skygiants

In addition to all the Perns, I have also been reading some non-Pern McCaffreys! At this point this includes:

The Ship Who Sang, in which a young woman gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, loses the thing she cares about most in the world, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in her manipulative boss

Crystal Singer, in which a young woman loses everything she cares about in the world, gains beyond-human powers through being indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and, despite not seeking a life partner, nonetheless enters into a romance with her manipulative boss

The Rowan, in which a young woman with beyond-human powers loses everything she cares about in the world, gets indentured to a corporation which provides her with wealth and status while simultaneously keeping her locked in endless responsibility and debt, and desperately seeks a life partner, eventually finding one in the guy who at the end of the book succeeds to the position held by her manipulative boss

Obviously all of these books have their own unique points of distinction:

The Ship Who Sang kicked off generations of what-if-a-girl-was-a-ship stories and also generations of disability-in-SF conversations; it is also IMO one of the most interesting of McCaffrey's structural experiments, being composed of short stories that do generally work well as short stories, while creating a coherent and connected character arc for Helva across the whole set. Also: women! Helva gets to partner with women! Does she want to partner with women? Absolutely not. She wants a hot guy, or, failing that, a weird little manipulative boss who's obsessed with her. But nonetheless while waiting for her inevitable manipulative bossmance she has some interesting women thrust upon her, which I appreciate even if she does not.

The Rowan is the latest, structurally the weakest, and I think perhaps generally the worst of these books ... Killashandra has a bad personality and it's charming, but the Rowan's bad personality mostly comes out in the context of being a bad boss within her devil's-bargain corporation, which is less charming. Also there's sort of a halfhearted attempt at an evil aliens are attacking plot but the evil aliens take up approximately ten (10) whole pages of the book because McCaffrey finds them much less interesting than the Rowan's boyfriend, who is of course destined for her because he's the only hot guy telepath who's more powerful than she is. Anyway, the funniest part about this book is the fact that the Rowan gets a telepathic cat in the first section, and because everyone loves a telepathic cat the telepathic cat is on the front cover of the book, but then Anne McCaffrey is like 'yeah but she left the telepathic cat on the spaceship the first time she left home, they weren't actually that tight' and the telepathic cat is never mentioned again.

Crystal Singer is notable for the fact that Killashandra -- in addition to being a failed opera singer who has to pivot to harvesting addictive crystal with the power of her voice -- is the meanest and most self-interested McCaffrey heroine and also the one who has the most casual sex. A real delight to go from Avril Bitra in Dragonsdawn to Killashandra, who has all of Avril Bitra's traits except she's protagonist-shaped so instead of performing sexy torturemurder and getting fired into the sun, she reluctantly saves the life of a guy who hates her, complaining about it all the way. God bless! Has the most opportunities not to enter into a devil's bargain with a corporation to become a protagonist, and also has arguably the worst devil's bargain of the lot (crystal singing rots your brain! creepy!) and so I think is in many ways central to the Corporate Devil's Bargain thesis of it all: the subtext of The Ship Who Sang and The Rowan is that yes, the devil's bargain Is worth it, but Crystal Singer holds it up defiantly and makes it text. Yes, you were probably manipulated into it, and yes, it's going to end in tragedy, but look how cool you are now!

This all also sort of makes me look a certain way at Lessa, the OG bad personality heroine herself, and her arc in Dragonflight. It's more obviously a devil's bargain when it's a Big Corporation and not a cool dragon that loves you unconditionally -- but what are all these sexy manipulative bosses, except proof that Big Corporation actually loves you unconditionally? And yes, you were manipulated into it. No, you can't leave now that you've done it. Yes, the institution takes away your agency, by design, but broadly speaking, it's a benevolent institution -- or at least, society can't do without it. Anyway, now that you're part of this institution, you are now the coolest person in the world; everyone needs you, admires you, loves you, and you're happier than you've ever been. Of course it was worth it!

