johnny dangerously.

Is Julius Caesar Hitler?

In the book succeeding this one, Robert Harris writes: “As Dictator encompasses what is arguably - at least until the convulsions of 1933-45 - the most tumultuous era in human history [...]”

Does Robert Harris think Julius Caesar is Hitler?

For the record, I don't think Julius Caesar is Hitler. I think Hitler is Hitler, and Julius Caesar is Julius Caesar. But writing Caesar as Hitler is a trap that Harris seems to fall into. It creates some logistical problems with the writing of the novel. You can't have Roman Hitler doing good things, or being kind. When Hitler– I mean, Caesar?– institutes reforms that enable the Corn Dole, the system with which every Roman citizen became entitled to grain, Cicero - the hero, the anti-Hitler - must oppose it, and the act must be evil. Because Hitler did it. I mean, Julius Caesar.

This is a well-written novel, on the prose level. It is consistently compelling, and excellently paced. I was riveted for almost all of it, which is saying something considering how bad my ADHD has been lately. But Harris' insertion of modern morality makes the pieced awkward at best on a political level, which is a shame because these are, in the end, political novels about political machinations. Politics is an area rife with moral greyness, where you must make compromises in order to pass legislation, where you have to get in bed with people you'd rather not. For the most part, Harris understands this, and how he depicts it slowly eating away at Cicero's morals and self-respect is compelling as hell! But the backbone of this novel is the fact that Julius Caesar is Hitler of the highest degree, which is somewhat specious considering the total lack of interest this book has in writing Roman atrocity. Because Rome in this book is basically London, and the Senate is (modern) Parliament, we can't focus on the things that detract from that analysis - the slavery, the rampant expansionist colonialism, the horrendous sexism, the legalized rape. It means Julius Caesar is Hitler without any atrocity that brings Hitler's ills into the world. He's simply Hitler because Hitler is bad, because because.

It's an Achilles heel on an otherwise strong novel, a footfall made weak by an elegantly made body. It's a shame I can't rate this novel higher, because I truly enjoyed it.

How do you rate a book that is, in matters of prose and pacing and theme, excellent, but utterly fails what you, personally, want it to do? This is a problem I've wrestled with in the entirety of Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy, and at its closing, I am left unable to answer.

The book itself is entirely concerned with Cicero. Cicero's life, and Cicero's dreams, and Cicero's death. Cicero as a man, and Cicero's ambitions. It is barely interested in Rome as a polity, largely letting any commentary on the state of Rome serve as a metaphor for the state of either Germany before and during Hitler's rise to power, or a sort of warning for England– pick your least favorite PM, and Caesar is him, just as Caesar is occasionally Hitler.

I am not interested in this metaphor. I am barely interested in Cicero as a man. Cicero has received an amount of attention, since his death and during his life, that was controlled expertly from beyond the grave. The book plays with this theme a little, but it's afraid to castigate Cicero, who it places in a role of most atheistic martyrdom. Cicero's reputation is sacrosanct within the book and outside it– people love Cicero today, piling him with praise and adulation, writing fiction about him, studying his words two millennium after his death. That's the world we live in, and it's the world of the book.

And that's the scope of the book. The book doesn't want to talk about Cicero's flaws– the big flaws, the human failings, not the political missteps and gaffes– and that's usually fine for me. I try to pay attention to what a book actually wants to do, so I'm not disappointed by it failing to live up to an impossible standard that I've created in my head.

So why am I so disappointed with this book and the series in general, even though it expertly does everything it sets out to do?

The books are narrated by Tiro, an enslaved man. Tiro is possibly one of, if not the most, famous enslaved people to have lived in ancient Rome. Tiro tells this story, but it's not Tiro's story. Tiro talks about Cicero, a man who owned him, with rapturous praise. Cicero never mistreats Tiro, because Cicero is a good master. Indeed, there is almost no mistreatment of slaves throughout the entire trilogy, because then the writing would have to focus on the lives of slaves and question whether a state that allowed, endorsed, and arguably ran on slavery was moral or immoral. Harris doesn't care about that, so he skips it, but I care about it, and its total absence from this trilogy, written from the perspective of an enslaved man, feels like a yawning chasm at the heart of the story.

