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I've been saying "I read the whole Mirror Visitor Quartet while I was sick," but that's not actually quite true -- I read the first two books on the T while I was going back and forth from jury duty every day, but the second two books I read each in a day while I was not doing much else except being in bed.
... and I just went back to read my post about reading the first two books in this series and I appear to have read them in even less time, without even the excuse of being sick, so I guess they are also just generally propulsive. I did go a bit slower this time because they are also translated from French, and these days I am fortunate enough to live with a professional French translator, so I spent a lot more time noticing particular translation quirks and occasionally asking Beth to reverse-engineer jokes for me. (I did think that 'circumflex eyebrows' as a descriptor changing at one point to 'grave eyebrows' was very cute and was glad to know just enough French to be able to get it.)
Anyway, to recap: this is a world in which everyone lives on floating land-arks, each populated by a family spirit (giant), their descendants (normal sized, all with some degree of thematic power inherited from their family spirit), and in some cases some other powerless humans also. Our heroine, Ophelia, comes from the small bourgeois ark of Anima, and her special power involves reading the history of objects when she touches them, around which she has a Strict Set of Professional Ethics. The series begins when she acquires an arranged-marriage betrothal to Thorn, the antisocial and off-putting court accountant at the ark of the North Pole; they become reluctant allies (And Perhaps More?) as she learns more about his secret dream of punching God, and also the fact that God may have it in for her, specifically.
Most of the books feature Ophelia going into Situations where she does not know the rules and several people seem to have it in for her, surviving various harms mostly through grim obstinacy and professional ethics: she spends most of the first book undercover as a valet, the third book undercover as a student at fantasy investigations academy, and the fourth book undercover in an sinister sanitorium. The exception to this is the second book, where instead of going into a Situation where she does not know the rules, Ophelia has to deal with her entire Bennettesque family coming to visit her in a Situation where they don't know the rules; this is one of several reasons why the second book is the most fun.
All of the books are very good about introducing characters that Ophelia has good reason to dislike, and then flipping them around and making them compelling and sympathetic. Part of the reason that Ophelia is a compelling POV to spend time with is that she, too, is good at recognizing the basic personhood of other people even if she does indeed have reason to dislike them. I got very attached to the characters in Books 1 and 2 -- especially Rosaline and Berenilde, Ophelia and Thorn's respective widowed aunts, one of whom is an easily scandalized paper-pusher and the other of whom is a selfish and manipulative court lady and both of whom I love very much -- and was not quite ready, on my first try, to embrace the new characters in Book 3 when Ophelia leaves the Pole to have adventures on the Ark of Babel instead, but this time around I did become fond of them as well.
My favorite of the new guys was Elizabeth, a student with no born powers but a genius for databases and organizational structures, who has put it all in desperate service to Babel's family spirit Helen. Helen's gigantism, unlike that of the other family spirits, functions as a disability such that she requires assistive devices to help her get around; it also prevents her from having descendants, so instead she's set up an academy for students who are immigrants or powerless, and rescued Elizabeth in particular off the streets. All of the family spirits are also incapable of forming long-term memories, so though Elizabeth knows her work on information systems is deeply valued by and important to Helen in the abstract, she really longs for the impossible, which is just for Helen to remember her, personally and specifically! I found this poignant and compelling. Also I thought Elizabeth's terrible habit of providing the most miserable possible answer to every question and then adding a deadpan 'just kidding' was charming.
Anyway at the end Elizabeth turned out to secretly be God with amnesia, which sort of ruined it for me, but more on this anon.
The books, especially 3/4, are pretty interested in disability and assistive devices in general -- Ophelia's YA-heroine klutziness is in fact the result of an accident when she was young that left her with reduced control of her motor system, Thorn gets a serious leg injury in book 2 and is in a permanent brace thereafter, one of the main characters in Book 3/4 is in a wheelchair, the various memory-assistive devices of the family spirits, and of course there's the whole sinister sanatorium in Book 4. I'm not particularly qualified to comment on how well any of this is handled, but I'd be very interested to see someone write about it. It is pleasing to me that neither Ophelia nor Thorn is ever described as objectively good-looking, even once they start to see each other with romance-tinged glasses; zero charisma on either of them and bless them for it. But there are beautiful people in the books, and they are not automatically evil for being beautiful either, and I also appreciate that.
