johnny dangerously.
Books like this are complicated for me. I really, really love them; I desperately want more of them; I wish they were written differently. Historiography, especially the conceptual stuff (what do we think about when we think about X? Why do we think that way? Where does that idea come from, and is it from history, or just books and TV?) really fascinate me. History is a bunch of symbols which we reinterpret every generation, and what we think of a period, a date, an event, is shaped by where we are now... and the last bit of big media frenzy over that period. It's fascinating, and it's much more vivid and vivacious than a point-by-point summary of what dates certain events took place. History is more than truth or lies, accuracy or inaccuracy. It's the conversations we have, and what we think is worth including in those conversations.
But, because these books are so conceptual, they tend to be kind of low on information. There's a lot to think about in this book, and a lot to learn. There's also a lot of fluff.
I get it. Palmer is writing in a really informal style, because she doesn't want to be an ivory tower academic who writes in a purposefully arch style to confuse and alienate plebs. As a pleb (I sure don't have a four year degree), I appreciate it. But there's always the risk of talking down to people, or implicitly signaling who is supposed to be reading your books. Palmer mostly avoids that, but there were a few moments that really made me groan. I do not need references to Firefly and Army of Darkness in my history book; I do not need the rib-elbowing understanding that we're all nerds here, ehh? Ehhh? We're the right kind of nerds, bookish chortlers who go squee and watch Doctor Who. Please, talk up to me, I bought your book.
Palmer also seems to be concerned I won't get her point, so she repeats it over and over, sometimes multiple times a chapter. I assume this is because she's an educator; she really really really wants to make sure I get the point. SPQR, SPQF! Historians in Greenland! Battle pope and warrior pope! These little references, and the concepts attached to them, show up in almost every chapter, which is a good rhetorical device! But maybe in a shorter book, with fewer chapters. Especially since I felt a few other concepts went under-explained. I wanted more about the contrasting tyranny of republicanism in Florence, the way art bolstered legitimacy, and the morals of peace that got referenced a few times. I wanted to know more about Machiavelli, who has four chapters dedicated to him but only shows up in two of them. I did not need the basics of moral philosophy explained to me the second time, or the third, or the... tenths. The first time was nice, though.
I guess what I'm saying is that this book is a little disorganized, and it chases its own tail a bit. I find this to be the case in a lot of ‘out of the box' educational materials, which assume that if you're excited enough, you'll just get it! Because learning is easy for everyone, and we don't need to worry about the accessibility of information. Because most educators– and, I assume, students at better and more prestigious colleges– don't have learning disabilities, there doesn't tend to be a lot of emphasis placed on making information organized and easy to digest when it's taught in an unconventional way.
I'm not saying the book had to be in chronological order– I found it quite refreshing that it wasn't– but I wish more time had been spent connecting the ideas that each chapter had, building on the previous thesis to bolster the next, rather than reiterating information without a ton of analysis. It's a book, so if I missed what dentology was, I could have gone back and reread. By the 14th time it was explained, I was fully tuning out, struggling to understand what bigger point the chapter was actually trying to make because it had gotten so lost in the weeds.
I'm not sure someone without a learning disability will have these problems? But I did and it's my review, so.
All in all, however, I consider this book a triumph. I've never found the Italian Renaissance very interesting, mostly because it's spoken about with such bejeweled reverence. I don't like romanticized history populated by buxom wax figures dressed in crushed velvet; it's boring. Ada Palmer successfully makes these people real, makes me care about their lives, makes me want to know more. Isn't that the goal of every educator?
I read Harris' Cicero trilogy a few years ago, and those books remain some of my favorite novels set in the Roman Empire, even as I find them a little disappointing. Harris just doesn't care about Rome the way I care about it, and the political machinations exist only to further an allusion to British politics just before the Second World War. So it was to my great surprise how enjoyable I found this book, which engages with a Rome I care far less about– the Rome of the modern day. I'm not trying to damn with faint praise when I say it's a relief to read Harris putting his immense talent toward a subject he cares far more about than Ancient Rome.
This book is probably as close to ‘cozy' as I get– everyone is presumed to be an essentially good person who means well, and disagreements are resolved with sometimes tense but never violent discussion and debate. Nothing graphically violent, sexual or horrifying happens. The end is a paean to religious tolerance– and tolerance in general. I'm of two minds on the ending; while I feel it was written with the best intentions in mind, it does kind of turn a minority into a rug-pull twist. I'd like to hear more from the minority effected– hopefully the success of the movie will start this conversation, as the movie is extremely, extremely faithful to the book.