While the beginning is a bit rocky and jumbled, the characters shine all the way through, and the ending makes everything perfectly worth it. The brevity helps immensely; this story did not need to be any longer than it was, and I'm glad no one pressured the writer into expanding it.

An excellent, clever, literary novel about modern fairy tales and fatherhood.

This novel is a masterclass in using fairy tale themes, and explains to me why so many gritty re-imaginings of fairy tales feel so hollow. This book actually has something to say other than ‘remember that shit you liked when you were a kid? We're reheating it because you're an ADULT now!'

It's so clever. That's the thing I can't get over. The way it writes magic, the way it comments on modernity, the way it ties history to the present, is so clever and masterful. This book is the work of a truly excellent author, to the point where its flourishes and victories look effortless.

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 try very hard to rate things with the scope of the material in mind– essentially, if you're reading Lord of the Rings and are disappointed by Aragorn's lack of tax policy, that's on you, not the author (and conversely, if you're reading A Song of Ice and Fire and disappointed by the wealth of violence, that's also on you). Usually this is pretty simple, but this book has an odd scope that left me occasionally at a loss.

This book is written from the perspective of Cicero's enslaved secretary, Tiro. One would expect, that the scope would include things like Tiro's life, his experiences being an enslaved person– yet it's extremely clear Robert Harris has no interest in this perspective. He wants to write about Cicero, and thus Tiro, his narrator, is relegated to a kind of third person perspective granted omniscience by time. Tiro is more of a literary device than a character. Is this a strike against the book? Probably?

Robert Harris is a deft enough writer to make me occasionally forget this giant hole in his work - which is saying something, considering how perpetually hungry I am for the perspective of the non-elite (as Jerry Toner puts it) in the Roman world. His political writing is sharp and fierce, and the story never drags, even when Cicero is kicking his feet in boredom. Tiro is a deft narrator, because Tiro is really just Harris in a tunic, explaining the intricacies of Roman law, politics, and the painful insertion of human flesh and soul between.

I've said before that all stories dealing with Roman history, but this period especially, can dip easily into the well of tragedy, and Harris' writing takes great advantage of that. I find Cicero, as a historical personage, irritating at best, and yet I found him a grand character here. Harris makes sure that you don't have to actually like Cicero to like these books, you just have to be interested in his career, and I admit I wasn't before– I started reading this book months ago and straight up gave up. I'm glad I came back to it, because with a fresher mind, the writing really sparkles.

If you want a book with political intrigue that is beautifully written, elegantly staged, and described with a sharp eye for detail, you'll love this novel. If you're looking for a keen eye into the life of the enslaved, well, you won't find it here.

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.

I grew up with the BBC adaptation, which is one of the few adaptations that's better than the original, but the book is still very good. It's a leisurely read– almost everything happens in some post-hoc narration rather than on the page itself– but it's supposed to be a historian's account rather than a melodrama. is it, like, historically accurate? No, not at all, but that's not the point. It's based on Seutonius' writings, writings that Graves himself translated; it's supposed to be biased. This novel is one long meditation on historicity and the role of historians. It's sad that its legion of imitators don't seem to get that. Every single book and show and movie that covers the Julio-Claudians is deeply indebted to this book (or the BBC miniseries) either as a direct descendant (HBO's Rome, [b:The Cicero Trilogy 32310982 The Cicero Trilogy Robert Harris https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1508696043l/32310982.SY75.jpg 52938876], [b:I Am Rome 174146857 I Am Rome (Julius Caesar, #1) Santiago Posteguillo https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1692261636l/174146857.SY75.jpg 95030492]) or as self-conscious flouting of its influence (Sky's Domina, and quite obviously [b:I Am Livia 20874139 I Am Livia Phyllis T. Smith https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441814072l/20874139.SX50.jpg 26171345], two narratives that beat the same dead horse into shoe leather). Honestly, the only successor who seems to get Robert Graves' intention isn't writing historical fiction at all; he's George RR Martin and you might be familiar with his little book series. If only for historical significance, and its contribution to the genre of not just Roman historical fiction but all historical fiction and literature in general (every I, [something] title is riffing off this novel in specific), this book is very much worth reading.

