Roo
Rating: 3 stars
Gardens of the Moon!
Malazan has a reputation, which was certainly a concern of mine when I started this book. It plops you into the world and you either have to sink or swim with the flow of it. I think that that outlook for Malazan is maybe required going in, and I'm glad to experience it early, because I think it adjusts expectations internally to, “either you're okay with this, or you're not”.
I liked the vastness of the world and the sense of scope for the world, the characters feel different and unique to one another, and the prose is something I enjoyed, without a lot of cliche and unevenness that you might expect in a debut book. However there were certain aspects of the book that simply didn't gel quite as much as I would have liked with me. Though the characterisation was there, I didn't gel with the character growth aspects. It sometimes felt like you might get a scene or two before a large characterisation jump occurred, and I'm more a fan of a slower build to that, and there was variation in this. The growth of Crokus for example felt more organic to me than the arc of Sorry, where the latter's main conflict was brought up as a burgeoning plot issue once, and then resolved by a different character in a different scene by what seemed like an unintended side effect of their own actions, which robbed me of some personal satisfaction. To me, this book has a strong theme of powers playing with people they deemed much less grand than them, from the Malaz Empire in its conquering to gods and their pawns, so to not see one of those great examples have agency in their own resolution in that theme kind of galled me.
The plot felt... a little like a prologue, and people will get their own mileage from this. It's multiple plot threads converging, but it doesn't play to the normal rise of tension, complication, climax structure that you see in many books. This led a little bit to feeling like things were uneven somehow, though also, there were plots and perspectives that meant you could entirely see the pieces coming together before Erikson spells them out, if you're paying attention. I'm not sure how much of this feeling was affected by a year break I took reading this book between the first quarter and the rest of it, but in some ways, the book almost stokes within you a desire to immediately reread, to see what you missed the first time.
Lastly, the ending didn't really stick for me, which I feel is potentially an unpopular opinion. The characters we spent most time with were the little guys of the world, caught up in the gears of machinations much larger than them. When all the conflict comes to a head in the final chapters, the plot resolutions doesn't come from those little guys half as much as it does from big power players. And, though we're told all these things are happening that are momentous and climatic and casually killing people and devastating the world, I didn't feel the danger so much, because the battle kept being outsourced (or so it felt) to a similarly powered NPC, rendering the climax muted. Lastly, to a certain extent in this, I truly think Erikson's worldbuilding approach bit him in the ass, because I swear one very important point of the climax was not mentioned until that point, making it feel slightly deus ex machina, as opposed to a well planted foreshadowing. Again, this could be a victim of my break in reading, but it felt a bit like, “well, why should I care?”
Overall, I'm intrigued by it all, enough to try another book or two and solidify my opinion, but I didn't leave GotM feeling wowed. I left feeling like there was a story that I wanted to read about the effects of war and the way people are used as cogs in machinations and the effects it has on them, and that story being left in the margins of great deeds and overshadowed by them. A real pity, I think, considering one of the themes I took from this book where that all the machinations of the world cannot survive the ferocity of a human heart.
Rating: 1.75 stars
How do I explain how much I actively disliked my reading experience here? I know people like this book, it's rated super well - I can't see it.
First 50% of this book is a repetitive cycle of “good guys chased, battle, rest for 0.5 seconds where a half measure of actual plot may move forward, and then oh no, the bad guys are here” - repeat. Don't get me wrong, I can understand some of these inclusions as necessary, but the vast majority could be easily included with more finessing of plot, and better thought into what POVs are being presented and why, and also in chapter length.
Broadly speaking, this whole book shows its seams. You can read chapters and understand that this four page chapter exists for the sole purpose of [blank], whether that is to change the political climate, get the token Object to person B, or have the good guys suffer yet another loss. It could easily have been culled from 320 pages, to 150, and I don't mean that as a hyperbole. Gwynne's addiction to ending so many short POV chapters on minor cliffhangers so he can be dramatic actually actively hurts enjoyment, because he makes you live in minute detail for set up scenes, just to artificially prolong tension.
Prose remains the same. I beg this man to learn to show, not tell, particularly with characterisation. I don't want to read “Corban felt sad” for the millionth time - show me he feels sad. It makes the characters feel flatter, because they're being narrated to me, and not actually living on the page. Battle scenes are constant, but just because there is conflict on the page, doesn't actually equate to conflict in the plot, and becomes yet another repetition of the same thing. Gwynne loves his battle scenes; I wish he loved the plot more. Characters on the heroes side are abused while the bad guys are always finding some deus ex machina that gets them what they want, so much so that I think Gwynne learned the wrong lesson from Hobb and forget the delicate balance of happiness to misery needed to make it work, and he obviously attended the Robert Jordan school of writing romance.
The fundamental thing I came away feeling - aside from relief that I wouldn't have to read the word shield wall for a short time - was that this series was sold as a quartet to the publisher, but Gwynne didn't have enough story to actually make four books. So, he decided to pad out the missing space with focus on battle scenes, thinking it's exciting and it is conflict, if very literally. However, movies and books when they get to areas where all the action is repetitive, utilise montages for this reason, to convey without draining the audience, what happens over a length of time, and for good reason. There's a small part at the end where I was intrigued by how it would be treated in future books, but, I thought that too at the end of Malice, and look where we are.