This book does what I desperately want more historical fiction to do: write a character whose outlook is true to their historical period, and... that's it, actually. It's such a small ask, yet it's so hard for the vast majority of historical fiction, whose characters tend to mug to the audience the way a comedian does at the end of their career: remember the good stuff? You want girlboss feminism? I can do that! You want some romantic swooning? I can do that too!
Rarely do I come across a historical character who is so utterly, totally disinterested in modern concerns. Sister Joanna is a Catholic nun, and she cares about the schism happening in England. She cares about religious relics being authentic. She cares about serving capital-G god. As the child of nobility, she has no experience with swords, and she's both spoilt by her childhood as much as she's haunted by the reality of growing up in a dangerous medieval world. She does not seem to be aware of modern conversations of social justice.
Sure, the book isn't perfect. It drags in places and has too many endings. But I'll do anything for a historical character who actually feels like a historical character.
I want to say first that I didn't hate this novel– it isn't bad, it's just not for me. I think if I hadn't read Hendrix's other works before this one, I'd have either liked it better, or never finished it. I do think that this is a very ambitious novel, possibly the most ambitious I've seen Hendrix try yet. I just don't think it lands, but I also think that's just because of my personal taste.For me, a novel lives and dies on its pacing, and this is the worst paced Hendrix novel I've read (and I've read all of his fiction except [b:Horrorstör 13129925 Horrorstör Grady Hendrix https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414314217l/13129925.SX50.jpg 18306052] and [b:The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires 44074800 The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Grady Hendrix https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1584222716l/44074800.SY75.jpg 68534292]). I think the unevenness of the pacing really undercuts the themes Hendrix is trying to work with. I find those themes very admirable and interesting! I think they're also very ambitious for an author like Hendrix.Hendrix has his predilections– he is clearly interested in writing about southern women, specifically white women, specifically ‘normal' women. By ‘normal' I mean women with no supernatural powers or ridiculous skills (except being a bassist, one time), but also he wants them to have an extremely realistic psychology. They don't know they're in a horror novel, and they react accordingly– frequently these girls are selfish, self-defeating and cowardly. Hendrix isn't interested in Strong Female Characters as a trope; these characters are meant to be relatable, not inspirational. We're not supposed to think ‘I wish I was her', we're supposed to think ‘if she could, maybe I can'. And that's fine and works great, because Hendrix's stories are often campy and vaguely comedic. He can write straight-up horror– I think [b:The Final Girl Support Group 55829194 The Final Girl Support Group Grady Hendrix https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1614275199l/55829194.SY75.jpg 86047832] is pretty light on comedy; everything is drenched in tension. That book also deals with the most heavy subjects of his works: murder, specifically femicide, school shootings, and dying of cancer. If you inserted comedy into that mix, it'd feel a little lopsided.So you see where I'm going? This book deals with some pretty heavy subjects, and it's got a lot of comedy, and a very cowardly protagonist. I'm not saying the protagonist of this novel shouldn't be cowardly; one of the main themes of this book is how much the main characters are all children, and I think that's a very good and fair theme for this subject matter. I just think that the mixture of comedy, very slow pacing, and extremely serious subject matter (child sexual abuse, which is barely a spoiler as it's pretty obvious from the book's blurb and content warnings, but whatever) makes the book feel... bad. Not bad in the way a horror story should make you feel, frightened and anxious, but for me at least, it meant spending a lot of time with a girl who was doing nothing to help a very vulnerable person while the clock wound down.A lot of this book is spent sitting, waiting and talking. I understand why– I once spent a summer in Virginia and the summers there are slow and hot. The book brilliantly evokes this lazy, sweaty feeling. But knowing that every hour that passes is another hour closer to someone being sent back to one of the worst situations a child can land in makes me want to rip off my fingernails. Add to that a long conga of humorous scenes, and multiple instances where the main character could help but flinches away and I'm straight up not having a good time.But it's stretching Hendrix, who usually doesn't write about people from these intense sorts of backgrounds. You can sort of feel his focus flickering, because the book also flinches away from the characters who are out of his wheelhouse– the character with an intensely traumatic childhood, and also the Black women. This is the first Hendrix book with more than one Black character, and all three of them are alive for the whole book! It's a mixed bag for Hendrix, who kind of doesn't know what to do with these women for a lot of the novel. Without spoiling too much, they frequently feel underwritten, one of them having almost no discernible personality (beyond the fact that she