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chrisbiss's reviews
608 reviews
Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram
This is so off-putting. I actively hate this.
This begins the choose your own adventure section and I'm just glad it was short. It's not well done, lurching from section to section without them feeling like they connect properly, and when the path I'd chosen finally ended it felt completely meaningless. I'm also mildly annoyed that after deciding to persevere with the book I don't feel like I've actually finished it, because I haven't read all of the choices at the end. But I'm not going to go back and choose other options, because I hated this so much that now that I'm done with it I absolutely don't have any desire to go back and spend more time inside it just to find out what the other endings are.
I'll have forgotten about this book by tomorrow.
1.0
This was a massive disappointment.
Stories about 'otherspaces' and weird liminal places are among my favourites, whether that's *House of Leaves* or Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. The fact that this also promised some choose your own adventure/branching path stuff made it doubly interesting to me. Unfortunately it's a complete failure to launch.
The main problem here is entirely in the tone of the thing. The main character's narration is abrasive in a really off-putting way, and he's supremely unlikeable. He's edgy and cocky without ever being funny, talking in a very disaffected, jaded way as though he thinks he's super cool. Both the narrator and the one other speaking character - a woman who is never actually named, identified only by the clothes she wears despite spending days with the main character - sound the same, and it reminds me of the way Redditors imagine cool people speak. It's like the worst parts of Johnny Truant's narration in *House of Leaves* but without any of the humour.
This would be a problem on its own, but it's compounded by the fact that this is a horror novel and we're meant to believe that this narrator is both suicidally depressed and scared out of his mind. He certainly spends a lot of time telling us that both of those things are true, but I never believed it for a second. I think fear can be hard to convey well in a first person narrative anyway, perhaps intuitively. First person promises to get us closer to the thoughts and feelings of a character, but fear creates irrationality and narration largely requires a rational mind. So by the time a character can tell us about the fear they're feeling its been diluted and muted, and it doesn't land. People like to laud "show don't tell" as a truth of writing when it isn't, but I think it's true of writing fear - and first person perspectives are largely "tell". Especially this one, which never spends any time to delve into the interiority of its character. Despite being firmly in his head for the whole novel I never got a sense of who he was as a person. There's no emotional core to this novella about suicide.
The horror itself is also very Reddit, to the extent that at one point the character plays the Elevator Game (a daft urban legend about haunted lifts that was turned into a film in 2023 and that very much reads like something posted to r/nosleep). This section is a massive tonal shift into absurdism that simply doesn't land.
By the time the narrator gives up and hands control over to the reader and it turns into a CYOA book I was ready to check out, and if the book had been longer than it is I would have DNFd. O didn't care about the character or the events being depicted enough to want to pick the direction the narrative goes in, I just wanted it to be done. And then when I chose the "you decide your own fate" option I was met with this:
Stories about 'otherspaces' and weird liminal places are among my favourites, whether that's *House of Leaves* or Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. The fact that this also promised some choose your own adventure/branching path stuff made it doubly interesting to me. Unfortunately it's a complete failure to launch.
The main problem here is entirely in the tone of the thing. The main character's narration is abrasive in a really off-putting way, and he's supremely unlikeable. He's edgy and cocky without ever being funny, talking in a very disaffected, jaded way as though he thinks he's super cool. Both the narrator and the one other speaking character - a woman who is never actually named, identified only by the clothes she wears despite spending days with the main character - sound the same, and it reminds me of the way Redditors imagine cool people speak. It's like the worst parts of Johnny Truant's narration in *House of Leaves* but without any of the humour.