Rating: 4.25 stars
Gideon the Ninth, by rights, shouldn't work half as well as it does. It is a mash up of irreverent narration, necromancy, dark academia, a sprinkling of theology that it either intentionally or unintentionally Christianity-like, all bound together with trauma and sarcasm. It is somehow a swashbuckler lead character with a Gothic setting, that also isn't afraid to knife you in the guts when it decides that it's time to drop the sarcasm and actually make you feel things. It shouldn't work, but it does.
In between the sarcasm, you get attached to the characters and intrigued by the mystery of how to become a necromantic mega-mage for an unseen, Undying Emperor. There were some parts that didn't flow as nicely - the purple prose can sometimes be so committed to being Gothic that you wonder at the choice at metaphors, and the sarcasm can sometimes feel a little like Muir is desperately trying to convince you that this is a cool novel. It's got necromancers in space, it's already cool, I didn't need to be convinced. I also had some issues with the logistics of how the central book mystery was pulled off, not in terms of it's actual conclusion, but it did feel a little contrived in hindsight as to how it was being prolonged, sometimes hamstringing its characters to ensure that it was revealed at the correct moment in my own opinion.
The inclusion of the Christian mythology lite though does intrigue me. There's certainly a lot left unanswered by the end of the book in that regard, so if you're someone who likes to dig into world lore, this book isn't super standalone. There's actually not a super amount of the greater world lore, which kind of saddened me, but there are three more books (one unreleased at the moment), and a somewhat cliffhanger at the end, which does suggest that the wider lore will be explored. I am intrigued if the Christian allusions are intentional to create things with the plot, like there are some allusions to mythology in Wheel of Time for example, or merely just a fun little inspiration for background and nothing more will continue with it.
All up, I had a goddamn blast reading it, and devoured the last third of the book in the search of what was happened and how would it be resolved. At multiple times in the buddy read channel, I was yelling at people, and that is a mark of strong feelings elicited. The ending also just about made me cry. So... touche. Well done.
Rating: 2 stars
I wanted to be able to give this a shot. But here's the rub - this book is a derivative book, that takes an awful lot from those that came before, slaps a lick of paint over it and decides that's enough. Which would be fine, because you don't always need to reinvent the wheel to tell a good story - we still love fairytales after all. But in the absence of stand out prose or character work, all you're left with is a tale that is so predictable, it makes the entire story drag down with it, because you know where it's going. You know the twists.
It reads a lot younger than it intends to. The character work is shallow and some of the characters are pure interchangable figures, as opposed to distinct people. The plot itself is so strangely paced, because it takes so many words to do very little with the plot. It could be easily summarised in about three or four sentences, and doesn't need to be a 15 hour audiobook. The one female POV is set up to be utilised later in the main character's story, and as such, her plotline feels completely extraneous, and that's needed because you don't feel any danger for the main character. As opposed to all other stories where the main character is slowly stripped of protection and guidance as they gain in power to maintain stakes, he just continues to have a small army of well trained mages and swordsmen and other allies surround him to protect him. Danger? He doesn't know it, though the book wants you to believe that he does. The big plot of this entire world, a rebellion against a bad Empire - apparently all the other countries are already on board and just waiting to rock and roll, so everything feels very very easy and convenient.
In summation, this needed more originality and a lot of tightening and finessing before it got sent out. And I hate to say that, because I want to encourage indie authors, but it isn't the gem I heard so much about, and I was so bored.
I received a copy of this book for free from NetGalley as an ARC in exchange for a fair review.
I can't give a rating to this book for the simple fact that to me, this is two stories forced to share the same breath and space as one another, and while I liked one story, I did not like the other, which is probably why this ARC took me over a year to read (almost a year and a half).
The first story is a story about free will, and how mortals are given it. That story relies on themes of love and determining your own path, and is told with a prose that is at once both purple but also fits the feeling of being told an ancient myth. That tale I enjoyed. The second story is a retelling of Greek mythology, but that I did not enjoy, because so much of it was bent out of shape and distorted in order to tell the first tale.
This is the problem with retellings. One portion of your audience demands for the tale to be told faithfully to the myth, and there, any deviation will be met with scorn. Another portion of your audience will demand that the tale be given originality and reinvented, and will scorn any attempts to be faithful to the source material. Authors must choose which side they will let their story land on, and ride the consequences, because inevitably, one portion of the natural audience for this tale will be unhappy, and I was unfortunately a part of that.
In this tale, the Olympian gods are all terrible, drunk on their power and spiteful and cruel. The only gods worth their salt are the Fates themselves and a singular Titan that remains behind, the first of the inaccuracies. For someone who enjoys the Greek gods as being a take on divinity that runs closer to the capricious and complexity of humans, to see them painted in such broadstrokes both bored and annoyed me. It was clear to me from that that this book takes the framework of Greek mythos and shakes it and bends it until it fits the story the author actually wants to tell. There is nothing wrong with the tale being told about how humanity is given its free will, nor the way that the story delights in such freedom and self determination of your own path, but I didn't see the need then to take a tale and force it into something else.
For me, this story would have been better served to be split in two, one a tale of Atalanta, and one a tale of mortals finding free will, and the disservice was done by trying to force the two together.
