sophia_sol | Entries tagged with pub date: 2020

Today I listened to the audiobook of The Empress of Salt and Fortune, rereading the book for the first time since I read it four years ago. It continues to be a very good book, and it's one that's very well suited to listening to as an audiobook, given the nature of the story it is telling.

But. This is not a review that's intended to convince other people to read the book. (Though you should! it's great!) Rather, I have a burning need to talk about spoilers, with people who have already read the book too and have opinions on some stuff.

Click here for the spoilers

Ok so. There's clearly SOMETHING going on with the identity of Rabbit vs In-yo, right. But I'm not clear on what???? Are Rabbit and In-yo one and the same person? Did Rabbit and In-yo swap places and swap identities, and if so, at what point in their lives? If there are hints that I'm missing here I would LOVE to hear more!

Ok one other note on the book, while I'm here and talking about it, actually.

right I suppose this is spoilers also

I really appreciate that it's a story about monarchy/royalty/empire that makes the ruler compelling in a way that gets you on her side while also being unflinchingly real about the death and destruction that inevitably comes from such a ruler and such a person. Impressive! I love it.

But really I want answers to the questions in my first spoiler cut!!

Huh. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting from this novella, except that I expected it to be something I wasn't expecting bc it's Tamsyn Muir of Locked Tomb fame, but it still isn't quite what I was expecting!

Anyway it's a story about the fairy tale trope of a princess who's locked in a tower by a witch, and her efforts to be freed.

It's also about the. relationship???? between Floralinda (the princess) and Cobweb (a fairy, who hates her and also helps her). and about growth and change and potential and becoming a different kind of person.

It's odd and surprisingly emotionally affecting and I was very into it.

I thought I had taken more detailed notes on these books to be able to write up a proper book review! These are three volumes in an ongoing manga series which I think is based on a webnovel? but I might be wrong about that. Many things are confusing to me.

Anyway! I saw this recced as a fun transmigration story that had similar vibes to moshang from svsss, and I was like, sold.

The premise:

Our main character, Kondou, gets accidentally sucked from our world into another realm along with a teen girl who is the special chosen one with amazing powers who's the only one who can save the world. Kondou, who isn't supposed to be there, is meanwhile like: "Welp. Better find some way to keep myself busy if I'm here." And volunteers to join the palace accountancy department.

The love interest, Aresh, is a handsome but taciturn captain who takes it on himself to save Kondou from his own self-destructive tendencies.

The first volume felt to me like it was mostly set-up, and it had promise but I didn't really feel like I had a good handle on the characters or their relationships.

The second volume started getting into the good stuff! However this is where my notes oh so helpfully stop, and I read the these multiple months ago so I remember approximately nothing of substance, lol. The relationship vibes are cute, I enjoy that Kondou and the chosen one do still feel a sort of friendship connection with each other since they transmigrated together even though they're very different and end up in very different spheres in this world, iirc the plot/worldbuilding development started to go somewhere in book 3, etc.

I like it and I'll be interested to keep reading! assuming I remember to keep on top of it as it comes out, lol. Which like. it's me. no guarantees.

A non-fiction book about racism and particularly anti-Black racism in Canada, by activist writer Desmond Cole.

I am a Canadian myself, but honestly, so much of the anti-racism rhetoric I hear is still so thoroughly based in a US context, given the English speaking media environment and online world are so US-dominated in a lot of ways. So it was helpful to read a book that was clearly and specifically talking about the Canadian context, with discussion about the Canadian activism being done and the Canadian police force's use of violence with impunity and the like. Canada likes to think of ourselves as being better than the US, but that's an extremely low bar and lets Canada think there's no work that needs to be done here when there's SO much that needs addressing.

A good and worthwhile read.

Aster Glenn Gray did it again! Wrote a really good queer historical romance that is thoroughly grounded in its historical setting with characters I love!

