Discussions (or angry angry rants) on fantasy and science fiction books. All posts are relatively spoiler-free (i.e. safe for someone intending to read the book in question) unless otherwise specified.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the need for and place of negatives reviews in the SFF sphere (and bookish sphere more generally), but I want to come at it from a different side today, specifically – when being positive is actively unhelpful.
Let me explain.
We’re going to start from a premise that the aim of reviewing is to help readers decide if they want to read a given book, and if they’re going to like it. There are other things reviewing is for, or can be argued to be for, but that’s not what I’m interested in here, so I’m putting them to one side for a second.
So you’re a reader. You consume reviews/recommendations from a small bunch of reviewers regularly, because then you get to know their tastes, which helps you figure out how well their tastes match yours, and how useful their reviews will be in helping you decide what to read. Maybe one of them you saw because they reviewed four books you loved and also loved them, and even for the same reasons, so you thought “hey, great, we likely have similar tastes, I’ll trust them”. You see they’ve reviewed a book really positively, so you go out, you buy it, you read it… and you don’t like it. Bummer.
Well, these things happen. It’s not an exact science, tastes vary, there will always be misses. But it prompts you to wonder, what don’t they like? This could be useful info in helping you frame your own choices in future. And as you skim through their back catalogue of reviews, you realise… 99% of their reviews are positive. There’s nothing in there at all on anything they have a worse opinion than “well I really liked it, but I wish x were different”. Huh. Interesting. But also… really unhelpful. Because suddenly you’ve lost 50% of your useful info on whether you trust their opinions to help guide your own. Maybe the hypothetical reader here hates… I don’t know… unreliable narrators. Second person narration*. Whatever. They’ve never seen this reviewer cover a book with those in, as far as they know. Is that because reviewer doesn’t like them too, so they don’t review them? Is it just a coincidence? Or do they love those things? Or are they things they don’t care about at all, really, so this reader won’t even know until they pick a book up that had a positive review that never mentioned them? A mystery!
And so, our hypothetical reader, after a while of this, realises that this reviewer just isn’t all that helpful to them. It feels like they like everything, can make anything sound good, and that’s just not going to help this reader filter down to the things they want to read.
But what if it’s not 99% positive, it’s more like… 85%? You can end up in a situation where – and I’m approximately quoting my partner somewhat here – the positive reviews mean nothing but the negative reviews mean everything. We both have reviewers we follow that if the reviewer loves a book? It makes no difference, as far as we’re concerned. Could mean we’d love it, hate it, meh it, whatever. But if those reviewers hate something? Their hates, however limited, do line up with some of ours, and that means we keep the fuck away from those books. All the utility of the reviewer is condensed into those exceptions, rather than across the whole scheme of books, where the existence of the negative – knowing even just that the negative can exist with reasonable regularity – lends weight to the positive.
And as a reader, I find that frustrating. The reviewers I vibe best with, the ones I come back to reading again and again, are the ones where I feel I have a genuine understanding of their tastes, as a whole, complex picture. The taste doesn’t have to map to mine. But I need to understand it, to see how mine compares, to know that if they think a book is a bit slow, it’ll hit my perfect sweet spot, and if they think a book has a couple too many POVs, it’ll be overwhelmingly many for me. Maybe they like romance more than I do, maybe I like being kept in the dark more than they do, and maybe we both hate horror. Negative reviews are a huge part of that picture, because, as a reader who likes some things and not others, what use is someone who appears to like everything? It’s meaningless.
And you could try reading between the lines, obviously. What don’t they review, what never shows up? But that’s a lot more effort to access, and requires a level of detective work I feel like most readers, myself emphatically included, don’t bother with (compared to the more vibes based feel you get from reviewers who present a more complex front), and one that’s fraught with possibilities – do they not review those things because they don’t like them? Or just because there are only so many hours in the day and books a person can read and time to write and so on.
For most of us, reviewing is a labour of love, and critically, an unpaid one for the most part. We do not owe our audiences, such as we even have them, anything. I don’t think anyone ought to review in any particular way, except the one that brings them their own joy. But I see a lot of people leaning towards a view that roughly boils down to “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”, and I really don’t like that as a prescriptive approach. I find value as both a reviewer and a reader in the negative, and while I wouldn’t ever tell someone how to do their own reviewing, I do draw the line at the sweeping statements that untrammelled positivity is “better”. It’s not. It’s just a personal choice, a style, a preference. And, like all these things, one that has drawbacks. In this case, the drawback is, in my opinion, that it renders the reviewer less easily assessible for taste-match to a reader, and thus less useful in that activity. As a reader, I probably won’t read their reviews, certainly not habitually as a tool of figuring out what I want to read myself. Which is, y’know, fine. We all get to pick. But it’s one of the reasons I personally don’t shy away from negativity, from criticism as well as critique, in my own reviews, because it’s something I find so needful when I read other people.
It’s also something I’ve never really seen discussed when people talk about how negative reviews are “bad” and we ought always to be positive, there’s no acknowledgement that this affects the function of the review. So I don’t really know, are the people who review that way thinking about that? Is that what they consider the primary function of a review? Or are they more of the school of thought that reviews are a promotional tool for the author, and so negativity is harming them? Or is it something else entirely? I don’t know, and I’d like to know. Because “what are reviews for” is such an interesting, nuanced question with multiple answers, and it’s something I come back to a lot when I write my own.
*I like both of these things, just picking something for the sake of something. In truth, a lot of the things I like/dislike are a bit more nebulous than this, so it’s a little more complex to pin down.
Whoah-oh… no I can’t think of a funny way to continue that. Maybe if I’d read Spare?
As of a couple of hours ago – I’m half way through my reading goal for the year, a whole month early. I’m really pleased about this, and am choosing not to notice the unusually large section of my “format” pie chart being novellas. It wasn’t deliberate, in any case, they were all books I wanted to read and just happened to be… a bit bijou. But books is books, and 50 is 50, so to celebrate, I thought I’d share the best books I’ve read so far this year.
These are the books that are new to me* and that I rated 5 stars, and so are the books I absolutely unambiguously loved. The fact that there’s eight of them out of fifty feels like a pretty strong showing to be honest.
At 8 we have The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera, which I reviewed here pretty recently in more depth. The short version is that I loved how it managed to handle heavy topics without having to info-dump on you right at the start, how it had such a driftingly thoughtful tone that persisted throughout all the things that happened, and that its characters were constantly fascinating and that it was overall just beautifully written. It’s the arc I’ve read so far this year that I’ve been most unexpectedly delighted by, especially because I only requested it on a whim and the nod it got in Gautam Bhatia’s newsletter, while knowing almost nothing about it beforehand, other than… it sounded neat. If you want magical realism, plots that will gently surprise you, and a twist that left me genuinely slackjawed, this would be the book for you.
At 7, it’s Hybrid Heart by Iori Kusano, which I’m reviewing over at Nerds of a Feather in a couple of days. This is one of Neon Hemlock’s novellas for this year, and so far in my experience with them… my god they do not miss. I have been banging the drum of Uncommon Charm to anyone who’ll listen, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this was another unexpected stunner. Did I think I was going to love near future tech-focussed J-pop stories? No I did not. But that was on me, because it’s honestly brilliant. The thing I loved most about it is how honest, sympathetic and intimate the character study of the protagonist is, and so you really feel immersed in her worldview, her changing thoughts about herself and her situation, and I think it would honestly be impossible not to feel a bit weepy for all she has to go through and learn. It somehow crams an enormous, effecting emotional journey into a tiny space and makes it feel like a whole world, and that is so, so impressive. Incidentally, Iori Kusano also wrote one of my top short stories of 2022 (can i offer you a nice egg in this trying time), which I managed not to connect at all until after I put down Hybrid Heart with a “fucking wow”. If you want an emotional gutpunch, but in the best possible way, read this one.
At 6, we have The Sorceror of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson, who comes in twice on this list. I’m not saying I apparently have a thing for drifting narratives, but between this, A Taste of Honey, Our Wives Under the Sea and The Saint of Bright Doors, it does seem to be a theme in what I’ve given five stars to this year. But aside from that, this is a novella that loves to do depths of feeling, of worldbuilding, of sentiment and drama, all with the lightest of light touches and I came away from finishing it almost breathless with what the author managed to achieve with so little. I’d call it an economy of prose but that makes it feel very cold and lifeless, when the process of reading it is anything but. Every tiny part of everything he says and does in it is imbued with life and art and glorious imagery, and it was a book I had to stop and savour, no matter that I wanted to devour it whole, simply because it would have been an appalling waste not to linger and enjoy every perfectly chosen word and sentence of it. I would gladly read anything this man writes. If you like prose, if you don’t mind things being taken on trust, and a narrative putting faith in you as a reader to put things together that haven’t been clearly spelled out, and if you want to see an author putting genuine magic into even the most human of interactions, read this.
At 5, we have Divisible by Itself and One, which is the newest poetry collection from Kae Tempest. This isn’t a shock. I love Kae Tempest. I experience frequent gratitude that Miranda introduced me to them. Along with Inua Ellams, they are just someone I will automatically buy whatever they put out next because I am entirely confident it will be wonderful. And this was again. I initially loved Tempest’s work for its rhythm and lyricality, and while this is absolutely still in evidence, there’s some deviation from it as well, especially in some of the poems that are more poignant and sad. It’s a collection with a lot of poised, delicate and often very bittersweet moments, captured glimpses of life that shimmer and disappear in the space of a page, but linger in the memory. The best new poetry I’ve read this year by a clear mile, and my love for them continues unabated. Read for just stunning poetry that will make you feel feelings.