This would be a problem on its own, but it's compounded by the fact that this is a horror novel and we're meant to believe that this narrator is both suicidally depressed and scared out of his mind. He certainly spends a lot of time telling us that both of those things are true, but I never believed it for a second. I think fear can be hard to convey well in a first person narrative anyway, perhaps intuitively. First person promises to get us closer to the thoughts and feelings of a character, but fear creates irrationality and narration largely requires a rational mind. So by the time a character can tell us about the fear they're feeling its been diluted and muted, and it doesn't land. People like to laud "show don't tell" as a truth of writing when it isn't, but I think it's true of writing fear - and first person perspectives are largely "tell". Especially this one, which never spends any time to delve into the interiority of its character. Despite being firmly in his head for the whole novel I never got a sense of who he was as a person. There's no emotional core to this novella about suicide.
The horror itself is also very Reddit, to the extent that at one point the character plays the Elevator Game (a daft urban legend about haunted lifts that was turned into a film in 2023 and that very much reads like something posted to r/nosleep). This section is a massive tonal shift into absurdism that simply doesn't land.
By the time the narrator gives up and hands control over to the reader and it turns into a CYOA book I was ready to check out, and if the book had been longer than it is I would have DNFd. O didn't care about the character or the events being depicted enough to want to pick the direction the narrative goes in, I just wanted it to be done. And then when I chose the "you decide your own fate" option I was met with this:
YOU WANT ME TO choose? Me? What gives you the right? I told you I don’t want to be here anymore. Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it all so glaringly fucking obvious? You want me to choose? You want me to choose love? Just tell me what you want. Use the words. Tell me what you want to see; I’ll say and do whatever you want me to do. Why? Why do you care? You can’t change how it ends. The story’s in your hands. No, it’s literally in your hands. When this thing gets published, my ending will already have been written. You choosing and me choosing doesn’t change a goddamn thing.
This is so off-putting. I actively hate this.
This begins the choose your own adventure section and I'm just glad it was short. It's not well done, lurching from section to section without them feeling like they connect properly, and when the path I'd chosen finally ended it felt completely meaningless. I'm also mildly annoyed that after deciding to persevere with the book I don't feel like I've actually finished it, because I haven't read all of the choices at the end. But I'm not going to go back and choose other options, because I hated this so much that now that I'm done with it I absolutely don't have any desire to go back and spend more time inside it just to find out what the other endings are.
I'll have forgotten about this book by tomorrow.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang
It turns out that "Heavy Snow" is only sort of an excerpt from We Do Not Part. It takes pieces from a longer sequence - the majority of Part 1 of the novel, as it turns out - and abridges them, re-ordering and recontextualising them and adding new material to make the ellisions work. It's a seamless piece of work, and though "Heavy Snow" is a piece of this novel I think it's different enough that it stands alone. In its extended form here, that story takes on much more weight.
5.0
I received an advanced reading copy of this novel from Penguin via NetGalley.
I didn't know what to expect going into We Do Not Part, because I never actually read the blurb before starting it. I just knew that I love Human Acts and the few pieces of Han Kang's short fiction that I've read, as well as the story "Heavy Snow" that appeared in The New Yorker late last year as an excerpt from this novel. I'd liked that piece a lot, and I really wanted to see the longer work that it came from.
I didn't know what to expect going into We Do Not Part, because I never actually read the blurb before starting it. I just knew that I love Human Acts and the few pieces of Han Kang's short fiction that I've read, as well as the story "Heavy Snow" that appeared in The New Yorker late last year as an excerpt from this novel. I'd liked that piece a lot, and I really wanted to see the longer work that it came from.
It turns out that "Heavy Snow" is only sort of an excerpt from We Do Not Part. It takes pieces from a longer sequence - the majority of Part 1 of the novel, as it turns out - and abridges them, re-ordering and recontextualising them and adding new material to make the ellisions work. It's a seamless piece of work, and though "Heavy Snow" is a piece of this novel I think it's different enough that it stands alone. In its extended form here, that story takes on much more weight.
The first act, following Kyungha's journey from the hospital in Seoul into the forests of Jeju Island in the grip of an unending snow storm, is simply beautiful. It's quiet and contemplative but at the same time urgent and scary, and even though the stakes are on their face quite small - will Kyungha arrive at Inseon's house in time to prevent her pet bird from dying? - they're no less meaningful, underpinned as they are by the weight of years of friendship and obligation, by a history between these two characters that's shown to us only in small pieces.