Thoroughly disappointing, this book is impossible for non-academics, highly pompous and needlessly verbose, and worse, does not stick to the subject it advertises. While it gives a good general overview of the period during which Balwin IV ruled, that information is only available to you if you speak French and are willing to wade through paragraphs of disjointed and turgid prose.

I've never found a Cornwell book boring before, and to be fair, I didn't find this one totally boring either. I just looked down at the time remaining and was aghast to realize there were six more hours of this novel left when so many years had passed and so much had already happened. I want to come back to it some day, but that feels a little doubtful considering I had difficulty telling the characters apart. This has never happened to me with a Cornwell novel before, but the guy's bound to disappoint me sooner or later.

I think a great deal of my fatigue with the book is how much of it feels like a retread of the Warlord Chronicles and The Last Kingdom series. Any novelist who has as large a bibliography as Cornwell will have stock characters and repeated tropes, but in this case, it meant I knew the trajectory of characters before we got there, making the incredibly leisurely pace feel even more sluggish. There just wasn't much suspense, if you are familiar with the way Cornwell likes to write various characters.

I think the novel has an interesting tension in the writing, if not the text. Cornwell is a historical novelist, but there just isn't much extant detail remaining from the British Isles 2000 BCE. It means that Cornwell has more room to fall back on his favored themes. However, this book is about building Stonehenge, something that was probably a religious monument, during a time when there really was no outlet for atheism. Thus Cornwell has to worldbuild a great deal of what the religion of that time even was, and... it's just not something that interests him, if the text is any indication. He is interested in exploring historical detail, and there just isn't enough to give the novel the texture and weight his novels usually have.

I don't regret reading this– listening to Jonathan Keeble is always a pleasures– but I'm fine with putting it down. I may reread the Warlord Chronicles, though, for a better and more satisfying version of this book.

In terms of prose, this book is a little dodgy– first person present rarely works, and here it's occasionally grating, and often distracting. But don't let that stop you from reading the work.

I think it's impossible for this book not to be compared to Elodie Harper's Wolf Den series, and while each have their strong and weak points, I think this book comes out stronger in terms of literary worth and political analysis. The story is short and to the point, about power, about hierarchy, about colonialism. Rome is an animal that feeds on the weak, and so to be strong is to eventually be corrupted by this influence– not because of capitalism, or because of inequality, or because of any one abstract principle; the book posits that injustice is inevitable in a system that is built on injustice. The tools this system uses– colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, slavery, classism, sexism– are systematic and important and innate, but they are legs of a spider.

And yet, is life worth living? Yes. Is it worthwhile to try? Yes. Is collective action, friendship, love, honor and hope, worthwhile? Yes, always.

Despite having an explicit rape scene (something Elodie Harper occludes rather than reveal with her prose) I find the book much more hopeful than The Wolf Den. The use of a first person narrator telling us the end of his story (similar to Graves' I, Claudius) serves not as a clever narrative device, but as a balm. We know he'll make it out. Does it really matter how?

Incredible prose and pacing, with a focus on the meaning of love– not in a more airy sense, but a practical focus that asks what it means to grow within a shortage of love and care. An excellent novel.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes vampires, Victorian history, or the history of pulp fiction or pulp horror, because this book covers each topic with aplomb. The premise has more depth than you think: Yes, Dracula is real, and yes, he's married the queen. But Newman hasn't forgotten anyone in his book.

Dracula's real, so doesn't it follow that other grand features of Victorian literature, and history, are real also? Sherlock Holmes can't solve this one, because he's been imprisoned for ‘subversive thinking' by King Vlad. Elizabeth Bathory sits cackling in the basements of Buckingham Palace. And the ripper still stalks the streets.

Kim Newman has a huge undertaking with this novel: To take every piece of vampire lore he can think of, and mix it with everything he knows of Victorian history, and make it all work. And he does! I've never read an alt history novel as good as this one. Newman doesn't forget any of the vast working parts of the engine that is Victorian London, but he doesn't get boggled down by details, either. Everything fits in a seamless background machinery that always feels real, and imbues every scene with vitality and credibility.

cool to read the book all the other books on this subject are cribbing off.

