This book was not what I was expecting when I picked this up. Forgive me but I compare everything to YA books I've read even when the subject in question is not a YA book so the book I'm gonna pull out to compare this to is The Dark Unwinding. They are very different books, don't get me wrong, but the vibes are more over there than the The Queen's Rising I was expecting. I don't know, relatively few people would find these comparisons actually useful but oh well I have a limited vocabulary. Should I also mention that I read the description back in May or whatever when I first came across the book in my library and thought it looked promising, but I didn't read it now before starting the book and didn't remember what it said from before so I basically went in blind.

The book follows an unlikeable man Leo who is expelled from his minister position in his Nazi-esque government (yes, Leo is a Nazi I guess) and sent to stay for the year at Montverre, the school he used to go to where they study "the grand jeu", which is like a game involving music, math, poetry, art, etc. all put together to commune with the divine (sounds weird but it totally works in text), and back when he was there he had won the gold medal and had had ambitions to become Magister Ludi (the master of the grands jeux). Meanwhile we also have the perspective of Magister Dryden, the current Magister Ludi and the first female one who is really put off by the presence of Leo in particular and we don't know why right away, and she has lingering trauma from someone's death long ago (tw: (this may or may not be a spoiler I don't actually remember) (view spoiler)). And we also get chapters in the perspective of journal entries of the younger Leo when he was attending the school and his rivalrous relationship with a fellow student, Carfax de Courcy. The perspective we actually start off in is that of the Rat, a girl who lives in the school who lives and thinks of herself as a rat, whom nobody knows about except to think that the school is haunted. I will say that starting off in her chapter may have been a bad choice because immediately I was like what am I getting into and this might be boring and what will the plot be/what is going on? Luckily I was reading this as an ebook on libby so I could check and see that there aren't that many rat chapters but it still put me off a bit. That also put me on edge going into the rest of the upcoming chapters because I was now under the impression that this book was going to be a slog. I also didn't like feeling so in the dark at the beginning of this book, where every single character knew more than I did and I had to figure out even simple things like oh this is actually a girl and not a rat, isn't it? But I can't truly say that any perspective or even chapter ended up being truly boring because I may have been disappointed to leave certain chapters (namely the journal entries from the past, those never had even a hint of boringness anywhere near them and I didn't want them to stop) but a page or so into any chapter (including the rat's) and I was hooked because they all had something going on or really intense feelings and I can't look away from that. The biggest theme of this book was each of their struggles with mental health and I think it was handled mostly compellingly (maybe we could've done a bit more?).

My biggest possible endorsement for this book is that I have never highlighted as many lines/paragraphs in a book that wasn't a book I was studying in English class or something. I have 55 highlights and not one was to save a word I didn't know or a part I didn't like, and I only started highlighting at chapter 10. These were all just lines and interactions I genuinely wanted to go back to and remember or things that helped me understand the characters better. I don't usually highlight at all but this time I was overcome and I have not felt this urge to go back and endlessly revisit parts in years. Also, there was a twist and it fucking shook me and also made so many little things make more sense/ be put in new context at the same time (originally before this their specific desires in the present were looking kind of uncomfortable tbh). The actual atmosphere of Montverre is wonderful (my favourite is the space above the ceiling of the great hall), the tension never leaves even though we do experience a range of emotions (though always regret), and all the potentially disjointed parts come together at the end (though I did kind of want the library to burn down to acknowledge all the times that was thought of) (but then the book acknowledged that desire (view spoiler) I could live in this book for days. I don't know that it tells me things about the world or anything deep like that but it is a meal of emotions.

A thing I'm not sure about:
- Christians are persecuted in this fictional regime, and we know that other religions exist too because they are mentioned by name but it is unclear whether they are also persecuted. Christians are the ones that are focused on, apparently because "The Old Man went to a Catholic School". Christians are not in a 1:1 comparison with Jews either because a) Jews exist and b) everyone is constantly making Christian references and saying pardon the Christian reference. I'm doubtful that Nazis and the non-Jewish German public in the time of the Nazis were constantly making references to Jewish things even if it was in a pardon me kind of way. I haven't really formed any thoughts about that yet though