never talks), and the other two existing to prop up the white main character and deliver some deus ex machinas. There's a palpable friction between the fact that Hendrix wants to write a white female character of middle class economic means as his protagonist (from the afterward, it's clear that she's based on relatives of his, so I understand this desire) and his desire to do better than his previous novels when it comes to the writing of Black and disadvantaged characters. This book really should have been about anyone but Fern, whose perspective only really gives you an everywoman account of what takes place. I wouldn't even call the underwritten aspects of the Black and disadvantaged characters an -ism, because the main character is also underwritten.In general, this film feels like a novella stretched to fit a novel's length. There's a lot of filling, a lot of the plot not progressing for convenient reasons (for example, there's a magic book that only shows important information when the main characters ‘need' it; conveniently, they only get it this info once a huge amount of time has ticked down, forcing conflict after chapters and chapters where very little happens that progresses the plot or deepens characterization). Reading the afterward and finding out that the first two drafts of this book didn't even have the titular witches really makes sense; they frequently feel misplaced, and they disappear from the story for huge swaths of time.This book feels extremely sophomoric for a writer of Hendrix's caliber, and I don't mean that in the sense that he's a perfect writer with no flaws; I mean that his previous two novels– which I really, really loved– are head and shoulders above this one in terms of craft. (You can weigh the merits of his attempts at representation for yourself.) While I have other gripes with this book, those are very much my personal feelings, which is fine, because in the end, this book isn't made for me. It kind of feels bad, I guess, because his previous books were, but I can get over that.If you want a very quirky and slightly twee story that is very light on actual horror (except for all the gore), this is a great book for you, especially if you want a story about the power of female friendship, motherhood, and a very well researched period drama.I just don't think he did enough academic research on the history of 'witchcraft' but I do appreciate that his witches were at least not more fucking Gardnerians. I deeply resent that ridiculous speech about The Burning Times-- yes, it was capitalized like that-- but I understand that it was given from the perspective of a 'witch' who was raised in a western / Mediterranean-inspired tradition, and that erroneous and ridiculous perspective is very alive and well today. We can see from the covens Hendrix thanks in the afterward that he probably picked it up from one of them, which, fine, whatever, I just hate it. (For more on this, I encourage you to read [b:The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present 34324501 The Witch A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present Ronald Hutton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1497092904l/34324501.SX50.jpg 55387180], which is excellent, informative, and is a comparatively very easy read. Apparently Hendrix did research the history of witchcraft, he just portrayed it in a way I didn't personally like, which, again, this is very much a personal quibble than an objective mark of quality. Happy to be wrong!
I have a few quibbles with this book, mostly on the subject of pacing and focus, but I'm not going to factor that into my ultimate score or feelings on the book. This was originally published on the AO3 and other serial fiction sites, and while it isn't fanfiction, it does share structural similarities with that type of work. I haven't read fanfiction regularly for over eight years; me whining about its structure would be like saying a soap opera is kind of long.
More to the point: This novel is for, by, and about trans women. I am not a trans woman, so when I went in reading this I tried very hard to keep my goal in mind while reading it. I read this because I want to better understand the art trans women enjoy, and in that sense, this book really succeeded. I think it's a lovely, fun story that plays with dark themes without getting too dark. (I know for my own self, I really prefer bleak dark fiction, so I wasn't totally caught up in the emotion of the story, but as I said before, I'm not the intended audience for this book. If I am not entirely on board with it, that's not the book's fault.)
This book really is a celebration of trans femininity, though, and I found that extremely inspiring. As someone who has a lot of difficulty with femininity in any form, it was very enjoyable to see people, well, enjoying femininity. At the same time, it was also very healing to see femininity celebrated in a way that didn't feel like everyone was in a cult. In her work, Gretchen Felker-Martin describes cisness as very sterile, and while I don't always feel that way, it does apply to how I find a lot of just-for-us-girls depictions of cis femaleness. This celebration of trans femininity was free of that sterility, and really wanted to both enjoy and interrogate femaleness. I loved reading that part of the book. It made femininity feel like a gift, one I willingly gave away. Reading this book was like watching someone try on a dress I'd donated to a consignment shop, a dress I hated, and watching their expressions fill up with light when they tried it on. I've never felt like that before, and it was wonderful.
