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adamantane's review
adventurous
dark
In short? It’s Dan Brown meets Anne Rice meets Kevin Kwan. Glamorous, globetrotting, murderous fictionalized art history with some weird sex that never feels sensual, and the sort of critique of consumerism/materialism and signifiers of affluence that involves gratuitous descriptions of food and clothes and traveling by plane to places on a whim.
Not quite as fantastic or poetic as Clive Barker, though there are some bits reminiscent of his earlier stuff (regardless of what the back cover says).
I think calling this book erotic is a bit misleading. The sex in it is lacking sensuality, and comes across as alienated as the narrator is from pleasure. It is mechanical, and the descriptions feel more like the stuff you hear from a blissed-out bedfellow post-coitus than anything actually erotic/pleasurable. The same goes for the descriptions about food and experience. It is discussion of spiritual pleasure and what matters that seems undercut with its own insistence on pleasure being this polished, glittering spectacle that is at the end as harsh, cold and untender as a diamond - which, if you read the ending, is the point. It’s an interesting book from that perspective. If magic is illusions, then each act of magic the MC does just leads her further into this web of illusions and delusions and yes, money matters, but it’s the people who have an abundance of it that can convince themselves the most that it does not. It’s an interesting story about desire - not erotic, because that would imply more than the hollow need and greed and ideal-driven desperation that these characters have - but about wanting more.
Not quite as fantastic or poetic as Clive Barker, though there are some bits reminiscent of his earlier stuff (regardless of what the back cover says).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Chronic illness and Dementia
Moderate: Sexual violence
Minor: Blood
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