The quiet beauty and escalating tension of Part 1 do an incredible job of priming us for the emotional impact of the rest of the novel. Once Kyungha reaches Inseon's home the story shifts into something that feels like a companion piece to Human Acts, as she is haunted by Inseon's past and discovers records around the Jeju uprising and massacre of 1948, in which the Korean government slaughtered thousands of civilians. I admittedly know very little about Korean history but, as with Human Acts, Han Kang presents the events she's concerned about in such a stark, unflinching way that it doesn't matter.
We Do Not Part's narrator is, herself, a writer who has previously written a novel about the massacre following the Gwangju uprising in 1980 - the same subject matter as Human Acts. Here Kyungha laments that she didn't tell the whole story in her book, that she allowed some of the atrocities to go unremembered. The final act of We Do Not Part grapples with ideas around forgetting and how we remember the dead, and how the past haunts the future.
This is a book with pain on every page, from Inseon's horrific injury at the beginning, to the frozen pain of Kyungha's journey and the uncovering of the terrible history in the back end of the novel. Kyungha, too, suffers with debilitating migraines, one of which grips her for most of the opening section of the novel. Both of the characters spend the entire book in pain that's exacerbated by their attempts to keep the past alive, and it would be easy to ask whether it's worth it. But the book closes with images that remind us that no matter how painful it may be, remembering is always an act of love.
We Do Not Part won the Prix Médicis étranger for its French translation, and I'll be very surprised if this English rendering doesn't appear on the International Booker Prize shortlist later this year.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
3.5
I received an advanced reading copy of this novel via NetGalley.
I went into this having only read the blurb and thinking it sounded nice but with no other expectations. It sounded like the sort of soft slice of life literary fiction that I really like, and that's exactly what it is.
This is a cozy, gentle hug of a book. There's drama and tension, but it's drama distilled through and softened by the years-long relationships of people who know each other well and have rubbed off each other's sharp edges. It's perfect for sitting down with a cup of tea and a couple of hours to spare and reading in one sitting.
My favourite thing here is that Gail is very clearly autistic, but this is never something that's explicit in the book and it isn't at all the focus of the novel. After feeling really alienated by All The Little Bird Hearts last year it was refreshing to see myself represented in a way that doesn't feel like fetishisation or like it's trying to tick a representation box. Gail just is who she is.
This is a lovely little slice of life, a time capsule of a long weekend that ends perfectly. I was enjoying it all the way through, but the final paragraph especially is perfect and brought a happy little tear to my eye.
This is just nice. Well worth the read.
I went into this having only read the blurb and thinking it sounded nice but with no other expectations. It sounded like the sort of soft slice of life literary fiction that I really like, and that's exactly what it is.
This is a cozy, gentle hug of a book. There's drama and tension, but it's drama distilled through and softened by the years-long relationships of people who know each other well and have rubbed off each other's sharp edges. It's perfect for sitting down with a cup of tea and a couple of hours to spare and reading in one sitting.
My favourite thing here is that Gail is very clearly autistic, but this is never something that's explicit in the book and it isn't at all the focus of the novel. After feeling really alienated by All The Little Bird Hearts last year it was refreshing to see myself represented in a way that doesn't feel like fetishisation or like it's trying to tick a representation box. Gail just is who she is.
This is a lovely little slice of life, a time capsule of a long weekend that ends perfectly. I was enjoying it all the way through, but the final paragraph especially is perfect and brought a happy little tear to my eye.
This is just nice. Well worth the read.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
4.5
One of my goals this year is for 50% of the fiction I read to be in translation, and I'm kicking off my attempt to meet that goal with Antonia Lloyd-Jones' translation of Olga Tokarczuk's novel *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead*, published in Polish in 2009 but not translated into English until 2018.
