute effort to tie up the story.
My biggest issue, though, was the damn Children.
First, Guin. Having a traumatic childhood is not her fault. Being emotionally damaged by her mother and losing her brother is not her fault. But Guin still repeatedly chooses to treat the people around her badly, and the book never really asks her to reckon with that.
She keeps Hank in her life despite knowing that she cannot or will not give him what he needs. She “loves” him, but she refuses to tell him that. She uses him as stability while offering him almost nothing emotionally. The irony is that she resents her mother for reducing her and her brother to material, but she treats Hank like a supporting character in her own trauma. She gives him as little as her mother gave her and never meaningfully acknowledges it.
Ennis is just as bad — he abandons her for 20 years to protect her and then just rolls in with some huge grand gesture and suggests to fuck everyone just to serve themselves. And Guin is more than happy to agree, when she had been agonizing over him doing that very thing for 100 pages!
Edith is the person who stole their childhood. Edith stole other people’s talent in order to write the books. Edith used her children as subject matter because she apparently could not even create a god damn plot of her own in spite of that stolen talent. Edith took the little bit of love they got from their father from them, exploited them, and prevented them from ever having normal lives all the while abusively neglecting them.
Some of the readers were obsessive, invasive, and inappropriate, but they were still just readers. They consumed a story Edith chose to publish. They did not steal Guinn and her brother’s childhood. Edith did by being a terrible mother and by using them directly as the main characters in her books.
So the decision to begin siphoning from readers to feed Mother because readers “took so much” from them seemed like totally convoluted and misplaced blame. The readers did not take their lives from them. Their mother sold those lives to the public. Redirecting that anger toward readers does not feel like reclaiming power. It feels like repeating Edith’s abuse using a more convenient target. And for gods sake, they literally already killed her — what more revenge can they take? To some significant degree the misery of their adult lives is on them — not Edith, and not the books. The final scenes in the publishers office seem written with a sense of new found empowerment, like they have finally taken control of the lives they lost, and I could not tell whether they understood how ugly their choices actually were. That they were a huge part of the problem. That they had hurt each other so much over time. And no one was to blame but them for those choices.
Also, side note — Ennis stayed away from Guin for 20 years to protect her “light” from Mother, but then was willing to bring her directly to Mother? What happened to that danger? It had seemed like as kids it wasn’t an option for Guin to become one of Mother’s children because she had a light. What the hell changed? And could he not have shown up earlier then if there was no real danger? Or never left her at all?
There was a point near the end, when the truth started being revealed, where I briefly thought the book might pull everything together. The writing itself is often strong, even if it is wordy and occasionally difficult to follow. But after all of the buildup, the payoff was two deeply damaged people continuing to live badly, hurting others, and choosing to preserve a fake version of a mother who never existed for them. They do not really heal. They do not meaningfully take responsibility. They just find a way to turn exploitation into an inheritance. And pass it on to the readers so they can willfully live in a fantasy world. Honestly it’s just… sad.
I do not think I enjoyed this. I would rather have read The Ninth City.