chrisbiss's reviews
608 reviews

This is one of those books that's been on my TBR for years. Since I'm writing a dark academia game at the moment that I intend to launch in March, I'm dedicating most of my reading in February to that genre as some sort of research for it. This seemed like as good an excuse as any to finally tick *A Deadly Education* off my list.

I wasn't sure what to expect going into this. That's partly because I didn't really know what it was about - if I've read the blurb it was years ago when I first picked this up, before it sat unread on my shelf for ages - and partly because I remember not really enjoying Temeraire when I read it back in 2006. I haven't read anything else by Novik in the meantime, but she continues to be popular and to publish work that seems quite well-received, so I was cautiously optimistic.

My immediate reaction to *A Deadly Education* was that it felt like reading fanfic. I can't fully quantify what "fanfic voice" is but it definitely exists and is immediately identifiable, and Novik has it. The tiniest amount of research tells me that I shouldn't be surprised by this. Novik was one of the founders of A03 and I think given that it's reasonable to assume that she has read a lot of fanfic herself. The book having "fanfic voice" isn't inherently a bad thing, but it definitely took some adjusting for me to get into it since it's so far removed from the kinds of books I usually read.

I'm not actually sure if I ever did get into it properly. On the surface there's a lot to like her, but it all felt very surface level. I never felt like I properly got to know El or learned who any of the other characters were beyond their surface level. Everyone exists as a person who's good at one thing with no more depth, which was frustrating. Part of that is due to the fact that we see everything through the eyes of a character who is supremely self-involved and who never makes any effort to let people in or get to know them on anything more than a superficial level, but it's also down to the fact that Novik never spends any time developing her characters in any meaningful way. The book is wall-to-wall plot; every chapter brings a new monster to be fought and a new problem to be solved, so that it feels a little like the worst sort of Monster Of The Week episodic TV, and the result is that nothing really has any weight because it's always wrapped up by the end of the chapter.

And yet despite the fact that I didn't really enjoy it all that much, I found it oddly compelling. I rattled through it in a few hours and when I got to the end I immediately wanted to read the next book. Given that I don't think it's very good, really, that's a very strange response from me. Maybe it's because there's so much hinted at about the world and the school that could be interesting but isn't ever really developed; perhaps I want more because Novik is dangling it in front of me and I (perhaps foolishly) think she's going to deliver on it if I just give it one more book. Who knows?

If I wanted to be really scathing I'd describe this as "slop". I think it's more than that if I'm being fair. It's not bad, per se. I think a lot of what I dislike about it is actually just a facet of the fanfic-adjacent genre that Novik is writing in, and I'm not the target audience for that. If I'm being a bit more charitable I guess I'd call it candy floss. It's straightforwardly entertaining and makes you want more while you're reading it, but ultimately it leaves you empty and a little disappointed when you're done.

I'm going to read the next one, though.

Jennifer Croft's name is one I've seen a lot in the past few months as I've been trying to read more translated fiction, particularly in relation to her work translating Olga Tokarczuk’s *Flights* and *The Books of Jacob* into English. I haven't actually read any of her translations yet, but when someone recommended *The Extinction of Irena Rey* and I saw what it was about I knew I had to read it.

Even had I not known of Croft beforehand, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm drawn to. A group of translators gather in a cabin in a remote Polish forest to begin translating the latest work by a Polish Nobel laureate. While they're there the author disappears, and in their attempts to figure out what's happened and where she's gone, weird things start to happen. The events are narrated to us in the form of a novel written by the Spanish translator, writing in Polish, which is then translated for us by the English translator, who is herself a character in the novel. She has added 'corrections' and her own commentary on the events of the novel in the form of footnotes, which are often scathing about the original author of the text, who in turn seems to despise the English translator.

What follows is a slippery, hard-to-define novel. It's concerned with climate change, and human impacts on the environment, and extinction, and the unbalancing of nature thanks to capitalism and the effects of people. Everything we create, it says, necessarily comes at the expense of something else - even art. The artist is rendered as a vampire who sucks truth and beauty out of the world and cannibalises it for her own purposes - just as destructive as loggers, or people drilling for oil, but in her own way.

