johnny dangerously.
I really wanted to finish this novel, but I became way too sickened by it at the 50% point, which is where the famous rape takes place. Not because of the rape itself– I know about Artemisia Gentileschi's life and I knew what I was getting into. No, what put me off was the incredible historical inaccuracy, all to push a really stupid point.
The book really wants to push this reductive men vs women angle, at the expense of every character except Artemisia herself, and perhaps her rapist Tassi. It belittles her father Orazio and is entirely incorrect on the way that the culture surrounding painting in Baroque Italy operated. I was not an expert on this subject before I read the book, and I don't consider myself one now. These are all things I learned from cursory research, which the author either ignored or didn't find in the first place.
It was not considered scandalous or disobedient for a woman to paint a nude woman. Why would it be? It's not like lesbianism was a popular subject– it doesn't even arise in what I read of the book. If you look at Gentileschi's work, it's full of nude women, often depicted in erotic poses. This was because a woman posing for a woman painter was considered more proper, and less like prostitution, which is a commerce that, according to Italians at the time, operated between men and women, not women and women.
There is a scene where Gentileschi decries Caravaggio's Judith as being too sexual– after all, we can see the shape of her nipples through her dress. Yet to accuse Caravaggio of a prurient interest in women is frankly hilarious; Gentileschi's work has far more naked female skin than Caravaggio's! Caravaggio's sexuality is famously debated over, then and now, because Caravaggio's favorite subjects are young men in various states of undress.
The book goes on to decry paintings showing too much nudity, as though nudity equals sexuality– something the book itself wants to address in scenes where its heroine champions her right to study the body and anatomy! And yet it still falls back on lazy stereotypes that evil men draw sexy paintings while good girl Gentileschi paints morally pure Art. It seems totally unaware of the fact that the viewer brings their own interests to the work, as in any art form. There's a scene where Gentileschi is horrified that a man might find her Susannah and the Elders painting sexy, and yet previously she bemoaned how other artists cavalierly depict female nudity. It's okay when she does it, but not them.
The book makes Gentileschi's father, Orazio, into a bumbling idiot with no talent, even though several years after the events of this book take place, he becomes a noted patron of Queen Henrietta Maria, the woman after whom Maryland was named. Orazio also scorns Caravaggio multiple times in the book, saying his interest in light and shadow is passe and that his work is gruesome– when in reality both Orazio and his daughter are considered Caravaggisti. The book also depicts him as unable to appreciate his daughter's work, when it was a matter of record that he boasted about her talents.
It does all this to further the idea that Artemisia was ahead of her time, that the establishment (men) couldn't understand her, and that she had feminism all figured out before it had ever been invented. The book depicts Artemisia as right at every turn, about everything, too talented to be properly understood, and with goals that are incomprehensible to her male contemporaries– all things that are entirely untrue, even inside the novel itself. A huge amount of fretting is spent depicting how Artemisia isn't free, how she can't go wherever she wants, how she is constantly chaperoned, yet her rapist attempts to assault her when she is without a chaperone. The book puts this down as a weird irony, and no more is said on the subject. The book's internal logic is broken.
In the end, the feminism in this book is reductive, second wave at best, terf-y at worst. The motif of the Hermaphroditus figure appears as an attempt for Artemisia to grasp at breaking the gender binary, and there's a lovely scene where she draws a man in a dress to try and better understand gender taboos. This scene is rendered obsolete by her later using the story to scare away a potential suitor. Breaking the gender binary is fine when she's in control of it, but the bodies of nonbinary / trans / gnc people are also useful as a medium of disgust and horror.
I read historical fiction so I can go back in time, and see the morals and cultures of a past era. I don't read historical fiction to learn historically fictitious tales about how everyone was wrong except one woman who has an entirely anachronistic view of the world, presumably from birth. It's boring, ideologically reductive, and incredibly uncreative.
