Jan 01 2020

Taking Stock of 2019

My reading jumped another 10 books or so in 2019. I know when, but I don’t really know why. In January, I had been pretty seriously ill (for me, at least). In February, when I was recovered, I read 17 books. That’s not much for, say, Jo Walton or Nicholas Whyte, but it’s the most I’ve read in a single month in many years, probably the most any month this century. Between the sudden burst in February and being a Hugo reader again this year (in lieu of actually attending Worldcon, alas), I read 81 books this year. That’s the most this century, too. Eight of those I don’t plan to write about, two are on the to-do list, so I have written something in the neighborhood of 70,000 words about 71 books over the course of 2019.

I read six books in German (same as 2018), four graphic works (or maybe five, depending on what one thinks of How To), and seven in translation (one from French, one from Russian, one from Japanese, one from German, and three from Polish). I think Don’t Panic was a re-read; otherwise, it was all new books this year. That’s unusual for me, the result, I think, of the round of Hugo reading and a concerted but so far largely unsuccessful effort to clear space in the very limited shelving in our Berlin apartment. I read thirty-one works written by women, and Wikipedia says that the gender of the author of The Promised Neverland is not known to the general public.

In June I pulled a couple dozen or so books out of the basement, where they had been languishing in the very outer reaches of t-b-r land. More than half of those are in German, and the largest share from a series that the Süddeutsche Zeitung published in 2008, presenting 20 books related in some way to Munich, where I lived from 1998 to 2008. Five of the six books I read in German this past year are from this series. (The sixth is about contemporary Poland, which I read for my first visit to Warsaw in 20 years or more.) I have enjoyed seeing familiar locations portrayed in art, and stories in the same general setting across decades. Of the six authors, four were new to me. The only book from the Munich set that I had read before 2019 was by Thomas Mann; the book was a new collection, and thus new to me too, but the author was not. If I continue with the set, all of the other authors will be new to me. Before the Munich books, the Süddeutsche also published two runs of “50 great novels of the 20th century.” I have read about half of the first set, and have written about them here, here, here, and here. Further, the Süddeutsche published a set of books that characterize great cities of the world. The only one of those 20 that I am sure I have is Das Haus an der Moskwa by Yuri Trofonov, which is known in English as The House on the Embankment. Its setting was sometimes known as the House of Government. The various Süddeutsche sets will probably be the source of the lion’s share of my reading in German in the near future.

Best sequel to a perfect book, The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner. Best frolic with a time-tested premise, Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor. Best alternate New Orleans, The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark. Best mashup involving Roman legionaries in Texas, The Incorruptibles by John Hornor Jacobs. Book that best beat expectations, A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka by Lev Golinkin. Best recent book that I read in 2019, Becoming (more here) by Michelle Obama. Best not-so-recent book that I read in 2019, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

Full list, roughly in order read, is under the fold with links to my reviews and other writing about the authors here at Frumious.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/01/taking-stock-of-2019/

Dec 30 2019

Molotov’s Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky

Early on in Molotov’s Magic Lantern Rachel Polonsky quotes Osip Mandelstam as saying “Ask me for my biography, and I will tell you the books I have read.” (p. 6) From that perspective, Polonsky braids three biographies. One is Vyacheslav Molotov, erstwhile foreign minister of the Soviet Union whose former apartment a banker friend of Polonsky’s comes to inhabit in the 1990s; some of Molotov’s personal library, with annotations in his hand, remained on the shelves in the apartment. Another is the late Cambridge don of Russian literature, Edward Sands, who learned the language during the war when he was on convoy duty in and out of Murmansk and other chilly places. The third is Polonsky herself; although the book is not labeled an autobiography, she cannot write so much about people, places and books as much as she does without revealing a great deal of her own story.

Molotov's Magic Lantern

Molotov’s Magic Lantern carries the subtitle Travels in Russian History, and while that’s true, it is also a collection of travels in Russia itself. Polonsky has built the book in something like a spiral, beginning in Molotov’s apartment and turning outward, moving around Moscow before essaying its suburbs, then Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, moving into Russia’s great distances to encompass Archangel and the far north, Irkutsk, Ulan Ude and Baikal. In an epilogue, she returns to Moscow, sitting in the Lenin Library before walking the Alexander Gardens alongside the walls of the Kremlin. In the end, there are more books, a final reckoning with Molotov, his library, and the facts of change in Moscow.

