Dave

There’s something about the way this book opens that punches you in the gut right away. The care and attention given to each scene in visceral detail reaches out and refuses to let you go, which isn’t something most books can accomplish.

If this book is anything, it’s dripping with intent. Don’t be afraid of the heady messages and themes that are buried in here about trauma, love, self-worth and how people who are different are forced to navigate a world that often makes no sense to them.

If you know Alex from the Constellis Voss books, it helps, but you don’t need to have read the previous books to be immersed. Alex is a complicated character who just wants the surrounding people to be happy after growing up a subject of abuse, neglect and forced into a life of sex trafficking and crime. Alex’s struggle with identity is never internal, it’s almost always external. While Alex understands he’s a boy, it’s everyone else insisting on treating him differently, be it like a girl or placating him by calling him a boy, but treating him differently.

When Alex can finally make friends is when things get complicated. At that point, Alex has already morphed into an assassin, hell bent on destroying his captor and boss, Boris, and is convinced not just that he’s a bad person, but an irredeemable villain that doesn’t deserve love and affection. While love is a central theme, don’t confuse it with romance. There is some romantic love at parts of Alex’s life, but it all gets jumbled up in his head while he’s fighting his fracture psyche and trying to literally push Boris’s deadly bullet leveled at him out of his head and prevent his own death.

Most of the book is Alex experiencing and fighting for these memories. The ones he doesn’t want seem to be the strongest, while the ones he wants to hold on to and cherish are the ones being wiped out by the bullet that’s coursing through his mind. Because there are always those people in life that want to control, to take all the accumulated good and block it out to maintain that control. Whether Alex realizes it or not, Alex isn’t the villain, nor is he only the summation of the things he was forced to do (mainly fuck and kill), but is a person with a lot to give and built up a community of people initially to help reach his end goal of destroying Boris, only for that to become something much more.

The book’s climax was masterfully built to, and not at all expected. Because this isn’t a story about revenge, fucking and killing. It’s a book about finding the people who love you, accept you for who you are and will accept all the messy bits that come with these relationships.

Getting to know, and I mean really know, some of these characters is also a treat, and helps add more context to the other books. Getting to see prime Alex interacting with all of them and forging these bonds that will carry forth into the future is really something.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those books that really has some moments that are hard to shake. Some of the stuff Manny goes through is tough to read, as he's a well-written, rounded character you grow to care about in short order.

Following a queer boy on the run from his religious upbringing and coping with a transient life that's full of compromises no one should have to make. The writing is fluid and smooth, to the point where you almost forget you're reading about some pretty horrific stuff.

I enjoyed this one. The shift near the end was something, although it did feel sort of abrupt, but overall, this was a book worth checking out.

For hyped up novels, it's difficult for them to deliver. It's never really the fault of the novel or the novelist. People fall in love with something because it perfectly aligns to their tastes, then they become a loud public advocate for it and it snowballs from there.

Needless to say, my expectations going into this one were, “this will be fine, I guess.” It was a lot better than fine. It was really good.

This is one of those novels that covers a long period of time, focusing on the relationships between two characters, Sadie and Sam. There is a third character, Marx, who's in the mix, but Marx is more, in his own words, an NPC of sorts. He's there as the muse and support for both characters, sometimes more, sometimes less, but a pivotal part of their lives.

Sadie met Sam when her sister was in the hospital with leukemia. A nurse saw her, bored in a waiting room daily, and pointed her towards a playroom set up for the kids, where she met Sam, an odd boy who was playing Super Mario Bros. It turned out Sam hadn't spoken to anyone in weeks after getting in a horrific car accident that mangled his foot and killed his mother. There was just something about Sadie and Sam that worked.

So, when they met up again years later in Boston while they were both in different colleges, Sadie handed off a student project videogame she was working on led to Sam and his roommate, Marx, playing it and finding it amazing. A bulk of the novel focuses on the creative relationship that ensues between the three, with Sadie and Sam creating a super popular, mildly artistic game, while Marx helped manage operations, which blossomed into them forming a game studio, developing more games together, and having the friction that creative partners always run into.

There was never a romantic relationship between Sadie and Sam, something they both mull over numerous times in their lives, but realize they're already partners even when they are furious at each other, coping with the loss of a shared loved one, and dealing with all of life's complications. There are parts that are heartbreaking and prescient. What happens to Marx is... well, I wasn't quite sure if it was necessary, but it served its purpose, I suppose.

I enjoyed that it showed a realistic creative relationship without feeling the need to dip into a basic love triangle kind of thing. Creative relationships are real, different, and can be intense. Sometimes that's enough of a story worth exploring, and this one was.

There's always that sense of excitement when Silvia Moreno-Garcia has a new book coming out. In part, it's because you know you're in for something that has her signature style, but will not be retreading on territory covered in previous books. For the most part.