Surprisingly good, considering it's Troy Denning, who I'm not really much a fan of regularly. The characterization of minor elements from The Phantom Menace was a real treat; it managed to carry the tone of the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, balancing them out and keeping everyone reasonably in character. The central plot was engaging and never dragged.

The squibs were awful, though, oh my god.

This book is a classic, and reading it, it's obvious why. The raw power of the writing is matched with the author's passion for the subject, and it illuminates an all-too-forgotten period of history. Reading this book will completely change how you look at colonialism, the Enlightenment, and the birth of modern western politics, because all are deeply tied into the Haitian Revolution. This part of history is often ignored and overlooked, and that's a travesty. To understand the French Revolution, you must learn about the Haitian Revolution. To understand colonialism, you must understand the Haitian Revolution. To understand the birth of America, you must understand the Haitian Revolution. This book is essential.

“You don't hire a genius to solve the most intractible imaginable problem, and then hedge him around with a lot of rules, nor try to micro-manage him from two week's distance. You turn him loose. If you need someone to follow orders, hire an idiot. In fact, an idiot would be better suited.”

This is a little speech given by Miles Vorkosigan.

There were a handful of things that I disliked about Cetaganda, but what really ruined it for me was the main character, Miles. I found him arrogant, rude, paranoid, childish, impatient, overbearing, condescending, and misogynistic. These are all fine flaws to have, in a well-built character! But Cetaganda is so deeply in love with dear darling Miles that these flaws are meant to be empathized with, accepted, if they can even be flaws!

For example, Miles habitually condescends to everyone, sneering with disdain and insulting them left and right if they cannot keep up with his superior intelligence, despite the fact that this exact strain of logic had been used against him, to hurt him and bully him, if you simply replace the ‘intelligence' with ‘physical state'. Miles also judges all women by their beauty before anything else, despite the fact that, again, the same logic has been used against him due to his disability. If Miles were aware of this internal flaw in his logic, that would be interesting. If the book itself were aware of this internal flaw of logic, that, too, would be interesting. But neither care enough about making Miles ever suffer for his poor behavior, except in the most glowingly melodramatic was possible, which absolves him of all his blame and drowns him in sympathy.

Miles has a boatload of flaws that would make him a fascinating anti-hero. He could be an amazing portrait of what growing up disabled in a viciously ablist and sexist society could do to his psyche, as he clings pathetically to his ego and intelligence, insulting everyone around him and making his own problems, dehumanizing women and them blaming them for finding him off-putting. But this is not the case, not by a landslide. That would require an understanding that Miles has flaws, instead of just quirky mean things that everyone forgives him for because he's oh! So! Smart!

Sadly, Miles is supposed to be a hero, the worst sort, the sort who are never wrong, for whom the world convulses around to aid at every turn. He ruins the book, no matter how clever the plot or nuanced the dialog (not that I found either particularly outstanding, but that's besides the point) by virtue of being the center of all morality. And, frankly, it's boring.

A baffling and shallow piece on ‘edgy' sexual counterculture. I bought it because I love Naifeh's art, but the writing is putrid, and, yeah, loathsome. The characters are caricatures going through pointless plots that only exist to show their content– pseudo incest, strap-ons, and a trans woman talking to herself in the mirror (how original!). I nabbed this on a deal years back because I loved the Courtney Crumrin books and wanted to see how Naifeh's art deal with more adult subjects, but I couldn't get past how bad the writing was. If you must buy it, focus on the graphics; the writing is only memorable for its equal potential to bore and enrage.

This book holds the distinction of having probably the best rendered, best written battle scene I've ever read. It's slow and painful, purposefully so, and perfectly explains every part of the fight, so the reader is never confused or caught off guard by developments in the fighting. Every part of the army makes sense, their movements and their gambits.

This book renders mood wonderfully in general; the scenes with the dying infant (no spoilers), the miserable waiting months in the swamp, the final battle itself, all have distinct moods that are rendered inexorably in my memory.

Possibly my favorite Cornwell yet.

I love Cornwell's ability to write a battle in a way that isn't ultraviolent or boring. I love his way with characters and showing their entire lives in just a few pages. I love his focus on parts of history that aren't well recorded, making me feel like a time traveler into the unknown.