This book is such a ridiculous improvement over previous books in the series. I don't know if I just find Miles' characterization more palateable when he's an adult, or if Bujold's writing has improved, but I found most of this genuinely enjoyable, even if the twist at the end was a little obvious (which is fine, not everything has to be a total shock, but it felt a bit unearned, whatever). It was an excellent character study of Miles, in a similar vein to how Wrath of Kahn looked into what happens when Kirk is grounded. I just wish, since the point Miles choosing not to get his heart's desire, he didn't ultimately get his heart's desire in the end anyway, but that's a problem with Bujold's writing in general. Her favorites may suffer, but they always get the respect (and domestic paradise) they crave in the end.
Ultimately felt a bit stilted; the so-called clever jabs were hammy and overdone, the characters seemed hollow ideas, and the plot seemed forced and superficial. But I've been wanting to read this series for a while, now, so I'm going to give another book in the series a try.
People will sell you this book as a comedy, and it is. It's hilarious! But it's also got some genuinely thoughtful, deep shit to say about self-loathing, the nature of entertainment, and the moral axis of representation and whitewashing in Hollywood.
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.
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 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.
Very fun with great ideas, but poorly paced; things only really get going 50% of the way into the book, which is a long wait for a horror novel.
This is an excellent book with one fatal flaw deep at its heart, but I do think it's a necessary read. While the ideas the book relays shouldn't be new to anyone who pays attention to the current corporate landscape, the exact details of corporate intrusion into our lives are definitely worth knowing, and they're related in a simple and easily understood fashion. The book is at no point overcomplex, except perhaps when reporting on subjects that are themselves purposefully obfuscated, like when they go into the twisted morass of music listening law.
The thing that keeps this from being a truly 5 star experience, a real ‘everyone needs to read this!' knee slapping call to arms, is the way the book focuses only on artists. Artists are unimaginably abused by our current megacorp dystopia, and I think they should get their due for their labor. I think the book should mention them, and it does. But it focuses on them to the exclusion of people whose experiences with corporate abuse are far more devastating in consequence and scope. It's easy to take advantage of artists, and so Giblin and Doctorow call them the canary in the coalmine of these antics, but I think what artists really are in this situation are the most easily visible people being taken advantage of.
The book talks at length about breaking corporate chokeholds– monopolies– but it talks about doing it through legislation. It mentions the COVID pandemic but not the riots. The book points to artists and how they've been abused, then blithely mentions production line workers wearing diapers and Amazon striking. The book's use of artists as its focal point is meant to show how corporate abuse could spread from just artists and eventually abuse you, but in using artists, the implicit you is presumed middle class. Purposefully or otherwise, the book excludes the people who were alienated from their labor far, far before any musician: the people who staff Amazon warehouses, automobile factory workers, the lower middle class and working poor. The book's diligent focus on legislative fixes to the problems of corporation totally ignores the importance of riots and radical action, and the book only briefly mentions strikes and labor unions.
The final passages of the book talk about how it's a big task to take down corporate greed (it is) but how we should take heart, because their control is so self-entangled that any strike against them weakens the whole. But the book forgets that the people, workers, the disadvantaged, everyone who is preyed on by corporate capital, are also a whole. We have to protect our own, even if it scares white upper middle class economists.
This is not an incitement of Giblin or Doctorow's priorities or an attempt to guess at their class status; I am not casting aspersions on their motives in writing this book, nor saying the book is useless. I think their best intentions are in this book, and it's truly an informative and important read. But it is blinkered in its scope, and that, again, weakens the whole.
What is prayer? What is faith? What is the division between holiness and the nature of the world? Is the world inherently innocent and pure, when untouched by man's hand? Is all love selfish? Is it possible to selfishly love god?