Silver Nitrate is a marvelous supernatural book set in Mexico in the 80s, focusing on their film and television industry. We follow Montserrat, an audio editor for a local film house, and Tristan, a disgraced telenovela star who's scarred up face has him doing voiceover work instead of being the leading man he was. Their shared love of campy horror flicks and a chance encounter with a retired local horror director, Abel, leads them down a dark path of helping him complete one of his lost films that's kept on rare (and volatile) silver nitrate stock.

Of course, Abel was working on the film with a former Nazi occultist who'd embedded spells in the film, and his untimely death left the spell chain broken, which Abel felt led to the end of his career and a string of bad luck. When Montserrat and Tristan promise to help finish by providing voiceover for the film and help complete the spells, their luck changes for a brief period before, well... as one of Abel's former friends Jose puts it, they set off a magical nuclear bomb and played right into that Nazi's hands of looking for immortality.

There's a lot of love put into this novel, with a focus on old horror flicks and Mexico's film scene and tons of occult stuff. Lots of research went into making sure everything felt right, and it shows. Much like Velvet Was the Night, this book is dripping with style, tension and is a joy to read. I found myself not reading too much at a time for the explicit purpose of not wanting to finish it too quickly, which is always a good sign.

Moreno-Garcia has a rare talent for making immensely readable books that still pack deep thematic elements for those willing to look beyond the well-crafted plots.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

A book with strong themes, is well-written and is the kind of book that I'd wish more publishers were putting out.

There's no hand-waving away racism, or “solving” it. The book bounces between two POVs; Ella, an unwanted black girl, and Ms. St. James, a well-off white woman doing research on civil rights. An enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

This is one of those books that I know I'll be reading multiple times and that leaving a conventional “review” for won't be possible.

The Passenger is presented through two different, alternating vantage points. First is through the hallucinations of Alicia, a certified genius in math, violins and a great deal of theoretical things. The other is Bobby Western, the brother of Alicia and, while smart in his own right, could never quite live up to his little sister. That didn't matter to him, though, because he loved his little sister. When I say loved, I don't mean sibling-wise; I mean... yeah. There are vague allusions to a quasi wedding ceremony, malformed babies and the hurt his family suffered because of all of this.

If this was the path of inciting incidents that led to Alicia checking herself into therapy, where she received shock treatments and hallucinated the Thalidomide Kid, almost described like a penguin, who would interrogate Alicia, berate her, and bring about a cast of crude “entertainers” to keep her company.

Bobby sees the Thalidomide Kid once when he closed himself up in a shack by the beach.

If you want to, you could read deeper into a lot of this, including McCarthy's use of language and his own reading into the Kekule Problem. McCarthy isn't a normal guy. He's one of the most acclaimed American authors and he can waltz into the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank where he's spent a lot of his recent years pondering language, mathematics and philosophy. This book is well researched, delving into complex mathematic theories, other times the Kennedy Assassination or the history of the atomic bombs. Western's dad was one of the creators of the atomic bomb, and his papers were stolen while Bobby was “away” after an accident.

It's understanding these things that helps to unravel what this book is. There's a plane crash at the beginning and Bobby is a salvage diver, working with a motley crew of rejects to take whatever job comes their way. One of those jobs is this crash, and there's a missing body, black box and no sign of forced entry. After this, things just seem to keep getting more complicated and worse.

We learn Bobby found a small fortune in vintage coins stuffed into pipes in the concrete foundation of his grandparents' old home. Alicia and he split that fortune, with Alicia buying a very expensive violin with her half, and Bobby buying a sports car and trotting around the globe doing various things, including being a pretty good race car driver. But what Bobby can't shake is that Alicia killed herself. She was always the smarter one, but she was also the active one.

She had checked herself into the asylum, had always known what she wanted to do, what she wanted to be. She was sought after by violin collectors to give the history and math behind antique violins. Everything about Alicia was active while Bobby drifted around, unsure of himself or his life. There's something here about Bobby's parents and their link to the atomic bombs and the sin that comes with being the offspring of such an atrocity.

The feds are after Bobby. On the surface it's about tax evasion, but there's something deeper here at play. Is Bobby the missing body from the aircraft at the beginning? Did Bobby ever really wake up after his accident and his mind is playing through his own guilt in a much more straightforward way than Alicia did?

One key here is perhaps the Thalidomide Kid himself. Thalidomide was a drug used in the 50s and 60s for pregnant women to help with morning sickness, and the results were horrific. It led to limb and liver deformities in babies that were born, or it led to miscarriages. Their limbs would resemble flippers.

Bobby encounters a host of different characters from his diving buddies, most of which meet untimely ends, to bar friends and even the glamorous trans stripper, Debbie. Debbie feels like something more, especially considering when it comes down to it, she's who Bobby trusts the most. The feds are doing everything in their power to strip Bobby's identity away from him, to where he feels like he needs to take a new identity at the hands of a lawyer he found in the phone book and has had a series of metaphysical conversations with at a mobster restaurant, and Debbie is his choice of confidant before he leaves.

Can you live your life if the past is anchored to your ankles and dragging you down? Most of his diving friends are listless and afraid of letting go of something, and their ends are not poetic. Be it living in a run-down shack shooting roaches, drowning on a job or having a lifestyle catch up, each one gave Bobby insight into what his life could be, but he can't quite accept any of them.

