akallabeth's reviews
226 reviews

 fun concept, disappointing execution.

the writing is so clunky; it manages to be both unbearably on the nose and so convoluted as to obscure meaning, often in the same paragraph. this is some sort of achievement i suppose, but not one that makes for a fun reading experience. it totally buried any other literary merit the book may have had for me.

body horror: medium. or i have a stronger stomach than i thought.
sapphism: medium to low, and by the end i sort of wished there hadn't been any.
cover: infuriatingly cool, and will probably persuade me to keep this book in my collection longer than i should. 

arguably rounded up slightly- it's always dicey with short story collections. susanna clarke's just such a wordsmith, man; her sentences are so satisfyingly put together. this has a very fun fairytale/folkloric vibe that i'm a fan of. technically can stand alone apart from strange & norrell, but i think to get the most out of it you should probably read that charming brick of a book first. 

nobody look at me, holy shit. this was a very interesting novel that i do not feel qualified to properly rate/review, for extremely obvious reasons. glad i finished it however. 

 there were so many ways for this book to feel trite or unselfaware or fail to evoke any sympathy for its bumbling protagonist, but it somehow manages to avoid all these likely pitfalls. instead i found arthur less endearing, the writing clever, and the whole thing very moving. not a romance novel per se, but a novel about love. a novel with a lot of love in it.

i saw a few charmingly snarky reviews calling this a gay 'eat pray love', but all that story got out of me was a half-hearted eyeroll; this one got me misty eyed. maybe it's just the homosexuality of it all!

a real case of reading the right book at the right time. as a fellow neurotic homosexual having a crisis in the leadup to their birthday - cheers, arthur less.

(p.s. i can't believe i read the penelopiad and then picked this book up 'for a change of pace' only for arthur less' main claim to fame to be a retelling of the odyssey. there are references to tiresias and telemachus here, for god's sake!!) 

unlike many of the more recent (circe industrial complex) mythology retellings, this novella is a borderline feel-bad experience, and i respect atwood immensely for that. 

well gang, i fucked around (read two rincewind books in a row) and found out (i am fully rinc'd out). objectively this is an improvement on the colour of magic & it definitely feels more like the later, more established discworld, but personally i was just at the end of my rope with this guy. adieu until interesting times, may god help me. 

it's Fine. there's only so much you can do with rincewind. i hold no ill will towards this book, but i'm glad i didn't start my discworld journey here, and you shouldn't either; it's not very indicative of the tone or quality of later books. i'm just reading it to satisfy my terminal case of completionism. 

this book - i cannot stress this enough - fucks severely. slow build, fun structure, and a truly bonkers ending in the best possible way. 

what this is is a secondary world fantasy retelling of hamlet where gods meddle in human affairs and have their affairs meddled in in return, told partially in the second person by a very particular and patient god who's got time. a lot of time. 

part thoughtful examination of the nature of language, belief, power, and what it might mean to be a god and exist so vastly and for so long; part shakepearean family drama centering a very long-suffering horatio. the reveals are slow to come but worth the wait. i was truly giggling and kicking my feet those last 20 pages. amen.

also YES ophelia my living girl!!!!!!!

this book's a real hidden gem, actually. 

it's got beautiful writing, a slightly tricky structure, and a richly imagined fantasy religion, all of which i am a known lover of. toss in some messed up friendships, meditations on grief, older female protagonists, and a willingness to dig into your characters' flaws... it's a lot of really great elements that make up a lovely, if odd, whole. 

2.75 or something, rounded up. i'm moved to generosity by the occasion, and the occasion is that i'm finally throwing in the towel re: mira grant/seanan mcguire. what my heart refused to accept over the span of 5 120ish page novellas, it finally fully comprehended after one 440 page novel. 

(this is c/p from goodreads. on storygraph i am less generous, i guess.)

the mermaids themselves? great. strange, unsettling, but plausible enough to accept. the scenes that were most purely suspense/horror and dealt with the mermaids most directly were honestly very enjoyable.

unfortunately.

so so SO much of this decently chunky book is characters talking to each other and pondering their feelings. sometimes they are talking about those feelings, sometimes they are talking about science. this isn't a problem inherently, and i am not a hater of slow-paced character pieces. the issue is that truly every single one of these characters is a big old nothing.

i didn't care about any of them. it's a decently big cast, and almost uniformly one-note and uninteresting and prone to this like.. late-era joss whendom qupping. you know when it wasn't funny anymore, just kind of stale and corny? even the characters that were clearly written just to be hated (shitty toxic ex! big game hunter right out of disney's tarzan!) were too uninteresting to get worked up about. the most distinct character was dr toth, and alas i didn't like her at all. 

(objectively unimportant tangent, but speaking of joss whedon and dr toth: why did dr toth read like a marvel style scientist with skills-as-the-plot requires? you don't even find out her actual degree is in biology until well over halfway into the book. i also never felt that was got a decent explanation for WHY she was so sure mermaids were real the whole time. okay, there's similar myths about them in many cultures across the world. and?? that is NOT sufficient! or a biology-based argument, at that. it truly felt like the fact that we started the book already knowing for a fact mermaids were real, with video evidence and all, allowed grant to never have to explain the basis for dr toth's actual theories.)

i was also hoping grant's adult writing would be less didactic regarding social issues etc than her ya, and it is but honestly only just barely. 

the dialogue style, didactic approach and (to varying extents, depending on the story) frustrating characterisation are all things i've repeatedly struggled with when reading this author, but she's always had just enough interesting elements in her work that i've kept reading her stuff hoping that maybe it was just that one book. it's not. all her books are like that. i've reached acceptance. so long, seanan mcguire. 

no one important even fucking DIED, man, come on.