I was sold on E.Y. Zhao's Underspin by this post via sleepnoises -- I also love books with Big Hole in the middle that do interesting things with POV! I also love a book that tells you at the beginning that the protagonist is already dead and then lets you sit with that tension for the next however many hundred pages. Pre-haunted by the protag, if you will.

I didn't quite love Underspin, as it turned out, but I do think it's really interesting as a structural project. We start at the funeral of almost-great table tennis prodigy Ryan Lo, his parents waiting for his coach to show up, which he doesn't. Then we go back in time and begin tracking Ryan's career through the eyes of various people who intersect with him over the course of his twenty-five years -- some who spend years with him on major life and career-altering enterprises, and others who cross his path for a day, a weekend, a single table tennis tutoring session at the local club. (My favorite POV character is the very elderly woman whose daughter is forcing her and her husband to take table tennis As A Retirement Activity despite their absolute lack of interest.)

Each of these chapters essentially functions as a little short story about a person who is at least tangentially involved with table tennis. They're all caught up in their own lives and problems, and also Ryan is also there, visible and attention-grabbing, handsome and talented and apparently destined for success, a perfect lightning rod for whatever insecurities the POV character happens to be feeling at that time. Through the structural distortion effect, though, it increasingly becomes clear that there's something wrong about Ryan's relationship with his coach, and the unease of that runs through the book, which began at Ryan's funeral.

I did kind of want more of a structural distortion effect ... from the description I was expecting a series of first-person narratives, The Moonstone-like, but on a prose level most of the book is actually written in more or less the same third-person MFA short story style, with a couple of exceptions. I didn't really click with it and it did detract a bit from the tension for me; I wanted a little more psychological horror, a little less wistful melancholy. But I think that's mostly an expectation-reality mismatch. I did like that there's never really a 'gotcha' moment, that by the time some truths are revealed you are not surprised by them, and that everything stays deeply ambiguous, deeply ambivalent, through the end. Also, there's no question that the book absolutely understands The World of Table Tennis.

I do think there is a particular charm, a particular interest, in a biographer who is really visibly in love with their subject. Like, you probably wouldn't want it in every biography. But it's nice to know that the author really extremely wants to be there. It gives an enjoyable sort of tension to the reading experience: at what point is the book going to go off-the-rails because the author has spontaneously transmigrated back to 1931 in a doomed attempt to alter the course of history and fix Buster Keaton's Hollywood career with the power of her passion alone? It could happen! It feels like everything has been foreshadowing it!

Obviously Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the of the Twentieth Century does not in fact go off the rails in this way, it does actually remain an interesting and readable biography that uses Keaton's life and career as a jumping-off point to explore the times in which he lived. In the book's introduction, Stevens explains that her fascination with Keaton is such that whenever I heard about something that took place between 1895 and 1966, I found myself trying to fit that event or phenomenon into the puzzle of his life and work. (She also uses the introduction to share a poem she wrote about Keaton. It's not bad!) Anyway, this is a pretty fruitful methodology that leads her to down various side paths to explore not just the history of early cinema but other twentieth-century touchstones such as changing child labor laws, vaudeville and minstrel shows, the rise of Alcoholics' Anonymous, and the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald.*

Often these aren't things that directly impacted Keaton -- Keaton never participated in AA, for example; by the time the program started to gain popularity, Keaton had already hit his rock bottom and come out the other side -- but they run along parallel tracks, such that Keaton's life casts a mirror on the phenomenon or vice versa, or there's an interesting alternate pathway to be imagined where they did indeed intersect. Keaton and Chaplin only worked together once, but you can't help but compare/contrast their trajectories; Keaton and Fitzgerald may never even have met at all, but the downward arcs of their careers were both intertwined with MGM executive Irving Thalberg, on whom Fitzgerald based his last novel.

(Also, it can't have helped with Fitzgerald's fascination, says Stevens, that Thalberg was also extraordinarily good-looking, slight-framed and serious-faced, with large, liquid brown eyes and wavy black hair -- an appearance not unlike that of a certain slapstick comedian whose contract his company had just acquired. We DON'T know they met but we DO know that if they did, Fitzgerald would CERTAINLY have thought Keaton was hot!)