At 4, it’s Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield. Lizzy and Esther gave me her previous work, Salt Slow for… either a birthday or a Christmas or something a while back, and it was gorgeous, so I was super excited to read this, even despite it being horrory, and horror about the depths of the ocean, about which I am a colossal wuss. I talk about it in more detail at Nerds of a Feather, but there is always something particularly impactful about a book that takes a genre or subgenre or concept you dislike and managing to turn it into a book you love, and this is precisely that. A big part of that success is that it is a book very closely focussed in on a relationship between two people, told in two different time frames, from two different sides, as it slowly falls apart, and that sort of close character work is something I often adore. But to suggest it works despite the horror elements does it a grave disservice – those elements are just as well crafted, and the quiet, building, or should I say deepening, darkness of it all that creeps in more and more as you read kept me completely hooked, even as I was absolutely horrified by it. If you don’t mind being permanently unnerved by the deep sea forever after, and want to be sad about some wistful lesbians with delicious prose, this is for you.
At 3, and it is a testament to how good some of the books I’ve read this year are that this is coming third, we have The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, another one I did a NoaF review for. I don’t even know how to sum this one up, to be truthful. It’s a story that defies a blurb, because a blurb absolutely couldn’t capture the sheer magic of the experience of reading it. It’s a traditional journey and quest story, except it isn’t. It is layered in framing devices, making you constantly aware of the story being told to you in a certain way, making you constantly aware of the narrator’s identity, and it is pausing, and thoughtful, a measuredly paced in how it chooses to take you on its journey. Its worldbuilding, its magic and its characters are all wonderful, not a weak spot in the lot, but its true art is in the technicalities of its prose, and the choices it makes in presentation, in crafting exactly how you, the reader, consume and critically think about consuming the story. It is meta as hell, while being also immersive as hell, which is a trick and a half to pull off if you can manage it. If you love authors playing around with voice, and with perspective and really thinking about who is speaking, who is telling the story, and when, and how, this is the story for you.
At 2, we have A Taste of Honey also by Kai Ashante Wilson, the sequel to The Sorceror of the Wildeeps. I did a slightly… er… off-piste review of it here earlier this year, but in a more conventional focus, a lot of its strengths are the same as Sorceror, just, if anything, more so. Its portrayal of love, of torn loyalties, of characters who are both intensely sympathetic and then at turns deeply flawed, in almost irreconcilable ways, but which nonetheless built perfectly into who they are. If I had to pick something that this book did well… well, I’d need to pick three for a start. But one of them would be how in a pseudo-historical setting, Wilson has done one of the best jobs I think I have ever seen of creating characters that are actually true to that history, and to their place within it. He has taken a character who is nobility in a heavily stratified society, and accepted what that would mean about them as a person, and about their interactions with those lower down the social tree than them, and not imposed modern values on them to make them palatable to the reader. We get historical seeming people whole and entire, and have to choose for ourselves how we take them within that context, and I really love that. Add to that the other two – the prose that belongs in an art gallery, and the twist at the end that just… fuck. Wow. Fuck. If you have ever trusted me with a recommendation, and you like prose, love and just… good books at all… read this.
And at the top of my list of books I’ve read so far this year, we have Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. Again, this is one I’ve reviewed at NoaF in a bit more detail, but the highest praise I can give it is despite all of the other books I gave five stars this year, despite all of the wonderful things I’ve said about them, and how utterly stunning they are… I did not have to think for a moment about which book was my best in this list. Not for a moment. I come and go in reading SF, and I’m not the most interested in space of all the people out there, but this just grabbed me from the get go. It is brilliantly political, and has the most gripping character arc of almost anything I’ve read for a long time. Kyr, the protagonist, goes on such a fucking journey, and it is incredibly impressive how compelling Tesh has managed to make such a deeply unlikeable character. She is an utter dickhead, and yet I never stopped wanting to see where things were going with her, not for a second. Despite being totally different to Tesh’s other work (the Greenhollow duology), it shares that beautiful knack of writing place and atmosphere, while making that deftness suited to the more barren environment of a space opera. Its also a book whose thoughtfulness and themes manage to genuinely live up to… well, it’s an ambitious title to choose, isn’t it? If you’re going Wilfred Owen, you’re going to need to go hard or go home, and Tesh is going hard. There is some extremely well managed politics and emotion in here, and a deep understanding of people, why they do as they do, as well as a total subversion of some very common stories about war and space and heroes. It’s the sort of thing there needs to be more of, and I will be throwing it at everyone who’ll listen to me about it for the forseeable. Read it if… if you want to think about your space opera, and about your characters, and to just revel in someone doing some really good shit with some well-worn tropes.
Hell of a haul for five months. Fingers crossed the rest of the year is just as good, though it feels somewhat impossible that it could live up to this.
*so I’m leaving off my reread of the Clocktaur War duology because the fact that I love Ursula Vernon is neither new nor interesting at this point
I have been super excited about Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee coming out for months. I saw people talking about it on twitter, about how it was an interesting new take on the Arthurian mythos in a modern setting, how it had a well written muslim woman protagonist, and how it was like Good Omens just with knights in. Critically, it was constantly billed as being funny.
It was so utterly disappointing to me that I did not so much as chuckle once during reading it. Not even a little smirk. God damn.
Dialling it back a little – Perilous Times is a near future dystopian story in a world of absolutely catastrophic levels of climate change and a politically ravaged Britain. We follow Kay, Sir Kay, knight of the round table, who, along with his fellow knights, agreed to Merlin’s plan to use magic on them to ensure they woke whenever Britain was in peril. Over the centuries since, he and his brother knights have woken time and again to fight whatever threats seemed apparent at the time, rising every time they were killed from the roots of the trees they were buried under. Kay has fought in wars and conflicts and more subtle strifes throughout the years since his own time, and has risen once again wondering what’s up this time. Seeing his home obliterated by rising temperatures, floods and famine, he figures that’s what the peril is this time, and seeks to fix it, along with Mariam, a young eco-protester he meets shortly after his resurrection. Meanwhile, Lancelot has also risen – far to the south, in Windsor under his tree – and is given a rather different explanation of the situation by Marlowe (yes, the playwright, I’ll come back to him later), and so the two knights find themselves fighting on opposite sides of a conflict playing out across Britain, with the stakes set as high as the fate of the whole earth and its continued habitability for humanity.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of serious themes in here. The climate change stuff is obvious and up-front, and pretty bluntly put, but there’s also a lot about how society treats refugees and scapegoats whoever it can to shift the blame from the people at the top causing problems. There’s also a lot about how political infighting and needless bureaucracy and discussion gets in the way of meaningful action, and how different people prioritise fixing the world and how they react to the broken world around them.
And yet, a lot of the cover quotes talk about it being hilarious. And there are definitely attempts at jokes in there. But they absolutely did not land for me, for a number of reasons. Primarily, a lot of the jokes feel like mocking, like laughing at, rather than with any real inward looking fondness, and yet are directed at people, groups and concepts that are absolutely meant to be in the right per the story’s morals. For instance, Mariam, our eco-focussed protagonist, is part of a feminist protest group on matters ecological, who also have a secret sideline in acts that those less well-disposed towards them might label terrorism. So much of the story is heavily focussed on how the earth is dying, and we see a lot of people doing nothing to help, and sometimes doing plenty to harm. And it is very clear that Mariam and her fellow protesters are on the right side of this debate, in the story. But… this feminist eco collective is called FETA. Like the cheese. Which is a joke that gets made in the book. And one of the members is very invested in being unproblematic, with staying vegetarian, with carbon neutrality before all else, and, incidentally, is into a lot of new age spiritual beliefs, and is written in such a way as to be a very mockable figure. And it’s hard to disentangle which bits of her characterisation are the mockable parts; it all feels lumped together so you’re supposed to laugh at her for… not wanting to eat meat? She talks like a stereotype – an unkind stereotype – of woke liberal feminism. Likewise, there are several groups of competing communists in Manchester, and it is again very hard to pick apart what we’re meant to laugh at about them, and what is meant to be putting them on the right side of this conflict. Because they are anti-corporate oligarchy that is ruining the country. They’re part of a load of supposedly potential allies that includes FETA. But there are definitely pot-shots taken about them renaming Manchester Engelsgrad, about being focussed on the wrong things.
It’s hard to pin it down outside of the context of the story, as humour often is, but in the moment, in reading it, a lot of the potential jokes feel a little… mean. Look at these silly little people trying to make the world a better place, look at them caring about the wrong things, if they could only not care about their silly problems and focus on the real issues, then it’d all be fine. But the problem is… a lot of their silly problems feel very valid. The Welsh faction don’t want to commit to immediate carbon neutrality because they need Welsh coal to ensure they have the power to maintain their sought-for independence. That’s not trivial, in the context of the story. And so it feels… unthoughtful at best to use that as a source of humour.
The thing it reminds me most powerfully of is The Big Bang Theory, which I have always struggled with, for precisely that same vibe it gives off of unkindness, and of someone external looking in and thinking themselves better than the people they’re laughing at. Humour as a tool of derision, without any of the fondness that can be found in teasing.
But humour is a very personal thing, and it’s possible I just wasn’t receptive to this. Especially as I am, in general, not very receptive to near future climate dystopia stories (I really really dislike reading cli-fi, I don’t like feeling sad about something I can’t fix like that when reading is supposed to be a fun activity), and so coming into one may just have put me in a sour frame of mind that made humour a little harder to let in. That’s on me, I didn’t do enough research into the book, and sometimes coming into a story cold means you miss information that might have let you make a better decision about reading it. Mea culpa.