This is an amazing novel, but not for the faint of heart. There's no one to root for. There's very little action. It's gross and enjoys its grossness. Nothing happens like how you'd expect. Even the expectations of genre– this is nominally a historical fiction novel, or perhaps a fantasy?– are casually cast aside. When we talk about subverting tropes, we rarely describe them in the way this novel casts them aside. No one is purely good or evil, but they're not ‘grey' heroes written with sympathy and nobility. Everyone has their own way of looking at the world, and it's all valid, and that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of Lapvona.
No one knows anything. They just know how they feel.
Is god an unkind father, a silly lord or a somber man, a fool who doesn't know the world around them? Is god anything at all? Is god just what you make for yourself? This very Marxist novel never sneers at faith, but it does take a keen interest how, exactly, one can live if your entire life is hinged upon an opiate. While I wouldn't call the book anti-religious so much as highly skeptical of organized religion (specifically in the way it was constructed– or believed to be constructed, it's not like this book is concerned with historical accuracy– in a feudalist medieval period), I can say this book will disappoint more dogmatically religious readers. But I also think that's kind of what it's trying to do in the first place. Just as it's trying to wiggle out of the expectation of genre, of needing sympathetic characters, of having coincidence converge happily, of reunions and rebirth and positive character growth.
Read this novel if you want a dark– and darkly funny– view of a very troubled town, with very fractured, selfish and cruel people populating it. And read it if you want to find out how these awful little humans are still, somehow, deserving of love.
So, I inhaled this in one day.
Grady Hendrix keeps improving. This is the funniest book I've read by him. It's also the most focused. If The Final Girl Support Group was his most complex novel, How To Sell A Haunted House is him really drilling down on a few issues and knocking it out of the park. This story is about motherhood, and family, and death, and acceptance, and puppets.
So many puppets.
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.
Just kind of... eh. The split POVs mean you spend a lot of time with people who exist to die, and the last minute attempts to humanize them before they are brutally murdered. The plot is telegraphed really strongly before it kicks off, and it takes a looong time to kick off. I can't tell if this book is an indictment of... what, consumer culture? Reality TV? It fails as both.
I like zombie fiction, I like it a lot. I like the narrative of survival, I like the tense situations, I like the potential for worldbuilding and the way it can put character development at the forefront. But zombie fiction, like most post apocalyptic fiction, is inherently conservative, falling victim to a ‘come and take it' ideology that prioritizes hoarding, us-vs-them tribalism, and a particularly Evangelical flavor of paranoia about the future. It's the end times, after all, and in the Christian West, an event that has not ever happened, no matter how many times it's been predicted, is something that feeds into the constant background static of our culture and policy decisions.
But I still want to read zombie books and watch zombie shows and play zombie games. It's fun.
This novella is fun. This novella is about zombies. This novella is also what we think about when we think about zombies– and the end times– and how we cast ourselves as characters within a grand narrative of apocalypse. This story is also very, very concerned with the post-truth era, the Trump administration, Brexit and fake news. All swirl together into a complex and bittersweet story of... zombies. And survival. And the truth. And what it means when we interact with any of those things, and how, if we touch one, we're almost always touching one of the others.
That sure was a book I read!
There are a lot of things I could comment on– the weird inaccuracy with what I know of the true crime community, given that literally all my friends are true crime freaks– but whatever. I read this book after Sharp Objects because I wanted to figure out something that's been bugging me since chapter two of SO.
Does Gillian Flynn hate women, or is her protagonist just a female misogynist? It makes sense for Camille, less so for Libby, but Libby seems to hate fucking everyone. And, you know, that's a style. If you wanna write everyone like you're JK Rowling describing Rita Skeeter, it's a choice.
But, that question solved, I'm left waving my hand at these deus ex machina murderer characters. Why do they murder? Because they're murderers! Anyone can just be completely unhinged, for no fucking reason, as the plot demands it. I'm sure it ties up lose ends, but like... it always pulls me out of it because the utter murderyness is the same. They're just full of brutality, because.
Needless to say, I'm reading Gone Girl next.
