Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
Bitter, entirely devoid of subtlety, and very very good
5 stars
This is the rare sequel that I like even better than its predecessor. The action is all in one world this time, and that lets the magical physics element disappear into the background. It also lets Ashtown and Wiley City both feel more developed - they're much more complete places in my mind now. More importantly, this is a much more direct, much more straightforwardly angry book. Johnson clearly wanted to wield a chainsaw, and she's very good at that.
It was not an escapist read in 2025, but the conclusion was very satisfying.
I'm actually about 3/4 of the way through this by the time I got around to updating here. It is an incredible book but oh god it needs so many content warnings especially right now.
Obvious general things: gore, violence, intense macabre, supernatural death cult, lots of abuse including sexual, including intra-family, including of children. More specific: a major strand of it is the author wrestling with the trauma of Argentina's era of military dictatorships, and the role of colonialism in them, by way of a supernatural horror story.
One thing it doesn't have, at least so far, is jump scares. The plot unfolds slowly and every new horror revealed is such a clear consequence of or context to what happened before that it's never terribly surprising. Which in itself feels like a stunningly effective allegory for a lot of political horror.
I'm very glad to be reading this, but …
I'm actually about 3/4 of the way through this by the time I got around to updating here. It is an incredible book but oh god it needs so many content warnings especially right now.
Obvious general things: gore, violence, intense macabre, supernatural death cult, lots of abuse including sexual, including intra-family, including of children. More specific: a major strand of it is the author wrestling with the trauma of Argentina's era of military dictatorships, and the role of colonialism in them, by way of a supernatural horror story.
One thing it doesn't have, at least so far, is jump scares. The plot unfolds slowly and every new horror revealed is such a clear consequence of or context to what happened before that it's never terribly surprising. Which in itself feels like a stunningly effective allegory for a lot of political horror.
I'm very glad to be reading this, but not sure I can recommend it for right now, especially to people in the US. I am also very much wishing I'd got around to reading it last year.
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
Can someone remind me what Mr. Cross's significance in the first book was? #SFFBookClub
[and as an aside: I'm just a few chapters in and it is already very clear that this one should be read second. I think there's juuuuuuuuust enough recapping that it would be intelligible on its own, but there have already been multiple mentions / introductions that have way more impact with the first book for context]
This was the #SFFBookClub January selection, and I bounced off it kind of hard. Which is particularly sad considering that I'd added it to the shortlist, after it was cited by an article from which other recommendations have been fun. But this one did not work for me, in ways that actively put me off.
I think I'm probably prejudiced against it by the physical book being so poorly printed that it's more work to read. There are no margins, meaning that starts and ends of lines disappear into the centre fold. And even within that it's aligned so poorly that a number of pages have a last line more than half of which is off the page. These are not the reasons I'm bouncing, but they definitely made me less patient.
What put me off the most is a weird imbalance between the book doing a lot of 'splaining …
This was the #SFFBookClub January selection, and I bounced off it kind of hard. Which is particularly sad considering that I'd added it to the shortlist, after it was cited by an article from which other recommendations have been fun. But this one did not work for me, in ways that actively put me off.
I think I'm probably prejudiced against it by the physical book being so poorly printed that it's more work to read. There are no margins, meaning that starts and ends of lines disappear into the centre fold. And even within that it's aligned so poorly that a number of pages have a last line more than half of which is off the page. These are not the reasons I'm bouncing, but they definitely made me less patient.
What put me off the most is a weird imbalance between the book doing a lot of 'splaining in the mouths of its characters--kind of Legend of Zelda style--while at the same time throwing a lot of Bantu (I'm not sure which specific language[s]) vocabulary at the reader without notes or translations - in at least one case, about 1/4 of a page. I have a lot of time for using the languages that cultural references come from, without necessarily translating ( outside.ofa.dog/book/146782/s/david-mogo does this to good atmospheric effect), but it made the over-explaining all the more jarring.
I then learned that the author is white, which bugs me for a story so heavily rooted in Bantu mysticism. He clearly is knowledgeable about the subject, but these aren't his stories to tell, and in this light the over-explaining feels like a white man showing off how cool he is because he knows about the subalterns' culture. I think the "Runes" character (a jumbled Celtic / New Age Druid wizard in Durban) is meant to be self-deprecating, but he's so secondary to the "Bones" character (the Bantu wizard) that I'm still left feeling that the wrong person is telling this story, in ways that are definitely to the book's detriment.