Rating: 2 Stars
Ah, the Atlas Six. It's one of those books to me that though I liked it at the start, the more I read of it, the less I liked of it.
This is my second Olivie Blake book, and I think her style of writing is something that one can bounce off quite easily. In Masters of Death, the need for all the characters to say witty one liners drove me away. In this, it was the endless nihilism and cynicism that was on display that drove me away. I think if I found the right combination of characters, then maybe I would enjoy an Olivie Blake book, but once she commits to an idea of the vibe and the theme, she seems to double down and make it central. This is perfectly fine, if you are the person who enjoys that particular vibe, but for this book? That wasn't me.
I had issues here, more than just the style. To me, this is a dark academia novel weighed down not only by nihilistic or ego driven characters that make being in their heads sometimes an experience that ranges from being a chore to an actually unpleasant experience, but also by inconsistencies with its own magical system. It pretends at being greatly scientific and intellectual, and yet, breaks its own rules. How does an empath for example, use magic to summon glasses to drink scotch? Beats me, but then the next chapter has everyone wondering about how time travel is possible through telepathy because time is a construct of memory and psychology, even as we talk about time as particle and quanta. The end result becomes a muddled mess where magic is simply what seems pretentious to talk about in one moment, and then convenient to use in the next. I have nothing against a marrying of concepts of magic and science, but if you walk that line, then to me, you have to pay homage to the fact that science is full of rules and inherently lends itself to a hard magic system. You can't treat a hard magic system as if it was a soft system. You have to stick to your worldbuilding, even if it uncool.
And there's a thick layer of pretence in this novel. These characters are smart and powerful, so to view the world with that pretence in mind makes sense, but it becomes grating. The prose doesn't help either, becoming very purple, especially in some large speeches were you just think, no nihilistic twenty odd is going to be talking this way, so it feels needlessly ostentatious. Still, despite all this, I'm compelled. I somewhat do want to read forward, to see if, against all these odds, these characters who are driven by self interest, arrogance, greed and cynicism can turn into people rather than just their own egos. If the other books hadn't already been out, I would have bought the second, because I can see a fragment of possibility for this to lend itself to a story I would personally like.
However, the sequels are out, and this is the book that most people say is the best. So, to that I say, I will not continue. Or perhaps, I might get the second from my library and judge for myself, but hold little hope. I do think there's an Olivie Blake book out there that suits me, because Masters of Death was a fine time, just a little bit too flippant for the heart that it wanted to sell to me, but if I had read the Atlas Six first, I don't know if I would have believed it. It takes too much from its characters, and they are not the characters I enjoy.
Rating: 3.5 Stars
There is an intriguing world premise and magical system here. A world with magic harvested from dreams? Assassins who are both kindly caretaker for the end and also a tool for rooting out corruption? So much of that is so up my alley that I was ready to dive right in. The only issue is, the hook never quite set in.
I can't tell you what it is about this book that didn't quite grab at me. The plot itself is relatively standard but that doesn't mean it can't get inbetween your ribs. I've read books that are just about finding magical items or retrieving a lost family member, and they've hooked me well enough with just that alone. For the themes on murder and euthanasia/kindness in death, in life and death itself, those were all good things that I enjoyed. Of the three main characters, two of them were at loggerheads and some of the most interesting parts were when they argued with one another and made me think on the nature of the magic and the world's construction. There are good bones here, but I just... didn't feel a huge pull with the greater plot.
Was it the villain who was just potentially okay? Was it the shortness of the book, though I don't much think that adding more pages would have necessarily creating a more compelling narrative. I don't know. I liked it, but I wasn't enthralled. It didn't spin me into a dream and enchant me, and I was never frantically turning the page like I did for say, the Lies of Locke Lamora, to see what happened next. As a concept, it was good, but in reality, I just didn't get overly invested, which is part of what I want for a book.
Rating: 4.5 stars
I really liked this book.
This book is an atmospheric tale of stormsingers, ghosts and pirates, that mixes just that right amount of gothic into its bones to make it creepy when it needs to be, and a seafaring adventure when it needs to be. To me, it was a fun ride, and I loved exploring the world (or worlds, really) as it was laid out before me, filled with ghistlings, snow, ice and storms called on the sound of a voice.
The only note I can truly make of it is the romance aspect of it feels a little thin as a connection. For the most part, the two who are involved are not in the same room together for the vast majority of the plot. In fact, they're more a tale of intersecting points, dropping in and out of each other's lives as the plot pushes them both towards the same goal, but not necessarily towards each other. It's interesting to me, because I enjoying learning about both characters independently of one another, and it helped to make it feel like they both were real characters, rather than one a lead and one a love interest, but at the same point in time, it did affect my enjoyment of the romance as it happened, because it seemed to build so quickly from so few moments. It just made me have to suspend my disbelief a little consciously, rather than just buying into it as I otherwise might have.
But ultimately? I love the world. I love the concept. Story threads are still left open to continuation for following books, while also keeping this first novel relatively contained enough that you feel satisfied with the ending. The main character is no passive damsel and has get up and go to her, but is also motivated by love for her family. Is it the highest of brow literature? No, this won't make you rethink your take on piracy. But it is fun and swashbuckling, with a creepy little mix of Gothic thrown in that makes me think so much of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. The ocean is dark and deep, and if there's any world that I'd want to explore that fierce and cruel mistress, it would be in the world of the Winter Sea.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Well this was a rip-roaring good time.