Honeytrap is that classic set up of a Soviet agent and an American agent during the cold war have to work together because of reasons and then fall in love, and it's one which I am primed to love because of my time spent in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. tv show fandom back in my younger days. The Soviet agent in Honeytrap even has a patronymic of Ilyich, which I immediately took to be a homage to MUNCLE's Ilya Kuryakin, and then felt extremely vindicated when MUNCLE was the first thing mentioned in the author's note at the back of the book.

However! This book is doing much more nuanced things than MUNCLE did, or indeed that MUNCLE fanfic did as far as I can recall.

It starts out in 1959 with Gennady and Daniel going on a road trip through America together in search of leads on the case they've been assigned to work together, and it all feels very familiar and classic, but then....it keeps going. The book goes up to the 1990's! And over that time it really explores the political and social realities of the times and places in question.

Click to expand for spoilers for the rest of the book

It's not actually a story about the Soviet agent making a home in the US like this kind of story often is, at least in English-language stories; both characters have understandable attachments to their homelands, understandable concerns and frustrations with the evils large and small that their countries perpetrate, ways in which they have been hurt by their country, etc. The reason why the road trip becomes such an idyllic part of their past isn't because it's about Experiencing The USA, but because they get to learn to know each other; and though the road trip must eventually end, their relationship isn't over.

The book is realistic about what it means to be queer in the changing eras as well. Both Gennady and Daniel are bisexual but have very different relationships with their bisexuality, and the other queer men who have come in and out of their lives have different journeys with their identities too.

I loved the moment where Daniel meets with a boy he'd kissed when he was young, who has grown up into a man who sponsors a group for gay students on campus in the 70's - and Daniel is horrified, because he's so worried about what he sees as the lifelong danger this man is encouraging these kids to subject themselves to, admitting to their gayness permanently on paper in the yearbook. But that man and his students are making their choices for very good reasons as well!

And over time both Gennady and Daniel have other relationships too, relationships that are deep and meaningful to them, and which fail for reasons entirely unconnected with each other. I love that we get enough of a sense of Alla that I truly care about her happiness too, even though we only get to know about her after her and Gennady's relationship is on the rocks; and I love seeing Elizabeth and Daniel's happy polyamorous lifestyle which eventually has to end because it turns out one of Daniel's relationship needs is to be someone's primary partner, though that's not exactly how he phrases it, and in the end Elizabeth can't quite give that to him.

The Daniel/Gennady relationship isn't the only possible love for either of them, isn't the only possible happy ending, and yet they do love each other and do end up getting a chance at a happy ending, and I just adore that.

Goddd so much of the book is about like, moment after moment of glorious stolen happiness between them with the sure knowledge that it will have to end. I finished the book with this sense of like. idk. Wistful yearning, and total satisfaction at the same time. It wasn't what i expected, at all! And it's so good.

We Ride Upon Sticks is a historical fantasy/magic realism novel set in the long-ago era of 1989, and it fully embraces what it means to be set in the 80's in the eastern United States. (is it weird to be reading historical fiction set in the decade of my birth? it sure is! but also I adore how firmly it embodies the 80's.)

The Danvers High School field hockey team has a long history of losing their games by embarrassingly large amounts, but this year is different. This year the 11 players have a PLAN, have made a magically binding pact, and are ready to do what it takes to win for a change.

The book is told from the pov of the team. Yes, the whole team, it's written in first-person plural. You would think this would be weird? But it super isn't, it feels remarkably natural to read!

None of the team members are the main character; the whole team is, equally. Over the course of the narrative, you spend time examining the realities of what it means to be each of them, what's going on in their families and relationships, what their inner lives are like, and so forth. You would think that this is too many characters to focus on, but again, it super isn't! I really felt like I knew all eleven of them.

One of the things I loved about this book is its prose; it's distinctive and confident and fun. And I love the way reveals are constructed, circling around the information so that you see what the result is and then come back around to see what actually happened – you get these kind of reveals both within the space of a paragraph, or a chapter, or a whole arc, and I love the way it carries you forward. And the author has a real knack for similes too, and the story is full of the kind of extremely specific and weird details that make something come alive. I saw in the author's bio that she's also a published poet and that doesn't surprise me!

