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This is one of a few books we've read for #SFFBookClub that consists of a series of ostensibly separate stories which collectively build one world. I loved the quietly unsettling mood of a lot of the stories, and actually enjoyed how much the author keeps the reader guessing until about half way through the book. But the two stories--one about halfway through, one near the end--which do the most explicit explaining ended up doing too much of that for my taste. I think a certain amount of tying things together was needed, but making things too neat was a bit of a loss, and the big picture story doesn't work as well for me as all the facets in the individual chapters.

Interesting selections, beautifully rendered in English, with a lot of helpful contextual material and annotations. Every now and then the annotations get a bit much, but more often they genuinely added to my enjoyment of the poetry.

I had a lot of fun tearing through this book. At first I felt like it was a bit too directly "colonised Philippines but with magic" to be interesting fantasy, but in the end Buba used the magical elements to really bring out the clash of two religions and cultures in a powerful, interesting way.

#SFFBookClub

#SFFBookClub September, which I'll pick up after finishing outside.ofa.dog/book/178751/s/i-am-the-dark-that-answers-when-you-call because it took me longer to get hold of a copy of this one.

In a year in which it's been extremely difficult to value or engage with my own culture, this book has been one of the few things I've felt able to connect to. It's one person's approach to drawing out all that is beautiful, nurturing, and life-affirming in Judaism, and explicitly rejecting all the ways our tradition gets used to defend evil. I needed it so very much, and ended up sending copies to a couple of dear friends.

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

#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.

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.

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