This is a book that is very aware of itself. I've not read any of the isekai genre, and this book is definitely written and noted in the acknowledgements to be inspired and influenced by the genre, but it seems relatively inevitable to me that any work within the genre carries with it a certain degree of meta-awareness. And it uses that awareness within the narrative to drive it, but also within the character of Rae to make observations about trends within literature and our beliefs about villainy and tropes. Some parts of this awareness is tongue in cheek, almost satirical, and some of it is very much holding a mirror to how society likes to treat people. Some of the interesting moments to me were when Rae was coming into friction with the idea that the the world around her was just a story, even as horrific things were happening, and how both could be true simultaneously.
There's an interesting part of the book that was crafted that makes me wonder. We're introduced to the “Time of Iron” world, and much of it is very tropey, so much in fact that nearly all the characters are given titles, reduced from names to things that could almost be trope names. Here is the damsel, here is the axe murderer, here is the last moral man - and it seems that much of the characters are skimmed in that way, letting their Title wear them. Yet, as the book deepens, you begin to see under those titles to the character underneath, nearly always a more complete characterisation. This is not a fact done incidentally, and by the end, you can very much tell that Brennan crafted this with intention. Linked to that meta-awareness that I mentioned above, Brennan is also crafting a story around the stories we tell to ourselves, and how they can leave much to be desired in the understanding of others, in the position of who is good and who is evil. Rae, the main character, in some slight background, is villainised by some of her friends for not being happy for them, and yet, when we also consider that those friends abandoned her on her sickbed, is Rae truly a villain in the tale? As Long Live Evil explores, villainy can be as much about deeds as it is about where you are when you view them.
But, let's talk about the vibe, because while the book makes these critiques and meta-points, the point of the book isn't about these. It's more lighthearted, and fun. Sure, sometimes, you can tell it's an adult woman writing someone meant to be in their early twenties, and there's a bit of secondhand embarrassment, but mostly it's fun. Rae knows her place in the story, and there's a certain delight in the scheming and quips and banter as Rae and her fellow Vipers try to make their own ends happen. Sure, maybe you wouldn't root for them in other circumstances, from a different point of view, but in this story, in this viewpoint, you sure are, so in my case, I sunk my teeth into the story and dug in.
Sure the prose is purple as fuck. The world insouciant is probably written too much. Colours are described as blood and bruises and ash and fire and tears. Skin is moonlight pale. Some of that you can simply explain as the Time of Iron book that is our primary setting being written in such a way - as previously stated, every character seems to have a title like the The Last Hope, the Pearl of the World etc, and even room locations in the palace have similar titles such as the Ballroom of Sighs - so characters within that world obviously think in such a way. However, the purple prose does lend itself to the Rae lead chapters, but if we're leaning into the meta nature of the book, in my mind, the purple prose is schlocky and fun, and maybe a little tongue in cheek jab at other very purple prose that you can find in fantasy books. In short, I felt it fit the fictional world that the majority of the book takes place in, and enjoyed the pulpy feel it gave the entire thing. However, if it's not your thing, it's not your thing.
But when I think about this book, I'm eager for the next, for the schlocky world perched on the edge of a ravine filled with the undead, with a villain who is slightly sociopathic (or very largely), for the purple prose and the modern observations. I had fun reading this book, and honestly, I'm looking forward to seeing how this nest of Vipers finds their way through the next book.
Rating: 3 Stars
I think, perhaps, I don't like coffee enough to enjoy this book.
Well, okay, maybe it's not that I don't like coffee. I have nothing against the cozy fantasy genre, but I think this style of cozy fantasy - the much more slice of life style, as opposed to a “small quests” type of cozy fantasy that I found in Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies, which I did greatly enjoy - is not my cup of coffee. There was a certain degree of feeling like I was waiting for the story to really kick in when the characters were discovering new drinks and foods to add to the cafe menu, and that never truly left. Did I want five repetitions of the cafe menu? No. I wanted more exploration of the themes that were hanging just there, of starting anew, the struggle between past and future, in what we think we are determined to be by birth and upbringing and what we can choose to be.
But it just... never dove that deep into it, which was a disappointment to me, because that I would have been interesting to me. When the story delved a little into these areas, that's when it shone the most for me, but it never seemed to dive in enough to make the act of reading truly worth it to me.
Otherwise, it's a fine book. Nothing too grand to me, but I truly think it's just due to this style of fantasy, this slice of life style, not being suited for me. The point of the story wasn't an indepth exploration of themes, but an experience that was meant to make you feel warm and comforted. It makes sense to me that this was written in Covid, as a remedy to it, but I read Legends and Lattes in 2025 - my need for comfort and normalcy is no longer at the level that I might have needed it in say, 2022.
It's a fine enough book. I think for someone who likes slice of life as a concept, it's probably a really good book. But I think I'm good having just one cup of this particular drink, and nothing more. It's just, not for me.
Rating: 3 Stars
It kind of breaks my heart to give a Juliet Marillier book three stars.