( Read more... )

But overall I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and it was definitely doing a bunch of really cool things!

A romance novel parody of Harry Potter written in response to jkr’s transphobia. A good-hearted t4t story of trans joy that combines things making no sense with things that are actually wonderful and fascinating worldbuilding (of a world which is distinctly NOT the world of the original hp novels), with delightful fourth-wall-breaking aspects. There are a lot of typos, and the style is very consciously romance-novel-esque with lots of epithets and things, so it took me a bit to get into it, but once I was in I was honestly hooked.

Also the author, Chuck Tingle, is out here on the internet openly being his wonderfully autistic self without shame, and encouraging everyone to live a life that centres love and the knowledge of everyone's intrinsic worth, and I really admire that!

So thanks Chuck. LOVE IS REAL.

I just reread Piranesi, and you know how when a book is so close to perfect and yet falls short in a few specific ways, it can feel more disappointing than a book that didn't get so close? Yeah, that.

There's so much about this book that's truly glorious, that I absolutely adore. Things that it's doing that are really special and unusual and incredible. But. For a book published in 2020 to unquestioningly reproduce a) the evil gay trope and b) the heroic police officer trope, with no indication there was ANY thought put into complicating either those ideas.....it's disappointing. Look, I'd absolutely be okay keeping Arne-Sayles gay; it's relevant to him as a representative of outsider thinking, especially during the era he was academically active. But there needs to be other non-evil, non-predatory queer characters as well to balance him out! In fact, let's just make 16 a non-cop lesbian, and maybe make Matthew Rose Sorensen gay as well, and the book would be fixed.

It's especially disappointing from an author like Clarke, who in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell created a book where the persistent theme throughout is that people with social and political power abuse it, and that the outsiders and people from oppressed people groups are worth listening to. But of course, as was pointed out to me, just because people are interested in those themes doesn't mean they're capable of recognizing all of who has power and who's oppressed.

On my first read of Piranesi I was so transported by the good things the book is doing that I didn't think much about these issues except to note that they were present. But now on reread, they sting a little more. SIGH. I want this book to be perfect, dangit!!!!

EDIT: can't believe I forgot to mention: Piranesi must have had a background as a birder! he confidently identifies herring gulls instead of being like "um, they're seagulls of some kind"

A middle grade book about a mixed race girl whose family moves back in with her Korean grandma whose health isn't doing well. I really loved it, and definitely cried at the end.

I don't love everything about it though. It's the kind of fantasy novel where it's never quite clear whether the magical elements are real, or if they're just a metaphor for the struggles the characters are experiencing. Look, the magic can be real AND an important thematic parallel, and that's what I want! Let the magic be magic! And it's so close to that, but not quite there. It frustrates me! I don't quite know how to articulate the reasons why I dislike this approach so much but it feels wrong to me.

But regardless of how real the magic is or isn't, this book is doing great things about complicated family dynamics, the ways in which it can be hard to talk to the people who you love, the ways in which untold family secrets can weigh a family down, and also about friendship and belonging and being othered for your race and for your weirdness, and what it's like to accept that you can change and still be yourself and that's ok. It's got a lot going on but it all ties together really well and I loved it. Though I also found it hard to read because it was STRESSFUL. I'm too much of a weenie for middle grade books sometimes!!

When I was a kid I read a lot of horse books, as one does, so when I heard about this book -- a fantasy novel kind of built around the structure of one of the classic varieties of horse books -- I was THERE. (I was also there for The Scorpio Races, back when that came out, which is the same kind of idea!)

The creatures being raced in this book, kehoks, are dangerous monsters whom the rider must control through sheer power of will over that of the kehok. Raia is a young woman who's run away from her abusive parents and needs resources to get them off her back; Tamra is a retired rider who now trains riders, and needs money to be able to keep her daughter with her. Together, they need to work to catapult Raia to winning kehok races, despite the enormous danger of the savage kehok Raia must ride!

