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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
i wanted to like this book so badly. i really wanted to like this book so tremendously badly. the prospect of a queer singaporean writer breaking into and revising sci fi tropes was giddying. the fact that they were clearly inspired by neon genesis evangelion and a host of other scifi things i love was even more thrilling. even setting aside what happened with neon yang’s role in the internet hate campaign against isabel fall (which is a whole, other twisted thing)—i really just wanted to like this, so very much.
unfortunately, i disliked this so much. i think i just really seethe at messianic stories—but in particular how this messianic story is written. it seems to me profoundly unthought out to simply say “what if a messiah was QUEER” while seemingly not interrogating examining or revising any of the deeply flawed building blocks of the story structure, of the giddyingly christian rhetoric and theological matter invoked, in the same way that this futuristic spaceworld of the novel is one where everyone is introduced with pronouns and neopronouns are respected and yet a world riddled with awful, despicable empires and eugenics and inequality and borderline genocidal religious violence. i simply don’t feel as if one issue can be easily picked apart from everything else, and the ways in which the novel didn’t examine the horrific nature of the story it told, well, it bothered me deeply.
there is one flippant chapter that says, in essence, well! everyone is selfish and bad here, so who am i to cast the first stone? (with some sneaky anti-cancel culture language slipped in there, too) but, plainly, my issues aren’t to do with imposing a sense of morality or moral superiority. i just find the characterisation of—frankly, everyone—deeply annoying. i find the cultish, extremist world of the faithful cloying and unbearable. i find the sudden flip from extreme self-doubt to complete arrogance and holier-than-thouness by misery unstomachable. a protagonist so entirely ensconced in their own suffering who is simultaneously miraculously buoyed out of every scenario and trouble by fate and destiny. i scream at the levels of selfishness, thoughtlessness, and also brutal hatred that these people sometimes display toward one another. it doesn’t help that, apart from misery, there are no characters that we are really given space to inhabit.
i appreciate the thematic idea of the nullvoid and the holystone; there’s a lot of power and magnetism to the ways in which the universe of the Forge is one defined by utter fluidity, utter elasticity and a seeming sense of unfixedness. yet this is so wholly contradicted by the unending, incessant hammering on of the idea of the omnipotence and perfection of the Forge and hir Will and the unquestionable authority of the Messiah. I rankle—I was plainly, disgusted by it all. The story seemed a thinly veiled fantasy of gaining power and “self-actualisation”.
Of course, then, there are the mechas, and the ways in which this story fixates on the idea of holy, divine transcendence as a kind of gender euphoria, a surpassing of “human biology” and an unlocking of some primordial, universal, cosmic substance. it makes all too much sense and i was sickened by it because i think i simply dislike utopias that are (a) impossible and (b) do not reckon with the messiness of it all and coast along on pretty language and an almost hedonistic sense of indulgence and pleasure. i reject your killing-fucking power fantasy of apotheosis! i simply do! and i accept and see that this is but the first book in a series that is fundamentally setting up a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between the faithful and the heretics, between the forge and the void, but nowhere in this first book are we given actual pause to consider this, to challenge or subvert the up & up narrative of the genesis of misery.
as a coda, i could not help but compare this to “i sexually identify as an attack helicopter”. i do not believe neon yang deserves to have their career shipwrecked and ended in the name of some invisible accountability. but i believe there is analytical power to comparing neon yang’s & isabel fall’s visions of gender given how viscerally yang reacted to fall’s story. it’s kind of astonishing how much the two stories mirror each other as stories that use mechas and machine-human melding as analogies for transness and gender. and, both in hyper-militaristic contexts, focusing on downtrodden individuals who sublimate their identities through war machines.
fall’s story is nuanced and complex and interesting because it constructs a world in which gender is not an absolute plane of being, some divine beyond-body enlightenment, but rather a fraught and contingent kind of social instinct that is aimed toward some kind of function and utility. something that is, in fact, bound to, and by, bodies and their interchange. something that is mystifying because it is inarticulable, because it clicks in a part of the brain that language can only grasp at, but that is immanent, not transcendent. pleasure and euphoria are contrasted against violence and power. the two are uneasy handmaidens. there is no utopia here and by the end of the short story the helicopter pilot and navigator duo realise their complicity and insist on another way of holding onto this slippery, free thing of gender. somewhere beyond the US military.
for yang, the apotheosis of gender is achieving a kind of ultimate, unbridled expression of self. one where an archangel is free to kill, free to wage war, free to fuck. an apotheosis which is, by definition, reserved for a particular kind of enshrined power, set apart from everyday, normal human bodies. in fact, misery consistently looks down upon the human, the fleshy. the machine hungers, not in a libidinal way, but in a cosmic, fated way, toward what it must do. there is a sense that this primality should not be restrained or bound. and yet, it is! it is bound by the machinations of politics and religion and war. it does not exist as some kind of godly thing by fiat. there is a cursory dismissal of the formal hierarchy, the bureaucracy of military and empire, but misery, giddy on their own god complex, compares herself to oppenheimer after the creation of the atom bomb twice. i cannot think of a more militaristic weapon than one that exceeds and surpasses the bounds of rank and order because its power is unimaginable, incomprehensible. if that is gender utopia, count me the fuck out.