Over the past year or so I've really got into crime fiction, and I've been seeking out 'literary crime' with mixed results. Literary fiction often thrives in ambiguity, and I love that - except when it comes to crime, which is a genre that (mostly) demands closure and a satisfying denouement. Many of the litcrime novels I've read leave things hanging in a way that I've found deeply frustrating when what I really want is for plot to unravel itself around me. Thankfully Tokarczuk manages to balance the best of both genres here, and I really enjoyed this.
My biggest surprise with *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead* was in how funny it is. When I see the words "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature" on the cover I don't particularly anticipate humour, and that expectation is compounded by having read this in the Fitzcarraldo Editions version. Those books are very, very pretty, but their austere, sparse presentation very much implies that this is a Serious Novel, and the books I've read from their catalogue have reinforced that for me. *Drive Your Plow...* **is** a Serious Novel, one that explores ideas about disability, age, religion, and conservatism, but it's also a novel that's at times laugh-out-loud funny.
Mrs. Duszejko is a force of personality and her narration grips hold of us immediately, not just thrusting us into her world but forcing us to see it exactly as she sees it. "Curtain-twitching old woman solves crimes" is of course a staple of the genre, and at times this is the coziest of cozy crime novels - especially if you read it on a day when you can't leave the house due to heavy snow mirroring the weather of the book, as I did. But it's also much more than that, straying into and teasing magic realism, delivering a treatise on the ethics of vegetarianism, and very delicately and sensitively portraying what it means to live with chronic illness. Tokarczuk is on record as having said that "just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time", and that attitude is on every page of this book.
The reveal, when it comes, isn't entirely unexpected. I'd begun to put the clues together and had my suspicions about who the killer might be, but because of all the other layers in the narrative it wasn't one of those moments where I then felt a burning urge to get to the end to find out if I was right. Having my suspicions confirmed didn't give me the "Aha! I've solved it!" moment I often seek from crime, but that's because it's so good in every other way that the way it interacts with the tropes of its genre is just icing on the cake.
Highly recommended.
Over the past year or so I've really got into crime fiction, and I've been seeking out 'literary crime' with mixed results. Literary fiction often thrives in ambiguity, and I love that - except when it comes to crime, which is a genre that (mostly) demands closure and a satisfying denouement. Many of the litcrime novels I've read leave things hanging in a way that I've found deeply frustrating when what I really want is for plot to unravel itself around me. Thankfully Tokarczuk manages to balance the best of both genres here, and I really enjoyed this.
My biggest surprise with *Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead* was in how funny it is. When I see the words "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature" on the cover I don't particularly anticipate humour, and that expectation is compounded by having read this in the Fitzcarraldo Editions version. Those books are very, very pretty, but their austere, sparse presentation very much implies that this is a Serious Novel, and the books I've read from their catalogue have reinforced that for me. *Drive Your Plow...* **is** a Serious Novel, one that explores ideas about disability, age, religion, and conservatism, but it's also a novel that's at times laugh-out-loud funny.
Mrs. Duszejko is a force of personality and her narration grips hold of us immediately, not just thrusting us into her world but forcing us to see it exactly as she sees it. "Curtain-twitching old woman solves crimes" is of course a staple of the genre, and at times this is the coziest of cozy crime novels - especially if you read it on a day when you can't leave the house due to heavy snow mirroring the weather of the book, as I did. But it's also much more than that, straying into and teasing magic realism, delivering a treatise on the ethics of vegetarianism, and very delicately and sensitively portraying what it means to live with chronic illness. Tokarczuk is on record as having said that "just writing a book to know who is the killer is wasting paper and time", and that attitude is on every page of this book.
