thesinginglights's reviews
665 reviews

A major step up from the first book, adding layers and scope to this world with a delicious mystery. A couple of let-downs: the unusual way some scenes were edited made for lack of clarity (early on, Sylah moves locations without a clear signal and was suddenly inside when she was outside) and my least favourite tropes of a character not revealing important information until it's plot relevant. But! Loved the new perspectives, the tighter focus, and awesome world. Stoked for the final book!

It's been a while—perhaps N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season or Joe Abercrombie's Age of Madness—that I have walked away from a fantasy novel that had such a searing clarity, control of its narrative, and thorough exploration of its themes. The first volume of this trilogy was a promising tale and this second one built on rock-solid foundations. Legal thriller, action-packed, and eldritch horror aplenty. And so dense a novel. Ever chapter briskly expands the story and the single POV allows for a feeling of tightness in a tale with a large scope.

The prose, characters, and worldbuilding are absolutely top notch. Perhaps the only major flaw was the romance which did not have the same brilliance. Fortunately it's not too much in the way of the larger stories, of an empire teetering on the brink of great change...

I mean it was alright. Very little happens except towards the end. I would say disappointing but it has the advantage of not being as bad as Path of Daggers

 Naomi Klein's excellent Doppelganger which is a difficult book to categorise: part memoir, part social commentary, it explores the idea of doubles. Klein is often mistaken for another famous and outspoken Naomi: Naomi Wolf. What starts as a frustrating, if amusing, conflation turns into a years-long obsession for Klein that forms part of the thesis of the book. Wolf, once a lauded liberal feminist devolves into anti-vaxx, conspiratorial thinking. Once a darling of the Democrats, she now rubs shoulders with the most extreme of the American right such as Steve Bannon.

But this isn't about Wolf (or Other Naomi as Klein posts) or even wholly about Klein. It's a book about us. About our culture, our society and systems. There is a twoness built in, a Shadow Land that has been revealed to us through the pandemic. It is a mirror of truth as well as a distortion, but it is a reflection first: this our doppelgänger culture.

While I loved the exploration of contemporary culture, the fearmongering, the conspiracy, and more, this book hangs a lot looser than previous endeavours. I believe we are seeing an evolution in Klein's writing. The tightly-wound journalistic rigour of previous books like The Shock Doctrine have fallen away into a more conversational tone. This isn't a criticism per se as readability should be lauded. But what I mean I think is it represents an evolution of Klein's style that focuses more on accessibility and putting things in human terms as opposed to the logically consistent, dense, and scholarly; she must rather relates the themes of the books to pop culture. I lost count at how many film and book references Klein makes. And it's great! What I'm getting at is a marrying of her two sides: the journalistic rigour with the cultural consumer and distiller. I would have loved a deeper exploration of our doppelgänger culture. We have had those ideas touched on by writers like Fanon and Du Bois but not so much in modernity. Perhaps that's the rub: it's much harder to write through that when it's still happening. We won't know all the ways in which conspiracy will affect our culture for many years yet. Still, dialling into the core concepts a but more would have helped this b0ok. No Is Not Enough, Klein's previous work, eschewed her older style for this newer one. My hope is a reconcilliation of these two styles on a new topic in, er, probably another 7 years.

What a damn interesting ride. I read the first part physically from the library and the rest on audio after failing to structure my time accordingly. I'll be re-reading this in the future. Who knows if I'll feel the same next time. 

 "There is no point beginning something without ambition." So begins the preface Gardens of the Moon. I will grant him the ambition and even admire the quixotic notions he espouses in the preface. Every writer needs an element of it, for them to believe that their story is worth being read.

And hoo boy is this book ambitious. So many places and characters and gods and things unexplained, or a lot of things explained that don't pertain to the usual elements: magic is understood situationally (Warrens are both a source of magic and realm which has denizens, but there are costs to using them among other things); characters don't always say what they mean; allegiances are hard to parse; characters have mysterious unexplained backstories, the full weight of which is hard to parse, especially so early into the series. This frustrates and intrigues me. It's hard to describe the book and what it's about because it's a constantly layered labyrinth of plot. This world is huge and the players are not all what they seem, even the gods are not what they seem.

I adored the worldbuilding and scope, felt the prose was often awkward, and the dialogue was mostly bad--elliptical, unnatural, and just plain odd. Characters often repeating their interlocutors' names again and again. Reading it aloud felt very unusual. The prose could get wordy and overcomplicate action and sometimes stymie clarity. I am all for bucking trends and allowing us to figure out what happens in the narrative. I respect it, even if I believe Erikson's skill does not match his ambition just yet, but when it comes to what characters are doing moment to moment, I need to clearly understand this. There were points where I could see a lot of the problems that early career writers make: to explain in precise detail actions, like which hand stabs which other hand, where the action called for something punchier (and less precise).

It's not all bad. There is a high level of coolness factor (Anonmander Rake and the Moon's Spawn, Dragnipur, Warren travel and Ascendants) but soured by awkwardness. The pacing for me was off as well. It was a slow burn throughout, which normally be fine if I felt like the characters and plot were making meaningful strides forwards. In the last third there is a lot of discussion about where they were going but no actual movement.

And good heavens, there were too many perspective characters. There are some scenes like the assassins on the rooftop where this constant hopping helped create tension and understand motivation and other time it slowed down everything entirely. In a lot of ways, it is emblematic of the problems of fantasy of this era: having the explosive finish with lots of build-up. But I wanted more juice throughout.

It was a damn good ride though.