This is a dense, interesting, frustrating and at times very funny book that I know I'm gonna re-visit soon. It also means I need to read Stella Maris, then re-evaluate this one. I'm glad we got this book.

There was something almost hypnotic about the early parts of the book and the themes present that kept pushing me forward, but as it moved along, the focus shifted enough to where the narrative felt more like a device to drive home the themes than tell a compelling story.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but when we get to the mother in the middle, then the friend in the last third, it's a lot less engaging of a read.

I think the thematic content present here is super interesting and worth exploring. A woman reclaims herself from a world that wants her to be a number of things and treated, well, like a moldable object. Only her path towards this self-realization intersects with several people along the way, and helps to drag them down, hurt them, and somehow, her path of self-actualization becomes one of destruction for others. It's sorta bleak.

Still worth a read. Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for the review copy.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

Roanhorse is a strong writer and is perhaps better suited for longer works. There was a lot of focus on the very interesting setting here, so much so that the plot and characters took a backseat to it. This was an enjoyable and smooth read, but felt like it was missing something.

When everything was resolved it sure felt like the last twenty or so pages were doing a lot of the plot's legwork for it.

The four stars is rounded up.

As much as I enjoyed this book, I found the last act to be sorta weak in comparison to the rest. There were a lot of ideas and themes focused on throughout the book, only when they all came together it really wasn't clicking, or felt lacking in finesse. For example, the attempt to flesh out the antagonist in the final act felt too little, too late. He was already a caricature, and perhaps if left like that, things would've been more impactful?

I'm not really sure. There's an argument to be made for the characters on the island feeling flat to serve the broader narrative, but I'm not sure I'm of that mind.

Still enjoyable and well worth the read.

A lot of good stories, with the first few being the most powerful.

Received a copy via NetGalley.

A book like Desert Creatures is difficult to pin down.

There are parts that have the sparse desperation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, others that match the brutality and then parts where the writing doesn't quite live up to these high points. It's perhaps deeply unfair for a writer to compare their work to someone like McCarthy right out of the gate like this, but those are the parallels that exist within the work, so...

Our protagonist is a girl named Magdala who's stuck traversing the wastelands of the southwestern US after an unexplained incident ruined everything. In the desert, people and animals are getting desert sick and turning into fluffy trees with fruit that makes anyone who eats it sick. The folks who aren't that lucky turn into monsters. Las Vegas is the lone holdout for civilization and worships a deceased cowboy.

Through the distinct parts of the book, it follows Magdala through her transformation from a scared girl into survivor badass, although there is a reprieve in the middle following a heretic priest named Elam. We're forced to see the horrors she endured, then the sacrifices to her own humanity she needed to make to survive. Her redemption is as close as we get to a resolution, and that redemption is loaded with caveats.

There are powerful themes about beliefs, women surviving trauma and what it means to be human. This is the kind of book that sticks with you and deserves your attention.

This is perhaps one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

Hard stop.

I had a few hurdles to overcome early on (was okay with demons, then we got a donut-slinging starship captain and I absolutely exclaimed “oh c'mon” while reading), but I'm thrilled to have continued on.

If I had to sum this book up, it would be that it's a story about very specific outsiders who face systemic, western-society induced hurdles that prevent them from being their true selves. While there is a literal Faustian bargain here, most of the characters are living in the same reality. One where demons are making deals with musicians for souls, starship captains from a far off empire are trying too hard to be perfect to gain acceptance, a luthier grapples with her family's generational misogyny and a trans runaway faces nonstop discrimination and somehow the core conceit for this entire story is the game UnderTale.

There's a lot to digest here.

What happens, though, is we get to see how love, encouragement and community can help. Maybe it can't heal these wounds and make the awful people go away, just like it can't make the mysterious “EndPlague” the empire faces stop, but by sharing beauty and love, in this book's case through music, it can reach other people and help them feel like they aren't alone.

Isn't that the point of art? I know it always was for me.

I can't recommend this book enough.

To say it's difficult to nail down exactly what a Locked Tomb book actually is would be an understatement.

For a series that I actively avoided, it's become something I very much enjoy. Being an artist and answering to yourself in the face of a passionate fanbase is bold. Gideon the Ninth was a fun book that had a lot going on for it and nobody would have blamed Muir for merely recreating it with the same cast of characters and continuing on with a linear story. Instead, Harrow the Ninth happened, which veered so far off course that you were either there for the ride or ejected, dejected that someone who wrote one of your favorite books isn't playing the greatest hits.

Nona is another very different book.

I'm gonna write stuff and it'll potentially be spoilers.

After the ending of Harrow, there were expectations of what we were getting. We were getting Harrowhawk coming to her senses, Gideon was indeed going to play a part, now we know more about Lyctors and John Gaius's bonkers empire. Hell, we've fought resurrection beasts and heralds. We've got our world-building down pat, but then again, who the hell is Blood of Eden that Camilla is hanging out with?