The original Sevenwaters trilogy was a fundamental book for me in my teenage years. Lyrical, told like a fairytale, old folklore, it very much helped to shape my reading tastes. Apart from the Sevenwaters books, I've read a few other Marillier books, but mostly, I was a Sevenwaters girl. So coming into the Harp of Kings, I felt... almost a little let down by the book I received.
First thing to note - the Warrior Bards follows in the same universe as Blackthorn and Grim books and the Sevenwaters books, though I think perhaps a few generations removed in the case of the latter. I didn't realise that going in, which makes me feel a bit out of order, especially as I haven't read the Blackthorn and Grim books myself. I feel a little like I've read the important climax of that series, which means if I go to read that trilogy, I may not get the entire experience, which is a little sad.
The good? We're still continuing with areas that I've felt are Marillier's strength, the old fae folklore that entranced me of the Sevenwaters books, the turn of phrase that feels lyrical, the love of music and stories that permeates the pages, the empathy and compassion in the characters, the sometimes otherworldly forest settings. These are all things that I have loved with Marillier books, and to have them return feels like a warm blanket wrapped around my shoulders as I settle in to be told a story by a favourite teller.
But it's the meh that's what got me. As strange as it sounds, the present tense really did not work for me. It felt a lot like being told a story, but not in the way that you are sitting by a fire and being told a story. It was very much, “here is the action. I felt this way”. It didn't lull me into feeling with the character, and that I felt kept a distance between reader and story in a way that kind of harmed my connection to it. The plot pacing itself also felt... odd. Too action motivated to let us linger overmuch in characterisation, which meant the characters to me started and ended in what felt like very similar places, though intercharacter relationships may have shifted, but also not action packed enough to make me feel like the slow investigation actually felt warranted. The fact that in a book as relatively short as this felt like it was paced oddly also feels like a warning flag here. To speak on Marillier's other novels, Daughter of the Forest was a very slow moving plot, and yet, I've never felt the urge to have it pick up. I was content to let it slowly wind its way. Here however, I really wished it would change something about its pace - either luxuriate in the slowness and let me draw into the characters, or lean into the faster pace and have more actual action.
I'm not ready to call this series quits. Marillier has always had a way to hook me with the Otherworld and characters with a good heart. There's a plot at the end of the novel that pulls at my heart strings. But I did leave this book feeling a little let down that one of the author's who created such a formative book series of my reading journey created a book that left me so underwhelmed with it. I'll be heading into the next book with more tempered expectations.
Rating: 3.75 stars
I loved this less than the first Emily Wilde, alas.
My issue here was mostly the quest, funnily enough. My main gripe of the format of how the narrative is presented remains, but c'est la vie. However, when I think back on this book, what I liked least was how there was such an obvious quest, maybe perhaps it felt to me that the book was so clearly setting up a character development, that just never happened.
Much of the things I loved of Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Fairies remains, though notably I felt less atmosphere here. There was still some, but it just was... less. And we had less interaction with the lesser fae also for the first half of the book, which made me truly miss Poe of the first novel. Rather than Emily going out into the world to study and see what she could learn, she was going with a mission, and the study was merely an excuse to see it done, it felt, and that didn't fulfil me as much as it might have, if it were the other way around. My enjoyment of the book really picked up when certain events happened, and the book once again leaned into the strange and uncanny, and hints towards the third book certainly make me believe that we will lean much harder into that for the next, which I do enjoy.
As I mentioned, I kept thinking that a certain character development was going to happen. Plot points all seemed geared towards this understanding, but it never came, which left a slightly flat veneer to the characters to me, that they would remain so static and not changed by the things they'd seen and undergone. Those two parts of the story really dragged down my enjoyment, and I think are perhaps a sign of a larger, and very common, syndrome - book 2 syndrome. If book one was introducing us to the world and characters and greater direction of the story, then book 2 is tasked with getting us to the starting point to book 3, where that greater direction will drive the story. It makes sense then, as to why the characters are more or less the same at the start and end of book 2, despite having a real motivation for change, and why the plot of Map of the Otherlands is so heavily quest driven as opposed to atmospheric, because it exists for that purpose expressly. It's a bridging book, but it doesn't do enough I think to truly make itself stand enough as its own book.
We still have fae lore. We have interesting developments within the fae lore. Emily is still snarky, Wendell still charming. But those bridging book issues tilted the scales for me and pulled down my enjoyment. However, current plot threads and hints towards book 3 truly hint at a return to areas that I really enjoyed in both books, and I find myself willing to overlook the more dragging book 2 in service of needing to get from point A to point B.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Things I loved
- old fae folklore! How different folklore from around the world was cohesively incorporated and explained within this world! The clear research into what fae have meant in various cultures and stories before, and how that can be good and bad and inbetween, and how sometimes, mortals aren't truly meant to understand the motives of the fae because they are fundamentally not governed by human rules.
- the atmosphere! This was my first adventure into cozy fantasy (or cozier fantasy), where the plot is world ending but smaller, but man did I love how the setting had so much atmosphere built into it. Wandering past the haunted house was an honest DELIGHT in this book with its little mystery of what was happening there.
- the characters! Grumpy and sunshine, but inverted gender roles, the unflinching intelligence of Emily Wilde herself. Loved it, need more of it now.