I also have to respect the books for prefiguring the last couple years of AI discourse with a subplot about a genius inventor whose mission is to unleash loads of badly-functioning automatons on the world in an attempt to end 'the servitude of man by man', which of course ends up creating an employment crisis on his homeworld as various institutions seize on the excuse to replace human labor with cheap mediocre machines. Then it turns out that all of the automotons are actually just infinite bad copies of real human beings who were put in an infinite copypaste machine. On the one hand it's so on the nose and on the other hand these books came out in 2017 & 2019 so I think in fairness one sort of has to hand it to her.
I do think that books 3 and especially 4 are significantly weaker than 2 ... Dabos is very good, perhaps too good, at sketching out compelling characters and dynamics and worldbuilding, and she simply cannot stop herself from doing it to the point where it all starts to totter under the weight of its own mythology and numerous subplots. Book 4 spent a lot of time trying to explain its Deep Lore about Mirrors and God and I still don't fully understand it, so if that was going to be the outcome anyway we could have spent less time on learning the Deep Lore and more time with the various characters. I also don't really love where a lot of the ending dice fell -- unlike many other readers of these books, I don't have a problem with the Big Thorn Sacrifice (there are narrative loopholes! it'll be fine!), but I am pettily annoyed about Amnesiac God Elizabeth. I also hate the reset of the family spirits to child-states, the messy relationships the family spirits have with the people close to them was one of the most compelling subplots creeping round of the edges of the narratives for me and I found having that all closed off disappointing.
All that being said, I really think the narrative as a whole is fun and interesting and ambitious, even the parts that don't work for me -- even if I don't think Dabos stuck the landing, I had a great time on the journey and look forward to another high-speed reread ten years down the line.
[one additional caveat about Book 3: one minor side character perpetually referred to as an Oriental doll. Racist, distracting, presumably Dabos' bad choice originally but also something the translator or publisher should have caught and changed to something less racist??]
... and I just went back to read my post about reading the first two books in this series and I appear to have read them in even less time, without even the excuse of being sick, so I guess they are also just generally propulsive. I did go a bit slower this time because they are also translated from French, and these days I am fortunate enough to live with a professional French translator, so I spent a lot more time noticing particular translation quirks and occasionally asking Beth to reverse-engineer jokes for me. (I did think that 'circumflex eyebrows' as a descriptor changing at one point to 'grave eyebrows' was very cute and was glad to know just enough French to be able to get it.)
Anyway, to recap: this is a world in which everyone lives on floating land-arks, each populated by a family spirit (giant), their descendants (normal sized, all with some degree of thematic power inherited from their family spirit), and in some cases some other powerless humans also. Our heroine, Ophelia, comes from the small bourgeois ark of Anima, and her special power involves reading the history of objects when she touches them, around which she has a Strict Set of Professional Ethics. The series begins when she acquires an arranged-marriage betrothal to Thorn, the antisocial and off-putting court accountant at the ark of the North Pole; they become reluctant allies (And Perhaps More?) as she learns more about his secret dream of punching God, and also the fact that God may have it in for her, specifically.
Most of the books feature Ophelia going into Situations where she does not know the rules and several people seem to have it in for her, surviving various harms mostly through grim obstinacy and professional ethics: she spends most of the first book undercover as a valet, the third book undercover as a student at fantasy investigations academy, and the fourth book undercover in an sinister sanitorium. The exception to this is the second book, where instead of going into a Situation where she does not know the rules, Ophelia has to deal with her entire Bennettesque family coming to visit her in a Situation where they don't know the rules; this is one of several reasons why the second book is the most fun.
All of the books are very good about introducing characters that Ophelia has good reason to dislike, and then flipping them around and making them compelling and sympathetic. Part of the reason that Ophelia is a compelling POV to spend time with is that she, too, is good at recognizing the basic personhood of other people even if she does indeed have reason to dislike them. I got very attached to the characters in Books 1 and 2 -- especially Rosaline and Berenilde, Ophelia and Thorn's respective widowed aunts, one of whom is an easily scandalized paper-pusher and the other of whom is a selfish and manipulative court lady and both of whom I love very much -- and was not quite ready, on my first try, to embrace the new characters in Book 3 when Ophelia leaves the Pole to have adventures on the Ark of Babel instead, but this time around I did become fond of them as well.