It turns out, none of this is very easy and this series explores love, trauma and the impact both have on individuals, groups and the greater community. Nona is, in a lot of ways, a shell. Nona is someone we care deeply about and want to be doing cool, kickass things, but in the wake of nonstop trauma, Nona is also Nona. There are locals kids she hangs out with, she's not very smart but she's a teacher's assistant to keep her busy and she's got her found family of Camilla and Palamedes sharing a body and Pyrrha Dve holding things down for everyone. They're in a bombed-out city on the verge of awful things and there are a lot of potentially familiar faces being referred to by different names.

Witnessing this through Nona's eyes is something that would only work via prose, as readers are familiar with a lot of the characters. Nona is, after all, only six-months-old in a nineteen-year-old body. It's complicated. This means even when we're familiar with characters, like Gideon, either Gideon has massively changed by all the events she's suffered through, or Nona feels intimidated by Gideon and sees her as a cold, impassive person, which is in contrast to how Harrow would see Gideon.

The biblical tract-style chapters of John's origin story punctuate all of this. These chapters break up the narrative while providing valuable context how this all began. We get to see how John was working on a cryo project as a part of the greater FTL escape plan to get as many people as possible off of Earth. Somewhere along the way, John discovers he's able to reanimate dead bodies, amasses a literal death cult, becomes a global figure that's helping keep a powerful president looking like he's alive and starts committing atrocities with a downright laissez-faire attitude. Somehow, this results in John and his cohort getting access to a suitcase nuke, John discovering the wealthy were planning to abscond while leaving 99% of humanity behind and that old softie John ends up starting an end-game style nuclear war, his powers reaching an apex where he single-handedly reaches out and slaughters every last person he can reach.

These chapters, especially in the context of where this book sits in the series where the emperor was slain, Gideon returned in Harrowhawk's body to fight, we discover Gideon's parentage and all of this other stuff, helps to frame exactly what this series is and who these people are. So much of what we experienced prior in the series was dream-like, odd and detached. Nona's reality, in contrast, is grounded and post-apocalyptic. Nona is living in the wake of the destruction, with the battered remains of the people who mattered to her. So, is Nona an awakening from a fairy tale, or a reprieve from the surreal reality of the nine houses, the river, the resurrection beasts and the heralds?

... does it even matter?

Gaiman is one of those authors that I've always been aware of, just never dove into. I picked this one up for cheap and wasn't disappointed in it.

There's something to be said for writing interesting, fantastical stories but keeping them grounded. Although this book hints at a large, expansive universe full of fantastical creatures, realms and planes of existence, it never leaves the protagonist's neighborhood.

When crafting a story like this, sometimes it's appreciated to keep it simple and contained. There are only a handful of characters and locations, helping to blur the line between childhood fantasies and the remarkable.

Having returned home for a funeral, the narrator recounts the house down the lane, the pond that was an ocean and the girl, Lettie, who held his hand to help ward off the evil that sought to upset his small world. It's a pleasant read that flows smoothly and paints a vivid picture.

If there's one thing I really love about Silvia Moreno-Garcia's work is that she's willing to take risks and not just stick to the same ideas all the time. After the success of Mexican Gothic, most authors would say, “I've found my niche” and stick to it.

Instead, she released Velvet Was the Night, a taught political thriller; Return of the Sorceress, a dark fantasy novella; and now Daughter of Doctor Moreau. While even in her earlier work there are clear through lines in thematic content, she's not afraid to experiment with genre.

This book has been called a ‘retelling' of the Island of Doctor Moreau, but I'm not sure that quite fits. It takes the basic idea of a European scientist experimenting on animals to create hybrids, as well as a few of the characters, and tosses the whole thing into a blender with very SMG themes of settler colonialism's impact on Mexico, treatment of women and wealth imbalances.

Chapters alternate between Carlota, the daughter of Moreau, and Montgomery, the new mayordomo of the compound. The major conflict throughout the book revolves around the wealthy Lizalde family, who are funding Moreau's experiments to get cheap labor, and the lengths Moreau is willing to go to with them to not have his funding cut off. Montgomery is a sad, conflicted drunk who has developed feelings for Carlota, while Carlota is a doting daughter who just wants to do the right thing, even if that means marrying the younger Lizalde to keep things flowing.

Spoilers ahead.

If you're aware of the original story, the puma-woman was Moreau's last experiment, and also his undoing. There's some clever conceptual play going on here where Moreau's perfect experiment was ‘saving' his daughter through his tinkering. We aren't clued in to the extent of it until the end, which shouldn't come as a surprise to readers paying close attention. Carlota is forced to become her own woman and cope with the heavy emotions of that transition from childhood to adulthood, including love and overcoming an overbearing parental figure.

Montgomery, on the other hand, is forced to deal with the fact he's still alive and that Carlota needs to figure herself out. This can't be some sweeping romance of a guy saves girl and her hybrid friends and everything works out, which is nice.

Well worth your time to read.

If you're looking for the usual Murakami experience, this is perhaps not what you should be looking for.

