jay wants to read Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami
#SFFBookClub August
#sffbookclub
See tagged statuses in the local Outside of a Dog community
enne📚 reviewed Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba
In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …
Saints of Storm and Sorrow
4 stars
I don’t hate you. I hate that I don’t have better answers to all that’s wrong in my city. The only choices shouldn’t be bloody vengeance or doing nothing. I hate that the CodicÃans’ ‘gift’ of empire is generations of trauma.
Overall, I think I'm a bit mixed on this book. I was most intrigued in the messy middle, where all of the characters are caught between competing and interesting tensions. It felt impossible for any character to do right by another while being caught in such structural traps. The focus of the book also (surprisingly?) felt firmly on these relationships between people who care about each other, and the messed up ways that colonialism warps their love.
I also quite enjoyed a character whose magic is tied to her emotions, and so she quite literally has to repress her anger and sadness in order to survive and hide.
It's …
I don’t hate you. I hate that I don’t have better answers to all that’s wrong in my city. The only choices shouldn’t be bloody vengeance or doing nothing. I hate that the CodicÃans’ ‘gift’ of empire is generations of trauma.
Overall, I think I'm a bit mixed on this book. I was most intrigued in the messy middle, where all of the characters are caught between competing and interesting tensions. It felt impossible for any character to do right by another while being caught in such structural traps. The focus of the book also (surprisingly?) felt firmly on these relationships between people who care about each other, and the messed up ways that colonialism warps their love.
I also quite enjoyed a character whose magic is tied to her emotions, and so she quite literally has to repress her anger and sadness in order to survive and hide.
It's also certainly a rare book where the straight relationship felt more interesting than the queer one, but maybe I just don't have much patience for religious "I can save her!!!" self-hatred stories.
el dang wants to read Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami
#SFFBookClub August
enne📚 commented on Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami
The #SFFBookClub book for August 2025.
(Please feel encouraged to read along and post your thoughts to the hashtag!)
Tak! reviewed Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba
In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …
Saints of Storm and Sorrow
4 stars
Content warning spoilers
Despite the overt themes of colonialism and religious imperialism, Saints of Storm and Sorrow feels primarily like a story about toxic relationships - Catalina's abusive partnership with Lunurin, Alon's self-destructive infatuation with Lunurin (and Lunurin's knowing, cynical usage of it), Alon's father's abusive treatment of Alon, even the goddess's relationship with Lunurin.
The hollywood ending feels good, but I have to wonder if any of these characters is undamaged enough to live Happily Ever After.
Tak! quoted Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba
In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …
The sea breezes keened of death in Lunurin’s ears, a cacophony of voices urging her to act.
There is a sense in which this book is "Spirit Island: The Novel". But as I type that I realise how snarky it sounds, and I don't actually mean that as criticism. #SFFBookClub
A few chapters further in and I'm enjoying this a lot more. I think it front-loaded a lot of zoomed-out worldbuilding, which is not the most interesting part of the book. Now it's much more a story of a few characters in that context, and the magic aspect is being developed in a way that adds more than I thought it would at first. #SFFBookClub
el dang started reading Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba
In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …
#SFFBookClub July.
One chapter in I'm a bit frustrated with how transparently it's a skin on the colonised Philippines--if it stays this literal I'll end up wishing I were reading a straight historical novel instead of fantasy--but there are some interesting ideas here that I'm hoping the author will start to play more freely with.
el dang reviewed In Universes by Emet North
For fans of Emily St. John Mandel and Kelly Link, a profoundly imaginative debut novel …
A fascinating fractal
5 stars
This is the book version of the theme-and-variations composition structure used in classical music and sometimes techno. The first chapter is a lovely and sad story in its own right; it almost feels like what Chekhov might have come up with if he'd been writing with today's gender and sexuality sensibility. Each thereafter takes mostly the same set of characters but with progressively larger twists - at first it's very much "what if protagonist had made a different choice at this key moment?", but it gradually shades over into wilder sci-fi speculations.
Strangely, it was the wilder variations that really made the book click for me. Before things got really weird I was starting to question how the book was going to sustain interest for 11 chapters, but North answered that question very effectively. I don't think it would have worked to go directly to those, the smaller variations feel …
This is the book version of the theme-and-variations composition structure used in classical music and sometimes techno. The first chapter is a lovely and sad story in its own right; it almost feels like what Chekhov might have come up with if he'd been writing with today's gender and sexuality sensibility. Each thereafter takes mostly the same set of characters but with progressively larger twists - at first it's very much "what if protagonist had made a different choice at this key moment?", but it gradually shades over into wilder sci-fi speculations.
Strangely, it was the wilder variations that really made the book click for me. Before things got really weird I was starting to question how the book was going to sustain interest for 11 chapters, but North answered that question very effectively. I don't think it would have worked to go directly to those, the smaller variations feel needed for the coherency of the whole, but I loved the effect of the whole set together.
el dang reviewed The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …
A delightful read, with a bit of a frustrating ending
4 stars
Content warning Vague discussion of ending
I loved this book as I read it. It probably helps that I identified with bits of the [unnamed but clearly an authorial self-insert] narrator/protagonist's experiences from before the book started; more on that in a moment. But it's also an entertaining story, and very engagingly written - many chapters had me laughing out loud at key moments even though the book's in no way a comedy overall.
Much of the book feels like a very sharp criticism of British society--I identified strongly with the narrator's endless experiences of people putting their assumptions over her experience, and needing to remind her that she doesn't quite fit in--and of the government / civil service's overconfidence in its own intrinsic goodness. In the face of that it was at times frustrating seeing the protagonist be so deeply invested in the Ministry and her job standing in it, but if I take a more critical eye to myself it becomes easy to understand as a reaction to that never quite being allowed to fit in. That part cut deep for me personally.
I also appreciated how much the book is also a lockdown story. I've been grumbling lately about how little art I've encountered that seems to process the covid pandemic and the experience of lockdowns in retrospect. And here came this book, clearly using the roommates-in-hiding portion of its arc to work through some feelings about that experience. More of this please!
The ending felt... not exactly too neat in that it does leave some ambiguity, but too abrupt. It felt like most of the story proceeded at a fairly comfortable pace, and then suddenly the author felt a need to bring it to a close with a sharp turn.
enne📚 commented on Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba
In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …
Saints of Storm and Sorrow is the #SFFBookClub book for July 2025. If you're at all interested, please read along and post your thoughts to the hashtag! See sffbookclub.eatgod.org/ for more details.
enne📚 commented on Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba
In this an enthralling Filipino-inspired epic fantasy, a nun concealing a goddess-given gift is unwillingly …
I added this to the July poll for #SFFBookClub.
The SFFBookClub is our informal fediverse science fiction and fantasy book club. Everyone reading this is welcome to participate. More details: sffbookclub.eatgod.org/
If you're interested in reading along, please help choose a book for next month: weirder.earth/@picklish/114683873892058550
Tak! commented on In Universes by Emet North
For fans of Emily St. John Mandel and Kelly Link, a profoundly imaginative debut novel …
The #SFFBookClub pick for June 2025
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and …
Enjoyable.
3 stars
I found this to be enjoyable, but it jumped around between the genres too much for my liking.
It really irked me that the MC never gets named. It was at least bearable due to the perspective being almost entirely from her point of view, but with how much she interacts with the other characters, it drove me a little bonkers that she was never called by any name.
I'm glad that I read this still, but it's not one that I'm ever going to have an interest in revisiting.
#SFFBookClub May 2025