This is all very classic horse book and I love it. However, it's not the only thing this book is doing. There's a second plot intertwined with this one, about the politics behind the recently dead emperor and what needs to be done to get the emperor-to-be on the throne, and the long and the short of it is that Raia racing with her kehok is in fact vital to the survival of the very empire. And like, okay, fair, those kinds of high stakes are classic for fantasy novels. But I think I just wanted this book to be horse-girl-book-but-fantasy, rather than horse-girl-book-subsumed-into-fantasy-tropes. I was there FOR the horse girl tropes, you know?

At any rate, I did appreciate that one of the main characters in this book is a middle-aged single mother, not a character type that often gets to be heroic in fantasy. And I loved Lady Evera, which is not something I would have thought from the beginning of the book, but she develops depths! And Raia did a great job in her role as ingenue, and I did find the whole plot to do with augurs mildly interesting. So overall a very good book, it's just too bad that it's not QUITE the kind of book I was most wanting it to be.

A graphic novel memoir by a Korean-American woman about her experiences moving to the USA with her mom as a teenager. Really well done and moving - did an amazing job of circling back around and through the past to recontextualize the things she experiences, but without ever feeling jumbled or out of order. The clear view of her mother's strengths and weaknesses as a parent were wonderful - it's obvious how much Ha loves and respects her mother, despite the way that some of her mother's choices make life harder for her. And the complicated feelings about identity and outsiderhood that she experiences, both in Korea and in the USA, are also conveyed well.

The one weakness of the book, in my opinion, is the somewhat jarring time jump near the end. After she makes friends with other Korean-American girls in her first year of high school, the story jumps ahead to her as a young adult visiting Korea for the first time since she left as a middle-schooler. The part of the story where she was finally able to settle and find a place for herself in a stable way is skipped over, and that part is, I think, relevant to the way she experiences Korea as an adult.

Still truly excellent though, and worth the read!

With the evil ex out of the picture, the rest of the characters in these graphic novels have distinct enough character designs that I no longer had trouble following things, and I had an enjoyable time reading volumes 2 & 3. Volume 4 turns out to be a Very Special Episode about eating disorders, and also the pacing is all over the place, so I didn't like it quite as well -- but I'm enjoying watching all these teens doing their best and caring about people!

I discovered the graphic novel tag on Libby a few days ago and have just been motoring through a whole pile of random ebook graphic novels that looked interesting to me, mostly not even pausing long enough between reading them to write down any thoughts. So here's a collection of very haphazard short reviews of a bunch of graphic novels! Yes most of these ARE middle grade, I love middle grade fiction and I super gravitated towards those when wandering through the options.

Witches of Brooklyn, and Witches of Brooklyn: What the Hex?!, by Sophie Escabasse

These are cute middle grade graphic novels about an orphan girl who lives with her aunts, discovers she's a witch, and learns about friendship and magic and being who you are. Quick and charming reads!

The Fire Never Goes Out, by Noelle Stevenson

A collection of Stevenson's biographical comics they wrote each year since 2011, along with other art and notes. It's a glimpse into a young person growing up and discovering who they are and how to live with mental illness and trying to figure out their identity, but all written in a very distancing and non-specific way (understandable, as much of this was written while the author was actively struggling with these things), so although it was interesting, it didn't fully capture me.

Be Prepared, by Vera Brosgol

A story about a girl with Russian immigrant parents who always feels like an outsider among her peers, and then learns about RUSSIAN SUMMER CAMP! Unfortunately, camp is not everything she dreamed. I loved this book, the art and the writing work so well together to capture the main character's experiences, and I loved that it was a book about camp where the conclusion actually was "hey it turns out camp's not for everyone and that's okay."

They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, and Harmony Becker

A memoir of Takei's experiences as a child in Japanese internment camps in WWII. Really powerfully done. I loved the way the book manages to show both how genuinely hard it was, and also how much child-him was oblivious to the real seriousness of what was happening to him and his family.