How do we heal? And what facilitates healing? And, if we can answer that question, what causes pain and suffering, and who is responsible for those wounds? Using the background of WWI and a bevy of historical domain characters, this book seeks to answer those questions, and honestly I think it does a fine job. It's certainly, along with its two sequels, one of my favorite books I've read as an adult... or, ever. You could justifiably say I'm biased, but I think it's a modern classic. The quick and easy prose only speeds it along, making it a slick novel to read that's nonetheless deeply feeling and contemplative. Five stars isn't enough, frankly.
I took my time getting around to reading this, which really says that the 1st book in the trilogy didn't leave an overwhelming impression, but I finished this book in a day, which says something about its hold on my attention. (I've been finding it difficult lately to keep my mind on a book long enough to finish it, but this one had me in a stranglehold.) The book is freakishly compelling, shocking not least because it's got very uneven pacing (90% of the action happens in the last 20% of the book) and the prose style is clear verging on bland– and sometimes jarring due to its choice to be in present tense. Still? It works, and it works much better than the first book, which also undeniably worked.
The story itself is exactly what you'd expect from the first, but also more. While I enjoyed The Wolf's Den, my major takeaway from it was how many punches it pulled. Don't get me wrong; I understand why the story chooses to never depict any SA graphically (even when it happens ‘on screen', no actions are ever descripted; it's all glossed over and implied). This book is clearly being marketed to the Madeline Miller and Classical Mythology retelling crowd, a microgenre that is YA adjacent and largely uninterested in portraying the darkest aspects of the Classical world in sharper detail. But this book has a lot more in common with Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls, tonally and thematically– it wants to talk about the degradation and misery that antiquity was built on. But, from the cover art to the book lists this series ends up on, it's slotted again and again next to books where the SA that is part and parcel for the Classical world either doesn't happen, or is so vaguely alluded to that you can miss it entirely.
Should fiction that focuses so solidly on characters who have experienced incredible abuse be written in a way that means readers never have to actually see these acts perpetuated? I can't answer that question, but it is a question this series invariably raises. Do I think the book would pack more of a punch, be more memorable, and have more of a coherent message if those acts were more solidly (if not graphically) laid out? Yes. Do I think it would have sold as well? No.
So I can't really blame the author for making the choices she does. Shakespeare gotta get paid.
I will say that this is a serious improvement over the first in terms of characterization: the first book definitely has the problem of all characters save the protagonist and the villain being rational actors, with no real agenda beyond continuing to exist; they don't have plots and plans of their own, only vaguely sketched hopes and dreams. This book does an excellent job of making it clear that everyone has an agenda, has secrets and wants and needs that are totally hidden from the narrator. It makes the book far more interesting, makes the twists feel far more earned, and recasts the previous book in a different light: in the events of The Wolf's Den, was Amara just seeing what she wanted to see?
The themes of this book are by far more unique and vivid than its predecessor by virtue of being a ‘what comes after' story. What comes after you get your heart's desire? What comes after freedom, in a society that hates the freed? Can a woman be free, or will she only be ‘no longer enslaved'? Stories like the first book often suffer from a kind of ‘beating the system' narrative. Yes, obviously, we want to see the little guy beat wealth and landed power to achieve their dreams, but if that was possible for everyone with enough gumption, society would look totally different. This book answers that question by postulating that freedom in an unfree society functions on the backs of the unfree– Amara is only able to afford freedom (in every sense of the word) by utilizing the same systems that oppressed her, by taking on the same mindset of the man who abused her. I love stories about complex trauma, not just escaping it, but the difficulties of not perpetuating it, and this story falls right into that basked. I think the depiction of Amara's abuser, the main villain of the story, is probably some of the most skillful work the book does. Felix is complex, abused, traumatized, impossible to predict, drunk on power, all-knowing, flawed, mistake-prone, dangerous, and love-starved. He is complex. Abuse and enslavement creates neither heroes nor villains, just incredibly complex people who must decide, for themselves, to be kind. But if they decide to be cruel, nothing in their backstory, however tragic, excuses that cruelty. And it is a choice. I wish this book had focused on this theme more, but I don't think it's a knock against it that it didn't; it's just one of my favorite themes ever, so I always want more.