It feels, in other words, like exactly what it is -- a book written by a person whose obsession with one individual has led them down a number of other interesting rabbitholes, to fruitful if not entirely cohesive results. If Keaton had been a fictional character, this might have been a 120K fanfic with a number of beautifully researched, oddly specific chapters. Because Keaton is a real person, we got this book. I had a great time!

I have succumbed to peer pressure and started rereading Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy -- well that's not true, I have reread the first book, Assassin's Apprentice, and told myself [lying] I PROBABLY won't go on from here, I just want to remember what's what! But it seems I will in fact be going on from here because to my surprise I thought Assassin's Apprentice was better than I expected or indeed remembered it being and now I want to get to the Liveship Traders trilogy, which is the one I actually actively remember as being good [citation: fourteen-year-old Becca, a notoriously unreliable narrator as we have many times established.]

The thing is I essentially remembered nothing about Assassin's Apprentice because at the time I read it I didn't really know the narrative value of the fraught emotional bond between a protagonist and their mediocre-to-bad mentor and Assassin's Apprentice is NOTHING but mediocre-to-bad mentors. This book is chockablock full of problematic adults intensely projecting their various personal traumas and failures on our young protagonist and attempting to extend him care and guidance through these various highly distorted lenses, and unfortunately their best at its best is never very good but you can't say they're not trying: not really appealing to me at fourteen but delicious to me at forty.

Assassin's Apprentice begins with the arrival of our protagonist on a royal doorstep, age sixish: this kid is the illegitimate son of the famously upright, faithful, virtuous, happily married, non-slutty heir to the throne, Prince Chivalry, and his unknown relatives have decided that it's time for the child to be Chivalry's problem. This immediately and publicly blows up the entire political situation in the country, as Chivalry and his wife subsequently remove themselves from the line of succession and retire to a remote country estate without ever interacting with the child in question.

So that's Fitz, a kid with no official status who's a walking Weird Situation For Everyone. As for his various mediocre mentors, we've got:

Burrich, who was Chivalry's overwhelmingly devoted right-hand man, and due to a one-two-three punch of inconveniently timed injury/Fitz's arrival/Chivalry's retirement has found himself demoted from Heroic Hand of the Heir to the Throne to local stablemaster and accidental foster parent to the kid who blew up his life and his boss'

Chade, the king's assassin, who started from a similar position to Fitz and has been tasked by the king with molding Fitz into just as useful a tool for the royal dynasty as Chade has been for all these years

Verity, Fitz's uncle and the new responsible-but-overwhelmed heir to the throne, a pleasant and dutiful man with minimal emotional intelligence, who is always sort of absently nice to Fitz until the Kingdom's Problems start Eating Him Alive and suddenly things become enjoyably fraught as the potential increasingly arises that perhaps the Kingdom's Problems would eat Verity alive a little less if he let them eat Fitz alive a little more, but he is not going to do that! because he has ethics! but they both know that the possibility is there!!

Lady Patience, Chivalry's wife, who shows up midway through the book when Fitz is a teenager like 'oops possibly this child should have been parented by us? who says you can't fix the failures of the past! I'm doing it right now!'

What I find charming about Lady Patience in particular is that it's really obvious that to Chivalry she was his beautiful carefree manic pixie dream girl and to everyone else she is a nightmare. In fact all these people are sort of nightmares, and they all do care deeply about Fitz, and are also all failing him in important ways that have to do with their own deeply personal blind spots. The book's strength is in the evenhanded way it looks at these people and their strengths and their failures, and lets both the love and the mistakes matter equally.