Snapdragon, by Kat Leyh

Delightfully queer story about a girl who feels like an outsider, an old butch lesbian witch who lives in the woods and articulates roadkill skeletons, and a lot of ghosts. I loved it!

Heartstopper (volume 1), by Alice Oseman

This is really just the first part of a multi-part story, but volumes 2 and 3 are checked out and I have to wait for my holds to come in to be able to actually finish! Alas. Anyway this is a gay high school love story between two boys, and I enjoyed it, but the art made it really hard for me to tell the new love interest Nick apart from the mean ex Ben, which was an ongoing problem.

The Magic Fish, by Trung Le Nguyen

Wow, this was incredible! The weaving together of the stories of a young Vietnamese teen trying to come to terms with his gay identity and how to tell his parents, and his mother's experience of being a Vietnamese immigrant who left her family behind and being caught between the world of her mother and the world of her son, and the fairy tales they read to each other that allow them to connect and communicate with each other. The three elements dip in and out of each other constantly, but each is monochromatic in a different colour, allowing you to easily follow how everything's connected without feeling lost. It also does a good job of making the art speak without words, which is something I don't always do a good job of following, but it really works for me here. The whole book is about different ways of communicating, and it uses its own form to enhance that theme. SUPER good.

Operatic, by Kyo Maclear

I see what it was going for, and I liked the bones of it, but it didn't quite all gel together for me, unfortunately.

How Mirka Got Her Sword, by Barry Deutsch

A perfectly fine story about a Jewish girl who wants to fight monsters. Nothing wrong with it, but it didn't excite me either.

Jane, the Fox and Me, by Fanny Britt & Isabelle Arsenault

The main theme of the book appears to be fatphobia -- but the art depicts the main character as being just as skinny as anyone else in the book, and nobody is in fact noticeably fat? So the theme of the art and the theme of the story end up being in tension with each other in a way that really detracted from what it was trying to say. Also the fatphobia the main character experiences doesn't actually ever really....get dealt with or addressed much. She finds a friend and then she feels better about everything, including her weight. (And, in a much pettier complaint, the fox of the title hardly shows up at all!!)

I am not quite the right audience for this book, because I'm a big fan of Hadestown, but I'm a fan of the 2010 concept album, not the recent Broadway musical!

This book contains the full lyrics to the musical, and notes from Mitchell about the process that took each song from its beginning to its final form. She talks multiple times about the ongoing need to change poetry into something more clear and concrete for the show, which makes a lot of sense for a musical, but which makes me sad as someone who loves an earlier and more poetic version of the songs.

A full length musical does have specific needs, and all of her discussion of how to shape the music and the story into what it needed to be to succeed was certainly interesting. But it's basically the story of how she took something that was very good at being one specific art form, and turned it into something that's very good at being a different art form. And I just don't have the emotional attachment to the Broadway version to be invested in the direction the edits took her.

(This might change if I ever see the musical live! But I haven't had the opportunity, and I don't know if I ever will)

I like to browse the recent books section of the libby app, to see what recent ebooks my library has acquired, and sometimes it really pays off! I hadn't even heard of this comic series before, but I saw it and was immediately intrigued, and when my holds came in on the four volumes collecting the whole series, I read them INSTANTLY and was totally drawn in.

The premise: a sports anime, but make it explicitly queer. High-school aged boys on a boarding school fencing team! Nicholas is the lead character, a scholarship student whose good instincts in fencing are held back by inferior technique. He has placed himself as a rival to Seiji, a dedicated and consistent fencer with years of training who doesn't know how to be anything but serious, and Nicholas is determined to beat him -- and also be friends with him.

I love both of them, but I also love all the other characters. They're all individuals, with their strengths and weaknesses (both on the fencing piste and off), and their own relationships with the other characters. And I was going to mention here which of the other characters I was most interested in but uh it may be basically all of them? I was riveted through the whole of the story.