Translation here is also rendered as an act of violence against ideas and language and culture itself. At one point Croft quotes Robert Frost describing translation as "flawed and flaying". Translation, and translators, create art in their own right, but they do it by using up the raw material of the original creation - which itself has been created by the original author's cannibalism of the world around her.

Interestingly, given that Croft is one of Olga Tokarczuk's translators, some elements of the plot here aren't entirely dissimilar to that of *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead* - not a book that Croft translated but one that I imagine she's familiar with. I haven't read much (any?) other Polish fiction translated into English, but I'm curious to know whether more of this novel is recycled and reimagined from Polish source material. That would be an interesting parallel with one of the major revelations about Irena Rey, the titular fictional author whose absence is central to this work, and it would add a very satisfying level of metatextuality to what is already a very complex and layered work.

At its best, *The Extinction of Irena Rey* is a really intricate mystery that gives us not one but two potentially unreliable narrators - maybe even three, if you consider its approach to translation and language and how it renders the very words on the page as unreliable by nature. There are moments where it falters, especially in the middle sections where the pace drops off and it often feels like the book is meandering through the forest without any destination in sight. When we do get to the climax it feels a little rushed and disjointed, and I struggled to tell whether that was intentional - we're told by the English translator several times that the original author is not a competent writer and that she's done her best to elevate the work in its translation - or whether it's simply Croft's own writing letting the side down. My instinct is that, since it's impossible to tell whether those rough moments are actually intentional, it's the latter and the novel simply stumbles occasionally.

Still, I enjoyed this a lot. My goal this year is to read more fiction in translation and, while this isn't *actually* a translated work, I enjoyed how much it tied in to that current interest of mine. There are a lot of very interesting discussions about the nature and purpose of translation layered in among the more immediate plot, and I think I'm going to carry them with me into the translated work that I read this year. I'm glad I picked this up.

This is another book that I really wanted to love but ended up thinking was just okay. It's a little too 'slice of life' for my tastes. It's well written and all of the characters are well-drawn, and many of the situations that are set up are compelling and I'd love to know how they're resolved. Unfortunately we never get a satisfying conclusion to any of them.

The final chapter serves as a little bit of a time skip, showing the fallout from all of the little dramas we've been watching, but it's all related to a new character with no investment in the situations as things that have already happened. I found it quite frustrating. The book almost seems to acknowledge this rug pull, too:

The stories we were hearing about perfect strangers were interesting and we wanted to hear them, and it's annoying that they were cut off before they ended. Maybe this is the point, and we're being asked to reflect on why we're so invested in the petty squabbles and dramas of other people? Maybe the book is telling us to mind our own business. But if that's the case it doesn't land, and I almost feel like I would have preferred everything to simply end unresolved rather than attempting to wrap things up with this loose, half-formed, unsatisfying denouement.



That said, I still enjoyed reading this, I just wish there had been a little more to it.

An old favourite from childhood that I was in the mood to revisit.

I received an advanced reading copy of this book via Netgalley.
 

I went into this one with high expectations but ultimately was disappointed. The Witcher meets Squid Game is an interesting pitch, and The Serpent Called Mercy does attempt to deliver a fantasy full of monsters, ambition, and the grit of urban underworlds. Unfortunately, what sounds like an exciting blend of intrigue and violence instead becomes a frustratingly uneven read, where ambitious themes and promising ideas are undermined by poor execution, thin world-building, and a central message that I found frustrating at best and naive and short-sighted at worst. 

The story alternates between cozy, domestic moments in tearooms around the city of Setgad and arena combat against horrible monsters brought in from outside the city, a juxtaposition that could have been compelling if handled deftly. The problem is that neither aspect fully lands. The action sequences especially fell very flat for me. These should be the beating heart of the novel but most of them consist of the protagonists sitting on platforms above the monsters they're meant to be fighting, talking through their plans in complete calm until Lythlet puzzles out the solution - usually by making use of something she's learned about said monster from a book. It put me in mind of someone reading a Dungeons & Dragons monster manual entry about a bear and then expecting to be able to win a fight against one. 