Writing a novel is hard. Writing a first novel is presumably very hard. Shaun Hamill might have bitten off more than he could chew by trying to make a very complex novel out of his first go. The first 2-3 chapters are exellent, exciting and almost perfect, then the book falls off steeply. Noah is just not interesting or sympathetic like the first part of this novel's POV characters, and Hamill cannot yet write a romance that I care about. While this is nominally a horror, it's really a supernatural family drama. The ending is incredibly pasted on, and everything just kind of happens because the book is running out of space. Hamill does have promise, though, so I'll check out his other books... in a little while.
I haven't really liked any straight up fantasy books (as opposed to fantasy horror or historical fantasy) in a few years. They just didn't vibe for me. I'm so glad I read this one, so glad it was published, because it's what I've been waiting for: someone using fantasy as an excuse to do an anthropological deep dive on a culture they made up, but without getting self-consciously pretentious about it like most Le Guin descendants tend to. Essentially, I applaud K. Ritz for having the determination to write something that is kind of unmarketable, and having read it, it's more than understandable to me why it came through a vanity publishing micropress.
To be clear, this book is great. I think it's amazing. I loved it. But I can readily admit it's not for everyone, and the necessities of its shape and style mean it loses the easy audience a more conventional novel would have. I'm not saying it's too deep for normies to understand– much the opposite, in fact. This book is fantasy, but it's not epic fantasy about world changing events, so it loses the Sandersonian crowd; there are stakes, but no battles and all the sex and violence is off screen, so it loses the ASOIAF crowd; it's fantasy about small events and bucolic experiences, but some very not cozy things happen in it, so it loses the Legends & Lattes crowd; it's got incredibly intricate aspirations in its construction, theme, and pacing, but it's written with very accessible and at times simplistic prose, so it's going to lose out on the literary fantasy crowd.
To be clear, of it changed any one of these things, it would fail to achieve its goals, but in doing so it makes itself very difficult to find a ready-made audience. I firmly believe if this was published ~20 years ago, it would have made a huge splash, but in the current landscape of over-genrefied marketing, it doesn't fit easily into a prescribed box.
What the fuck am I talking about?
Sheever's Journal is the journal about a man named Sheever, who is a poisoner, and it details a huge chunk of his life as he works in the kitchens of a noble house in a fantasy land of the author's creation. You would think this means it's a book about court politics and intrigue. It's not. It's about being Sheever, and what that means to Sheever, written as though it was a normal human's journal. I've read diary-fiction, and most of them cut corners with the diaryness to make themselves more literary; nobody has that good a memory, and almost nobody would write novelesque prose in their diary, but we expect it because we all know it's a novel and this is what we want to read, in the same way that even the most ‘grounded' movies still star the world's most beautiful people. K. Ritz has no interest in this. Her novel refuses to ever forget that it's Sheever's Journal– sentences are simple and short, written quickly, several scenes don't make sense, and things are frequently unexplained. The political situation of the world Sheever inhabits is extremely multilayered and complex, and you're not supposed to understand all of it– if someone from another world read your journal, would they know the difference between Christianity, Christ, a Christian, and Christina Aguilera? In this book, you'll meet Dyns, Drays, and a man called Dyn; good luck keeping them straight. In the end, you don't really need to. It's supposed to be confusing. Indeed, multiple questions the novel asks, mysteries the characters entertain, are unresolved. Is Sheever in love? Is the prophecy real (and what about his visions? His horocope)? Is magic real? How does Mearan culture work? What is Tiarn rebuilding from? Who is the man in the prologue? How was this journal discovered? Is Sheever even running from a real thing? These things are never revealed, either because Sheever doesn't know, because he already knows, or because it will be covered in the next book.
And that's what makes it great, for me. It's a book that's unflinchingly itself, and damn the consequences. It's also frequently heartbreaking and deeply evocative; some scenes in this book are going to be tattooed on my memory for years to come.
If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, don't walk but run to read this novel. But if it sounds like it's not for you, don't force it. This book exists for itself, and in a world with an eternally shrinking quantity of midlist authors– especially in genre fiction– I think that's a fantastic accomplishment.