- the FOOTNOTES. This may be the first book with such footnotes that I truly enjoyed as much as this - though the Ruin of Kings with the snide remarks certainly is another that contends with it - but I LOVED the footnotes, especially as Emily is a kind of fae scientist. It all very much added to her characterisation as a well read, highly intelligent scholar to include such things, and gave succinct bits of information for the worldbuilding.
- the fairytale/old story motifs. Old stories informed the fae of this world, and those motifs and stories repeated again, and I loved that so much. I've always had such a weakness for those stories, and to see them echoed in this story was so lovely for me.
Things I didn't love
- honestly, my only note was the format of the book. The journal entry format really hindered the book in some ways in terms of the crafting of rising tension and the come down from such a climax within the narrative. Because of how Emily writes her days, very quickly you forget that it is simply a recounting of what happened. You're drawn in, feeling like you're in the moment. You get to a dire moment, a moment of survival and then the chapter ends. Next chapter, now!, you think, and then when you reach the next chapter it is the next day. That question of survival is suddenly and anticlimactically answered. Of course they survived, Emily is writing. All the wind in the sails is gone, and you are pulled out of that immersion, and each new entry/chapter has to wind you back to that place. If it doesn't, you're there, painfully aware, that this is a woman recounting her day in almost exhausting detail of thoughts and actions, which may beggar belief. That push and pull between letting yourself sink into the story and how the story is told so it continually pulls you out of itself can sometimes create a real friction between book and reader to me.
I devoured this book in three days for r/Fantasy bingo, and then immediately went onto the second even though I'm behind in my bingo, and can't use the second for a square, that's how much it hooked me, okay.
Rating: 2.5 Stars
This was a very middle of the line reading experience to me. I felt we had a strong start, but issues became more apparent as the book continued to go on, including the book starting to really show it's Booktok influence in it. If you like romantasy, if you like the books on Booktok, this is up your alley. If you want something with a lot of worldbuilding and lore and tight plot, I don't necessarily think this will be the match. I'm not calling it terrible, but neither am I calling it great. It is middle of the road, and in a way that feels like it will always remain there. I don't get the sense that my enjoyment will pick up significantly, I don't get the sense that things will develop much greater depth in the ways that I would hope for, but I don't think it's a waste of paper either. It's a strong debut, with an interesting shift towards an older, more cynical protagonist who has endured more than a lot of other leads within the same sphere and who experiences trauma and various coping mechanisms with said trauma that feel realistic, from self harm to alcoholism. However, it just is... a lot of the same, which makes even reviewing it hard, because I feel like everything I say is something already said.
So in quick notes version:
- the world lore feels very lacking. This world has two suns and multiple moons, and yet I could not tell you a single way in which that plays in excepting that we are told that the suns are both up. Given that this world is suffused in magic which is waning, it could be interesting to explore the idea of a dual sun world that only survives through magical sustenance, so the fading of magic is a real issue and the capitalist greed that causes the tyrannical king to sell said magic is an act of self serving self sabotage, and yet, we don't get that. The world may as well be our own for all those additional suns.
- I liked that Keera was an alcoholic, I liked that she struggled with it. It felt like a real humanising moment for someone who has been placed in a situation that they loathe and have been stuck there for decades. However, she also is the Prettiest, the Strongest, the most Skilled, the most Strategic etc - her singular flaws that we are given is that she has a propensity to hold onto bad memories (which is also viewed within the story as a good thing, as remembrance and honouring the dead), a bit of a masochistic streak, and her alcoholism. Otherwise, she's pretty much your girl for anything else. Later reveals also do not help with this at all.
- I initially really appreciated that the plot wasn't falling so very deeply into the usual tropes. Usually in books of this same sphere, the first person who's described as reasonably attractive is your love interest, without fail, and for a good half the book, I honestly thought we had somewhat sidestepped that particular predictable point. However, when you do meet the male love interest, it becomes apparent very quickly, and then by a certain point, I also came to doubt that we were sidestepping anything much predictable at all. Of course, there was a one bed scene, with the very see through context of “only two rooms for four people at the inn!”. Why did the two women not pair up together? Possibly because it didn't tick that neat little “only one bed” graphic that Booktok loves. And that towards the end, that vibe of “we're marking off this trope” really started to kick in for me. Why could I believe Nina and Matthias in Six of Crows and their one bed scene? Because they were doing it to survive, in a cold, forbidding landscape after almost drowning. It was literally that, or die. But here... This scene was just... an inn was full? It didn't feel enough to justify forcing two characters into close proximity, when one has a real hang up about their body and it being seen, especially when the same characters had also been camping in caves.
- Related to that, when the love interest became the love interest, I really just started to feel like he had become very paper thin. Sometimes it feels like the love interests only exist to stand as a counterpoint to the main character, and that feeling started to creep in. Don't ask me much about the love interest outside of Keera, because I don't know if I could honestly tell you much at all.
- The prose felt very “tell, not show”. The word said felt like it was beating me across the head. I can't think of anything too specific to the telling aspect, but that's because it was just everything. The swords clashed. His eyes sparked with anger, but god knows if we couldn't have known that without being told directly. Keera randomly gets a special gift for a character that we don't see the procurement of on page, using a deus ex machina that is not mentioned at all, that she's had for years. There's a certain plot twist that I think is coming up in certain books that feels like a neon sign is pointing at it.