It's much smaller in scope, although the execution remains immaculate. There are excursions into different points of view, with most of the book taking place with Mari and the small cast being in third person, but occasional glimpses into Eri, Mari's sister, and her long slumber from a first person (we) perspective through a television screen. These passages involve a faceless man and an ominous sense of dread that leaves you with questions at the end of the book.

For a small book, there's a lot to unpack, such as the relationship between Mari and Eri, two sisters who went through a few traumatic experiences together, culminating in being stuck in an elevator together, before they drifted apart into different lives. Eri is a sleeper, always asleep, never awake, while Mari has a difficult time sleeping and finds herself out and about.

An encounter with one of Eri's classmates leading to needing to swoop into help a Chinese girl at a love hotel adds texture.

There's clearly an interplay between the girls going on here, where they're two parts of a whole, a yin and a yang. All while the male characters prove to leave both Mari and the reader feeling uneasy or downright disgusted with them.

It's very clear to see this is a short book about trauma, the people who inflict it, and what it does to the victims. You have to go digging for answers, which won't bode well for some readers. If you're willing to put in the work, though, it's an interesting read.

Very obvious spoilers ahead for Gideon the Ninth and this book.

To go from the sort of obnoxious opening chapters of Gideon, where Gideon's sense of snark comes across as forced and obnoxious, to this book where you're begging for that signature snark again is really a feat. I put GtN aside at least two or threes times before it stuck for me, but when it did, that book hit hard.

Harrow the Ninth is not an easy book, by any stretch of the imagination. All the negative reviews decrying this book as a departure from the previous one and not as fun illustrate the point of the book.

This isn't a fun book, it's a book about loss and grief. It's about what we do when we're overwhelmed by grief and try to soldier on so we'll look strong instead of coping. There's some thematic overlap here with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind where Harrow is so overwhelmed with the death of Gideon so one of them could survive, and for her being the survivor, that she literally has a rival necromancer in Ianthe (both now Lyctors, sort of) do an experimental procedure to rewrite Harrow's mind and change their shared history so Gideon was never there. Instead, it was Ortus, the failed cavalier, who took her place.

Thusly, we see Harrow interacting with the remaining lyctors while carrying Gideon's longsword with her and haunted by “the body,” which is intended to be the body within the Locked Tomb she disturbed as a 10-year-old that led to the death of her family. While interacting with her fellow lyctors and ‘God,' a name named John, of all things, we see how Harrow is not considered a full lyctor because she didn't properly absorb her cavalier like the rest did.

... we know that she did, which was how she defeated Cytherea in the previous book, but in this book everything is different.

The book is split into two different narration styles. One in third, the other in second person. Yeah, that's right, a bulk of this book is in the dreaded second person. In part, because Harrow isn't telling her own story. She is being told her story.

A part of me thought “dear god, this is really going hard on this artificial memory and the allegory” because a solid 65% of this book is told like this. We don't even have glimpses of whatever the “real” is until about 60% and the final act of the book features things finally split between Harrow stuck in “the river,” a surreal part of the afterlife, while Gideon awakens and takes over Harrow's body.

While we go through this book knowing that Harrow is off, what we get a clear view of is how “God” and his lyctors work. They're dysfunctional, bitter and all hate each other, plus one named Ortus (no relation, really) is trying to kill Harrow. The mysteries unfold slowly and we spend a lot of time with the husk of Harrow knowing full well she's hurting so bad that she'd rather allow herself to be this husk of an undead immortal being than live with the guilt of knowing she lived and the only person who ever cared for her sacrificed herself to land in this position.

When Gideon “returns” it's impossible not to be excited. Think about that. I went from thinking this was the biggest piece of twee shit in the world to cheering for the return of Gideon in all her awkwardness.

By the time the book was over I ordered the hardcovers of both (I read them via library copies, more people should use the public libraries that are available to them) in a heartbeat.

I can't tell you how many times I've picked this book up, read the first few pages and tossed it aside.

Something about those first few pages is difficult to overcome and I know I'm not the only one. Maybe it's folks around my age (pushing 40) who all seem to uniformly find the same annoyance in a snarky, smart-mouthed protagonist that feels very contemporary (if not dated) for a fantastical setting that kills our interest. Or, for me, the sorta grimdark setting of the Tomb of the Ninth.

In a way, it felt like a Nick Lutsko Spirit Halloween video with no tongues in cheeks.

If I'm honest, I can't tell you why I picked it up again. It's been recommended to me dozens of times now, and I've unknowingly bought it twice in different formats. All of my desired library holds were a few weeks out, so I sorta just said, “fine, I'll try this again until one of the holds comes through.”

Sure enough, there was that beginning again where we meet the titular Gideon and it's the same cringe epic bacon guy sort of humor that made me hate ‘The Martian' in all of its glory. Along with a comically dark setting of some sort of tomb planet with shambling skeletons and dark dungeons. Sigh.

But, I kept going. This book gets hyped a lot for queer representation, and any cynicism about this sort of melts away because Gideon is absolutely queer, but done in a way where it's very matter-of-fact. Gideon is just Gideon, being queer is just a part of the character.