Every page has something interesting, or something to inspire deeper reflection, or something surprising, an unexpected connection or vivid details that bring the past into the present. Many pages have all of these together.

After a walk around her Moscow neighborhood, during which Polonsky has sketched the imperial and communist-era connections among the buildings on her small street and noted the latest wave of renovation on Corner House, a late imperial construction that “had been allowed to decay during the Soviet period.”

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/30/molotovs-magic-lantern-by-rachel-polonsky/

Dec 29 2019

Killing Floor (Jack Reacher #1) by Lee Child

I read a lot of mystery novels, by happy coincidence of them being a) one of my favorite types of books and b) the primary subject of the website I work for. As such, you’d think I’d have read any of Lee Child’s bestselling Jack Reacher books already. A phenomenon pretty much since they were first published in the late 1990s, they number in their twenties now and have won a ton of awards in addition to raking in the big bucks for their author. Tom Cruise has already made two movies out of the series, for goodness’ sake! But I honestly only got around to looking for a copy when The Guardian did a feature story on why the grandes dames of literature (and quite a few sieurs) so lurve these books. After reading Killing Floor, I can understand why.

First, I’ll say that the conspiracy at the heart of the novel, and particularly the question that so stumped the experts, was one big duh for me. But everything else! From the identity of the first dead guy to the identity of the tenth man in the conspiracy, I was genuinely thrown for a loop, so well paced was the story! I enjoyed everything from Reacher himself to his supporting cast to the mystery and violent thrills throughout. I genuinely did not expect Reacher and Hubble to develop the relationship they do, and the part where Reacher finds out what happened to Blind Blake was especially moving. Even that bittersweet ending was so thoughtful and respectful, both of Reacher’s and of Roscoe’s needs.

I don’t know if I’ll make a point of picking up the other books, but I can absolutely see the (feminist) appeal of these modern-day Westerns, and could definitely do worse than reading the next when I have a bit of free time. If only I had that free time to spend! One quibble: I was surprised originally to read that Mr Child is British given that Reacher is an ex-military American drifter, but after reading Killing Floor could absolutely tell. Which isn’t at all a bad thing. Having that one random “about” thrown in there felt like a touchstone to a cultural tradition I’m more at home in than the bleak Americana on display here otherwise. Most readers probably wouldn’t even notice, but it was nice to feel that sense of remove, a quiet acknowledgment of places outside of the occasionally stifling self-absorption of this glorious country.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/29/killing-floor-jack-reacher-1-by-lee-child/

Dec 27 2019

Goodbye, Paris by Anstey Harris

There are two really standout things about Anstey Harris’ Goodbye, Paris. The first is the exquisite attention to detail in re: playing music and crafting musical instruments. Ms Harris’ husband is a violin-maker, and you can tell she’s shadowed him quite closely for the purposes of this novel. Her gifts as a writer are even more extraordinary given that she doesn’t play (much or well, according to the extra material in the back of my Kindle version) herself.

The second, and perhaps most important, is the emphasis on kindness in these pages. Our heroine, Grace Atherton, is a stringed instrument maker who long ago gave up her career as a cellist after a traumatic experience in college. After establishing herself as a luthier, she meets handsome, charismatic, married David at a party, and the two embark on a passionate eight-year long affair, travelling from her little village in Kent to their beloved Paris and back, keeping things secret in order to protect his children. But when David accidentally becomes a French hero, in the process outing his relationship with Grace, everything begins to fall apart. With the help of her rebellious teenage assistant, Nadia, and her dapper older customer, Mr Williams, Grace will have to pick up the pieces and try to rebuild her life, even as her past refuses to stay buried for much longer.