There's a decent story here, maybe not something groundbreaking, but something that still is good and has something to say about how we use and abuse the people and the land we live on for our own gains and how that breeds resentment and complacency and apathy. Something about how we can be broken and rebuild ourselves if we choose to try and do so. But it all gets bogged down in the technicalities of writing from prose to characterisation and lack of world depth. This is, however, a debut. Things could improve. No writer perfects their craft with the first draft, or even the first novel. But it is also treading a familiar path, and if you've read enough within the genre, you can see where this is going. I'm lightly intrigued for the future, mainly because there's a plot twist coming that I can feel in my bones, and I'm a little curious if I will be proven right or if there's an actual rug pull coming, but I don't know if I'd honestly stick it out to the end. It's a situation where I'm tempted to Google the answer for that clarity and then move on.
Ultimately, this novel is just... not for me. Not really. I'm too deep in the waters of fantasy to look at this and not see the predictable plot and prose that feels far too much like I'm being told what to feel to truly connect with it as much as I had wanted to. For me, it's not as fun as I had hoped for that, because I kept getting pulled out of the narrative by wincing at a scene that felt like it wasn't truly justified. I'm glad the author was able to get published from their platform, but to me, this book wears a little too much of its Booktok upbringing on its sleeve for my personal taste.
Rating: 3 Stars
Trying to describe this book feels always a little bit like throwing buzzwords out at random and then watching everyone get confused. A noir triceratops? Investigating the murder of a Nightmare? In a shifting landscape populated by collective dreams, imaginings and nightmares of the human world? Oh, and the noir detective's preferred drink is a root beer float and there's... Sadness penguins?
It's a kind of crazy that is lovely to dive into, because Tippy reads as the noir detective, but his world is so full of colour and whimsy, because he's a Friend of a child, and therefore fits best amongst the other Friends of children. There is a real marrying of the tropes of noir with the aesthetics and softness of childhood that works together so well with Tippy that you just throw the conventions out the window and go with it, because of course it is how it is! Of course the stuffed yellow dinosaur detective loves root beer floats and being put in the dryer, because it makes his stuffing warm. Of course he has that ethereal Detective Stuff that puts him in the right path of solving the mystery, because what child wouldn't give their imaginary friend that ability? It makes so much sense within the context that you throw away absurdity and fall into the softness of the idea of a childhood friend that you left behind, still living out their days in the StillReal. And it's not just a world of colour and plush toys - we also get to see parts of the StillReal that are dominated by superheroes and their villains, strange underwater imaginings and stereotypical Capitalist cities. The world here is literally as varied as the human imagination, and we get to see a small breadth of it as Tippy tries his best to solve the mystery of the Man in the Coat.
At times, that mystery though did drag a little bit longer than I would have otherwise liked. This leans into noir quite strongly as opposed to the fantasy. Yes, we're in a fantastical setting, but it feels relatively grounded as a detective story, and perhaps that's where the fault lay to me. A lot of mysteries in fantasy stories feel like they resolve perhaps a bit more quickly or with less side quests - or if there are side quests, they feel more related to characters and other motivations. The mystery itself is usually far less of a main driving force as opposed to the fantasy elements, but the opposite was true here. Towards the last twenty percent of the book, I just was dragging my feet to finish it. I knew I only had about two hours left, and yet, reading that last section took me over a month. I can't quite put my finger on the why, but I suspect it was because the mystery by that stage was largely solved, and all that was left was the catching - which makes me think that the problem here was me. I'm a fantasy reader at heart, and not a mystery reader. True, I like puzzles and riddles, but I can leave them behind me once I get the answer. The catching of a criminal interests me less than the who and the why.
Ultimately, I think the Imaginary Corpse is a fun ride, with an interesting premise, but maybe, just not for me. I love Tippy, I love his world, and the way that it is suffused with hope and kindness, and maybe, just maybe, that's because at our heart's, humanity wants to be suffused with hope and kindness, and so we freely imagine it, but it leans more towards mystery than it does towards fantasy, and that just didn't grab me quite as much as I had hoped. Still, I think if there was another mystery with Detective Tippy on the case, I just might come along for another ride even knowing so. After all, isn't that what Friends do?
Rating: 3 stars
Imagine what happens to the Musketeers if Cardinal Richelieu won in his fight to assassinate the King and disband his most loyal and just warriors in the Three Musketeers? That's kind of the vibe I want to channel when thinking of this book.
The Greatcoats are the Musketeers, semi-autonomous warriors who are judge, jury and executioner of the King's laws, independent of the ducal laws. However, where Traitor's Blade could easily move into grimdark territory, it instead carries on the swashbuckling that is the hallmark of most modern adaptations of the Three Musketeers, with quip, banter and a romp through the action. Rest assured, your Greatcoats are here to act in service of peace, justice and maybe a round or two of love as well, all of which predisposed me to love this book. The 1993 Disney version of the Three Musketeers with gloriously over the top Tim Curry and swaggering of the titular musketeers was a favourite in my home growing up - critics may not have liked it so much, but as a fun romp where the good guys are good and always have a sharp remark, it was dearly loved and much played.