See, the thing is, Gideon is also really annoying. One of the drawbacks of having an obnoxious lead is you're gonna turn some people away. That's what happened to me. Then you start to see more of Gideon, and that everyone is annoyed by Gideon and a lot of the goofy, aloof behavior is a defense mechanism from a lifetime of trauma.

You really, really need to push past those initial annoyances, though, because once you do, everything opens up.

The story winds itself around in all sorts of interesting ways, the characters are all mashed together, pit against each other and forced to cope with their own shortcomings in unique ways and while there's a relatively massive bodycount for named characters here, never did I find myself wanting to put this book aside after the story got going.

In places, the diction can feel clunky in trying to illustrate this realm as a science fantasy one, especially considering Gideon is our anchor to things and Gideon's link to everything is comic books and skin mags. Still, the occasional five-dollar word is easy enough to gloss over considering how well everything else flows.

This is a special book and if you're like me and struggled with the beginning, it's worth pushing further into before writing it off.

This book is a lot of things, none of which are easy.

The first thing I noticed was there were no paragraph breaks. Just... none. The only reprieve the reader gets is when a new chapter starts and there are only a handful of them. Even the sentences snake on for pages at a time, refusing to let the reader take a breath.

It's all intentional and while grating at first, pushing through it unlocks something a lot deeper in this book. Just like Cormac McCarthy writes with sparse punctuation and refuses to use quotation marks for his dialogue, this book trudges forward using punctuation, or the lack thereof, as a bludgeon.

Because this book is brutal. If I had to guess, I'd say that Fernanda Melchor wrote this book angry, and I don't blame her at all. It's a book about poverty. Not about the kind of poverty a lot of books released in the US are about, but agonizing, inescapable poverty punctuated by constant violence. The publishing industry is so filled with books written by those of privilege and wealth that it's refreshing to not read a book about a well-off New Yorker sometimes.

The central premise of the book is that there's a witch in town. She provides a variety of services for the local women, most of which we learn about later on in the book. In a world where the only way to make money and support their family for most of these women is for prostitution, there aren't exactly women's health clinics around, if you catch my drift. This ‘witch' can help, along with other ailments as well.

The story unfolds from the perspective of a few characters, each in their own chapter, all based on the brutal murder of the witch by a few local boys. The reason for the murder unfolds when the reader is taken closer to the act itself by inhabiting the POV of the men responsible, each with a different understanding and reason for being in that van that pulled up to her house that evening.

Let's just say that extreme poverty, exploration of sexuality and the relationship between cycles of abuse, poverty, corruption, and homosexuality all end up tangled in the same web, eventually.

The conscious decision to write the book in this manner gives it a sense of movement, like a makeshift go cart wheeled up to the top of the hill, allowing you to jump in while it's in free fall, forcing you to be along for the ride with no real sense of control. You're just along for the ride, unable to look away from the horror of those rocks at the bottom of the hill.

Just beautiful.

I'll admit, I had my reservations about The Hacienda early on.

Earlier on in the book it felt like it was going in a very well-trodden direction that I'm just not super into. Seeing taglines like “Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca” sets a stage, which perhaps makes perfect sense considering the material, but also makes the earlier parts of the book seem almost rote and overly indebted to said works.

That is, before Andres becomes an important character in the book. The interplay between Beatriz and Andres is crucial framework here. A lot of authors do the thing where one character knows all the answers the other is searching for, only for us to inhabit their heads without ever an inclination of what these may be. Cañas avoids this masterfully by introducing Andres later in the book and keeping him engaged in the ‘now' of the action.

By the time he's forced to reckon with the past and analyze it himself, it feels natural and earned, as opposed to obfuscated through narrative trickery. That's not easy to pull off and most authors fail at this.

It's a genuine treat to watch everything unspool, the characters interact and how complicated everything is both in Mexico at the time and in the lives of these characters thanks to European colonizers and their own histories.

By far my favorite Emily St. John Mandel.

There's an inherent meta quality to this novel that makes it feel different from the rest of her work. In the wake of the popularity of Station Eleven and then the follow-up, The Glass Hotel, which was perhaps more divisive among readers, this book was more of an examination of how the author is coping with writing a book about a deadly pandemic just a few years before an actual deadly pandemic hits and having that book become not just successful, but almost oppressively so.

St. John Mandel's followup, The Glass Hotel, was, in a lot of ways, a more interesting book to me. More of a contemplative piece about greed, human nature and the difficult of just existing. Not to say Station Eleven wasn't about those things as well, but there are readers who see things through different lenses, not that of theme but tropes.

There were readers disappointed that The Glass Hotel wasn't another post-apocalyptic book, that it wasn't giving them a similar story, if not a follow-up. As an author, it's difficult to not internalize these things.

Certain ‘spoilers' follow.