The reveal, when it comes, isn't entirely unexpected. I'd begun to put the clues together and had my suspicions about who the killer might be, but because of all the other layers in the narrative it wasn't one of those moments where I then felt a burning urge to get to the end to find out if I was right. Having my suspicions confirmed didn't give me the "Aha! I've solved it!" moment I often seek from crime, but that's because it's so good in every other way that the way it interacts with the tropes of its genre is just icing on the cake.
Highly recommended.
Confessions by Catherine Airey
Last January I kicked off my year of reading with Paul Murray's The Bee Sting and absolutely loved it. This year, as fate would have it, I've started with another Irish novel. If this is the beginning of a new tradition where my first book of the year is an Irish book that I love, then sign me up.
I really loved this book.
There's a lot going on here. We start in New York in September of 2001. The planes have just hit the Twin Towers, and Cora has become an orphan. From there we begin a generational journey that will take us back to 1974 and all the way to the present day as we spend time with all the people whose lives are impacted by this one death among thousands. Along the way we explore the generational impact of trauma brought on by poor mental health; the AIDS crisis; abortion rights in Ireland and, later, America; what it means to be gay in a country that won't legally recognise your relationships. The power of art to heal and to damage in equal measure. The way people come in and out of your life, and how once they're gone it's hard - if not impossible - to put things back the way they were. There's tragedy, and loss, and grief, but it's always threaded through and held together by love, and redemption, and the idea that you make your own family and hold on to the people you care for.
I read this in two sittings on consecutive days, but when I reached the end I was surprised by that fact. It felt like I'd spent a lot longer than six hours with this book. That's not to say that it's slow going, though. I would describe the pace as 'measured' - the narrative takes its time to reveal itself, but at the same time there are no wasted moments. I really felt like I was sinking into this world and these lives, wanting to learn everything I possible could about these characters and their complicated history.
In marketing material Confessions has been compared to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and I think that's an apt comparison on the surface. I really enjoyed that book when I read it last year, but I found that even though I loved it while I was reading it I was left with a sense that none of it really mattered once it ended. Because it spans such a wide amount of time I never really felt able to get down in the dirt with the characters; everything felt very surface level, with no real depth. That's not the case here, and I feel like this is the sort of book that is going to reward rereading.
Without wanting to gush too much, this is one of the most assured debuts I've read in a long time, potentially up there with Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep (which was my favourite book last year). Every character feels real and alive on the page, and each of them has a distinct voice, including some of the best use of the second person I've ever read. The plot slots together like the most intricate of puzzles Even when the novel feels like it's about to falter, Airey knows exactly what she's doing. There's a reveal in the finale (which I won't spoil here) that, when it was first hinted at - i.e. when we realise what's happening but before the characters do - felt a little contrived. I was seriously concerned that, with just 60 pages to go in the novel, the magic of the book had been ruined. But when the moment arrived it was perfect, and it brings everything to a beautifully satisfying close.
This was a book I was really excited about when I first saw it announced, and I'm very pleased to say that it lived up to my expectations entirely. This was a great way to start the year.
4.0
There were the things you presented to people - your stories. Then tere were the things you never confessed to a soul - your secrets. That was how we existed, how we knew ourselves at all.
Last January I kicked off my year of reading with Paul Murray's The Bee Sting and absolutely loved it. This year, as fate would have it, I've started with another Irish novel. If this is the beginning of a new tradition where my first book of the year is an Irish book that I love, then sign me up.
I really loved this book.
There's a lot going on here. We start in New York in September of 2001. The planes have just hit the Twin Towers, and Cora has become an orphan. From there we begin a generational journey that will take us back to 1974 and all the way to the present day as we spend time with all the people whose lives are impacted by this one death among thousands. Along the way we explore the generational impact of trauma brought on by poor mental health; the AIDS crisis; abortion rights in Ireland and, later, America; what it means to be gay in a country that won't legally recognise your relationships. The power of art to heal and to damage in equal measure. The way people come in and out of your life, and how once they're gone it's hard - if not impossible - to put things back the way they were. There's tragedy, and loss, and grief, but it's always threaded through and held together by love, and redemption, and the idea that you make your own family and hold on to the people you care for.