The four extant volumes take us through team tryouts and to the end of the team's first practice match, and now that I've finished them I'm desperate to read more. Unfortunately that's all there is!

It looks like there are also some novels by Sarah Rees Brennan continuing the story, but I've found Rees Brennan's writing pretty hit-or-miss for me, so I'm feeling a bit skeptical about giving these a try. I want to read more of this story as written by CS Pacat! SIGH. Has anyone else read the Rees Brennan Fence novels, and can tell me more about how they are?

This book is more deliberately YA flavoured than Novik's previous novels, featuring that now-classic trope of magic boarding school. The main character is a teen girl named El who is in her second-to-last year at the Scholomance, a school with no teachers and lots of deadly magic monsters that want to kill/eat the teenagers who inhabit it. (Students attend this school anyway because the rate of survival for magic teens outside the Scholomance is even worse!) El is an outsider who doesn't have friends and allies to help her survive school the way many of the kids do. But the boy who's the best at killing monsters seems weirdly invested in helping her, much to her suspicion!

Tbh my main opinion of the book is that it leaves me cold. I just never really cared! It's slick and well paced and well written, and very more-ish, but it doesn't feel to me like there's much actual heart in it. Like, I was warned it is a bit of a horror novel, but it didn't ever feel even a little bit horror to me because despite the high stakes for all the characters at all times, the stakes never felt worrying. Lots of people will die gruesomely and it's fine, basically? I think it might be a better book if it leaned more into the horror actually!

But as it was I just slid along easily through the prose to the end of the book and only had a bit of a small feeling about what was happening like, once. A little bit.

This is not Novik's usual flaw in writing, in my experience, and it's weird! Usually I CARE even if I'm mad about her choices. So I'm not sure what happened here. Especially since her most recent book before this one (Spinning Silver) was so absolutely brilliant and I adored it, and this feels like such a large step down. A really disappointing reading experience for me.

Novik does also continue her tradition of writing books that clearly and obviously need lesbians and have no lesbians, much to my dismay (and, okay, some amusement). El's male love interest Orion OBVIOUSLY needed to be a butch lesbian instead and it's a tragedy he isn't. (Not as much of a tragedy as the lack of lesbians in Spinning Silver and Uprooted though. Those ones demanded lesbians, whereas this one merely would be better with lesbians.)

On a final note: the first thing I remember hearing about this book when it came out was that it's racist, so I do feel the need to acknowledge this aspect. There was one passage about a black character's hair that was notably bad, and Novik has removed that passage from future editions and issued an apology; the ebook I read did not contain the passage in question. The other issues that I've seen raised, I've seen people of colour having widely disparate opinions as to whether they're actual issues in context or not, so I as a white person do not feel qualified to have an opinion about who's right. So that's just something to keep in mind for people interested in reading the book. But as you can probably tell from the review above, I'm not exactly recommending the book regardless!

This has been sitting on my ereader for ages and tbh I don't even know when/how I acquired it or how I heard of it. I thought it was a novel but it turns out to be novelette-length. Anyway it's a charming and light little historical romance about a woman named Socorro who decides to up her desirability as a houseguest by cultivating a skill in leading seances, which is made more complicated for her when an actual ghost unexpectedly shows up at her first attempt. I immediately wanted the story to be a romance between Socorro and the lady pirate ghost, but unfortunately that relationship is just a friendship, and the actual romance is het between two living people. Anyway, nothing amazingly groundbreaking or anything, but a fun story to read!

This book was published through a kickstarter, which I very happily backed, based on the premise of: a book of sff short stories featuring wlw where one woman is skilled in fighting and the other woman is skilled in something not-fighting. Delightful!

I finally got around to reading the result, and although none of the stories really blew me away, as a whole reading the anthology was just very lovely. It's nice to spend that much time reading sff that's about wlw who get happy endings! To just spend some time in a headspace where that's normal!