On the other hand, there are other issues with the story that make me inclined to think this is part of a wider problem. To come back to Marlowe here, a lot of the backstory and worldbuilding doesn’t really manage to carry the weight the story gives it. For… reasons that are never really explained, our Arthurian knights are given missions by Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright, who is also immortal (deal with the devil, of course) and thus works for a shadowy ministry of the government that knows all about the magic and the fey and the secret things of Britain. He somehow knows when the knights are going to start clambering back up into the world, and is able to come fetch them, and send them off where they need to go, like a somewhat camp M. How this all came about is never really explained, even though there are points in the story where both Kay and Lancelot pause to question it. Sometimes books have vibes based worldbuilding, and respect that, I really do, but if the story questions its worldbuilding, I do think the story needs to be ready to answer those questions. If it’s not… well, just don’t ask them. Let the vibes be vibes.
The same problem haunts the mechanism of the knights’ resurrection when this too is brought into question at several key points. Things go wrong, and become issues in the plot, but are never really examined much, and at least one of them feels like a rather artificial attempt to add tension.
There is also a pretty significant issue with the pacing – it took me about two thirds into the story for it to stop feeling like preamble. We spend a long time at the begin mired about in people wandering all over the place not knowing what they’re doing, or what anyone else is doing, without there really feeling like any narrative drive is guiding events. Even then, the pace doesn’t pick up dramatically until right near the end, at which point everything seems to happen at once in a cacophonous mess.
And there are also issues with the characters (ok wow, I was intending this to be a fairly mixed review but I’m turning it into a laundry list of issues… I promise there’s some balance in a minute). The story is told in three perspectives – Mariam, Kay and Lancelot. Mariam in many ways ought to be the most sympathetic. She’s a relatively young woman trying to do the right thing in a horrible, messy world, she cares an awful lot and gets somewhat steamrollered by events. She gets upset about the right problems, and just wants people to stop pissing about and focus on the big concerns for five minutes, please, guys, I’m begging you. But a lot of the time, her character falls flat at the key emotional moments where we need to care about how she feels. This is especially true when she gets angry, and particularly when she gets angry with Kay. Kay, we also see messed around a lot by events, but he’s a bit of an emotional closed book about a lot of it, and so it’s a little hard to really get into his head. However, there is one moment where he gets a really horrible bit of truth delivered to him, something that messes with his whole worldview and perception of the last thousand plus years. And then, right after that, Mariam gets angry at him for being sad and wanting to give up. Is her anger totally understandable? Absolutely. She’s had a shit time of it. But because the story puts that juuuuust after we’ve seen a really horrible, emotional moment for Kay, it’s hard not to get defensive on his behalf. And there are several moments like that throughout the story, that make sense on an intellectual level, but because of the timing or the juxtaposition or whatever, they do not manage to make emotional sense, and leave you feeling quite muddled about how you feel. Kay and Mariam both get them, and frankly I think both are done a bit dirty by them, because by rights they ought both to be really sympathetic characters.
On the other hand, there’s Lancelot. Lancelot is a dickhead. He’s messy, drunken, snarky, self-serving and just generally an asshole to everyone around him. And yet… the story makes Lancelot really emotionally sympathetic. He gets his character beats in the right moments, in the right contexts, for them to really work, and I ended up genuinely caring about him and his ending, when it ought to have been very much “well fuck you and the horse you rode in on” when we get towards the ending. What I think really does it for him is he gets variety, whereas the other two are rather stuck in one or two emotional beats for most of the story – Mariam in her weary anger and Kay in his “wtf am I doing if I hit my problems maybe they’ll go away” – and so because they lack variety, because we never get a break from that one note, however valid the note is, it becomes a sort of background noise. Whereas you get breaks in between feeling sorry for Lance when he’s being a knob, and so when it comes back round to sympathy, you’ve not tired out the muscle. But it feels very wrongsided, when you get to the end. Kay is exactly the sort of character I would normally love, and here I am instead supporting the asshat. And it’s not even like Lance is the funny, sarcastic arsehole, where of course everyone is supposed to love them the most. He is, often, just a dick, and sometimes very much an antagonist. And so the story feels sympathetically off – my moral/political/narrative sympathy sits somewhere other than my character sympathy and it just feels very muddled.
It also doesn’t help that I feel like Mariam just gets undercharacterised. We never get an awful lot about her as a person, and she’s someone the story relies so heavily on that to not have that does her a great disservice. We only know her in relation to the problems of the world around her – as a feminist, an eco-protester. We only learn she was training to be a nurse because she needs a moment to remember the people whose voices aren’t being heard, and when that’s no longer critical, that bit of characterisation mostly disappears again. We never learn anything trivial about her, about what she’s like simply as a person, and the story is poorer for it.
But… but. See, there is a but, eventually. I really like the ideas at the core of the story. It’s a story that examines what it means to want Arthur back, what he stands for, and against, and how that relates to the realm being in danger. Is someone from way back when really the right solution to modern problems? Is he not, as we know from the old stories, a complex figure who isn’t always a good knight in shining armour, let alone a good king? How might that power, that emblematic nationalism be twisted to bad ends? And, critically, who wants Arthur back? Why is it them? Why do we need someone else, someone “special” to solve our problems for us? At the very core, this is a book about heroes, and why we don’t need them, and about collective action and responsibility and the need to get off your arse and fix the world rather than waiting for a hero who may or may not solve the problem you want him to solve. And those ideas are really really good! I want those ideas. They make a great story, and a really great interrogation of a myth that is quite ubiquitous in British folklore, but also one ripe for interrogation. One of the best bits of the story is the knights talking about how taken Churchill was with them all, how he related to Kay as a black man vs Lancelot as white, how he thought about the story of them all generally, and the sense of unease they felt about his interests and priorities. There are moments when the author really uses the Arthur mythos, and retellings of the mythos (there are a number of Sword in the Stone references, especially in the latter third) to make us examine things, and it, and those are so lovely that it makes it all the sadder when the rest of the story is, frankly, a mess.
I’m not sure how you could make this a better book. I’m not a writer. But I think there is a better book lurking in the ideas here. In those moments of interrogation and thoughtfulness, and in using old ideas to look at new problems. But it’s trying to be an adventure and a comedy and also a critique and admonishment of a lot of modern problems, and there’s just not enough space and time and skill for it to be everything at once, so it doesn’t really succeed at any of them. I ultimately gave it three stars, because despite all of its many, many problems, there truly is the heart of a good story underneath it all. There just are… a lot of problems in the way of getting there.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I started reading this, but honestly, I think that was the best plan I could have had. Expectations would have only held me back (and/or been absolutely useless to me). The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera was an incredible, unexpected delight, and one that at no point conformed to any ideas I might have had of where the story was going to go. Every time I settled into “oh I seeeee, interesting”, something subtly shifted in the narrative and we were off in a totally different direction, leaving me constantly, and joyfully, on the back foot.
And I think that was a wonderful thing, for all that “unpredictability” is such a complex and messy topic in how we discuss novels. We yearn to be surprised – we say “ugh, I could see the end coming a mile off” as a terrible insult when reviewing – but so often that surprise comes at the expense of good plotting, pacing and foreshadowing. You can easily surprise a reader by totally changing the parameters of the story, throwing in a deus ex machina, or just making something up about the substance of the world that had never been mentioned before. Of course you can. But I would much prefer a predictable story full of Chekhov’s entire armament shed than one that prioritises the reader being unable to see the end coming over making sure that end is well earned. Thankfully, plenty of stories manage to do both, so it’s not a real concern. The interesting thing is managing to write a story where there isn’t much in the way of foreshadowing, but the ending still feels earned and supported by what’s come before.
Which is what Chandrasekera has done here.
I was absolutely unprepared for how this story was going to progress. There is no way I could have predicted it. But it never feels* like those changes are sudden moments of “SURPRISE BITCH! DIDN’T SEE ME COMING HUH?”. Instead, they are integrated into the story much more gently, much more softly, and so do not jar when the moment comes. And, critically, they mostly do not jar the protagonist, and so the reader is somewhat forced by his (frankly distressing at times) levels of willingness to go with the flow to not overreact to dramatic changes. Fetter doesn’t care, and he knows more about the situation, so why should we?
The whole story thus has a drifting, floating tone and pace, making it feel somewhat longer than its size, and somewhat at odds with the often heavy content it’s dealing with. Throughout the course of the story we grapple with colonialism, autocracy, war and famine, racial profiling, religious violence, non-religious violence, and a whole host of other issues one can find in a state that does not care for all of its citizens. But that gentle tone never undermines the seriousness of the issues at hand. For all that Fetter, and thus the reader, is never particularly surprised, especially not in a dramatic way, by changes to the story and the situation he observes, that does not mean he (and we) are unable to feel the seriousness of it. It’s simply that all things in the story are communicated and internalised slowly, and if anything, that lends them more weight, because we are forced to simply… sit with them.
The city much of the story takes place in is also an interesting setting, because of the way its oppressiveness is revealed to us. At first, Luriat seems somewhat utopian – it is kind to its newcomers, with free housing and no need to work, and easy access to citizenship, provided you fill in some forms. But we slowly discover that this is only the surface, and there are much nastier tendencies hiding beneath, both in how it treats those outside its boundaries, and, more quietly, those within. Fetter slowly starts to see how the concept of race science permeates all the social interactions, bureaucratic behaviours and all levels of life in Luriat, how truly rotten it all is. And because it is revealed so slowly, we have to sit with it all and really think on what it means, how it affects every interaction. By being so slowly understood, it is hammered home all the more firmly.
There’s a similar approach to the fantastical in the novel as well. In some ways, it feels like magical realism – the magic is treated incredibly offhandedly, just another part of life, not to be remarked upon, and critically, not to be explained. But what starts as small bits of the fantastical slowly builds and builds until it feels overwhelming, and some parts do merit an explanation. And the way they integrate with the building of the plot at times lends itself more to the feel of urban fantasy, so it ends up being hard to quantify quite what genre this is or isn’t… which honestly, I really like about it. It simply is what it is.