I read this in two sittings on consecutive days, but when I reached the end I was surprised by that fact. It felt like I'd spent a lot longer than six hours with this book. That's not to say that it's slow going, though. I would describe the pace as 'measured' - the narrative takes its time to reveal itself, but at the same time there are no wasted moments. I really felt like I was sinking into this world and these lives, wanting to learn everything I possible could about these characters and their complicated history.
In marketing material Confessions has been compared to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and I think that's an apt comparison on the surface. I really enjoyed that book when I read it last year, but I found that even though I loved it while I was reading it I was left with a sense that none of it really mattered once it ended. Because it spans such a wide amount of time I never really felt able to get down in the dirt with the characters; everything felt very surface level, with no real depth. That's not the case here, and I feel like this is the sort of book that is going to reward rereading.
Without wanting to gush too much, this is one of the most assured debuts I've read in a long time, potentially up there with Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep (which was my favourite book last year). Every character feels real and alive on the page, and each of them has a distinct voice, including some of the best use of the second person I've ever read. The plot slots together like the most intricate of puzzles Even when the novel feels like it's about to falter, Airey knows exactly what she's doing. There's a reveal in the finale (which I won't spoil here) that, when it was first hinted at - i.e. when we realise what's happening but before the characters do - felt a little contrived. I was seriously concerned that, with just 60 pages to go in the novel, the magic of the book had been ruined. But when the moment arrived it was perfect, and it brings everything to a beautifully satisfying close.
This was a book I was really excited about when I first saw it announced, and I'm very pleased to say that it lived up to my expectations entirely. This was a great way to start the year.
They: A Sequence of Unease by Kay Dick
3.0
I'm not sure how this one came across my radar, but I'm always a sucker for "lost" dystopian novels (ask me about Katharine Burdekin's *Swastika Night* some time). After a couple of disappointing reads at the tail end of December I was hoping that this would close the year out on a high.
That wasn't really the case, unfortunately. I didn't dislike this by any means, but I didn't love it either. It's a slippery, ethereal thing, dreamlike in a way that's not necessarily good. The subtitle ("A Sequence of Unease") is definitely accurate - the text evokes a mood rather than anything concrete, building up layers of unsettling tension that work wonderfully. But there isn't anything to grab hold of, no real sense of who these people are or what's happening, and I found that as much as I enjoyed reading it the images slipped off my mind and faded much like a dream does upon waking.
That's not to say that it's forgettable. There are definitely some great stand-out moments that I'll remember, in particular a very tense sequence about halfway through where the narrator tries to navigate their way to a safehouse through a hostile village by following cryptic clues hidden in an old game. There's a real sense of danger and lurking violence in those pages that I really loved, and it's one of the few moments in the book where what's actually happening breaks through the fog of unease and makes itself clear on the page.
I definitely enjoyed this, and I think it's still a very relevant book, but I don't know if it's one that I'll revisit in a hurry.
That wasn't really the case, unfortunately. I didn't dislike this by any means, but I didn't love it either. It's a slippery, ethereal thing, dreamlike in a way that's not necessarily good. The subtitle ("A Sequence of Unease") is definitely accurate - the text evokes a mood rather than anything concrete, building up layers of unsettling tension that work wonderfully. But there isn't anything to grab hold of, no real sense of who these people are or what's happening, and I found that as much as I enjoyed reading it the images slipped off my mind and faded much like a dream does upon waking.
That's not to say that it's forgettable. There are definitely some great stand-out moments that I'll remember, in particular a very tense sequence about halfway through where the narrator tries to navigate their way to a safehouse through a hostile village by following cryptic clues hidden in an old game. There's a real sense of danger and lurking violence in those pages that I really loved, and it's one of the few moments in the book where what's actually happening breaks through the fog of unease and makes itself clear on the page.