The cozy elements of the book fare a little better, but even then they're undermined by tonal inconsistencies. One fairly major subplot revolves around child sex trafficking and the sexual abuse of children, and the references to it are introduced with the subtlety of a brick. Characters mention it in passing without ever really reflecting on the true horror of it, and it's incredibly jarring when set against the cozier, warmer moments. And even those cozy moments are set against a backdrop of abject poverty and spiralling debt that's never really explored. The result is a story that feels unsure of what it wants to be - soft, comforting wish fulfillment fantasy or dark, gritty drama that explores the evils of unchecked capitalism. 

The book also struggles with charaterisation. Lythlet, our protagonist, is positioned as an intelligent, capable heroine, but her immediate mastery of every skill and situation robs the story of tension and her character of any sense of growth. In her first arena battle she manages to do something that hasn't been done by anybody in decades, unlocking a well of ancient magic that grants her the power to rewrite time itself for 8 seconds. This is barely ever mentioned again, and it feels like this should have been the climax of her time in the arena rather than something that happens casually once or twice and is then forgotten. Her only flaws seem to be that she struggles to understand social cues, and that she has a stutter - but the stutter is mentioned a handful of times in the opening chapters and then forgotten entirely. 

This is a symptom of a common problem in the book. Things are mentioned and plotlines are seeded only to never turn up again. A major subplot throughout the novel is the existence of a shady vigilante character called the Phantom, who has been stealing from the rich of the city and is a wanted criminal. Lythlet starts to be drawn into a web of conspiracy theories about the Phantom's existence, and it seems clear that this will be an important element in the final act. Then it's forgotten entirely, with no payoff whatsoever. 

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the book is its political naivety. The story’s central message seems to be that oppressive systems, whether they involve abusive employers, mob bosses, or the structural corruption of the city, can be defeated just as easily with a stern talking-to as with violent action or revolution. It places a strange and uncritical faith in the rule of law, despite its depiction of a city riddled with crime and inequality. In the current political climate, where systemic injustice often demands more than polite appeals to decency, this message feels incredibly naive. There's certainly a place for this sort of soft wish fulfilment, but perhaps not in a novel dealing with violent mob bosses and child sex slaves. 

This is a long list of complaints, but it's not all bad. Every time I felt like abandoning the book something would come along that kept me gripped - some revelation about the world, or a detail that I thought was interesting and wanted to see explored more. When it works well the juxtaposition of cozy fantasy and gritty underworld violence is really good. It's just a shame that the focus of the novel seems misplaced, and that it's so inconsistent. I'm also unsure who this is for. It's pitched as an adult fantasy novel but it reads much more like YA or NA, and I think that had I known that were the case I likely would have skipped it. As it is, I think it's too inconsistent for me to be able to recommend it. 

My ultimate takeaway from this novel is that it was just fine. And that's a shame, because it's a really strong pitch and I really wanted to like it more than I did.

My main problem here is that it's simply oo fast.  The story has no time to breathe, rattling along from scene to scene with very little connective tissue. Time jumps forward weeks and months with no indication that this has happened, and I found myself going back to reread sections to try and get myself situated in the narrative again. Characters make decisions and come to conclusions in the blink of an eye. One of the main characters, and FBI agent named Sloane, learns that vampires are real and is immediately fine with it and mentally prepared to deal with it, without any sense that this is a shock to him. A medical intern who's roped in to help the protagonists harvest organs from vampires witnesses her friends cutting open a live vampire and pulling out its insides in the back of a car and doesn't even flinch before she's asking if she can get wrist-deep in the much. And while all of this is going on the point of view jumps between characters without warning, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, in a way that's very jarring.

Something I find that happens in books like this, where I really wanted to love it and end up just thinking it's okay, is that I grow increasingly critical of tiny, trivial details that don't really matter on their own but that add up to a growing sense of disillusionment with the work. One is the aforementioned speed with which characters react to their world being turned upside down. Others were small things about the world and the 'rules' of vampirism that didn't really add up. A big plot point is that characters throw things for vampires to count as a distraction - bags of rice, tongue depressers, etc. But on multiple occasions vampires break through windows to attack people or gain access to locations. Why are they not compelled to stop and count the shards of broken glass on the floor before continuining? Why does this counting thing only work some of the time? Another peeve - a couple of our protagonists are vampires, and they're capable of resisting the urge to feed. Why are they able to retain their humanity but none of the "bad" vampires are - even those who, we're told, are freshly turned, just like our protagonists? They're not really important issues but they jumped out at me and bothered me while I was reading.