The book's weakness is in that Robin Hobb apparently decided that since she had all these deeply flawed sympathetic characters, she also needed some actual villains that no one could possibly feel sympathetic about. There's an evil prince who wants to usurp the throne, and there are also some evil pirates who are kidnapping people from the kingdom and turning them into Soulless Monsters, or rather what blotthis accurately describes as video game NPCs that you don't need to feel bad about killing. The fact that Hobb goes to great lengths to explain how everyone is very distraught about the situation and does some failed experiments to ensure that there's no way to turn these people back from being soulless monsters and you really truly don't need to feel bad about killing them really just makes it worse.

Also, I think it's important to note that Robin Hobb really is better than most of her peers at thinking about the practical requirements of domestic animals in a Nineties Eurofantasy environment; the proper care of horses and dogs forms a significant underlying element of the book and occasionally becomes a major plot point, especially since Fitz's Special Secret Skill is dog telepathy [Burrich thinks From Personal Experience this is an evil perversion that will ruin Fitz's life and that he must train out of Fitz as much as possible] [this is definitely not a metaphor for anything] [Robin Hobb wants to know how you could you possibly ask that]. Anyway the flip side of this is that Robin Hobb will Not hesitate to kill a puppy. Never think she won't do it. She has a knife to another puppy's throat right now. ( spoilers )

It's been several days since I finished Cristina Rivera Garcia's No One Will See Me Cry (translated by Andrew Hurley) and I've still sort of singularly failed to formulate an opinion about it; I just keep sort of mentally picking the book up and turning it over and putting it uneasily down again.

In some ways this book reminds me of A Month in the Country, in that both are historical novels that delicately build up a picture of lives destabilized by and lived in the cracks after an epoch-shaking event, while carefully avoiding -- tracing the parameters of, writing around, turning the camera consistently away from -- the event itself. The difference is that A Month in the Country does in fact feel light, delicate, balanced against the heavy thing at its center, while No One Will See Me Cry isn't in any way a light book; aside from the heaviness of its subject matter, feels laden with symbolism at every turn, although the symbolism itself is often specific and startling.

The premise: in 1920s Mexico City, an aging, morphine-addicted photographer who's been hired to take portraits of asylum inmates meets Matilda, a woman he last photographed many years ago, when she was a prostitute. Joaquin engages in a kind of narrative barter with, first the asylum doctor, then with Matilda herself, in an attempt to understand her story and how it intersects with his own to bring them both to this asylum. Both of them, it turns out, formatively knew and formatively loved the same woman, a revolutionary, in the years before the war -- but neither of them was actually involved in the Revolution, neither of them were active agents for or against the transformation of their livetimes; Joaquin describes himself more than once as the only photographer of his generation who didn't take any photographs of the war, and Matilda was, at the time, involved in an emotional affair with a desert landscape.

There are some tropes that one expects, and is braced for, around Women and Lost Women and Madwomen, especially when insanity is used as a thematic metaphor around national trajectory, especially when all that is inextrictable from questions of poverty and indigineity. Rivera Garcia is definitely deploying some of those tropes with purpose and to a point and I absolutely do not know enough to have a full sense of what she's doing with them. This is one of those situations where I wish I was reading a book in context of a class or a club. As it is, what I'm left with is interest, unease, some beautiful and surprising images, and a sense that I ought to read a lot more about the Mexican Revolution.

As I mentioned on my last Pern post, Dragonsdawn was always the most memorable Pern book for me -- for my sins, and sins indeed they are. That said, having reread it, I can understand exactly why I found this so compelling. This was the book that sold me on the fantasy of planetary exploration and colonization as a delightful and desirable experience! You could go to a beautiful new world and discover baby dragons and have random islands named after you! You could build a new Utopian society! Is Anne McCaffrey's vision of a Utopian society uncomfortably libertarian? Sure, but I was ten, I didn't know what libertarians were, I just understood that Sorka was having a very cool time as a happily free-range child exploring the Pernese landscape. I don't think it was until I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars as an adult that I fully came to terms with the fact that going to space actually sounded like a deeply unpleasant time, logistically speaking, and let the faint wisps of the Dragonsdawn dream of First Feet Down on a beautiful new planet that's functionally just like Earth with bonus charming telepathic fauna dissipate into the ether.