also, one last thing: this read like a novel that needed more sharp editing. the language work genuinely felt sloppy (how could phrases like “yeet” and “calm your tits” slip by untouched in a world where people barely remember the earth and you get archaic overwritten references to shit like moby dick or AI??) the characters as mentioned were basically non existent beyond flashy referential names, the worldbuilding of holystone while interesting felt swimmingly convenient, and god, again, there was just no dramatic tension because a fucking ANGEL and the ability to manipulate matter saves misery from everything.
unfortunately, i disliked this so much. i think i just really seethe at messianic stories—but in particular how this messianic story is written. it seems to me profoundly unthought out to simply say “what if a messiah was QUEER” while seemingly not interrogating examining or revising any of the deeply flawed building blocks of the story structure, of the giddyingly christian rhetoric and theological matter invoked, in the same way that this futuristic spaceworld of the novel is one where everyone is introduced with pronouns and neopronouns are respected and yet a world riddled with awful, despicable empires and eugenics and inequality and borderline genocidal religious violence. i simply don’t feel as if one issue can be easily picked apart from everything else, and the ways in which the novel didn’t examine the horrific nature of the story it told, well, it bothered me deeply.
there is one flippant chapter that says, in essence, well! everyone is selfish and bad here, so who am i to cast the first stone? (with some sneaky anti-cancel culture language slipped in there, too) but, plainly, my issues aren’t to do with imposing a sense of morality or moral superiority. i just find the characterisation of—frankly, everyone—deeply annoying. i find the cultish, extremist world of the faithful cloying and unbearable. i find the sudden flip from extreme self-doubt to complete arrogance and holier-than-thouness by misery unstomachable. a protagonist so entirely ensconced in their own suffering who is simultaneously miraculously buoyed out of every scenario and trouble by fate and destiny. i scream at the levels of selfishness, thoughtlessness, and also brutal hatred that these people sometimes display toward one another. it doesn’t help that, apart from misery, there are no characters that we are really given space to inhabit.
i appreciate the thematic idea of the nullvoid and the holystone; there’s a lot of power and magnetism to the ways in which the universe of the Forge is one defined by utter fluidity, utter elasticity and a seeming sense of unfixedness. yet this is so wholly contradicted by the unending, incessant hammering on of the idea of the omnipotence and perfection of the Forge and hir Will and the unquestionable authority of the Messiah. I rankle—I was plainly, disgusted by it all. The story seemed a thinly veiled fantasy of gaining power and “self-actualisation”.
Of course, then, there are the mechas, and the ways in which this story fixates on the idea of holy, divine transcendence as a kind of gender euphoria, a surpassing of “human biology” and an unlocking of some primordial, universal, cosmic substance. it makes all too much sense and i was sickened by it because i think i simply dislike utopias that are (a) impossible and (b) do not reckon with the messiness of it all and coast along on pretty language and an almost hedonistic sense of indulgence and pleasure. i reject your killing-fucking power fantasy of apotheosis! i simply do! and i accept and see that this is but the first book in a series that is fundamentally setting up a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between the faithful and the heretics, between the forge and the void, but nowhere in this first book are we given actual pause to consider this, to challenge or subvert the up & up narrative of the genesis of misery.
as a coda, i could not help but compare this to “i sexually identify as an attack helicopter”. i do not believe neon yang deserves to have their career shipwrecked and ended in the name of some invisible accountability. but i believe there is analytical power to comparing neon yang’s & isabel fall’s visions of gender given how viscerally yang reacted to fall’s story. it’s kind of astonishing how much the two stories mirror each other as stories that use mechas and machine-human melding as analogies for transness and gender. and, both in hyper-militaristic contexts, focusing on downtrodden individuals who sublimate their identities through war machines.
fall’s story is nuanced and complex and interesting because it constructs a world in which gender is not an absolute plane of being, some divine beyond-body enlightenment, but rather a fraught and contingent kind of social instinct that is aimed toward some kind of function and utility. something that is, in fact, bound to, and by, bodies and their interchange. something that is mystifying because it is inarticulable, because it clicks in a part of the brain that language can only grasp at, but that is immanent, not transcendent. pleasure and euphoria are contrasted against violence and power. the two are uneasy handmaidens. there is no utopia here and by the end of the short story the helicopter pilot and navigator duo realise their complicity and insist on another way of holding onto this slippery, free thing of gender. somewhere beyond the US military.