Which again, loops back to that unpredictability. Of course, some of this may be my lack of familiarity with Sri Lankan literature. Maybe it’s actually super predictable if you’re well informed on the scene. But coming at it as someone who isn’t, it doesn’t contextualise neatly into a box that I have, while vibing partly with several of them, and so either I don’t have the apparatus to use meta knowledge to predict it, or it’s doing an interesting job of rejecting that predictability. Either way, I enjoyed it very much.
The only thing I did not always enjoy was the way the characters, particularly the protagonist, Fetter, were built. By his background, by the way the world is, Fetter is intensely naive about some aspects of life, especially politics. This naivety bleeds through into how the world is explained to us through his lens – leaving parts of it as a total blank because he absolutely does not understand them, and blatantly says so. And that part, the way his viewpoint affects the worldbuilding, I love. It’s synthesised very thoroughly and never feels like an excuse or a way to run away from creating something. However, on a personal level, I often struggle with naive main characters, especially when they seem not to learn and overcome this naivety, even with time. For the bulk of the story, Fetter has lived in the city for year – become a resource for newcomers on navigating its paperwork, even – but he still hasn’t grasped a lot of the political realities around the atrocities committed quietly by the city. He knows, more or less, but he does not really understand, especially the why and the wherefore, until very very late in the story, and far later than seems to make sense to the reader. Luckily, Chandrasekera manages to make him sufficiently endearing otherwise as a character that this is somewhat forgiveable, and it does make sense in the context of his background… but I like my characters savvy, in general, and so this was a minor disappointment.
In the grand scheme of things, however, it mattered not at all. The book was thoroughly enjoyable, engaging and thoughtful right from the start, and I was hooked throughout my time reading it… even before the point, quite near the end, when everything went down. Chandrasekera wrote an amazing book anyway, and then right when you were getting comfortable with the ending, decided to turn everything on its head and make it a stunning book, in a way that forces you to reexamine the narrative that went up to this point and go “oh… oh of course”. I will give you no more than that in explanation, because it was a joy to be surprised by, but it alone, as a little moment, made the book 5 stars for me, even aside from every other bit of lovely prose and careful world building that led to that point.
If you like magical realism, if you like worlds full of mystery, if you like characters lost in the sea of events that are bigger than them, and if you like stories full of critique for the hardness of the world, this is a story for you. It’s beautiful, sometimes hard, and constantly thoughtful, and I loved it.
*ok except for one time but that is… a special case and honestly what makes the book a 5 star read for me, so shush.
I really like the cover for this – relatively simple but really quite gorgeous
FAIRIES. I love fairies. I am five times more likely to read a book with fairies in… well, maybe not the ACOTAR kind, but otherwise. I was promised fairies here, and it absolutely delivered on that score.
All the Hollow of the Sky is the second of Kit Whitfield’s Gyrford books, following a family of fairy smiths in the town of Gyrford as they deal with the various supernatural problems that are their purview, and the more mundane (but no less troublesome) problems they have in amongst themselves. In this one, the long absent father of Jedediah, the Smith patriarch, has returned looking suspiciously unchanged after his disappearance, though with some rather worrying differences in how he perceives the world. Unfortunately, though some things are different, the way he treats his family hasn’t changed one bit, no matter how they’ve grown up without him, and they must together find a way to deal with the resumption of his tyranny, as well as the very real fey problem that’s come back with him.
There’s a lot to recommend about this book, and a lot I enjoyed – I stayed up until 5am to finish reading it – but it’s not an uncomplex positive. While I’ll come back to its better qualities in a moment, I want to linger on the main issue that bothered me the whole time I was reading, and it was one that was a mixture of pacing and tone. Put simply, about 85% of the book felt like prologue or backstory, and only the final bit felt like we were really grappling with the actual plot.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, there is just a lot of backstory needed to set the scene for what’s happening. We need to understand the absent father, Corbie, and how he fits into the story of the family, and why they fear his return. We need to understand the context of his initial disappearance. And unfortunately, a lot of this context is delivered in substantial, discrete chunks, as a story told to a listening child in some parts, rather than being woven in to a more present narrative, and so in the early parts of the story, it’s hard to tell which “present” is the one we’re meant to be in, because we spend so much time in other ones learning how things came about, whether the childhood of Jedediah and his relationship with Corbie, or even earlier with the events surrounding the childhood of Jedediah’s mother and aunts. And I don’t dispute that these are all necessary pieces of the puzzle to understand the present story – it’s one that’s meant to be woven deep in the family’s history. And I don’t dispute that the backstory and flashbacks are well written, and enjoyable to read. But the way they interface with the present plot just doesn’t work well with how we approach the novel, and leaves it with very strange pacing that only really settles when the action truly kicks off near the end.
The second issue feeding into this is exactly that pacing – whether by necessity of that delivery of backstory or just by choice, Whitfield has written this to be a slow, gentle, meandering book. Which, in some ways, is lovely. It roots us all the more deeply in the family and its problems, and gives us a really strong sense of the characters and who they are to each other and to the town. But when coupled with all of that backstory that occupies so much of the book, it leads to us dwelling on it even more, expanding its proportion to fill up even more of the perceived space. And it just leaves the reader feeling off balance – constantly asking “are we there yet?” and constantly being told, no, you need to know more of the background before you can truly understand. And that’s… frustrating.
I think I almost would have liked the story to be reframed, not as a narrative in the “present” with extensive backward glances for context, but instead a narrative that just happened to be episodic, set across several time periods (perhaps told in a non-linear way), to allow it to feel less distracted from what it is clearly centring as the “main” plot. There wouldn’t need to be even a particularly substantive shift in focus to achieve that, just a little bit of shimmying to go from weirdly off-balance to neat, and I think that somehow made it worse while I was reading – it was so close to being so good that it just kept niggling at me, as well the constant feeling of “well, are we going to get to the actual story yet then?”.
But! If I leave that aside, there’s a lot here to recommend it. I think the way Whitfield approaches the fey is great, having them be more on the folkloric side, and run a pretty wide range from sentient and helpful to magic animals to forces of nature, as well as a wide range of emotional attitudes and relationships with humanity. They’re a complex, specialised set of problems that need a complex set of training to approach and interact with, and that really illustrates the need for, and the skill of, the central family of smiths.
What’s also done well is how those smiths fit into the wider community – they are not isolated problem solvers, cut off from the mundane world except to swoop in as heroes. They live in the community, have friendships and relationships with their neighbours, and their work intersects with daily life. The “present day” events of the story are set around the Clementing, a festival in which the smiths place iron wreaths on graves in the churchyard to prevent fey interference, but it’s also a festival they take part in alongside their neighbours, the same as their neighbours – they cook, they bake and they celebrate. I really enjoy seeing in the story the magical problem solvers being fully situated in their place and people, because so often with stories, the magical side of things is hidden, or restricted or so dangerous that others can’t know about it, so we rarely see how it might intersect with just… normal life. This also allows Whitfield to weave in some of the traditional mythos around smiths and how they relate to fairies, because we see it in the behaviour of the people around them. Especially considering the heaviness of the backstory, it was nice to see the worldbuilding dealt with more subtly in this way.
And finally – and critically for me – the characters are lovely. Because we spend so much time with them, with their concerns, in the build up, we have the space to grow to love them, and they are worth loving. They are flawed, and interesting, both in ways relating to and independent from the fairy influences on their lives. They also speak with unique, recognisable voices from the page, and Whitfield has done a particularly good job of giving them localised-seeming accents without it ever straying into parody, as often happens when non-RP English is represented in fiction without due care. We spend enough time with Jedediah, with Matthew and with John that they all become properly fleshed out characters, and with their own interesting perspectives on their problems and the world, and it gives us a really beautiful triangulation on those problems. When Jedediah is too closely tied into his own emotions about Corbie, seeing things from John’s perspective shifts the narrative, and then Matthew’s exasperation with John balances out his own frustrations with the way the others solve problems.
And so, in many ways, it works wonderfully – as a study of characters and their relationships, as a work of fantasy building on traditional fairy and smith lore, as a story heavily rooted in a place and a people. It’s just unfortunate that the framing and pacing mess so substantially with the reader’s enjoyment of the story that it rather throws everything else off kilter. That being said, I had a lot of fun reading it when I was immersed in it, and the other parts were sufficiently enjoyable that I would definitely read another of Whitfield’s books, as the problem feels very specialised to how this particular story needed to be told.
I exist at a weird interstice in the people I know, when it comes to books. On the one hand, I have a lot of friends, even the ones who read, but who for the most part aren’t immersed in SFF fandom or considering it a significant hobby for whom I read “a lot”. My reading goal this year is 100 books, which I’m very likely to hit (or possibly exceed). But then on the other hand, there’s the not-tiny group of people I either know or see online, in those bookish spaces we swim in, who read vastly more than I do.
And because I pay attention to them, to all the other people reading however much they do in those spaces, and talking about them, reviewing them, going to events about them, I’m very conscious of all the books that are in those conversations, that all those other people are reading. The ones I’ll never read, because 100 per year is simply not enough to do that.
Even if I say let’s cut it just to SFF (which I wouldn’t, but whatever). And then let’s cut again to the specific subset of SFF that’s read by the people who engage with the Hugos and Nebulas, and maybe that bit of intersection with the big popular stuff that hits the parts of booktok I’m on. Let’s only ever read new books, no rereads (which is mostly true anyway). Let’s only be current, and read what’s new and interesting coming out as it happens (also mostly true anyway). Even then, it would be an impossible task. For every book I choose to pick up, there are a whole stack that I will simply never get to.