Sea of Tranquility features a prominent author, Olive, in the future who wrote a book about a deadly pandemic and was on a book tour promoting said book because of an upcoming film adaptation of it, while a deadly pandemic was blossoming in a part of the planet. This author lives in a colony on the moon and spends ample time throughout her sections feeling dislodged from reality while traveling from hotel to hotel.

Hotels play a big role in St. John Mandel's work here, huh?

There are gonna be folks that label Sea of Tranquility as a time travel novel, which is perhaps fine. There is time travel elements involved here, namely a character named Gaspery who worked as a hotel security guard (cough) until his sister, an agent at the Time Institute (the same Time Institute that the author stand-in's husband was helping design) who has a theory that certain glitches appearing in different points in history prove simulation theory, where they are living in a computer simulation. It was something Zooey and Gaspery's mother deeply believed. I should note that Gaspery is named after a character from Olive's work.

Gaspery isn't introduced as a point of view character until the second half of the book, with him appearing throughout the first half as a strange figure to the different characters, including Edwin St. Andrew, a British expat in Canada after going on a tirade about the ill-effects of colonialism and his family essentially kicking him to the curb. He has a hallucination in the woods in Caiette. Yes, that Caiette, where Vincent from the Glass Hotel, filmed a video her brother used for a visual art piece, including a strange “glitch.”

Gaspery appears to Andrew masquerading a priest, asking him about what he saw in the woods.

Gaspery also appears as an interviewer with Olive when she's on her book tour, meets with Vincent's brother and old friend and we're all sort of in a churn here with the characters from The Glass Hotel.

The first half of the book establishes the importance of The Glass Hotel and its cast of characters, as well as Olive and her Station Eleven-ish work, on top of her mounting fear of the encroaching pandemic. All throughout, we see Gaspery and it's unclear as to why.

When we find out later he's a time traveler tasked with uncovering the mystery of these glitches, including interviewing a violinist in a futuristic Oklahoma City airship terminal, that same violin music present in each instance of someone encountering the “glitch,” things get more complicated.

Gaspery's job is to gather data and investigate, not interfere. But he does. Because his humanity won't let him meet with Olive and know the pandemic will kill her days later, or Andrew, depressed after his time at war, meets his own untimely demise. This causes a ripple effect where the Time Institute frames him for a murder in the past, sends him to prison to rot, but his sister instead gets him to somewhere he'll be safe... where, and this is all a spoiler or whatnot, he becomes the old man violinist with a surgically altered face so the Time Institute won't find him.

It's not a simulation, it's just Gaspery intersecting with himself in time multiple times over in the same place.

But that's just the plot, right? What's interesting to me is what this all means.

I've read other reviews that are disappointed with St. John Mandel's return to talking about a pandemic, which is ironic considering The Glass Hotel received a lot of praise, but also a lot of criticism for not following in Station Eleven's footsteps. In a way, it almost proves the exact point of this book. Actually, it does.

What does it mean to be an artist who has always existed within their own space, allowed to work as they wish and create different kinds of work, only to become successful and suddenly people want more of the same from you? There are passages where Olive is running through criticisms of her books in her head that come from readers, critics and interviewers, about how her endings aren't impactful enough, or how certain characters don't meet certain expectations, or how certain tropes weren't present and so on. She's on a book tour for a book that she wrote a while ago, only popular again because of a film adaptation (cough Station Eleven on HBO cough) and, well... you get the picture.

Many of the “problems” readers expressed with The Glass Hotel were revisited here, although key mysteries (like what happened to Vincent) are never addressed (thankfully!). This was an entire work about the literal impact of fictional characters on the real world, about the inability to change the past and the conflicts an artist creates for themselves throughout their career.

... written during a pandemic by an author who studied pandemics to write a very popular novel about a pandemic.

An author who feels like she's from the fucking moon, witnessing people make the same mistakes from history and feels powerless to make any sort of positive impact on anyone because people are nitpicking not the stuff that matters to her about her work; the characters, the themes and the messaging, but the surface level.

I love it.

I definitely enjoyed this but felt like I was in a fog for most of it. Enjoyed the second one more.

So, I have not read the previous book still, but the author made it clear this could be read independently. This was one of those ebooks Tor sends out to subscribers for free that goes on a folder somewhere and gets lost that I didn't actually lose and I'm glad I didn't.

Truthfully, I had no idea what to expect. Readers are trained to look for tropes, so everything I was reading about this hit those pretty hard, which are not really indicative of what the book was actually about. Sapphic romance? Cool. Historical fantasy? Sure! Nonbinary representation? Alright, cool.

I still had no idea what to expect.

One thing I noticed right away is that I've yet to really read a modern novel that tackled nonbinary representation well, as in using they/them pronouns. Most I've read have been SF and have defaulted to a specific gendered pronoun to deal with some sort of alien society, etc. There's a couple of things I noticed here. The first is that I sorta found myself getting lost at first, having to stop and realize the “they” wasn't being used for the group, but the individual. It's silly, I obviously know this and use it normally, but I haven't read a novel that does that well yet, so there you go. The second is holy shit, I read a broad range of books that err progressive, how haven't I read something that does this already? Publishing has a lot of issues, but representation needs to be more than just ornamental for brownie points. Do better. Like this book.