The story beats aren’t terribly different from other contemporary novels, but the narrative choices echo Grace’s taste in music: traditional tunes given interesting, often elegant new interpretations by their players. Ms Harris eschews the usual judgments and selfishness often endemic to fictional characters in the situations she presents and gives us readers instead a world where compassion and empathy reign. In fact, the most monstrous act of the entire book comes when a character pretends that his cruelty was meant to be kindness all along. Ms Harris doesn’t condemn a person’s weaknesses and doesn’t pretend that Grace or anyone else in this book is anything but a flawed, human character, but she also uplifts their strengths with acts of love and consideration for the people around them. It’s a heartwarming novel and a reminder that sometimes even the littlest kindnesses can mean the world to their recipients.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/27/goodbye-paris-by-anstey-harris/

Dec 24 2019

The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth #3) by N.K. Jemisin

I just don’t get it.

This isn’t a terrible book. But it’s not a very good one either, and I am utterly mystified by all the acclaim it’s been getting. Never mind my hostility to the introduction of magic into what was a solidly sci-fi series till partway through book two. Never mind my brain’s readiness to map the horrors of the book’s oppressive systems to real-world issues, only to fail because they’re really not the same. Even as a fantasy novel, even divorced from an American racism it references only haphazardly, it just doesn’t work.

A large part of this is due to the lack of narrative tension in the big showdown. Nassun’s motivations have always seemed a little half-baked: she wants the world to burn, except for Schaffa, which is fine given that she’s a love-starved pre-teen whose parents have been absolute shit, and who has finally found someone who will actually care for her the way a parent should. I was less convinced by Essun claiming that she and Jija loved Nassun unconditionally but failed to parent her, whereas Schaffa’s conditional love was more to Nassun’s liking. Fearing for someone’s survival isn’t the same as loving them, Essun, and Jija proved pretty consistently that his love was conditional on Nassun not being an orogene. Honestly, the only time Essun was anywhere near a good parent was at the end, when she realized that she couldn’t kill her daughter but that should be kind of a duh? Or not given her history. Essun is awful and abusive and I don’t care what happened to make her that way, she sucks and I hated that we had to root for her as the heroine of this novel. Don’t get me started on how weird it was that Nassun cadged onto Essun’s abuser, almost like a fucked up real-life grandparent dynamic. It’s not unrealistic but it’s weird that Essun doesn’t really think much about it beyond acknowledging the irony.

And then that ending. I mean, the stakes were so incredibly low! Anyone with half a brain could see what would happen to Essun given that Hoa had pretty much told her already what he was going to do to her. And Nassun would basically either catch the moon or turn everyone into Stone Eaters like, neither of these is a bad ending! I literally could not believe that I sat through that ridiculous, convoluted magic system with characters I actively disliked only for there to be zero tension at the end. I’m supposed to care or think it’s some kind of revelation that Essun finally turned into a decent mom? Fuck that bitch. I’d 100% read books about Ykka and Tonkee tho: those characters ruled.

Doug is also reading The Stone Sky rn, so you can look forward to his review soon. For me, the first book in the series was good, the second was meh and the third was just a continuation of mehness. Sorry, friends who liked it more, this just wasn’t for me.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/24/the-stone-sky-the-broken-earth-3-by-n-k-jemisin/

Dec 20 2019

Nobody Leaves by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Before he became a famous foreign correspondent, Ryszard Kapuściński wrote a series of astonishing dispatches for the weekly newspaper Polityka from Poland’s small towns and backwaters. Poland in 1959 still bore many visible scars of the war that had ravaged it a decade and a half previous. With Stalin’s death in 1953 the worst excesses of Soviet Communism had begun to recede, but the violent suppression of a workers’ uprising in Poznan in 1956 had shown the limits of politics within the so-called workers’ and peasants’ state.

Nobody Leaves

Kapuściński was by no means a dissident, yet neither were his stories panegyrics to the party line. On the one hand, Communist authorities expected journalists to have something of a watchdog function, exposing instances where policy was not being properly administered. Provided, of course, that the story did not rock too many boats. Ideally, such a report would reveal inadequacies at a local level that could then be set right by intervention from higher authorities. And indeed, in one or two, Kapuściński does offer to connect local people with folks from the center who could straighten out a thing or two. Kapuściński also practices the long-standing Polish art of seeing how much can get past the censor; more than a century of Russian occupation from partition to the Great War gave generations of Polish writers experience in testing limits, and Kapuściński is an heir to that tradition.

