cattytrona's reviews
288 reviews

i love magic sm: the beginning of this had me metaphorically kicking my legs with glee.
i do wonder how this would read without prior knowledge of the film – they are different enough that this is still interesting and keeps you on your toes, but it also feels sillier and less efficient in comparison.

i think this does a better job of the horror of bordens’ situation – i think that’s its entire point, everything is just a way of exploring the twin thing – but the film does more with making the angier stuff horrible in a more human cruelty sort of way.

the novel does add some good character stuff, i particularly liked the detail that angier is essentially a bit of a useless magician, and needs support

except this is actually a clue, of course: it’s not that borden just is better, it’s that there’s two of them, the support’s built in

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i’d really like to see what this looks like on the page, whether it does anything with font or even spacing.
ultimately i think every story should be about magicians.

they’re just so relentlessly good and smart and funny. it’s interesting how much these first books do begin to repeat, expand, iterate the same concerns, and give them more roots and grip in/on the city. in another series i might dock a star for repetition but i like hanging out here too much, and think the points are worth repeating.
was thinking, whilst listening to this one, that it’s nice ankh morpork isnt just london.

like that this is a solid mystery with red herrings and everything. love that this is a direct response to fantasy monarchies, my most enemy concept. the guards series as restoration fantasy but for institutional justice?

This starts with the ‘real’ author ‘finding’ a ‘genuine’ ‘historical’ event, and so there I was, thinking ok, I’ve read Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, I’ve read Poor Things, I’m buckled up for a complicated, surreal book which plays with the reader’s ability and desire to distinguish between reality and madness and the supernatural. Now I’ve finished it, I think that was a bad choice by the author, to allow those parallels to be drawn. Makes the book feel rather bereft in comparison. There isn’t a sustained hint of a ghoulie: any whisper of otherworldliness feels like historical set dressing.

It’s a clean text, for all it is doing moral complication. There’s a perfect matching of events discussed in court and document, despite the lack of crossover between the two, in a way which feels carefully done to ensure the reader’s got all information. This clarity about the succession of events means any discontinuities feel signposted. This is boring and novelesque! What happened to the document conceit!

The characters and their relationships also feel simple, tropeish. Tough father, dead mother, local bully, girl who leads on. Okay? I can see why this would be a stressful environment to live in, but this is a story, so why not have some interesting complexities. As it is, it’s fairly dull to read about, and without the murders, it would genuinely be deeply pointless. There is a hint at some deep interpersonal cruelty which pushes thing further, with the sister, but it’s so thoroughly external to what we’re told, that it feels meaningless at best, and nasty and a tad misogynistic at worst. The treatment of women in this is weird, and not really dwelt on enough for me to know whether that weirdness and lack of dwelling is an attempt to represent a lack of representation, a silencing of female experience, or if it’s just supposed to be a part of life at the time, important to include for realism but not worth lingering on. That’s too little information for me to comfortably give it the benefit of the doubt.

There’s two references to a Gaelic speaker, but otherwise the issue of language goes completely unremarked upon, and outside a scattering of context-particular nouns, the whole thing’s in plain English. This is nuts. In a novel – a novel! full of words! – which does engage with the estrangement of Highlands from Lowland Scotland, of the inability of lower classes to be heard by those who deemed superior, it feels like such a loss to not engage with the languages which were a part of those divides. It’s also less interesting to read. I’m so bored of plain English. Language is an opportunity for challenge, and has so long been a battleground!

come for the traingun, endure the deep, constant sadness of the story

smart and good. my favourite throwaway bit which i’d completely forgotten but was totally delighted by was

the rat society in the prison

Felt at various points like being read a bedtime story/attending the kind of performed lecture where the lecturer gesticulates and like, strides up and down/being told obvious lies by a confident 6 year old boy. Rarely felt like a book.
I love the layers of impossible, contridictory past this imagines: at least three moons, and a whole history of advanced cities, tucked into the pages of the earth.
The standout stories, for me

Not sure I would return to this complete edition - there's a lot of stories, there's a lot of book, and without the momentum of plot to pull me through, I stopped and started. But in fragments, yes.

I continue to overestimate these books (affectionate). I guess I just thought, given it's the end of a trilogy, the longest book so far, there's a special new type of dragon, that there would also be conclusions and levellings up. Maybe it's unfair to say there aren't. But the way this series progresses is through re/discovery, rather than successful proactive work, and that can cause the main characters to feel rather passive by the end of it. This is particularly the case when they instantly work out what they've rediscovered, so there isn't even any tension, because they're just fated to know.

Two stars and a wish, because I have those:
Star: So glad I read the Harpers Hall books first, was delightful seeing the characters from that here.
Star: I thought the final pages with Lessa were lovely. Gorgeous to end up back where the first book started, yet so much further along.
Wish: I hoped for more from Ruth, he was just so special in so many ways, and I wish there 1) had been more exploration/examination, 2) had been more done with it than fire lizards (good) and putting a new spin on the weird mating stuff (whatever).

Of course, the whole series is ultimately wish fulfilment on a higher level, right. What if you were a cool youth who was liked and included by the best guys on your planet? What if you had the specialest dragon? And a hot girlfriend? And could sort of Challengers with both dragon and gf at once? What if you lived on a tropical paradise beach and you really could have it all because of teleportation? The issue here is that a book of this length cannot really be sustained on having all a teenage boy's dreams come true - the story needs something chunkier.

skimmed. i understand why it’s so massive in the discipline, because bennett really does hit on every major theme there is to worry about, but my goodness it’s dense and written in the 90s