Likewise, I think this book much more than the last sets up an interesting sequel. Yeah, the main character is once again surging toward a new life, having both lost and gained everything, but she doesn't know what we know. Pompeii is about to explode. Capping off a trilogy entirely about choice, who has choices and who has choices made for them, who is allowed to steer the direction of their own life, with an event that no one chose, is a bold move and I can't wait to see how it turns out.
I really, really wanted to like this book, because medieval fantasy with excellent worldbuilding, an interest in nuance, and female main characters, is incredibly thin on the ground. Regrettably, the writing was just too clunky for me to get into. I don't mean that in the sense of prose, but in the sense of how mood and character was conveyed. The writing would tell me what to feel, rather than having the characters react to it. Despite the book being of a reasonable length to get lots of scenes of characterization, I was instead informed post-hoc what the characters were like. Genuinely disappointing for such a promising premise, with such an interesting focus. I desperately want more books that deal with the (well researched!) intricacies of medieval law, set on the backdrop of a fantasy version of the Carolingian Renaissance, dealing with the politics of warring Germanic city states. Incredibly promising! I may still read the sequel, just to find out if the writing has improved.
A lovely little novella about the evils of academia, this is a lovely answer to all of the weird self-obsession that tends to come with the dark academia genre. At no point does the novel glorify the horrors professors often put their students through, the obsession, the anxiety; it holds a mirror up to the selfish thrill of self-annihilation and asks us to care for ourselves before our careers, because that is so much harder and so much more painful.
While not a perfect book by any means– it lacked a certain weight to the action and character that made it seem like a series of scenes, rather than a fluid whole– it was overall highly enjoyable, and I recommend it enthusiastically to anyone looking for a light read with fantasy characters and good humor.
Ultimately, this horror / dystopia / alt history severely pulls its punches with regards to the ending. It's barely spooky, barely horrific, and so light on the dystopian and alt historical detail that the whole thing feels unsatisfying. The use of post notes to render unreliability and worldbuilding is a pretty interesting one, however.
An excellent work of historical fiction, showing the lives of the Roman underclass. I wish more books were written about people history would rather forget, especially since the lives of slaves and prostitutes were unusually well-documented in Roman history. All the characters are real and varied, and the author deftly avoids a lot of the worst tropes associated with this sort of story. My only complaint was feeling the ending was a little rushed, but the last chapter more than makes up for it.
This book is kind of a mess, in terms of everything but pacing and plot. Considering how many authors struggle with those things, Hide succeeds aptly.
Overall, the book is much less clever and lyrical than it thinks it is, and the way it handles its characters and narrative feels kind of detached. Is it third person or omniscient? The prose tries to do the Stephen King thing of telescoping in and out of different perspectives, but doesn't quite manage the balance King's prose gives. The characterization starts out strong, but ends up thin. The satire is kind of forgotten mid-way through the book, if not earlier. Anyone with a glancing knowledge of mythology will immediately spot the twist.
For all of that, it's engaging? I read it all in under less than 24 hours, which can't be said for most books. It's the perfect length, and unlike many horror novels (which in my opinion have a tendency to just kind of stop and go ‘well the horror's over, now, everyone smile!') actually earns its ending. For what the book is trying to say, it does an admirable job.
Absolutely stunning. Every book Hendrix writes takes out a chunk of my heart. He improves tremendously every book, and I deeply enjoy watching his career. This book is probably his most complex, but it's also his most complete. He's trying to address multiple different issues, from horror movies to how we treat women in society to true crime fanaticism to incels, and he weaves it all together in a strange universe of his own making. The world the girls live in is effortless and easy to imagine, real and wild, our own world writ large. If any book of Henrix's deserves a sequel (in 3D), it's this one.