In “Far Away” there’s a village that automobiles have not yet reached, but DDT is there and people who know the land well argue with men sent by the party to improve the yield. Communism never sat well on Poland. The title character of “A Farmer at Grunwald Field” does not much care about the upcoming commemoration of 500 years since a Polish victory over German armies. Piatek used to be the top farmer in the area, but a wintertime accident broke bones in his hip and thigh, and they did not heal properly. Things are getting tougher. He’s pleased that many are coming to visit for the celebration, “but he’s worried that the thousands of feet will crush his field, which has been growing so promisingly.” (p. 24) “The Fifth Column on the March” counters the official narrative of the late 1950s that West Germany was a revanchist power, itching to re-take lands that had been transferred to Poland at the end of World War II. The story traces two older German women — born in 1876 and 1903 — who hear old songs on the radio and escape from an old folks’ home, thinking that the German army has returned. The women want to reclaim their farm a few towns away, where they had once led a sizable enterprise and employed 100 Poles. Of course nothing of the sort is happening, and local officials eventually return them to where they had been settled. It’s at once a send-up of how the party line portrayed Germany and a devastating portrait of aging.

“An Advertisement for Toothpaste” sets out the marital prospects in a tiny town with four times as many young women as young men, all set around a summertime dance that might or might not be a life-changing event for the dancers. In “No Known Address,” Kapuściński sketches guys working at staying in the cracks of the system, floating from work site to work site, never settling into the heroic workers’ roles that the party and state assure them are their destinies. “The Geezer” is twenty-seven, but having been born in the early 1930s, he’s worlds removed from his pupils who were born at war’s end and have only ever known reconstruction and socialism. “The Taking of Elzbieta” depicts the knowing and pious cruelty of a religious order that tempted a young woman away from her family. In “The Stiff,” a truck breaks down but the coffin still has to be delivered a dozen or so kilometers away. The pallbearers, who in truth did not know the dead man very well, decide to carry him through the night. Unexpected bits of life intervene along the way.

Polish audiences have long seen Nobody Leaves as a key collection of his work, but this first translation into English did not appear until 2017. The collection is short, fewer than 120 pages, and most of the stories are equally compact, but their brevity serves to concentrate their power.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/20/nobody-leaves-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/

Dec 18 2019

The Kiss Quotient (The Kiss Quotient #1) by Helen Hoang

This may well be the best romance novel I’ve ever read. And it’s not just because it features a leading pair from two wildly under-represented groups in romance fiction. From start to finish, I desperately wanted our lovers to wind up together. I have literally never cared so much about a romantic couple having their HEA as much as I did this one.

Our heroine is Stella, an econometrician and autistic who has trouble socializing: not great when her mom has high hopes of grandbabies out of her only child. Her experiences with men have been so terrible that she decides that the most rational way to overcome them is by getting better at sex. So she hires Michael, a half-Vietnamese half-white escort, to teach her. Soon enough, they’ve graduated to practicing at a relationship instead of just practicing in bed. But will her neuroatypical reasonings and his self-punishing prejudices keep them from committing to the love they’re growing together?

It’s sort of a reverse Pretty Woman, only with a lot less of the grossness of that movie, and a lot more insight into both autism and Vietnamese culture. Stella and Michael are two lovely people caught in complicated circumstances, and the way they come to one another is one of the sweetest darn things I’ve ever experienced. It was also shockingly realistic despite the rich patron-poor prostitute framing. I mean, I get it, romances are about happily ever afters and those are far easier to obtain when our heroic couple is rolling in money, but honestly it’s one of my least favorite romance novel tropes. Poor people fall in love with each other too, you know. I will say one thing: while I would have found Michael’s behavior towards the end absolutely revolting from any other person, I thought it appropriate here, as he was mirroring what Stella had told him she would do herself in his situation.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/18/the-kiss-quotient-the-kiss-quotient-1-by-helen-hoang/