My favorite of the new guys was Elizabeth, a student with no born powers but a genius for databases and organizational structures, who has put it all in desperate service to Babel's family spirit Helen. Helen's gigantism, unlike that of the other family spirits, functions as a disability such that she requires assistive devices to help her get around; it also prevents her from having descendants, so instead she's set up an academy for students who are immigrants or powerless, and rescued Elizabeth in particular off the streets. All of the family spirits are also incapable of forming long-term memories, so though Elizabeth knows her work on information systems is deeply valued by and important to Helen in the abstract, she really longs for the impossible, which is just for Helen to remember her, personally and specifically! I found this poignant and compelling. Also I thought Elizabeth's terrible habit of providing the most miserable possible answer to every question and then adding a deadpan 'just kidding' was charming.
Anyway at the end Elizabeth turned out to secretly be God with amnesia, which sort of ruined it for me, but more on this anon.
The books, especially 3/4, are pretty interested in disability and assistive devices in general -- Ophelia's YA-heroine klutziness is in fact the result of an accident when she was young that left her with reduced control of her motor system, Thorn gets a serious leg injury in book 2 and is in a permanent brace thereafter, one of the main characters in Book 3/4 is in a wheelchair, the various memory-assistive devices of the family spirits, and of course there's the whole sinister sanatorium in Book 4. I'm not particularly qualified to comment on how well any of this is handled, but I'd be very interested to see someone write about it. It is pleasing to me that neither Ophelia nor Thorn is ever described as objectively good-looking, even once they start to see each other with romance-tinged glasses; zero charisma on either of them and bless them for it. But there are beautiful people in the books, and they are not automatically evil for being beautiful either, and I also appreciate that.
I also have to respect the books for prefiguring the last couple years of AI discourse with a subplot about a genius inventor whose mission is to unleash loads of badly-functioning automatons on the world in an attempt to end 'the servitude of man by man', which of course ends up creating an employment crisis on his homeworld as various institutions seize on the excuse to replace human labor with cheap mediocre machines. Then it turns out that all of the automotons are actually just infinite bad copies of real human beings who were put in an infinite copypaste machine. On the one hand it's so on the nose and on the other hand these books came out in 2017 & 2019 so I think in fairness one sort of has to hand it to her.
I do think that books 3 and especially 4 are significantly weaker than 2 ... Dabos is very good, perhaps too good, at sketching out compelling characters and dynamics and worldbuilding, and she simply cannot stop herself from doing it to the point where it all starts to totter under the weight of its own mythology and numerous subplots. Book 4 spent a lot of time trying to explain its Deep Lore about Mirrors and God and I still don't fully understand it, so if that was going to be the outcome anyway we could have spent less time on learning the Deep Lore and more time with the various characters. I also don't really love where a lot of the ending dice fell -- unlike many other readers of these books, I don't have a problem with the Big Thorn Sacrifice (there are narrative loopholes! it'll be fine!), but I am pettily annoyed about Amnesiac God Elizabeth. I also hate the reset of the family spirits to child-states, the messy relationships the family spirits have with the people close to them was one of the most compelling subplots creeping round of the edges of the narratives for me and I found having that all closed off disappointing.
All that being said, I really think the narrative as a whole is fun and interesting and ambitious, even the parts that don't work for me -- even if I don't think Dabos stuck the landing, I had a great time on the journey and look forward to another high-speed reread ten years down the line.
[one additional caveat about Book 3: one minor side character perpetually referred to as an Oriental doll. Racist, distracting, presumably Dabos' bad choice originally but also something the translator or publisher should have caught and changed to something less racist??]
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This twist sounds as though it would seriously decrease the odds of Thorn punching God in the face.
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There is going to be a bande dessinée adaptation of this series, which I am looking forward to!
Dabos has a new book out: Here and Only Here -- the French title is Ici et Seulement Ici, which is a fun on "si et seulement si" = "if and only if" -- which seems to be a standalone dark fantasy school story. Based on
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omg a bande dessinée?! that's extremely exciting & I definitely think the series would lend itself really well to that with its big dramatic visual set-pieces and character descriptions.
I had not heard that Dabos had a new book out! Definitely intrigued enough to give it a shot based on the strength of the Mirror Visitor ....
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(Also I continue to ship Berenilde and Rosaline.)
(not that you need my updates as I go but you're getting them anyway.)
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(BERENILDE AND ROSALINE ARE SO CUTE and you'll be pleased to know that we are not the only person to ship them either; the Yuletide tag has been inaugurated. Widowed aunt 4 widowed aunt!)
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