My favourite story in the collection was "The Sweet Tooth of Angwar Bec" by Ellen Kushner, a short story set in her Swordspoint universe which features Katherine from about five years after Privilege of the Sword. It was very charming! But a number of other stories in the collection were also fun and charming (especially "Margo Lai’s Guide To Dueling Unprepared," "Elinor Jones vs. the Ruritanian Multiverse," "The Commander and the Mirage Master’s Mate," "The Parnassian Courante," and "The Scholar of the Bamboo Flute"), and even the stories I felt meh about were still worth reading on some level. I didn't actively dislike any of the stories.

Overall: I'm unlikely to ever bother rereading, but glad I decided to back this kickstarter and get my hands on this collection!

The thing about this series that has been nagging at me from the first book, but haven't been able to articulate to myself until now, is that it is simultaneously too hopeful and not hopeful enough. It makes it hard to believe in the hopeful future the books are clearly trying to work towards. ( cut for spoilers for the end of this book ) And one of the the other effects of this hope/hopelessness is it also kind of makes me feel like the efforts at diversity are asking for an ally cookie instead of feeling like what would actually happen in the version of history posited by the series. Given how sexist/racist/homophobic/etc the powers that be are, would they really be letting all these people into space? Even given the dire urgency caused by the asteroid? Bigoted people will shoot themselves in their own foot facilitate their continued bigotry tbh!!

I rated the previous books in this series highly and wrote positive reviews, but I had a sense of unease all along that I just ignored because I couldn't figure out what I was reacting to. I'm still not sure I'm able to fully explain my position here, but. The above at least points towards it.

Anyway, let me talk more about this book specifically! This book focuses on a different female astronaut than the Lady Astronaut herself. The hero of this book is Nicole Wargin, caught between her professional ambitions and her role as a political spouse to support her husband. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story. But the main driving plot of the book is: there's one or more saboteurs on the moon, endangering everyone in the nascent colony there! And this was EXTREMELY STRESSFUL for me to read about, which made the whole book super hard for me to actually read. I nearly gave up on it several times.

This was made harder by the fact that I was reading it while away in a provincial park on a canoe trip with no internet access, so I couldn't google for spoilers to lower my stress levels as I otherwise would have!

I also was not a fan of the fact that ( spoilers! )

Anyway I do overall still like this series, but not as much as I once did.

Oh boy. Hmm. Where to start? A brilliant book, but I have some complicated feelings about it, so let's see if I can work through those by writing about it!

In this book, Cara is a traverser, someone who travels between different versions of the world for her job. The reason she can do this: she's dead in most other versions of reality, and you can only go to worlds where you don't already exist. So most traversers come from difficult backgrounds, the kind of lives where you have a lot of near misses with death. Between her history and her job, she has something of a complicated relationship with her own identity, and with the concept of death! She also has a complicated relationship with her handler, Dell, involving flirtation from Cara and a certain degree of mutual attraction, and Dell keeping firm boundaries that make it clear she'll never be willing to respond or act on this attraction.

It's a book with a lot to say about what makes a person who they are, about class dynamics and the huge effects they have on everyone's lives, about what it means to love someone (both platonic and romantic), and about evil capitalist tech bro billionaires.

All of this is GREAT. But I found the book very slow to start; it took quite a while before I was into it. And even after I got interested, it took even longer for me to be really invested. I think this might be because the book is doing enough unexpected things that it took a long time for me to be able to settle into an understanding of what sort of book I was actually reading! Not to say that unexpectedness is bad; just that when I don't know what to expect, I can't emotionally prepare, and so I hold myself at a further emotional reserve from the story.

Anyway eventually I was invested indeed, and cared a lot about everything, and also found it all really interesting! But then I was once again thrown by the ending.

( a bunch of spoilery discussion of the ending )

At any rate, despite the issues I had, I do really think it's an amazing book and I'm so glad I read it. I will be thinking about it for a while, I think!

Content note: Cara is a survivor of an abusive intimate partner relationship, and although that relationship is in her past, it's relevant to her present and so you hear a lot about it.