Dec 16 2019

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

One of the problems with the classics is that their motivations can seem so far removed from our everyday lives. Even if the works can stand alone on their artistic merits, there’s often a lot of phobic nonsense distracting to modern-day readers who don’t have the privilege of merely ignoring such in our day-to-day: must we have to pretend it’s not hurtful in our entertainments either? The fact that appreciation of said classics often relies on a knowledge of the mores of their times in order to be comprehensible further alienates today’s readers, especially when the gatekeepers of such knowledge are themselves often of a, shall we say, classical persuasion that seems focused entirely on Then as opposed to Now. What point can there thus be in engaging with the classics when all they support is a fossilized worldview that seems perishingly meaningless in the face of our complicated times?

Even so, a classic is often a classic because the themes resonate, centuries on, even as the details too often detract from fully enjoying them. This is one of the reasons I’ve always been so fascinated by retellings, whether they be of fairy tales, legends, myths or plays. The resurgence of fairy tale retellings at the turn of the century was a godsend for me, and even more recently there’s been something of a trend in literary novelizations, whether to great effect (Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, arguably Hannah Capin’s The Dead Queens Club which deals with history made legend,) or less so (Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under.) That was a large part of why I picked up Home Fire, a novel I would probably never have bothered with otherwise if I’d had only the blurb to go on. You’d think it was tailor-made for me — British Muslims worrying about their families in a time of increasing, encroaching terrorism — but honestly, I turn to fiction because I don’t want to deal with my real world problems for a span. I was, however, intrigued by the idea that the writer had loosely based this book on Sophocles’ Antigone. The original had never done anything much for me, but the concept, the idea of the re-telling, drew me in.

And wow, I get it now. Kamila Shamsie takes the abstract principles of burial and government and meaningless deaths, and translates them into concrete, modern-day examples that finally, finally get me to empathize with why a woman would throw away her own life over a dead relative. Broken into five parts, this tale begins with Isma, the dutiful older sister who gives up a chunk of her life to raise her siblings. When they’re finally grown up enough to be left on their own, she reclaims her academic trajectory, finally able to go abroad for her PhD. While in America, she runs into Eamonn, the son of a polarizing British politician, and accidentally sets him on a trajectory to meet her sister, the alluring, headstrong Aneeka, whose love for Eamonn will always be second to her love for her twin, Parvaiz. Parvaiz has been seduced into terrorism and desperately wants to come home, but Eamonn’s father, Karamat, the new Home Secretary, will do everything in his power to make that an impossibility. It’s a compelling narrative of heartbreak and disaster that it’s difficult to look away from: a train wreck, but in the best possible way.

Ms Shamsie takes the tale of warring Thebans and makes it modern and topical and, thus, relatable. In her telling, it’s less about gods and honor — religion here is more decorative than propulsive; fight me over it, if you want — and more about family and love. There’s probably a classicist somewhere fanning themselves over the temerity, but honestly, it’s the only time I’ve ever cared about Sophocles, so. There was a point near the middle of Isma’s bit where I was starting to roll my eyes at the MFA-ness of the writing, but it grew stronger and more self-assured as the book went on, leading to a devastating, indelible ending.

Home Fire well deserves all the accolades sent its way. If you care a whit about Antigone, or even if you want to know what all the fuss is about, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/16/home-fire-by-kamila-shamsie/

Dec 14 2019

Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers (Infinite Stars #2) edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Oh gosh, how does any collection live up to its own hype of being “the definitive anthology of space opera”, especially when it’s the second of a series? Tho perhaps the series altogether is meant to be definitive?

Regardless, if you love you some space opera, this is a great place to not only immerse yourself in some of the finest representatives of the genre, but also to discover brand new authors and series you might not have been familiar with before. A particular delight of discovery for me was Weston Ochse and his deadpan look at alien invasion with The End-Of-The-World Bowling League, a story that expands on the Grunt Universe. I was also thrilled to make the acquaintance of Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series via its original representative in this volume, Ishigaki, as well as Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Diving series with the inclusion of Lieutenant Tightass. Another terrific story from a new-to-me author was The Traitor by David Weber, who also contributes a charming introduction. While his Honor Harrington series has been perpetually on my radar, this is the first time I’ve ever actually read his work, and I’m much the better for it (tho I can understand how his wife is not a fan of the ending of this particular story.)