Alas.

What struck me about this book was how this worked on an allegorical level. Written by an Asian American during, well... I don't even know how to explain these last few years, right? People are awful and the treatment of nonwhite cultures in the west/global north errs on the side of awful, if not criminal.

So, this book asks a simple question: Who controls the narrative and how does it impact “othered” people?

Tigers are “othered” here. Feared for being vicious, blood-thirsty villains who attack at random without regards for life. They're shapeshifting, of course, which means they're actually tigers who can take the form of people to appear “normal” and, look... if you understand how a lot of nonwhite cultures exist within a fairly homogenous monoculture, you've heard about this and probably know people who have to do this to get by.

Think ‘Sorry to Bother You' and the “white voice” black folks would use at the call center to get a better reaction on the phone.

The central focus is a group cornered by three tiger sisters and the resident storyteller/cleric of the group finds a way to bargain for their lives by telling them a story. It's a well known folktale about a relationship between a tiger and a cleric.

The cleric tells the sanitized, “cultured” version of the tale, which paints the tiger as a dangerous beast to fear, dehumanizing the character for being different and misunderstood. It also shows the cleric, who within the framing of this sanitized version of the story, openly mistreats the tiger, as a civilized savior (a “white savior,” if you will).

Throughout the telling of the story, the tigers respond to each passage with frustration and anger, making the cleric write down the story as they remember it, which contains an almost identical plot, but with wildly different details.

You see, the tigers remember the tiger character with pride, label the treachery of the cleric for what it is, and don't celebrate the bare minimum the cleric does to make good without putting in any work. The tiger saves the cleric numerous times and yes, there are bargains that come with it, and some of what happens are due to cultural misunderstandings, but the tiger loves the cleric and is willing to look past most of this.

Ultimately, Chih remains afraid regardless of this heightened understanding and happily takes the assistance of other hunters swooping in to the rescue to scare off the tigers, although they do imply that the tigers should be left alone. There's a sense of yearning and perhaps this was a mistake to break a pact with the tigers like in the story and that they would spread the written story.

This proved to be a really well done case of showing how outside cultures are powerless in the face of their oppressors to control their own history or be seen as literal humans. Just fantastic stuff. I'll definitely read more from this author.

I don't have a ton to say about this except it was a strange omission from my reading history.

This was one of those books that... yeah, it took me a full month to read, not because it was long, but because there were entire parts of the book that dragged so much that I found other things to do outside of reading this.

There is a lot of this book to like and I'm glad I read it, that being said, there are some major pacing issues in here.

The basic idea here is Addie LaRue doesn't want to do her arranged marriage, nobody is listening to her, so she makes a wish in the night and a malevolent spirit hears her wish and grants it to her, in exchange for her soul. What did her wish end up being? “I want to live.”

Thus, Addie lives for hundreds of years but nobody can remember her. The author takes every opportunity to place Addie in different parts of history, which is where things get bogged down. A subplot is that Addie figured out the only ‘mark' she could make on the world, the only recordings of her, were art. So she meets tons of artists of note and becomes a subject for them.

There's parts of this book where you can't help but roll your eyes at historical figures that show up, all having a made a deal with this same spirit. All the famous people have, you see. Okay.

The actual meat of the plot comes into play when we meet Henry, a boy who works at a bookstore in NY and gasp–he can remember Addie~!

It's at this point where we get dueling POVs between Henry and Addie and we're pretty deep into the book here. Like, really far into it. We're talking almost halfway before the actual plot of the book kicks in. Seriously, almost half of the book is just doing constant legwork of “nobody remembers Addie and she's depressed, also the demon/spirit/devil is an asshole.”

So, when we eventually, finally find out dear Henry has made a deal with this same devil, which is why he can remember Addie, we find out he just wanted to be loved. Oh, and his deal was just for a year, so Henry dies soon.

But guess what? Addie and Luc (the spirit, who now has a name) go from an adversarial relationship to oh wait, they are actually ~in love~ sort of. Sort of. You see, Luc is a bad boy, bad to the bone! He is a demon and is ~the night~ who makes these deals but he's way into Addie and the timelines start to feel jumbled. This hot-and-cold relationship gets shown in flashbacks, but the problem is some of the flashbacks happen before periods we've already flashed back to and had no real reference to this Addie and Luc romance plot.

So here, with the book almost coming to a close, we have dear Henry, who's going to die, and dear Addie, who's decided she's not human anymore, anyway, and we have Luc, who just wants Addie for himself and this relationship doesn't feel very healthy... For a book that meanders and lingers, the third act does a lot of the heavy lifting. My difficulty with the book at this point is imagining this thing have massive rewrites and revisions to make this plot more focused and that's generally speaking not where I want to be with a book.

The ideas and characters mostly work, but the plot's lack of focus leading to cramming most of it into the last act means by the time it's done you're satisfied and have fond memories of it, but reflecting on the whole book it's not as easy to keep these feelings.