I mean, it is sort of an open question though: early Pernese culture, potential paradise or libertarian cult? I do think McCaffrey knows that the colonist's blissful vision of If Everyone Has Enough Land For Themselves We Can All Just Be Chill And Not Actually Bother Society-Building is doomed to some degree of failure on account of bad actors, even before it's interrupted by Thread. She could have just made it a book about dealing with Thread and developing dragons about it, and it would probably be a better book if she did, but she's so grimly determined to put some bad actors in just to demonstrate she knows they exist. This at least is my theory of how we got Evil Sexy Avril Bitra, perpetrator of history's most inexplicable heist. "If I go on this fifty-year mission, I can steal some diamonds, steal an escape pod, launch myself back out into space, and get picked up back in a society that's moved on a hundred years from the one I left! Probably they'll still want diamonds and I'll re-adapt just fine!"

So, I can understand, I guess, why Avril Bitra. I don't understand and don't think I will ever understand why Avril Bitra's narrative foil is a would-be tradwife who nonconsensually aphrodisiaced her way into marriage with a man who has never shown any romantic interest in anything except cave systems and then spent the next eight years making a shocked Pikachu face about the fact that he continued to not be all that into her. Why is Sallah Telgar's plot in this book? What is it doing here? Why is Avril Bitra evilly torturing Sallah on the spaceship given so much page space and weird psychosexual intensity when literally nothing about this plot actually impacts the colony's situation IN ANY ACTUAL WAY? I thought a reread would leave me less confused about all this than I was when I was ten and in fact I think it did the opposite. Anne, please ... you must have had some thoughts about this, thematically, structurally ... I'm coming to you, hat in hand, asking for answers.

I do think it's very funny that in the years between 1968 and 1989 Anne McCaffrey decided that it was a bit embarrassing that she'd built biological differences into her dragons such that the queens don't breathe fire, and decided to blame it on the fact that the dragons were genetically designed by an Extremely Traditional Chinese Grandma instead. Is it also racist? Yes, extremely. But if we start talking about all the unfortunate well-meaning racism in Dragonsdawn we'll be here all day and I don't have that much day left. Racism aside I did find myself unexpectedly somewhat moved by the subplot I did not remember at all in which Kenjo Fusaiyuki, a guy who has made a Profound Mistake in moving to an isolated colony planet that's dedicated itself to being low-tech and abandoning spaceflight, desperately hoards fuel for as long as possible to put off the time when he will have to at last give up for good and all the thing he loves most and is best at in all the world.

And you know who could've saved Kenjo Fusaiyuki's life, if she had stopped to help the two guys Avril Bitra clonked on the head instead of uselessly pursuing her into space? YES, IT'S ANOTHER SALLAH TELGAR CRIME. Sallah Telgar, you have so much to answer for.

Because Becky Mahoney and I know each other, I boosted a Bluesky giveaway for her upcoming vampire novel Thrall (coming out next month!) in the spirit of friendship and then was somewhat surprised to discover that I had in fact won the giveaway -- surprised but delighted, obviously, since I've loved all of her previous books even when they weren't LUCY CENTRIC DRACULA RIFFS!! focused around a COLLEGE PIRATE RADIO STATION!!!

The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.

Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.

Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!

It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.

Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler ( but I guess is technically a mild one: lesbians! )

One of the simplest and purest pleasures in fiction is to ride along as an unhappy person becomes happier, and this at the heart is the charm of the self-pub coming-of-trans novel Our Simulated Selves.

On first glance the premise of this one could seem dire: depressed incel, told by dream girl that they would not date even if the incel was the "last man on Earth," uses advanced brain-scanning technology and giant quantum supercomputer to set up a simulation world where literally everybody else on Earth does disappear immediately after that argument, and see how long it takes sim self and dream girl to get together in this apocalypse scenario. (The reader, who has already seen our protagonist describe dysphoric brain fog and experience mysterious joy about playing a girl character in D&D, will at this point certainly have some ideas about the ways that this sad incel is working from some fundamentally incorrect principles.)