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. …
well, I think in the end I read this about 1.5 times, which is 50% more than I read of most books. I’m very much not a re-reader so this would be correctly taken as a mark of just how gorgeous Chandrasekera’s writing is. Now to get my hands on Rakesfall….
The boy was raised as one of the Chained, condemned to toil in the bowels …
Sparse, intense
5 stars
Wow.
In some ways this is radically different from the Olondria books, which are the other things I've read by Samatar so far: where those are an overwhelmingly rich feast with many interwoven strands, this is a short, very sparsely written story with a very tight focus. But Samatar is an exceptionally good writer, and part of what makes all of them work is simply that. And I see something of a continuity:
A Stranger in Olondria: one person's very self-centred account of some epochal changes in a place he doesn't entirely understand
Winged Histories: 4 peoples' accounts of how their stories weave in and out of the events of A Stranger in Olondria.
This book: all about connection, imposed or chosen.
...which is probably as much as I can say without spoilers. #SFFBookClub
he lantern light seems to have written a poem;
they feel lonesome since i won’t …
An utter delight
5 stars
It took me months to read this because I wanted to savour every poem, and the very personal essays that Wang included as a sort of translator's notes / author bio hybrid.
The 5 poets have very distinct voices and styles, and I hope that more of each of their work gets translated into English. Without being able to read the originals I can only judge so much about the translation but I found them very readable, the footnotes helpful without being excessive, and the distinctness of each poet's voice seems like a vote of confidence in the translations.
«Oh, sí, mis buenas gentes, sí, ya lo creo que sí. Se puede vivir en …
starts strong, ultimately meanders too much for me
No rating
I enjoyed reading most of this book, but as I went on from one story to the next I noticed I was taking longer and longer breaks between the stories. In the end I stopped a couple short of the end just because I was about to head out on a trip and I realised I wasn't finding it compelling enough to bring the physical book with me. I'll probably read them eventually, but I'm not in a hurry so I'm just considering this shelved for now.
The basic premise is that all the stories are pieces of the history of what appears to be one empire which has waxed and waned in size and power over a very long time, possibly millennia. But I'm not quite sure if I have that right, because the stories are generally not connected to each other - I think I caught one ruling …
I enjoyed reading most of this book, but as I went on from one story to the next I noticed I was taking longer and longer breaks between the stories. In the end I stopped a couple short of the end just because I was about to head out on a trip and I realised I wasn't finding it compelling enough to bring the physical book with me. I'll probably read them eventually, but I'm not in a hurry so I'm just considering this shelved for now.
The basic premise is that all the stories are pieces of the history of what appears to be one empire which has waxed and waned in size and power over a very long time, possibly millennia. But I'm not quite sure if I have that right, because the stories are generally not connected to each other - I think I caught one ruling dynasty's name getting repeated but that's the only explicit link I've picked up so far. Which I don't necessarily mind in itself--after all I've enjoyed plenty of collections of totally unconnected short stories--but it seems to have constrained the author just enough for the stories to start to feel samey even though they're about clearly different eras and take a variety of narrative points of view.
I noticed somewhere that this book was originally published in Spanish as two separate volumes. I might have enjoyed it more if I'd read one volume and then set it aside for a while as I tend to do with successive instalments of a series. The repetitiveness didn't really start to bother me until some way into the second volume.
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was created in a surge of revolutionary self-determination that …
This is a topic I've been interested in since visiting Zagreb a few years after its war ended, and wondered about how different its 20th century built environment felt from other recently-Communist places I'd visited. I wasn't there very long and one can only read so much into the shapes of buildings, so it's always just been a sort of "hrm, I ought to learn if there's any there there" sort of thing at the back of my mind. So when @loshmi@social.coop posted social.coop/@loshmi/113568017088684018 I figured this book could be a way for me to find out.
«Oh, sí, mis buenas gentes, sí, ya lo creo que sí. Se puede vivir en …
Finally reading the Oct/Nov #SFFBookClub book. A few chapters in and I'm both enjoying it and seeing what seems to have frustrated a few other readers. I'm curious to see how I find the balance of those as I read on.