Is he doing anything ground breaking? Probably not. But these books, like the Warlord Chronocles (narrated by the same guy, Jonathan Keeble, who does an excellent job with both books) are an immense comfort read for me.

Probably the weakest Saxon Story novel yet, by which I mean it's a brilliant piece of historical fiction. The plot was solid, but felt more like a series of brilliant but awkwardly connected scenes than previous books. That said, those brilliant scenes truly are brilliant and highly memorable.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for a fair review:

I love Caitlin Starling's horror novels, because I love her pacing. She starts as close to the action as possible, and only includes details relevant to the plot. Both The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence are strong yet lean novels. I'm never bored, and I have trouble putting them down.

So I was a little disappointed when I got five chapters into Last to Leave the Room and found myself bored. Nothing's perfect, though, so I kept going to chapter 15, where I felt like things were finally happening. They weren't. I'll be honest, if I hadn't gotten this book off NetGalley, I may not have finished it.

The thing that makes Starling's books work, for me, is the relentless focus on necessary detail combined with cutting the wheat from the chaff. I never feel like things haven't progressed in a chapter, like things aren't developing. Yet that's a huge problem in Last to Leave the Room. Once the delicious joy of reading Tamsin's neuroses wears off, there's a lot of detail I just don't care about, and the detail I do care about is spread thin with incremental development. I never cared about the node project Tamsin was working on, perhaps because there's precious little detail about it in the actual novel. It's a thing that Tamsin has to deal with to justify her deteriorating mental state, but it's very vague within the novel. Maybe I missed something, but considering how lush with detail The Death of Jane Lawrence is with medical gore and The Luminous Dead is with cave diving, I doubt it. This book ultimately feels like it was originally a novella that publishers wanted stretched out to novel length. In the end, it feels boring and empty, which is the exact opposite of what I go to for a Caitlin Starling novel.

That said, I think it is of great interest to anyone who really, really enjoys unreliable narrator POV, especially when that POV is a very ‘problematic' woman. That just wasn't enough for me, personally, to make the book shine.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC in return for a fair review. Sorry for reading it in one sitting.

Weird, lyrical, unhinged, whip-smart, extremely painful. This book is difficult to describe, but that's a compliment; it's complex and refuses to compromise, while still having highly engaging and readable prose. Most experimental / poetic novels are a little too obtuse for me, but Rumfitt's eye for prose and person always sits well.

In the end, I think I liked it less than Tell Me I'm Worthless, though I don't really think that's the book's fault. While it begins with (helpful!) content warnings, it doesn't really go into enough detail for me (I'm fine with books not having content warnings, for the record, but this book's CWs were a bit vague). In the end, it dwelled on subjects I personally find incredibly gross. Not morally suspect, not bad, not wrong, just, for me, subjectively, gross. And that will inevitably make me like a book less, no matter how well it's written.

And Brainwyrms is incredibly, startlingly well written. It's at least as good as Tell Me I'm Worthless, perhaps better in how it expands its scope and aims. The book has a lot more to say on a wide range of issues, but still hits the topic home. If you disliked the unsubtlety and long rambly prose style of TMIW, though, this book is similar. Personally, I find that a success; I love Rumfitt's work and her style.

For those interested, the content warnings that I felt would have personally helped me with this book: watersports, scat, bugs / parasites, transformation into bugs.

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.

Honestly, I think if I'm going to keep reading this series, I ought to stick to the Cordelia books. I have nothing against Miles, but the way he's written is a little insufferable. While Cordelia is also ultimately always right about everything, it's somewhat more refreshing to see that in a female character. Reverse sexism strikes again, I guess.

I also just prefer the culture clash and political backdrop of these novels to The Adventures Of Sexist Baby Genuis With A Chip On His Shoulder. Cordelia is, I think, supposed to be an unreliable and biased narrator at times. Maybe that's something Bujold is trying with Miles, but I've never gotten that sense personally. With Cordelia, her super-liberalism is supposed to be lampooned as it contrasts with the super-conservatism of Barrayar, or the central conceit of the book wouldn't work. I personally find that much more engaging to read.