I’m not self-conscious about how much I read because of the number, I’m not ashamed of how much or how quickly I do or do not read in the slightest, but I am intensely conscious of all those books I’m not reading.
In some ways, it’s a great problem to have. The bits of SFF that I’m into are currently in such a boom, full of so many exciting authors, great stories, interesting ideas, and that should be celebrated. I get a choice! A marvellous, wide-ranging choice to suit any mood or taste or preference, I need only search to find it. But that comes with the cost of knowing all the things I missed, especially when I’m selecting based on current-ness. There will always be those books I never quite got to, the ones where life intervened or the bookshop didn’t have it or the hundred other reasons something even that caught my interest and I wanted to read passed me by, because the world, or the community at least, has moved onto something else, and there’s all these new shiny things I’ll only ever read a fraction of, so dwelling on the ones behind me only makes the current choices harder.
As an example, I remember when In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu came out. A friend recommended it. I read the blurb. It sounded fascinating, and I wanted to read it. But the only place I could buy it was Amazon, and I prefer not to do that when remotely possible, so I put the intention aside, thinking at some point, I would see it somewhere else, surely Waterstones might have it one day, and I could come to it then. And time… passed. Eventually, many months later, I did see it, when looking for something else, and was so delighted it had shown up in an indie shop that I bought it. And now it sits on my tbr, waiting. Because it’s not current now. It happened when it happened, then passed by without a significant wake left behind it, leaving only my intention to read it, with none of the associated trappings.
I will read it though. I will. Partly because I bought it, so I should. Partly because I have a completionist streak. And partly because maybe this shift in my reading habits, and more critically, my thinking habits around books, isn’t always a helpful one.
I’ve found myself more and more these days thinking of books as having a best before date. As things that have a period of relevance, and then they drop out of the limelight and the reasons to read them dry up. I think, if I had told myself ten years ago about this, she’d have been… a little baffled. But there is such a joy to reading something* while it’s fresh, while all the other people are talking about it, so you can be part of that conversation, and see it all while you know what’s going on, while it’s still easy to find. I recently read an arc of Some Desperate Glory, which I adored, and there is something so satisfying about seeing the growing swell of other people reading it, being excited for it to come out, when I know I love it too, and knowing that there will be content out there around it while my love for it is still fresh in my mind. There’s nothing wrong with that. And for some books, the relevance period is longer, whether because they’re an ongoing series (Gideon the Ninth) or because they’ve been revived for a tv show (the Grishaverse) or simply because they’ve had such an impact on the genre as a whole, that people will never truly stop talking about them (LOTR, and, to a lesser extent, things like Ancillary Justice). Some books were universal enough in their time that coming back to them later is always met with “ohhhh I loved that! Maybe I should reread it…”. But most books… aren’t that. Most books have their time as being a big deal, as being the topic of conversation, and then slowly, by degrees, slip out of that.
I review books because I like talking about them. I like thinking about them, too, but I find that nothing shapes my thoughts about them better than a conversation, even if it’s an abstract one held simply with all the other voices on the internet. And so being part of those conversations has become intrinsic to my relationship with reading. It shapes what I choose to read, what I choose to write about, and where I choose to put my thoughts. But it has its downsides, and no more so than when I find myself thinking “oh, I won’t read that… it’s not relevant anymore”. Because… what if that doesn’t matter? What if I love the book anyway, despite the conversation being long past. Isn’t that worthwhile? It certainly used to be, when I’d read the things I wanted to read regardless of their date, simply because they were there, in front of me, and I wanted them.
Sometimes I think I should go back to that. Maybe my ironclad intention to read In the Watchful City is my subconscious telling me that I should. But I know, realistically, that I can’t. I’ll miss too much, both of the books I never read because of it, but all the conversations I’ll never have about those books.
And then I think, well, maybe I can read more? And theoretically, I could. But that too would come with a cost. Some of it would be quantifiable, in terms of hours spent, taken from sleep or other hobbies. If I read more, I play less Dragon Age, don’t go to longsword, don’t see that film, don’t knit that sock. But there’s the more nebulous cost, the one on my choices. If I truly wanted to read more of those books I’ll never read, I’d need to impose on myself a discipline I’ve never had to learn, to push through the urge to read whatever my soul is craving in the moment, and instead say “no, I know I do want to read this, even if not now… so sit down and do it”.
And even then, even then there would still, always be that pile of books I never get to. There are not enough hours in the day or pounds in my bank account for me to truly get to every book I could ever want to read. So instead, I see them pass by, and sometimes I mourn them as they go, for the favourites they might have been but never were. They are the price, paid for access to all these conversations, awareness of all these things that are out there now, available to me should I want them, all these people making wonderful things that might, just might, be for me if I wanted them. And in the end, however sad, they are a price worth paying.
*or playing – I adored being part of the Hades discussion while it was a big deal, so thank you once again Filip for getting me to download it while it was still in beta
Last week, I went on holiday! Specifically, on a reading holiday. From Friday to Monday, I was in a shepherd’s hut near Windermere, listening to the rain on the roof, snuggling under blankets, drinking my body weight in tea and, yes reading books. It was beautiful, relaxing, incredibly quiet and extremely picturesque – exactly what I was after. I also enjoyed the long train journeys up and back, because trains are amazing, and having a little wander around Windermere (the town, not the lake) itself.
I did also get quite a lot of reading done, as was the hope/plan. I went in without too many specifics on what I wanted to read, beyond what I took with me (too many things, way too many things) because this was supposed to be all about letting myself just… enjoy it. Read what I fancied. Put it down if I didn’t. Pick up something else. Listen to a book while doing some knitting. Staring out of the window like a heroine in a classic novel on a windswept moor. Y’know, the good stuff. And it was.
And these are the books I got through in the time:
The Queen of the High Fields by Rhiannon Grist
This is one of Luna Press’s run of novellas, which I’ve been interested in for a while now, and so it was good to have an excuse to get to one of them. This has a lot of interesting Welsh mythology themes, and a couple of really interesting main characters with a great and complex dynamic. It does a split narrative of past and present, told in short chapters, and somehow manages to feel as dense and substantial as a novel, despite being a tiny thing. This was a really enjoyable read, and it’s made me keen to look at the rest of what Luna have on offer, because if they’re as good as this? I need to get in there.
I also have to say I really love the simplicity of the cover design. It’s neat, fresh and instantly recognisable, and I think it’s doing an awful lot of work for something so simple.
2043… a Merman I Should Turn to Be (Black Stars #3) by Nisi Shawl, narrated by LeVar Burton
This one was an audio, because I had some knitting to get on with while I was up there, and I’m incapable of knitting without listening to/watching something at the same time. This turned out to be a great choice, because LeVar Burton is an absolutely amazing narrator – he’s got the range and variety to do the different character voices genuinely differently, and managed to really get the emotion into the story while having it still feel like an audiobook, not a radio play.
The story is also neat and tense and efficient – it’s really short and packs a tonne in, both of plot and emotion, and it reminded me of how well Nisi Shawl managed that emotional impact in the only other thing of hers I’ve read, Everfair. It does what I enjoy most in this sort of short fiction, presenting us a very brief snapshot of a world and time and people, and we pick up the details in hints and tidbits as we go, until we leave at the end with a surprising amount fleshed out for how briefly we inhabited the story.
Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee
This is an arc, so the book isn’t out until the 11th of April, and honestly, I may buy a copy when we reach that point. I enjoyed Jade City, so was pretty optimistic about how Fonda Lee was going to do here, but honestly, I think I enjoyed this even more.
It’s the story of a girl working at the royal mews, whose job is to train and handle rocs, and use them in the service of her king to kill the manticores that plague the countryside, with which she has her own painful history. It’s beautiful, emotional and manages to be both simple and complex at the same time – it weaves in some great relationships between the main character, Esther, and the people around her, particularly two other roc handlers with whom she is close, and how those relationships change over time, and respond to great upheavals. If I have one criticism, it’s that what foreshadowing there is in the book is sometimes more heavy-handed than I feel the severity of the incident it refers to warrants, but it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of the book. Everything else is wonderful, and the world she evokes is vivid, immediate and interesting, while still being very much the background to the more emotional and character focussed heart of the story. I flew through reading this on the train, and could happily devour another in the same world or with the same characters with joy.
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
One of the books I’ve been looking forward to for months, this did not let me down at all. I loved Tesh’s Silver in the Wood/Drowned Country duology, and was super interested to see how she’d go from historical queer magical folklore-y mystery to intergalactic space drama (also queer). Turns out, yes, it’s totally different from what she’s done previously, but the gorgeous writing has continued and the switch from novella to novel has been a massive boon.
Some Desperate Glory is the story of a woman growing up on the last hold-out of human civilisation in a universe where a powerful alien federation has destroyed the earth. The station on which Kyr is raised makes sure its children know their duty – to fight, always to fight, and make their enemies fear them still, few as they are. But, as the title implies, there’s a little more to what’s going on in the world than Kyr knows, and so we move with her as she learns that the simple truths of childhood don’t always apply to the universe we grow into as adults. It’s a novel very interested in growth, in making mistakes, in change and in the complexity of interspecies morality and warfare. It’s also a novel where I found myself genuinely surprised how much I was rooting for characters who seemed intensely unlikeable, and which gave me a lot of reason to keep with them, and to watch them begin to learn their mistakes, and begin to grow and change.