I definitely enjoyed this, and I think it's still a very relevant book, but I don't know if it's one that I'll revisit in a hurry.
Godblind by Anna Stephens
2.0
*Godblind* came up in a few lists of recommendations for people who had enjoyed Joe Abercrombie's work or for fans of grimdark fantasy in general, so I decided to give it a go without knowing much more about it. Unfortunately now that I've finished it I wish I hadn't bothered. The only reason that I didn't DNF it is because I've abandoned the last two novels I picked up and I didn't want to make it three in a row, but now I'm frustrated that my year might be about to end on such a sour note.
In my mind grimdark fantasy is very much a response to "traditional" epic fantasy in the mould of *Lord Of The Rings* and *The Wheel of Time* - those tales of good versus evil, with very defined morality where the massing forces of evil rise up and attempt to overthrow the world. I go into books in this genre expecting shades of grey, expecting antiheroes and characters who do bad things for what they believe to be the right reasons, where the "bad guys" believe themselves to be just and the "good guys" make us question what it actually means to be good.
That's not what *Godblind* is, and it's very much operating in the same sort of territory as *Wheel of Time*. The villains here are worshippers of objectively evil gods who have been sealed away from the world. Their plan is to convert enough people to their cause - by deceit if need be - and to bathe the world in enough blood that they can tear down the veil keeping the gods out of the real world and let them walk the land again, creating chaos and destruction and a lot of death. The only reason for this that I can see is that these people are also evil through and through, and in many cases they resemble cartoon villains more than they resemble characters with any depth beyond being capital-b Bad.
The poor characterisation on display here doesn't stop with the villains, either. Our "good guys" are just as one dimensional - in fact they're perhaps even flimsier than the villains, who at least have motivations we can understand. The main characters just seem to stumble from one situations to another with no rhyme or reason. I couldn't tell you who they are, what they want (beyond "stop the bad guys"), what they care about. They're collections of physical traits - mismatched eyes, feisty redhead, former slave, prophet who has seizures - with no real character attached.
A bit reason for the lack of good characterisation is in the pacing. The chapters are incredibly short, often only 3 or 4 pages long, and they leap from plot point to plot point at full steam ahead without ever slowing down to let us get to know the characters or to show us any connective tissue. The result is that very important events happen off page. Crys' relationship with Prince Rivil is formed in a card game that we don't see; his escape after the reveal of Rivil's treachery is narrated after it's happened, at the same time as the nature of the treachery is revealed; a tense journey through enemy territory to try and get a warning to the forces of good takes five days, none of which we see. Crys goes from being a homophobic bigot to happily and hornily gay in the click of a finger.
It's a shame because I think there's some interesting stuff going on here, but we're never given a chance to see it. A sequence towards the end where characters are diverted into some underground tunnels that the villains attempt to flood could be tense and horrifying, but it's so disjointed and fast that it's a mess. There's a whole web of plotting and scheming going on in the background of the book that the plot hinges on that could be fascinating, but our only exposure to it is in characters monologuing their plans (in one case while literally twirling their moustache) before we jump to a point where they've achieved exactly what they wanted without any real effort. Characters say exactly what they're thinking at all times, with absolutely no subtext or subtlety.
This was a big disappointment, and I won't be reading the rest of the series.
In my mind grimdark fantasy is very much a response to "traditional" epic fantasy in the mould of *Lord Of The Rings* and *The Wheel of Time* - those tales of good versus evil, with very defined morality where the massing forces of evil rise up and attempt to overthrow the world. I go into books in this genre expecting shades of grey, expecting antiheroes and characters who do bad things for what they believe to be the right reasons, where the "bad guys" believe themselves to be just and the "good guys" make us question what it actually means to be good.