Most of the book is from the POV of sim protagonist with occasional outside-world interjections and responses from the simulation runner, which means you also get sort of a fun inside/outside view of an apocalypse-ish survival situation -- within the simulation, protagonist and dream girl are running around gathering up non-perishable food and trying to figure out how long the power grid is going to last; meanwhile, outside the simulation, Protagonist Zero Version is like 'shit, I didn't really think through that they'd be treating this like an apocalypse and I forgot to write any code for food spoilage!' But the main satisfaction of the book is in watching our protagonist go through the work of transformation to become a better and happier person -- with a little added weight, because at the same time we're also seeing the worst and cruelest and most unhappy version. Overall I found the reading experience really charming and sweet!

Syr Hayati Beker's What A Fish Looks Like is perhaps the weirdest/coolest/most interesting thing I've read so far this year -- an apocalyptic collage novel(la), told in letters, posters, angry breakup notes, and a series of strange fairy tale riffs about breakups and loss and change and transformation on both the personal and the planetary level.

In the frame story for What A Fish Looks Like, a queer radical collective in a city living through massive climate collapse has gotten its hands on 100 tickets for the last big trip off-planet. It's T minus ten days: who's going? Who's staying? Who heard the gossip about Jay and Seb making out on the dance floor, even though they had a really messy breakup and Jay has a ticket out and Seb has no interest in leaving, and who wants to use the Saga of Jay and Seb to distract themselves from the fact that the oceans are rising and the skies are red and this year's bad fire season never ended?

In the interstitials, a community outlined in personal letters and party invites and notes on the bathroom door of a favorite bar counts down to the point of decision. In the stories themselves, a person has a bad break-up and and takes on some polar bear DNA about it; a closeted teacher loses a student to a big wave in the new and frightening ocean, and meets a mermaid about it; a stage manager forges ahead with a production of Antigone in a burning city and turns into a spider about it. The people who appear in the stories also appear in the interstitials, part of the community; the book is slippery about to what degree the stories are meant to be read literally as an accounting of events and to what degree they're metaphors, wishes, retellings. The interstitials make it clear that there is certainly a theater and a fire. Probably nobody actually turned into a spider about it, but who could say. The world is getting weirder, and who knows what's possible or plausible anymore?

I'm including a screenshot of one of my favorite pages of the book -- most of the stories are text but a lot of the interstitials are in images like this one -- which I think gives a good sense of the kind of community portraiture that makes What A Fish Look Like stand out so much to me.



Highly recommend checking this one out: you might be confused, you might be depressed, you might be inspired, you absolutely won't be bored.

I finished Tasha Suri's The Isle in the Silver Sea yesterday and I am wrestling with profoundly conflicted feelings about it. It's an interesting book, it's an ambitious book; it's a book with a great deal to say, sometimes with a sledgehammer; it went in places I didn't expect, and appreciated, and also I think it maybe fails at the central task it needed to succeed at in order to make it actually work for me as a book.

The premise: we're on an island, and this island is composed of Stories About Britain. London is there, constantly caught between Victorian London and Elizabethan London and Merrie Olde England depending on what sort of narrative you're in. The Glorious Eternal Queen reigns forever with her giant ruffs and bright red hair. Each bit of the island is tied to a bit of story, and that story attaches itself to particular people, Incarnates, who are blessed/cursed to live out the narrative and keep the landscape alive with it. At this point this has been going on for so long that incarnates are usually identified pretty early and brought to live safely at the Queen's court where they kick their heels resignedly waiting for their fate to come upon them.

Sometimes immigrants come to the island. When they come, they forget their language and their own stories in the process. They are not supposed to get caught up in incarnation situations, though -- in theory, that's reserved for True Born Englishmen -- but unfortunately for our heroine Simran, she appears to be an exception and immediately upon sighting the shores of the isle as a child also started seeing the ghost of her past incarnation, indicating that she is the latest round of the tragic tale of the Witch and the Knight, who are doomed to fall in love and then die in a murder-suicide situation For The Realm.