It was an absolute five star read for me, and contains some plot choices and structural decisions that were a little outside the norm – none of the things I could think to compare them to were novels at all. It’s not a fun read, and not a light one, but I think it’s a deeply rewarding one if you go into it wanting moral greys and people fucking up and maybe realising they’ve fucked up, and trying to figure out what to do now. It is, more than anything else, a novel that really, really lives up to its title.
The Garden (Into Shadow #1) by Tomi Champion Adeyemi
This is the first in a series of Amazon shorts by various authors – many of whom I adore the work of. As it happens, the only thing of Tomi Champion-Adeyemi’s I’ve read before is Children of Blood and Bone which I… did not get on with. Partly this is because I often just don’t get on with YA, but also specifically in this case because I found some of the execution a bit eh, and a lot of it, outside of the setting, was quite trad YA plot and characters and plot beats, with a side order of (as a friend pointed out) being alarmingly close to the events of Avatar the Last Airbender in parts.
The Garden could have been written by an entirely different author. It’s magical realism in tone, following a woman on a trip to Brazil inspired by the contents of a journal belonging to her mother, and the conversations she has with her guide along the way, digging into his and her own beliefs about the world and the supernatural, and what she’ll find when she reaches the mysterious garden she’s searching for. It’s told in a mixture of prose and poem, and really puts you into Lęina’s strange perspective, showing you a world fracturing into greater strangeness as she follows her journey onwards. Almost all of the story is in the conversations she has with Angelo, her guide, or just with herself, and so it feels incredibly intimate, and was well suited to the audio version I listened to.
The exterior of my little hut away from home – it really was tiny
Godkiller by Hannah Kaner
I read this in part because it’s been getting a lot of buzz since the beginning of the year, and in part because I got it in my illumicrate box, so I figured I may as well. As is often the case with these things, it did not live up to the hype at all.
We follow the titular godkiller, Kissen, in her royally endorsed duties to root out gods in her country and help stamp out their worship. We also follow a little girl mysteriously bound to a small godling, and a man who once served the king as a knight. Their stories intertwine and they end up together on a journey to a desolate city, once home to many shrines, before they were all destroyed in a war not so long ago. There are bumps along the way, and of course the characters, who mistrust each other at first, learn more about each other and to get along, and maybe become more than just companions of necessity.
In many ways, it’s just another quest narrative, like a million we’ve seen before and will see again. What makes it stand out from the crowd is its disability rep – the main character has a prosthetic limb, and we also see a deaf character and several who use sign language. These parts are worked well into the narrative and into the construction of those characters and how they interact with each other and the world. Unfortunately, this is all let down by *checks notes* literally everything else about the story. The writing is dull and uninspired, likewise the world building, and there are parts of it that simply do not bear up under scrutiny. Things happen which just… don’t make sense at all, based on the information we’re given. The characters are also flat and charmless, and so even by the end of the book I neither liked nor disliked them, because there simply wasn’t enough personality worked into the story for me to respond to them emotionally. Given that one of them is a sad, honourable knight with a sword and an enormous sense of duty, this is… impressive. I honestly struggle to see why this has got all the buzz it has, because it’s just a rather poorly written book.
Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne
This was another disappointment. I had rather enjoyed reading Legends and Lattes, the inception point of the current trend for cosy fantasy, and had seen this billed as filling the same niche. Unfortunately, while it does aim for the same vibe, it fails to have the writing, pacing, character-creation or prose to keep up with Baldree (which, for all its charm, is hardly the epitome of perfect craft either). The soul of the book is in many ways a carbon copy of Legends and Lattes, but it’s a much bigger book, and most of that extra space is just… filler.
I’m aware that the appeal of cosy fantasy is, to some extent, there are low stakes and not much happens. But there’s a limit, and this really pushes it. For me, a lot of the issue is the central romantic relationship. It predates the start of the book, so we see a stable couple remaining a stable couple throughout the story – which would be fine, if we got to see that couple responding to story events, and those events having an effect on their relationship, or giving an opportunity to showcase how that relationship works. But instead, it feels like the core romance here is just in a holding pattern throughout the story, despite some fairly un-low-stakes events happening to both parties at various points. The two protagonists – both of whom have viewpoint chapters – also just lack the charm and personality that Viv, L&L‘s protagonist, manages to push out onto the page, and so much of what we get from them just falls flat.
There’s a lot of not a lot going on throughout the story, and I left it feeling like this could have been edited into a tauter, snappier book that might have worked a lot better.
Ultimately, if you’re already read L&L, this will be a let down, and if you haven’t read L&L, you should just go read that instead for the same experience but… better.
Persephone (Into Shadow #2) by Lev Grossman
Following on from The Garden, Lev Grossman’s contribution to Into Shadow is a little disappointing. Where Champion-Adeyemi was playing with prose and poetry and an interesting character study, Grossman’s Persephone is far more a typical urban fantasy sort of vibe. It’s a perfectly fine example of one, but I feel like it was let down a lot by the form, simply because, for me, much of the appeal of an urban fantasy type narrative comes from exploring a world that lies within or alongside or under our own, and the juxtapositions and contrasts or ideas you get thrown out of the two together. When you have so little space as this – I think they’re all novelettes, though it’s been near-impossible to actually check that – you cut the reader off from a lot of the time spent in that world and discovering it, and so you just don’t give them the opportunity to love it in the way a full length novel might.
Aside from that – and in some ways that’s a good aside as I was left wanting to know more about the world – it’s well done. There’s a mystery at the core of the story, and how it develops is very well paced. It also has that spareness and economy that allows a short form story to really do a lot in its little space, and a lot of implication that relies on the reader making jumps of intuition or logic to try to figure things out. I finished it thinking “oh I wonder” and “does that mean…” and “so did she just…”, and those questions lingered with me after, which for me is a sign of a story well told. That said, I think it would have been much better told in a full length novel, so it ended up being relatively middling for me over all.
The Six Deaths of the Saint (Into Shadow #3) by Alix E. Harrow
By contrast, The Six Deaths of the Saint was a phenomenal story, and one that took its size and form and used them to make itself better, not less. It is exactly what it needs to be and no more, and manages to pack a huge emotional punch for its very short size.
It follows a poor girl, young and ill, who sees a vision of a saint and is led to follow her prince, to fight and to kill. And then it becomes something… else.
It’s also one where sharing almost anything about the story would ruin the sheer delight of it, so I’m going to leave it there, and end with an exhortation that you should read it because it is simply beautiful. Given that I have thus far not really enjoyed much of anything of Harrow’s that I’ve read, I hope this is taken with the enthusiasm it deserves.
I also started listening to, but have not yet finished, Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse and picked up briefly Lote by Shola von Reinhold, which I think I’ll read pretty soon as the little I read of it really grabbed me.
And that was me done with my holiday! I’ve still got a lot of reading to get through soon, especially because I’m on the jury for this year’s Subjective Chaos Kind of Awards, which I am incredibly excited about. I’m reading in novella, fantasy and short story, but honestly, all of the short lists are packed with some really interesting stuff, so I suspect I’ll be dipping my toe into the other categories too, just for my own amusement.
Nebula and Hugo season are also just getting started, and I’m amused to see there’s only the one novel on the Nebula shortlist I have yet to read, so I’ll need to get that under my belt soon too. A busy spring lies ahead – I can’t wait!
The view on my way up the winding lane to the shepherd’s hut, and the only clear sky day of my whole trip
I may or may not be susceptible to advertising, and doubly so to the sort selling me on receiving monthly mystery parcels. As such, I’m now signed up to both illumicrate and Fairyloot. Yes, yes, I’m a sucker. This self-analysis is not being helped by my opinions on December’s Fairyloot book (and my first), which feels as though it has been designed to personally aggravate me.
We’ll get to the more substantive critique in a minute, but I want to start off with something that will be entirely irrelevant to most readers, but was intensely annoying for me – it got my university wrong. Frequently. The protagonist is a female scholar – a professor, in fact – in Cambridge in 1909. Cambridge did not begin to award women degrees until 1948. When they did try to change the rules, for instance in 1921, there were riots*. It was not an uncontroversial situation.
Based on some other choices in the book (queernorm universe), I am reasonably sure the author has intended this as a deliberate choice, making the world of 1909 just… a better place than it really was, to give herself the space to write the story she wants to write, without having to put in a load of homophobia and misogyny. I’m… not a fan of this approach. It is, among other things, my abiding criticism of most works in the steampunk and adjacent genres. There’s an episode of Star Trek: DS9 in which Sisko, asked as a black man to play dress-up in a sanitised version of 1960s Las Vegas, sums it up nicely: “We cannot ignore the truth about the past.“**. I think by writing a version of the past in which everyone gets to be happy, as they could not in truth, you erase the very real problems, and the struggles of the people who lived them, just so you can enjoy an aesthetic, and that doesn’t sit right with me. Knowing what I know about women in that university at that time… I deeply dislike that we’re given a happy nice version in which those problems just… never happened.
I know other people have a different take on this, and the argument that the people who were excluded at the time can enjoy reclaiming what they ought to have had access to in the first place is a perfectly reasonable one… just not one that works for me. It niggles, in the process of reading.
To add to this… there are some more minor incorrect bits and bobs:
I’m reasonably sure the author uses “professor” in the American sense, not the British one
Every time she talks about a geographical feature or location in or around Cambridge, it just sounds totally incorrect
The protagonist has a BSc… when everyone at Cam gets a BA
The university seems to have a modern US tenure track system
It is considered in some way weird or shocking that someone was there not on merit… vs the entire historical Oxbridge situation
We don’t have quads. That might be an Oxford thing or it might be an American thing, I’m not sure.
Despite mentioning Cambridge approximately one gazillion times throughout the course of the novel… the author never once mentions a Cambridge college.
