Wren
The lobster doesn’t realise it’s in a pot until it’s soft and tender for dinner.
Sadly, this was such an incredible disappointment.
As an avid fanfiction reader, I love time travel fix-its: stories where the characters go back in time, waking up as their far younger selves but armed with all the knowledge, skills, and experience from the awful future they left behind, and get to retrace their steps, letting hindsight guide them past all the pitfalls, wrong turns, and ambushes from the original story. So when I heard about this book—just that, except it’s original fiction—I wad immediately intrigued and curious, though I also immediately had my doubts. In fanfic, this set-up can work so well because you’re already invested in the characters, and because you’ve already experienced the actual story with all the conflicts and tension, and you just want to self-indulgently watch the beloved characters have a break. Like, I genuinely don’t think that Jon Snow single-handedly saving the Seven Kingdoms from all possible threats at fourteen makes for a better story than the actual ASOIAF! But I’ve enjoyed those kinds of fic for the characters and the feel-goodness.
Could that work as an original story, especially one where the time travel happens very early in the story and we don’t even get to know most of the cast until we’re back in time? That remains to be seen. Because this book definitely didn’t achieve that for me, but I also disliked it for so many other reasons that I can’t even say if that specific aspect was salvageable or not.
Let’s start with the worldbuilding. One good thing I have to say: I loved the magic system. It was a bit confusing at times, but generally robust and wondrous and it actually felt magical. This is absolutely my favorite aspect of the book and its main redeeming quality. Everything else, however, was painted in extremely broad strokes and felt like cardboard decorations.
I was also regularly taken out of the story when the characters in this seemingly secondary world setting used words like “Cheshire smile,” “Pierrot,” “Machiavel,” or “Abyssinian cat.” I don’t my anachronisms in my fantasy. I’m fine with the names being loosely tweaked versions of real world names. But when you present to me a fantasy world that apparently has Lewis Carroll, Italian commedia dell'arte, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Ethiopian Empire historically called Abyssinia, and I’m starting to have questions that distract me from everything else. And most of these concepts could have just been described in more lore-friendly terms to deepen the worldbuilding instead! Just describe a cat with large ears and ticked ruddy fur instead of explicitly calling it an Abyssinian. Describe a sad clown without calling them Pierrot. These could have been fun Easter egg type of things!
The characters and the plot. Ugh. There were good ideas here! There were opportunities for fun to be had! There were such interesting themes here, like Cyril’s complicity with Eufrates’s actions in the original timeline, how he basically let his husband destroy the world for love, the responsibility. The scene where he realizes Eufrates also time traveled back with him and isn’t his innocent younger self is pretty powerful! I was looking forward for the emotional complexity and the actual fixing of it all.
Instead, Cyril behaved as a dramatic teenager, orchestrated a situation where Eufrates actually got all the power way sooner than originally, and then ran away.
And the promised friends to lovers to enemies to lovers relationship turned into Eufrates being a cartoonish villain sending evil letters while Cyril blushingly flirted with someone else.
And then by the middle of the book the only really likable character turned out to be the true cartoonist villain and it was revealed than none of the evils Eufrates had committed in the original timeline were actually his fault! He’d been under a bad magical influence all along, and Cyril’s only fault was not noticing that influence despite being the most powerful mage of his generation. That was the point the book lost me, tbh, because way to ruin all the most interesting parts by making potentially complex characters with agency into poor little victims. I was debating DNFing, but I was so far along already, I thought I might as well continue and see if it gets better from there.
I… evidently should have DNFed.
Guess this is one of those situations where my disappointment is so acute because at the very beginning things looked so promising and I built my expectations up way too high.
The lobster doesn’t realise it’s in a pot until it’s soft and tender for dinner.
Sadly, this was such an incredible disappointment.
As an avid fanfiction reader, I love time travel fix-its: stories where the characters go back in time, waking up as their far younger selves but armed with all the knowledge, skills, and experience from the awful future they left behind, and get to retrace their steps, letting hindsight guide them past all the pitfalls, wrong turns, and ambushes from the original story. So when I heard about this book—just that, except it’s original fiction—I wad immediately intrigued and curious, though I also immediately had my doubts. In fanfic, this set-up can work so well because you’re already invested in the characters, and because you’ve already experienced the actual story with all the conflicts and tension, and you just want to self-indulgently watch the beloved characters have a break. Like, I genuinely don’t think that Jon Snow single-handedly saving the Seven Kingdoms from all possible threats at fourteen makes for a better story than the actual ASOIAF! But I’ve enjoyed those kinds of fic for the characters and the feel-goodness.
Could that work as an original story, especially one where the time travel happens very early in the story and we don’t even get to know most of the cast until we’re back in time? That remains to be seen. Because this book definitely didn’t achieve that for me, but I also disliked it for so many other reasons that I can’t even say if that specific aspect was salvageable or not.
Let’s start with the worldbuilding. One good thing I have to say: I loved the magic system. It was a bit confusing at times, but generally robust and wondrous and it actually felt magical. This is absolutely my favorite aspect of the book and its main redeeming quality. Everything else, however, was painted in extremely broad strokes and felt like cardboard decorations.
I was also regularly taken out of the story when the characters in this seemingly secondary world setting used words like “Cheshire smile,” “Pierrot,” “Machiavel,” or “Abyssinian cat.” I don’t my anachronisms in my fantasy. I’m fine with the names being loosely tweaked versions of real world names. But when you present to me a fantasy world that apparently has Lewis Carroll, Italian commedia dell'arte, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Ethiopian Empire historically called Abyssinia, and I’m starting to have questions that distract me from everything else. And most of these concepts could have just been described in more lore-friendly terms to deepen the worldbuilding instead! Just describe a cat with large ears and ticked ruddy fur instead of explicitly calling it an Abyssinian. Describe a sad clown without calling them Pierrot. These could have been fun Easter egg type of things!
The characters and the plot. Ugh. There were good ideas here! There were opportunities for fun to be had! There were such interesting themes here, like Cyril’s complicity with Eufrates’s actions in the original timeline, how he basically let his husband destroy the world for love, the responsibility. The scene where he realizes Eufrates also time traveled back with him and isn’t his innocent younger self is pretty powerful! I was looking forward for the emotional complexity and the actual fixing of it all.
Instead, Cyril behaved as a dramatic teenager, orchestrated a situation where Eufrates actually got all the power way sooner than originally, and then ran away.
And the promised friends to lovers to enemies to lovers relationship turned into Eufrates being a cartoonish villain sending evil letters while Cyril blushingly flirted with someone else.
And then by the middle of the book the only really likable character turned out to be the true cartoonist villain and it was revealed than none of the evils Eufrates had committed in the original timeline were actually his fault! He’d been under a bad magical influence all along, and Cyril’s only fault was not noticing that influence despite being the most powerful mage of his generation. That was the point the book lost me, tbh, because way to ruin all the most interesting parts by making potentially complex characters with agency into poor little victims. I was debating DNFing, but I was so far along already, I thought I might as well continue and see if it gets better from there.
I… evidently should have DNFed.
Guess this is one of those situations where my disappointment is so acute because at the very beginning things looked so promising and I built my expectations up way too high.