Simran's knight is Vina, the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy noble, who is happy to be a hot and charming lesbian knight-at-arms but does not really want to be the murderous Knight any more than Simran wants to be the Witch. However, the plot begins, Simran is targeted by an Incarnation Murderer who kidnaps her best friend and challenges her to meet him on her Fated Mountain, and they of course have to go on a quest where they of course fall in love despite themselves and also learn more about why the current order must be overthrown because trying to preserve static, perfect versions of old stories is not only dooming a lot of people to extremely depressing fates but also slowly killing the Isle. This quest makes up the first part of the book.

I am very interested in the conversation that Tasha Suri is using this book to have about national narratives and national identities and the various stories, both old and new, that they attempt to simplify and erase. Her points, as I said, aren't subtle, but given Our Current Landscape there is a fair argument to be made that this is not the time for subtlety. I also think there's also some really good and sharp jokes and commentary about the National Narratives of Britain, specifically (evil ever-ruling Gloriana is SUCH a funny choice and the way this ends up being a mirror image for Arthuriana I think is quite fun as well).

On the other hand, the conversation is so big and the Themes so Thematic that they do end up entirely overshadowing the characters for me, which I do think is also a thematic failure. The first part of the book is about Vina and Simran's struggle to interact with each other and their lives as individuals, rather than the archetypes that overshadow them, but as Vina and Simran they also never quite felt like they transcended their own archetypes of Cranky Immigrant Witch and Charming Lesbian Knight With A Hero Complex. Which startled me, tbh, because I've liked several of Tasha Suri's previous books quite a lot and this hasn't struck me as a problem before. But I think here it's really highlighted for me by the struggle with Fate; I kept, perhaps unfairly, compare-contrasting with Princess Tutu, a work I love that's also about fighting with narrative archetypes, and how extremely specific Duck and Fakir and Rue feel as characters. I finished part one feeling like I still had no idea whether Vina and Simran had fallen in love as Fated Entities or as human beings distinct from their fate, and I think given the book this is it really needs to commit hard on that score one way or another.

Part two, I think, is much more interesting than part one, and changes up the status quo in unexpected ways. If I pretend that part one landed for me then I'm much happier to roll with the ride on part two, though there is an instance of Gay Found Family Syndrome that I found really funny; you can fix any concerning man with a sweet trans husband and a cottage and a baby! genarti will argue with me that she thinks it was more complicated than that, to which I will argue, I think it could have been more complicated IF part two had had room to breathe and lean into any of those complexities. Making part one half its length and part two double its length would I think fix several of my problems with the book. "but you just said that Vina and Simran don't feel specific enough" yes that's true AND they take three hundred pages to do it! I'd be less annoyed about them feeling kind of flat if we were moving on more quickly to other things ...

Anyway. I didn't find this book satisfying but I did find it interesting; others may find it to be both. Curious to talk about it with anyone else who's read it!

Sidenote: the Tales and Incarnations are maintained by archivists, who keep the island and the stories it contains static and weed out any narratives they think don't belong. This of course is evil. I went and complained about the evil archivist propaganda to genarti, who read this book first, and she said 'read further.' So I did! It turns out that in contrast to the evil archivists, the woods are populated by good and righteous librarians!! who secretly collect oral histories and discarded tales that have been deemed subversive by the archivists but which of course the island needs to thrive. I do appreciate that not all institutional memory workers are Evil in this book and I understand the need in fiction to have a clear and easy distinguishing term between your good guys and your bad guys, but Tasha Suri, may I politely protest that this is in fact also archivist work --

Sidenote two: v. interesting to me that of the two big high-profile recent Arthurianas I've read the thing I've found most interesting about both of them is their use of the Questing Beast. we simply love a beast!!