That last one took me a while to figure out it was what was bugging me, but once I realised, it was glaringly obvious. If I ever meet someone else who went to Oxbridge, pretty much the first question out of my/their mouth is “oh, which college?”. It’s just… it’s such a default. So to go through a whole novel about a character who has such fond and constant feelings about Cambridge, and for her to never mention her own college, nor her friend/rival/person’s college, or even if they’re at the same one, is deeply bizarre.
Of course, none of this matters to most readers. It is, for the most part, irrelevant. But when you read something you know a bit about and you see it being got wrong on a fundamental level… it’s very hard to let go.
Luckily, the book was bad in other ways, so I can gripe about those as well.
The story follows Professor Emily Wilde, a dryadologist, on fieldwork out in Ljosland*** to uncover details of a particular type of faery for her great work – the first real encyclopaedia of all faeries. While out there, she is, to her disgruntlement, joined by her annoyingly charming and handsome friend and academic rival, Wendell Bambleby.
Yes, you read that right, Wendell Bambleby. No, I never got over it. I’m still not over it****.
Together, they investigate the mysterious local faeries, as well as getting drawn into the faery-related problems experienced by the villagers. I suppose this is technically a spoiler, but since I considered it glaringly obvious from the blurb, you can cope – Emily and Wendell also fall in love.
Which is… it’s fine. It’s not stunningly original or anything, but it could still be some fun fluff done well.
Alas, it was not.
The story is written as, for the most part, diary entries by Emily… which is fine at the start, but as events go a bit pear-shaped, it begins to strain credulity somewhat that she/whoever would be writing them when the entries claim to be from. The prose style also strays very quickly away from even vaguely plausibly her writing a diary to something that feels much closer to a more normal 1st person narration voice. I would, quite frequently, forget it was a diary format until I hit a new chapter with the date at the top of it. This feels a shame… I like fun formats, and if you’re doing one, you should actually embrace it.
This then highlights how shallowly the characters feel drawn. If the diary format had been fully realised, this could quite easily be handwaved away as being stuck insider her head and only getting her view. But it isn’t, and quite frankly, even she, our first person narrator telling us her actual thoughts, feels distant and hard to grasp. She just lacks substance. The side characters never stood a chance.
The plot, too, is a bit thin on the ground. Events hang together by tenuous threads, often of motivation that we simply do not see spelled out in how people behave. People behave unexpectedly, and things just sort of… happen.
And then… well there’s the whole premise really. Emily is a scholar in 1909 doing fieldwork. One of the few bits of genuine historical accuracy that remains in the book is the entitlement obvious in Emily’s attitude towards the people who form the basis of her study. I am… not certain if this is deliberate, on the author’s part. She goes in, despite claiming to have done extensive fieldwork before, and proceeds to just assume the world always follows the rules she knows at home, and being utterly baffled that other people in other cultures… have different mores. And even when she notices that she’s offended someone, someone she needs on her side to get her work done, she doesn’t ask what it is she’s done, not even the friendly young boy who seems to think she’s great for reasons unclear to me. It is only when Wendell turns up to be charming at everyone/thing and points out to her that people… are people… that she manages to make friends*****. And while, yes, this feels like absolutely the sort of attitude an English scholar in 1909 would have, why, when you’re doing queernorm, gender equalitarian past, did you have to leave that in? Why am I meant to be sympathetic to someone who is trampling all over other cultures like that? Because I’m not. I in fact immediately started messaging a friend who did anthropology fieldwork to grumble about it.
Between the lack of substance and the terrible choices, I found it very hard to get on Emily’s side, and it’s a book that really does need that sympathy to get you through.
The world-building is also a little odd. We’re in a fake Scandi island, but the protagonist has come from a real place. But she’s also done research in a made-up southern European country. It feels like the world-building has been done very much on the fly, and, if I’m being rude, just to get around having to do any research for points where the author didn’t feel she knew enough just to go for it. Honestly, if she’d gone the full Lady Trent and made up a fake country that was totally England, we all knew that, but it was a silly made up name, with a silly made up university, it wouldn’t have bugged me half as much because, well, it doesn’t have to be accurate. It’s made up. But I feel like if you make choices that encompass real world stuff, you have to at least get it a little bit right. Make it so people don’t notice right off the bat. But this half-in, half-out approach doesn’t manage to give you the wins of either side, and leaves it all feeling an unplanned mess, rather than a coherent, thought out thing.
That being said, there are some good points. For all its lack of commitment to the framing device, the writing is very easy to get into, and it’s a very fast, pacy read that I got through in a single day. Despite the characters, and some of the events, the romance part manages to be kind of compelling. Mostly, this is because Wendell is, at times, very funny. You can see why someone would both like and want to smack him, in those moments where he gets some actual character development. But none of this makes up for the sheer annoyance I felt reading it all.
I don’t hate it. I dithered between giving it 2 and 3 stars. It’s not that bad. It’s just also… not very good. And it’s trying to do the sort of cosy, romantic fantasy that there’s plenty of around right now, so it’s not even like you have to stick with it for lack of options. If you want what this is giving, I’d say go read A Marvellous Light or Half a Soul instead, both of which do magical historical romance, and both of which are just much better written, and have much fewer glaring lacks of research to smack you in the face while reading.
EDITED TO ADD: in a somwhat damning indictment of the book, in writing all of this, I got carried away and forgot to add that it also has some incredibly basic, but nontheless entirely incorrect, Latin in it and guys, you can get people to check that. Just find one (1) person who knows what a noun case is! Please!
*There is a photo, in fact, that I have seen several times (but cannot seem to find online), of mostly male students gathered protesting outside the gate in the Pfeiffer Arch of Newnham College back when this was all happening. In that photo, I can see the room I lived in in my third year. In any case, it was a Whole Thing. **It’s S7E15, “Badda-bing, Badda-bang”. I believe by the end of the episode, Sisko actually comes around to enjoying the holosuite program, but I personally didn’t like how that all went. Sisko at the start of the episode was right. ***Which appears to be a fake Scandi island, using the name of a real town in Norway. ****Wendell Bambleby, despite having what I can only consider a parodically English name, is actually Irish. There is precisely zero acknowledgement at any point in the text that there might, maybe, just slightly, be some Anglo-Irish tensions in 1909. *****Which is not to say Wendell is perfect – he’s just as bad as her, except that he notices it, and is willing to try to get his way by being charming and manipulative, rather than obtuse. That might actually be worse.
I realised, a while ago, that almost none of the books I had read with gay male protagonists/major characters was written by men (gay or otherwise)*. Given that in the other direction, I’d be a bit wary of books about lesbians written by men, so maybe I should keep an eye out for something to redress the balance. A friend recommended A Taste of Honey some months back, and, after an amount of Waterstones shenanigans, it finally arrived in time to be one of my first reads of 2023.
I’ll come back to why it’s a great book in a second, but what it did do, critically, is solidify for me something – it’s not that people who aren’t men necessarily write gay men in an off way, or not particularly in the books I had read, but instead that penises are just inherently ridiculousto me. It is very hard to write a serious sex scene that reads as beautiful and meaningful and everything and then drop a verb like “throbbing” or “pulsing” into the mix. Are there any good euphemisms for dick? Not that I’m seeing! All oblique ways of referring to the male orgasm? Terrible! “Gushing” is a horrible verb**.
Basically, I’m fundamentally incapable as a human being of not snickering quietly to myself about dicks. So I’ve learnt something about myself, I guess***.
Anyway, personal epiphany aside… this book was great.
We follow Aqib, a distant cousin in the royal family of Olorum, as he meets a handsome visiting soldier from Daluça, and falls for him despite the hopes his siblings and father pin on him marrying well within Olorum to further their own standing (and indeed the somewhat less than accepting mores of his homeland). He falls quickly and hopelessly for Lucrio, and we see his life in snapshots of the ten days Lucrio remains in Olorum, and what comes after.
The structure is lovely, and doesn’t feel the need for any sort of perfect symmetry or pattern of exactly when we get each bit. Information and timelines flow as the story requires, and nothing is given that isn’t beautiful or some way important to the telling. For so short a book – it’s only a novella – it crams a lot of chronology in, mainly by way of each section being a very brief snapshot in time. It’s a moment of meaning or import for the characters, we see it, we move on to the next.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t linger on them as people. Aqib is a thoughtful and reflective viewpoint character, and we’re well situated in his mindset (both good and bad). We see how beautiful he sees Lucrio to be, how beautiful he considers his homeland, but we also see his dismissive view of “menials”, as he calls the non-royals he encounters, and his very particular views on his own worth (or lack of it). He’s a very plausible royal character, unthinkingly superior when it comes to those he has the power to order around, but at the same time, someone with a lot of insecurities about their own place in the world, their own value, when comparing himself to the other people within his sphere. He is particularly aware that he’s not any sort of warrior, and finds himself wanting for that, despite us seeing him in so many areas where he does excel.
He’s also someone coming to terms with their own naivety around sexuality, though that gets much less exploration.
The world is a well-built one too, with elements of history sitting happily alongside total fantasy – the Daluçans are patently pseudo-Romans****… but they bring their gods along with them in their state visit, in a very literal sense. The gods are a point of interesting development only lightly touched upon throughout the story, and one I might very well read the other novella set in the same world to try to get more info on. I’m not dissatisfied with the amount we get given in this, as it’s perfect for what it needs to achieve (and I think a heavier touch might have ruined some of the magic and mystery the story has), but it’s well enough done that I’m curious about other details. The author isn’t afraid to leave us to figure the details out for ourselves, which I also appreciated.
