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This book does so many things, and all outstandingly. It's a portrait of a Cahokia that in our timeline was never allowed to exist. It's a noir detective thriller. It's an intense character study of a deeply relatable protagonist. It's a love poem to 1920s jazz--the music and the cultural space it created.

I'm having difficulty actually talking about it coherently without massive spoilers. So just go on and read this book.

Full disclosure: this book was written by someone I know socially. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it just as much if I'd found it by chance, but the sneaky thing about biases is how invisible they can be.

The description pretty much says as much as I can about the plot without spoilers. But what I can add is that Colin manages to be simultaneously terrible and very, very relatable - all the weaknesses that drive his series of bad decisions are ones everyone shares to a greater or lesser degree. And with that, I feel like the book manages to be a bit more than the knowingly silly light read it presents itself as, because the protagonist is a case study in how some less outlandish real world bad decisions happen. But this never comes at the expense of it being light entertainment.

Minor criticisms: even the other characters who get significant time don't feel fully fleshed out, probably because we only see them through Colin's eyes. And there are times, particularly towards the end, when the fantasy elements can get a bit USS Make Shit Up. Which would be very frustrating if the point of the book were Serious Fantasy Worldbuilding, but it's so not that.

There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.

#SFFBookClub

Aha! I finally got around to working out how to actually link things properly instead of just pasting URLs in the text. I should have known it would be just a simple subset of Markdown but I wish Bookwyrm had either a prompt about that in the UI or a post preview mode like GitHub does.

Many signs are telling me that this has to be the year I finally read some Mann, and this book in particular. My German is far too rusty to read the original, but I found this apparently highly regarded translation at my local bookshop. The signs:

• Project 1933 using Mann's diaries as a source in most or all episodes so far.
• Time Shelter making a lot of explicit references to The Magic Mountain in its early sections.
• The Empusium which I'm hearing some raving about is apparently a modern take on the same story.

So... this won't be the next book I read because I need something lighter after Time Shelter (and have one in mind), but soon.

In the in-Bulgaria section of the book, it mentions a Czech film called "Lemonade Joe". I found the file online at easterneuropeanmovies.com/lemonade-joe/ (not free to watch, but a 24-hour membership is reasonably cheap). It's weird and delightful - in parts a loving satire of the Western genre (think Blazing Saddles or The Three Amigos but a decade or two earlier), in parts a slightly clunky but on-point critique of product placement / sponsorship culture, and in parts just fun slapstick comedy. Plot definitely drags in the middle, and there's a blackface scene (as unconvincing disguise, not minstrelry at least) that has aged very poorly, but worth a watch.