This is a weird book, but not because of anything the book itself does (or does not do). In a vacuum, The Mercy of the Gods is a fairly boilerplate, run of the mill ‘hard' SF novel; if you like SF door-stoppers that focus more on plot minutia, passably plausible future-tech and encyclopedic worldbuilding detail, than characterization, emotion, or cultural worldbuilding detail, this book is perfect for you. Ignore the rest of this review and read it now.
However, when viewed within the body of work the authors have published beforehand, The Mercy of the Gods is kind of bizarre. The previous series written by James SA Corey, The Expanse, is radically different than TMoG, and not just in terms of thematic tropes. It's also structurally differnet, and not really in a good way. Thematically, the Expanse was notable (to me) and enjoyable (for me) for focusing on cultural and sociological worldbuilding, being concerned with the politics of class, having dense characterization. Structurally, the books used changing POVs to move the plot forward and show different perspectives on plot development, and while the books were never briskly paced, they never wasted their time or felt like a slog (to me).
None of this is true of TMoG, which has a huge cast of largely identical characters (there are three categories of character, of which there are three to four examples of each: Leader Guys In Conflict, Women Who Are Emotionally Unpredictable / Ambiguous For A Tragic Reason, and Support Guys Who Are There For The Other Two Types Of Characters To Bounce Ideas Off) all from the same profession and class background, from a world with no discernable difference from Earth save that it has different country names and a higher technological level. As such, every POV feels roughly the same except Jessyn's, because her mental illness is very deftly written (I suspect this is because she is based on a real person in the author's life, and while I also suspect I can guess exactly who that person is because I've read several interviews with them, I'm not going to out and say it because that sounds extremely creepy). As such, it's not clear who'se POV it is in almost all chapters.
The plot is extremely meandering but also emotionally distant– monstrous events like the colonization of Earth take place, but everything feels very detached. This is especially strange because these chapters feel very much like the part of the Expanse where Earth is bombed from orbit, but it lacks all emotional resonance or feeling. Same with a section where the main cast is held captive by the aliens– there is striking resemblance to an excellent part of Cibola Burn where colonists on an alien world are trapped underground, but there is again no real emotion present in these sections because there's no sense of perspective. While every chapter is told in the third person from the POV of a named character, things frequently feel like they're written in omnipotent POV because the main cast has so little discernible difference in perspective from each other.
It's also horribly paced, with several (very very long) chapters in a row that don't really move the plot along or aclimate the characters to their surroundings; it just feels like they're there so the writers can figure out the plot and the worldbuilding as they go along, but they forgot to edit the extremely bland chapters out. This book would be 2x stronger if it was half its size.
I don't know why they changed so much, why it's so different on every level. I strongly suspect, though, that the writing duo that is James SA Corey benefitted hugely from their first few Expanse books detailing a structured TTRPG adventure. At almost all times, it feels like the Expanse knew where it was going; TMoG never really does, and every plot development feels like it just appeared there suddenly, with very little buildup or foreshadowing despite having a wealth of paged in which to do so. I also think James SA Corey benefitted from being less well-known when the Expanse came out, and thus they were more heavily edited– the books ended up more polished. Now that the Expanse is extremely well-known in SF circles, James SA Corey are probably edited less, and can throw their weight around more to keep in things that an editor might want them to cut.
In a nutshell: if you loved the Expanse for any other reason than it was long and moderately hard-SF, you might still like The Mercy of Gods! But if you like both, you'll probably like them both for very different reasons, because they are such different book with such a variant level of quality that if I didn't know better, I'd assume TMoG was written years and years before Leviathan Wakes. It feels, at best, like a sophomoric attempt made by authors who have the capabilities to do much, much better.
Was Ancient Rome a cancerous state built on oppression? Can a ‘good' state exist if it requires slavery and colonialist expansion to function? Are the patrician nobility of Rome good people, even if they are to a man slave owners? Did women within Ancient Rome's patrician class feel empowered by their wealth or held back by contemporary sexism?
Colleen McCullough confidently answers: Uh, iunno.
Look, I didn't love Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy either, but it at least played with a few of these questions. It cared about the historiography of Rome. It was told from the perspective of a slave who loved his master and had no particular opinions about being an enslaved person, but it was at least in conversation with I, Claudius and, like, scholarship. It engages with the legacy of Rome. That's really all I'm asking for, here. What are we talking about when we talk about Rome?
The First Man in Rome functions as a romance– not a romantic romance, but the original meaning of a romance, an adventuresome story about heroes, told in a vernacular style. (I can't say McCullough's prose is ever particularly sparkling.) I don't really understand why these books are as popular as they are, but I don't generally understand why generational stories that have extremely simplistic morality are popular (Sorry, Mr Follett).