What really stands out, though, is the prose. And especially the voice of characters talking. Our book club questions include one that asks if the characters speak with their own unique voices, or that of the author, and for this, there’s a resoundingly clear answer. Aqib’s voice is lyrical and wry and charming, and clearly speaks of a wider thought that’s gone into who he might be in the world he inhabits. Though we have less of him, as a non-viewpoint character, Lucrio likewise speaks as someone who lived his life might, and both of them have bilingualism as an important point in how they communicate and how they relate to one another. It’s not something particularly forefronted in the story, but it’s always something I appreciate in pseudo-historical settings just for how common having to deal with at least bits of multiple languages was in the ancient world, especially for educated or trading classes. It’s just… it’s nice when people highlight that. It pleases me.
In short, I loved it. The prose is what I think will stick with me, but the structure, the twist (it’s a really good twist) and just the vibes of the world too were well worth the time. I love the way the gods are introduced to us, and how the world-building continues to surprise throughout. I love that our protagonist is both likeable and flawed, and there’s an assumption we’ll keep both of those in mind throughout, without having to come up with a way to excuse his less good traits. I will absolutely read Sorceror of the Wildeeps, the other novella in this setting, when I’ve cleared a bit of my tbr.
*Exceptions I could think of – The Tarot Sequence by K.D. Edwards, which I enjoyed a lot, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune, which I… did not. **That one’s not in this book, I hasten to add. ***On an actually serious note, I’m sure there are books out there with gay characters written by women that aren’t good, or are purely meant to titillate a female audience or that reduce the characters to stereotypes or just fundamentally Do Not Get It. I don’t think the ones I’ve read are particularly like that, though I’m hardly the best audience to judge. This is more just me realising that I’m an incredibly childish person and I have to account for that when trying to judge this in future. ****THERE WAS A CATULLUS REFERENCE
There are a lot of Greek myth retellings floating around now. And not just Greek myth retellings, but feminist ones specifically. In many ways, I am the targetest of target markets for the subgenre, and I have to admit, even I am getting a bit bored of it. The feminism is often the blandest possible iteration, and the myth retelling is rarely doing much original or reinventive work with the material*. I’m at the point now, where, when I reflect on one of these, my first question to myself is “what does this particular one do to justify its existence?” What does this new thing bring to the table that hasn’t already been done and done and done again? So for instance, Wrath Goddess Sing‘s thesis of a transwoman Achilles is a totally new (to me) lens on the story, through which much of the rest of the world and characters are reimagined – it’s doing something genuinely interesting with the material, and doing it well. And the justification can just be that – “this one is actually really fucking good” – it doesn’t all have to be new and shiny. But there are so many now, another mediocre, milquetoast feminist straight take feels… irrelevant at best**.
With that in mind, what about Ithaca justifies itself?
Well, it’s fucking funny, for a start. There’s a tragic absence, Natalie Haynes aside, of Greek myth retellings with swears, sex jokes and the ability to laugh at oneself, and Claire North is having a good go at filling that gap. Out loud cackling definitely occurred while reading.
But it’s not just funny. The prose is absolutely A+, I’d argue up there with Madeline Miller at the points North chooses to wax poetic. The characters are well-drawn, grounded and extremely emotive. The narrative voice is unexpected – Hera as the storyteller is a new one for me – and unexpectedly sympathetic. We’re filling a mythical gap, telling the story of the absence in the story, the pause for breath before the big drama of Odysseus’ homecoming, and that gap gives a greater scope for originality which is well used.
Above all, though, what it does, surprisingly for the content, is make its feminism incidental. And that’s fantastic.
I – we, none of us (I hope) – need to be hit about the head again with the ol’ “did you know, women in the ancient world were fully functioning human beings who could have thoughts, dreams, feelings and desires?”, tag-teaming “did you know, women in the past were terribly oppressed?”. I’m not saying both aren’t true, because they absolutely are, but if you’re reading feminist myth retellings… you get it. Or you’re never going to get it. It’s so often just entry-level shit like this and I’m just so tired. We deserve more than this. The readers can take nuance. The readers can manage a point more complex than “women also people *gasp*”. One way you solve this is by writing something with an actually nuanced take (Bright Air Black by David Vann, for instance). The other way, which is what North has done, is to make the feminism just… not the point. It’s there, of course it’s there, but it’s the axiom, not the problem. We’re coming into the story all sharing the same assumptions of women being fully functional, intellectual-capability-having people who are oppressed within a patriarchal society, cool, we’re all on board there? Great, now let’s get on with the actual story. And because we don’t have to spend page time on the head-whacking of entry level points and patronising the reader’s own intelligence, there’s more page left for… well, for the story.
Oh right, yeah, the story. I should actually talk about that.
Ithaca takes place in… well… Ithaca, towards the end of Odysseus’ time on Ogygia with Calypso. It follows Penelope as she struggles to balance the presence of the suitors in her palace, the growing distance between herself and her son, the threat of pirates raiding their coastal villages, and the general problem of being in charge while also being female. We know a little of this time/place from the Odyssey itself – we know about the suitors, the shroud Penelope weaves and unpicks, and her good and wifely devotion to waiting for Odysseus to return and retake the mantle of kingship. What we don’t know from the Iliad is, of course, the nitty-gritty daily grind of keeping the little fishy island from collapsing in on itself. And that’s what we get, more or less, with a side order of some wider politicking that comes up a bit later in the story.
And Penelope is a really great character to pick for this sort of story, precisely because of what we do/do not know about her from myth. What we do know? She’s meant to be devoted, smart, a match for Odysseus, and perfectly capable of tricking all the suitors for years with her weaving ruse, as well as just being a Very Good Wife. She’s the pattern for what the wife of a Homeric king ought to be like, especially when contrasted with Helen or Clytemnestra***. But that leaves a gap, as all the Homeric epic does, of the daily life, the detail, and the intricacies of the person beyond their mythic role. What does being a dutiful wife mean? How does that resolve, day to day? How does that feel, to the person performing duty? And it is in this space that the novel exists. We get to see the work required to keep Ithaca together during the long – oh so long – absence of its current king and the youth of its future king, the desperate politicking and trading and juggling of needs. But we also get to see the reality of a relatively small island in the aftermath of a nation-encompassing war. Simply, there are almost no young men, save those who could not go to war. It is a kingdom with almost no one trained in the art of war to defend it. It is a kingdom of old men, of teenage boys and of women, and women without quite the level of male control in their lives than might have existed in other times. And so it is, primarily, a story of women simply because they are who we have. The grand underpinning thesis behind its female focus is simply necessity – the women are who are left doing the work, and so they are the actors of our story.
And Penelope is aware of this fragile situation, and knows that to succeed, amid the old men and the boys and the egos and the full awareness that these men were the ones who were left behind, she cannot be like her cousin Clytemnestra – a comparison that crops up again and again in the book – she cannot choose to take on the mantle of kingship herself and rule as her husband might. Instead, she has to be… twisty. Sneaky. Subtle. And occasionally be dramatically overcome with womanly emotion at an opportune moment to get the right effect. She has to weaponise her femininity to get what she knows Ithaca needs to survive.
I find this sort of take often more pleasing than the ones where a woman goes “fuck it” and acts outside the boundaries her society put on her. Those can be dramatically cathartic, but I always read them knowing there will be consequences for the heroine. These ones feel… I don’t want to say “more realistic” because it’s all myth, when you get down to it, but you know what I mean. I like seeing someone manipulate the context they’re in to make it work to their advantage. And this is what we get from Penelope.
And it becomes something of a thesis on queenship by the end. Because our narrator is Hera, and queens are her dominion in the world, we get her ongoing thinking about her queens in Greece – Helen, Clytemnestra and Penelope – and their differing approaches, and how they succeed and fail in their queenship. It’s a very thoughtful take – in a generally rather thoughtful book – and one I appreciated not least because it gives us a real character insight into such an often sidelined goddess. I have to admit, she’s never been one of my favourites, but North has managed to give her such a voice, such a depth of emotion towards her small demesne, that I found myself sympathetic to her in short order, much to my surprise. And, like Penelope, Hera in Ithaca has to manage power struggles around her, has to be the one who bends, who sneaks, who gets things down by bargain and co-operation, against a contrast of Athena and Artemis, whose own brands of femininity are rather different.
Which rather feels like it undermines my point about sidelining/incidentalising the feminism of the book, but I don’t think it does. I think it is a book very interested in femininity in the ancient world, rather than one interested directly in feminism. It’s observational and thoughtful and sometimes desperately sad, and it comes with a basic assumption that of course the women of Ancient Greek myth were perfectly competent, but it lacks the driving thesis, and centralising of that feminism that I think is present in many other of these stories, and is all the better for it because it’s giving us something different.
And so, I genuinely loved Ithaca. Like its protagonist, it is quietly, thoughtfully and interestingly doing something in a space left by those around it, unexplored. It has moments of wonderful humour, cutting sadness and genuine human emotion, and it trusts that the reader has the sense to take them as they come, rather than feeling the need to explain itself heavy-handedly at all turns. It gave me unexpected appreciation for characters I never felt for before. It centres the experience of Penelope as a queen, a mother and a woman, and really thinks about what that would mean in an ancient setting. And I appreciate it deeply for all of that.
I’ll be pre-ordering the sequel and looking forward to it with… an amount of bittersweetness, because we come to know and like the characters of the maids in Ithaca and… well, I know what’s coming. But if Ithaca is anything to go by, the inevitable heartbreak of House of Odysseus will be well worth it.
*I’m sorry but I still think Circe sucks **Does it stop me reading them? Not as much as it probably should, if I’m honest. ***Insert elaborate but rather grasping thesis on how she presents a perfect balance between Helen’s “too womanly” nature and Clytemnestra’s “too manly” and what this says about Ancient Greek poets’ opinions.
A Reader of Else 