Much of that tone is echoed here, though that doesn't mean that Traitor's Blade is afraid to dig into aspects of what actually does happen when the bad guys win. There are darker moments, and it serves them well to be preceded by such moments of levity and swashbuckling, because you feel the gut punch of those moments more. The rage and grief of the main character becomes a stark contrast to the bravado and charm that preceded it maybe only a few chapters before. De Castell doesn't like to overly linger on those darker moments, which is probably for the best - some of them contain sexual assault - but for that brevity, I don't feel as if the moments were being glossed over or dismissed. I always felt the weight of them. But the author, to me, felt like he was making a conscious effort to make you aware of the shadows of this world, but not drag you into the dark completely.
However, I gave this book three stars for a reason. The first star was knocked off because though it was fun, it very much is not the grand literature of the century. It's also not trying to be. Swashbucklers are meant to be fan favourites as opposed to critical darlings, and knowing your appeal is half the battle. De Castell leans into the swashbuckling without hesitation. The end result is a book that you largely enjoy, but isn't like to stick around too heavily in your mind, or be something that you need to recap on a lot before you hit the next book. The take away of this book could be summarised by a few short sentences, or half a page at most. You don't need a lot, but if that's what you're after - a shorter, breezier type of read - then it works perfectly. The world has some intriguing premises - Saints can be supplanted, which begs the question of how Saints began, for example - but if you're expecting a lot of worldbuilding, you don't get a lot, or truly need a lot. If you're someone who likes to dig in a lot to the books you're reading, you're probably not going to enjoy this as much as I did. It's switch off brain content, and enjoy the ride, rather than analyse.
Some slight nitpicks:
- I did enjoy this book most when we had all three of our “musketeer” Greatcoats together, and within probably the opening third, they are separated and remained so for the next fifty percent of the book. Without that back and forth quip and banter, it was a little more difficult to remain as breezy.
- There's also a slight note I could make about the characters - all of whom are roughly in their mid to late thirties - feeling slightly more around the late twenties in their dialogue, but hey, banter is banter, and I wasn't too fussed by it.
- Lastly, the fight scenes tended to use a lot of technical terms, or sometimes just described things strangely. For those who know fencing, I'm sure the technical terms feel great, but as someone who doesn't, and with the strange explanations of movements sometimes, it sometimes just got a bit lost. For example, “She extended her left hand towards me, fist closed tight, palm to the ceiling. Then she brought it close to her mouth and it looked as if she might blow us a kiss. Instead, she exhaled, and blue powder billowed into the air.” I must have read that three times to try and figure out what exactly was happening - a hand as a fist and upturned, extended towards Falcio, and then brought back towards the character (she) and opened with an exhale, like blowing a kiss. Perhaps my brain just didn't get it, but for whatever reason, some of the action descriptors had me just going “sure, it was a cool fencing move, and I'm glad for you”.
The next star got knocked off however with the inclusion of the mystical healing power of a vagina. The scene is loaded with such strange takes - the Madonna/Whore complex, or more appropriately here, the Priestess/Prostitute complex, all neatly packaged in one woman, a man healed of psychic and physical wounds by sex, including apparently deep seated trauma that drove him forward for a decade and a half, and all done by a woman who is about half his age, and met once in passing, but left enough of a mark on that she would pledge her love to him a decade later. Strange felt like an understatement for those things alone, but the way in which the scene is written felt honestly disturbing, because the character resists the healing, saying outright no to it whilst being confined, but is still given it, and in a religion where sex is used as healing, the scene which is painted in the book as a good thing, a healing, reads much more like sexual assault and coercion.
Said female character is only present in the book for a single chapter, and yet, Falcio, the male character ruminates on her later with an affection and sense of bond towards her that feels unearned and especially strange after their encounter. What's more, considering the deep seated trauma that Falcio has, all of which stems from a fierce loyalty towards another woman in his life, it feels almost like a slap to the face to read. Where has that loyalty gone? Why was it so easily replaced by this random woman who he barely remembers, so fleeting and small was their first encounter in his memory? It really drew me out of the tale, because I didn't believe in it, in any sense - not the affection apparently between them, not that what was done was meant to be a good thing, not a single bit.
So it's a strange place where I'm at. Honestly, I think I'd be okay, if I was to reread this book, to skip that chapter with the priestess entirely. The lingering way that Falcio's attention returns to her makes me feel like she may have return features, but it honestly strains all sense of credibility to me that this one character feels such devotion to one man based upon such fleeting moments. True, this is a swashbuckler, some sense of credibility is meant to be thrown out the window. But it really hampered my enjoyment, especially with the way that this priestess is written to attempt to heal Falcio - it leaves a kind of oily residue all over the book that was otherwise right up my alley and dragged what was a breezy read into an uncomfortable place.
Ultimately, if you liked the Three Musketeers, you'll probably enjoy this, but beware of those caveats - a thinner sense of worldbuilding, a plot that has probably less to carry over to the next book than other fantasies, a team that does get split up for the vast majority, and a set of truly baffling choices with the main character and a priestess that is pretty much sexual assault that the book doesn't acknowledge as such. There's bumps in this road, and sometimes when you fly down a road at speed, you barely feel them, and sometimes they break your wheel, and this book has a bit of both.