This is a story about heroes fighting a justified battle against savage barbarians (who are given no characterization) for the glory of their country (the nature of its glory is not considered); the generals of this war are brave and enterprising men (who own slaves) with wives who love them (even though they're sometimes selfish bitches) and deserve good things. It has the morality of a pulp story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it was published in 1990.
Penance is the rare book that's compulsively readable while also being delicate and insightful about its subject– at least for me. Everyone has different standards about what is and isn't impossible to put down, but for me, after reading the first chapter, every moment spent not reading this felt wasted.
It's deftly written while always having incredibly clear prose that is neither ‘invisible' or bland– every word is chosen thoughtfully, even if the vocabulary and sentence structure is often simplistic. It reminds me of my favorite Palahniuks and Pat Barkers: a book that never talks down to its readers, trusting them to understand the complexity of thought found in its straight forward (and occasionally blunt) packaging.
And the messages this book sends are very complex and well thought out: is it possible to cover true crime in a moral way? What type of people bully and what type people are bullied? What's the cost of not ‘fitting in' as a child? How does the internet warp young minds? What kind of person is a ‘good' victim? Are ‘good' victims real, or an invention of narrative convenience? Can children's play and imagination build up to murder? What kind of child is capable of murder, and is that capability innate, or does it grow over time? When does bullying become criminal? What amount of bullying is acceptable or ‘normal'? And, perhaps most importantly, the question the book tackles in its final section with one of the most richly layered and consequential plot twists I've ever seen: Is there really any difference between true crime journalism and true crime fanfiction? Is everyone engaging in true crime discussion just writing a different kind of fanfiction? Even if they're not doing it in prose, everyone is forming a narrative in their heads. No one in these forums and blogs and chatrooms and social media accounts was an actual witness to the events they're compelled to discuss. Is all of that just a different kind of fanfiction? And if it is, who has the moral high ground? Who is engaging in these topics in a respectful way? Is anyone?
Is the only way to answer these questions in a way that's respectful to the victim, this book seems to say, is to just write fiction. So Eliza Clark did, and I think it's one of the most engaging, creative, layered and thoughtful books I've ever read.
...At least, I think so. I don't know much about true crime, but Eliza Clark clearly does.
It's fine.
I don't read a lot of YA, or any really, but every summer I get intensely bookblocked and need to read something out of my usual genre to get out of it. And this did the trick, mostly. It's kind of like feeding on cardboard, there's no nourishment there, but my body can basically digest it. And that's fine! This genre isn't for me! Whatever.
The narration style is kind of terrible for action scenes, which had me skimming a lot of the final 10%. A lot of it felt like it was written in-the-moment as Novik came up with the idea, and it made a lot of the plotting clunky. The prose was fun though and I liked what Novik was trying to say about complicity. This is a good baby's-first-grimdark, or a way to microdose young readers to books with darker, if not particularly more challenging, themes.
I think Darnielle is trying to do something very intentional with the pacing of this novel, the denial of closure and satisfaction, and it just does not work for me. I have other quibbles with its choices - for a novel about mothers, it seems to only be able to envision women as distant helpmeet who uphold the virtuous and unquestionable nuclear family - but all of those pale in comparison to how boring I found reading it. Danielle's prose is astoundingly good, but in service of what?
This is a book of incredible conviction and literary depth, to say nothing of its deep political commitment. A lesser novel would use the central conceit– the spy who sees from the perspective of both sides of the war– to flinch from political commentary, playing a both-sides game where it can't lose, but neither can it win. Nguyen wisely takes the risk to give credit and criticism to every part of a conflict that's much more than two-sided. Complex and multi-layered, this is a heart-wrenching, hilarious, disgusting, sexy, depressing and enlivening book.
I only wish it used punctuation marks! I know the choice is stylistic, and thus stylistically valid, but books without punctuation are very difficult for me to read (thus the fact that this book took me a year to complete!) due to learning disabilities. I ended up only able to finish as an audiobook, voiced by the immensely talented Francois Chau, whose performance leant even more depth, texture, and feeling to the narrative.
Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read an ARC in return for a fair review.