If I’m being perfectly honest, tho, I picked up this book because of authors I was already familiar with and was panting to read more of. Top of that list is Curtis C Chen, whose Codename Kangaroo novels I adore. His original short, Fire In The Pocket, is a terrific look at a young Kangaroo and the beginnings of one of his most important professional partnerships. I was also really excited to read Becky Chamber’s A Good Heretic: I’ve been meaning to read her Wayfarers series for ages and this story only served to heighten my excitement at hopefully finding time for the first book soon. I was familiar with C. L. Moore’s fantasy work (Black God’s Kiss is a classic) but had never read any of her space westerns: Shambleau was exactly as unsettling and terrific as you can expect from an author who believes love to be the most devastating force in the universe. For some reason, I was surprised to discover here that Gardner Dozois wrote short stories in addition to compiling them. The inclusion of his A Special Kind Of Morning underlines his excellent taste in addition to highlighting his own skill at writing in the genre.

Special mention goes to A Beast For Norn, which is the only one of the 26 stories here I’ve encountered previously. Everyone and their mom knows George R. R. Martin for Game Of Thrones, but far fewer are familiar with his terrific Haviland Tuf stories, of which ABFN is an excellent example (tho my personal favorite is Guardians, because yummy.)

I’m not 100% sure of how well this volume fulfills the remit of space-opera-definitive but I definitely had a good time exploring the universes with the stories included here. Some worked better than others, but I was overall impressed with how I didn’t often feel like I was missing a huge chunk of information because a story was set in a larger, established universe. Bryan Thomas Schmidt has done a great job curating a collection that will whet the reader’s appetite for discovery with tantalizing glimpses into whole galaxies of space fiction that deserve to be more widely read. Recommended.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/14/infinite-stars-dark-frontiers-infinite-stars-2-edited-by-bryan-thomas-schmidt/

Dec 08 2019

Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer

Of the predecessor to Seven Surrenders, Too Like the Lightning, I wrote that Palmer directly tackles the problem of how different far-future humans will be from present-day people. As Mycroft Canner, her unreliable narrator, says near that book’s beginning, “You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described. … It will be hard at first, but whether you are my contemporary still awed by the new order, or an historian gazing back at my Twenty-Fifth Century as remotely as I gaze back on the Eighteenth, you will find yourself more fluent in the language of the past than you imagined; we all are.” (Too Like the Lightning, p. 7)

Seven Surrenders

The people of four hundred years hence are both familiar and strange; the future, too, is a foreign country, and they do things differently there. One thing that the people of the future largely thought they did not do was sanction violence to uphold the systems of their societies. They thought that such things had been dispensed with after the final wars of religion. The Hive system of choosable law and government, at once cornerstone and keystone of the current Enlightenment, were meant to preserve autonomy and bring the benefits of plenty to all of humanity.

Seven Surrenders picks up immediately from the end of Too Like the Lightning and shows, among other things, the violence inherent in the system. Not only has the present peace been a masquerade, some key people have been preparing to win, and perhaps even instigate, a new war. By the end of the book’s tumultuous events, each of the seven Hives has surrendered an important part of its autonomy and self-understanding. The introduction promises that the present order does not hold, although that transformation has to await The Will to Battle and the forthcoming Perhaps the Stars, which complete Palmer’s Terra Ignota series.

Although Seven Surrenders is also a middle book, it concludes the first part of the set, and contains transformations of its own thus avoiding some of the typical middle-book problems. The world is familiar enough from Too Like the Lightning, so the reader spends less time figuring out the world and more time seeing it develop and change. The sprawling cast of characters is likewise familiar, so it is simpler to follow their metamorphoses. And there are plenty of those, with many new connections revealed, alliances broken, and reversals suffered. It isn’t the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/12/08/seven-surrenders-by-ada-palmer/