Because of the quick pace the ending just doesn't really land, unfortunately. It builds to a climax but it nevers feels earned. It's just chaos and blood and violence because that's how a vampire story needs to end, right? I feel like this had the potential to reinvent the genre in the same way as something like 30 Days of Night or Blade but it's so rushed that it just falls flat, and that's a shame.

I'm not mad that I read it, but I wanted more from it.

My first DNF of the year. Because of the structure I don't actually know how much of the book I read (especially as I was reading digitally and so couldn't see physical pages) but I'd guess I got to about the 30% point. This is a really disappointing one, because I really loved The Cartographers and have been looking forward to this for a while.

I've always considered myself a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure style books, but it turns out I only like them when they're a gamebook and not a novel. With a gamebook I feel like I'm playing and making choices to try and win, and it doesn't matter that I'm going to miss bits of the book because the point isn't to see everything but to find the correct route through the thing. With a novel, on the other hand, I don't want to miss anything, and so making a choice feels like being asked "which bits of this book don't you want to read?"

It's been a while since I read it but I remember liking the prose in The Cartographers. That's not the case here. This has the cadence of the worst kind of trashy, highly commercial thrillers. The characters are paper thin, the situations are contrived, and every page just screams "this is a plot-driven novel". I never connected with or liked Marsh, and I found every other character she interacts with to be deeply annoying - especially Talia, who I think we're meant to like but I have no idea why. The constant intrusion of the viewers in their chat window was incredibly annoying, too, and pulled me out of the book every time they appeared.

What a shame.

I'm currently working on a dark academia TTRPG and wanted to read some lesser-known (and shorter) works in the genre, so I picked up this anthology. Subterranean Press have a track record of putting out good work, so I was hopeful.

I should have realised what I was getting into when the marketing blurb talks about "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" with an implied (derogatory) behind it. There's a common thread in this anthology of the stories being reactionary, tinged with right-wing rhetoric about "snowflakes" (one literally uses the phrase "Snowflake Generation" to describe Millenials) and a fear of anything resembling social justice or equity, and are deeply misogynistic. I think it's obvious that the majority of these stories were written by white American men in their 60s and 70s (an observation that Jane Hamilton's "Writing Maeve Dubinsky" would likely take issue with, as it examines identity politics through a lens of "straight white women should be able to write about whatever they want, and are probably better at telling the stories of queer and Black people than they are themselves, even when they have to steal them to make it possible").

Alongside the aforementioned plagiarism story we have tales about a professor who murders her students for being too woke (after seducing them); a man with a PhD in Medieval Studies who can't get a job and so shoots down a plane full of tenured professors with an RPG to create openings in the job market; a school where they learn to murder non-white and disabled people; a story that introduced its female main character as being "smarter than most of the male students [...] and damn near all the women" but who isn't, it turns out, smarter than the male characters who fuck her over and have her killed; and a woman who is raped by her boyfriend's PhD supervisor but says nothing because everyone knows she's slept with other men before and so it was basically her fault, if it was even rape. That last one might be trying to make a point about why women don't report these things, but if it is it does it clumsily and in a way that seems to point the finger at the victim.

It's not all terrible. Ian Rankin's story of a man investigating an historic murder in a secret society is gripping and genuinely very good right up until its slightly clumsy ending. Owen King's "That Golden Way" takes a step sideways into weird otherspaces horror and was really fun, even if it wasn't quite what I was looking for from "dark academia". Seanan McGuire's tale of a girl with a dark past and a darker future in her first days at university was a really nice fish out of water story right up until the very surprising twist into supernatural territory and I wish it had been longer.

Normally in anthologies I find that one or two stories strike me as being great, and that the rest are just fine aside from a couple of stinkers. Here I spent most of my time wondering if there was going to be a single story in the book that I liked even a little bit. Out of the 18 stories here there were only 3 that I actually thought were good, with the rest veering from bad to actively offensive. But, based on the thesis of most of these stories, maybe I've just spent too much time in these soft leftist halls of learning and need to toughen myself up.