This book is trying to do something tremendous, and, mostly, it succeeds. Its failings are small things, niggling complaints about pacing and length. I'd give this book a 4.75 if possible, because it's just short of absolutely perfect. A lot of the dramatic weight could have been improved by either having fewer main characters, or more room in the book to flesh those characters out. This book is a response to Stephen King's IT, and that book is famously enormous; while this book doesn't need to be a doorstopper, it could have benefitted from a few extra pounds.
All that said, it's thematically and emotionally immaculate. The mood shifts between Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the works of Alison Rumfitt, and IT, yet it manages to entirely original. The book really comes into its own as the voices of its main cast emerge and flourish, and perhaps selfishly I wanted more time to sit with them. However, the very action-oriented horror suits this book well, and the buckling conclusion is as heartrending as it is satisfying.
What is conquest, and what is empire, and what is religion? These are questions The Stars Undying flirts with, but is uninterested in fully answering. Instead, it spends most of its words detailing the lives of Cleopatra, Caesar, and Mark Antony in some reincarnated mode that is both slavish to detail– multiple facts about these historical figures are awkwardly replicated in this SciFi adventure even when it's unnecessary to the plot– and totally uncomprehending of the historical figures real weight. The things that are changed barely make sense at first, until I realized the intention was to make these figures less complicated, more consumable, more sympathetic, less problematic.
Was Caesar a tyrant who ended the last vestiges of republicanism in ancient Rome? Was there anything worth saving in Rome's horrible bloodbath of an empire? Was Egypt culpable in these wars? Was its sovereignty truly worth preserving when it was ruled over by a foreign queen? These are questions the book is aware of, but doggedly ignores.
It also makes the odd choice to obscure and deemphasize the historically significant Roman women of the period. Servilia and Aurelia are dead, Calpurnia is gender-bent, Fulvia is declawed, but this is okay because... Antony is a girl, and Brutus is nonbinary, and Cato and Pompey are also women? Hurray.
I rarely ask for books to be longer. In general I think they should be shorter. This book's pacing was incredibly fast and deftly balanced! But in the service of that rapidity, it left out a great amount of detail, meaning, and nuance. The book's focus is clearly on the romance, the great imperial saga, the tragedy and the agony, the ambition and the grace! But for what? These things don't exist without context, and the writing relies on the preexisting template (Antony and Cleopatra and the end of the late Republican period in Rome) for those details. In trying to balance both, it serves neither.
Here is a statement the book does not make, though it delves constantly into the idea of death and immortality: The dead, especially the ancient dead, are symbols to us. What we say about them says more about us than them. What this book says about the ancient dead is that they are glorious, fascinating, and romantic.
But it doesn't know why.
This book is a continuation from My Heart Is A Chainsaw in more ways than one (obviously). It not only completes and continues to further flesh out the themes of the previous works, but exacerbates the flaws. Jones has this way of writing where it often feels like it takes 3 pages for one thing to happen, be it a conversation or a slasher show down, because revelations and stray thoughts are piled on top of each other. It makes the pacing treacle slow, even with a novel that starts out bloody and has no bloated second act like the first in this trilogy.
Likewise... some of the character development felt, well, under-developed, even though logically I know this isn't true. The choice to make this book multipov, to take us out of Jade's head, means that Jade doesn't have enough time to shine. Though I may be biased; I read for more Jade.
All that complaining aside, this is a solid novel, and its flaws are largely technical bugbears. The story and characters are joyfully coherent, and the themes continue to grow and change in a way I find refreshingly authentic.
Jones is kind of a messy writer, and I've come to expect that. I like his writing, I like his ideas and the way he gets them across, but pacing is his weakest skill, and occasionally the plot feels tied together in chunks rather than one coherent narrative. On these scores, My Heart Is A Chainsaw is head and shoulders above The Only Good Indians, but it still has its twitchy vestigial failings that feel like a few more run-throughs with an editor could have fixed.
Whatever, though? Conceptually, this book is excellent. I really liked The Final Girl Support Group, but this one blows it out of the water. I try not to compare books that don't have much to do with each other, but TFGSG and MHIAC are made from the same stuff. They're both about women and trauma, how we conceptualize media, what a ‘final girl' means, but MHIAC feels more honest and authentic in ways I find difficult to pinpoint. Maybe it's because there's no layer of leery judgement, or no power of female friendship Hail Mary. Who knows. Maybe Jones is just a cleaner writer thematically. The book is awesome, though, that's what I'm saying. I loved Jade, and I can't wait to read more about her.