That's not what *Godblind* is, and it's very much operating in the same sort of territory as *Wheel of Time*. The villains here are worshippers of objectively evil gods who have been sealed away from the world. Their plan is to convert enough people to their cause - by deceit if need be - and to bathe the world in enough blood that they can tear down the veil keeping the gods out of the real world and let them walk the land again, creating chaos and destruction and a lot of death. The only reason for this that I can see is that these people are also evil through and through, and in many cases they resemble cartoon villains more than they resemble characters with any depth beyond being capital-b Bad.
The poor characterisation on display here doesn't stop with the villains, either. Our "good guys" are just as one dimensional - in fact they're perhaps even flimsier than the villains, who at least have motivations we can understand. The main characters just seem to stumble from one situations to another with no rhyme or reason. I couldn't tell you who they are, what they want (beyond "stop the bad guys"), what they care about. They're collections of physical traits - mismatched eyes, feisty redhead, former slave, prophet who has seizures - with no real character attached.
A bit reason for the lack of good characterisation is in the pacing. The chapters are incredibly short, often only 3 or 4 pages long, and they leap from plot point to plot point at full steam ahead without ever slowing down to let us get to know the characters or to show us any connective tissue. The result is that very important events happen off page. Crys' relationship with Prince Rivil is formed in a card game that we don't see; his escape after the reveal of Rivil's treachery is narrated after it's happened, at the same time as the nature of the treachery is revealed; a tense journey through enemy territory to try and get a warning to the forces of good takes five days, none of which we see. Crys goes from being a homophobic bigot to happily and hornily gay in the click of a finger.
It's a shame because I think there's some interesting stuff going on here, but we're never given a chance to see it. A sequence towards the end where characters are diverted into some underground tunnels that the villains attempt to flood could be tense and horrifying, but it's so disjointed and fast that it's a mess. There's a whole web of plotting and scheming going on in the background of the book that the plot hinges on that could be fascinating, but our only exposure to it is in characters monologuing their plans (in one case while literally twirling their moustache) before we jump to a point where they've achieved exactly what they wanted without any real effort. Characters say exactly what they're thinking at all times, with absolutely no subtext or subtlety.
This was a big disappointment, and I won't be reading the rest of the series.
Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase
Did not finish book. Stopped at 22%.
Did not finish book. Stopped at 22%.
I really wanted to love this - an afrofuturist blend of The Handmaid's Tale and Get Out (as it was sold to me) sounds right up my street. Unfortunately wanting to love something doesn't make it happen, and I'm DNFing after 90 pages.
There's been a trend in recent years - particularly in SFF - for books to feel lightly edited if not unedited, and this is one of those books. It feels like an exploratory draft that's never been refined into a finished work. There are endless pages of exposition about the world and the body swapping that don't really manage to explain anything clearly, and meanwhile I have no sense of the characters and no indication of why I should care about any of this.
Despite all the exposition I don't feel like I understand the body swapping; the logistics of it, the politics of it, the reasons for it, the way it shakes society and the people within it. I don't understand how long the main character has been with her husband, whether she was with him before the body she's currently in and if not, how that works logistically if they knew each other beforehand. I don't understand her social position; her body is low status but she out earns her husband but her company is failing and also he controls her every move and is essentially abusive? It doesn't make sense.
Strong concept but unfortunately it failed to land for me.
There's been a trend in recent years - particularly in SFF - for books to feel lightly edited if not unedited, and this is one of those books. It feels like an exploratory draft that's never been refined into a finished work. There are endless pages of exposition about the world and the body swapping that don't really manage to explain anything clearly, and meanwhile I have no sense of the characters and no indication of why I should care about any of this.
Despite all the exposition I don't feel like I understand the body swapping; the logistics of it, the politics of it, the reasons for it, the way it shakes society and the people within it. I don't understand how long the main character has been with her husband, whether she was with him before the body she's currently in and if not, how that works logistically if they knew each other beforehand. I don't understand her social position; her body is low status but she out earns her husband but her company is failing and also he controls her every move and is essentially abusive? It doesn't make sense.
Strong concept but unfortunately it failed to land for me.