for yang, the apotheosis of gender is achieving a kind of ultimate, unbridled expression of self. one where an archangel is free to kill, free to wage war, free to fuck. an apotheosis which is, by definition, reserved for a particular kind of enshrined power, set apart from everyday, normal human bodies. in fact, misery consistently looks down upon the human, the fleshy. the machine hungers, not in a libidinal way, but in a cosmic, fated way, toward what it must do. there is a sense that this primality should not be restrained or bound. and yet, it is! it is bound by the machinations of politics and religion and war. it does not exist as some kind of godly thing by fiat. there is a cursory dismissal of the formal hierarchy, the bureaucracy of military and empire, but misery, giddy on their own god complex, compares herself to oppenheimer after the creation of the atom bomb twice. i cannot think of a more militaristic weapon than one that exceeds and surpasses the bounds of rank and order because its power is unimaginable, incomprehensible. if that is gender utopia, count me the fuck out.
also, one last thing: this read like a novel that needed more sharp editing. the language work genuinely felt sloppy (how could phrases like “yeet” and “calm your tits” slip by untouched in a world where people barely remember the earth and you get archaic overwritten references to shit like moby dick or AI??) the characters as mentioned were basically non existent beyond flashy referential names, the worldbuilding of holystone while interesting felt swimmingly convenient, and god, again, there was just no dramatic tension because a fucking ANGEL and the ability to manipulate matter saves misery from everything.
I absolutely loved the Tensorate Series by Yang, so I fully expected to enjoy this book as well and I absolutely did. It delivers on premise, has tight writing, engaging characters that make you cheer for them and yell at them in equal measure, and the ending is definitely one that I'm going to be thinking about for the next few days.
I think it ultimately delivers on the premise of a spin on the chosen one trope -- in the beginning, I was ready to fully take Misery at her word that they were a fraud. As the plot progresses, that is cast into doubt and confusion, and then in act three, it's hard to say what exactly to believe!
This is likely one that I will re-read after my brain has finished percolating on it a bit longer, but I've already recommended it to friends so they can talk about it with me.
Not without flaws, but none that bothered me enough to complain about in a review, so 5 stars!
I think it ultimately delivers on the premise of a spin on the chosen one trope -- in the beginning, I was ready to fully take Misery at her word that they were a fraud. As the plot progresses, that is cast into doubt and confusion, and then in act three, it's hard to say what exactly to believe!
This is likely one that I will re-read after my brain has finished percolating on it a bit longer, but I've already recommended it to friends so they can talk about it with me.
Not without flaws, but none that bothered me enough to complain about in a review, so 5 stars!
HIGHLIGHTS
~angelic mecha suits
~magic gemstones
~what’s the difference between hallucinations and visions?
I feel like I should have enjoyed this much more than I did. Broken down to its constituent parts, I love everything that makes up Genesis: the religious themes and imagery; the jagged-edged nonbinary MC who is utterly convinced she’s not the Messiah; mysterious gemstones with all kinds of otherworldly properties.
And yet.
I think part of the problem is that, in this kind of set-up, we all know the Empire is – best-case scenario – mistaken in its take on Life, The Universe, And Everything; worst-case scenario, they’re deliberately lying about everything, and most especially The Enemy. We all know that The Enemy is either misunderstood or misrepresented; that they are far more likely to know The Truth than the protagonist’s side are. And while it’s a very cool change of pace to have our MC go from unbeliever to fanatic rather than the other way around, it still meant I was impatiently waiting for the Twist Reveal the whole time I was reading…which undercut basically all of the tension.
Also, while I can’t talk about it in any detail at all, the epilogue massively pissed me off. It rendered the entire rest of the book pointless. The whole thing from start to finish was a massive waste of everybody’s time. What on earth was {spoiler}’s goal then??? If {spoiler} wanted {spoiler} then there were much, MUCH simpler ways of making it happen than the entire plot of the book. What even.
Argh.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
~angelic mecha suits
~magic gemstones
~what’s the difference between hallucinations and visions?
I feel like I should have enjoyed this much more than I did. Broken down to its constituent parts, I love everything that makes up Genesis: the religious themes and imagery; the jagged-edged nonbinary MC who is utterly convinced she’s not the Messiah; mysterious gemstones with all kinds of otherworldly properties.
And yet.
I think part of the problem is that, in this kind of set-up, we all know the Empire is – best-case scenario – mistaken in its take on Life, The Universe, And Everything; worst-case scenario, they’re deliberately lying about everything, and most especially The Enemy. We all know that The Enemy is either misunderstood or misrepresented; that they are far more likely to know The Truth than the protagonist’s side are. And while it’s a very cool change of pace to have our MC go from unbeliever to fanatic rather than the other way around, it still meant I was impatiently waiting for the Twist Reveal the whole time I was reading…which undercut basically all of the tension.
Also, while I can’t talk about it in any detail at all, the epilogue massively pissed me off. It rendered the entire rest of the book pointless. The whole thing from start to finish was a massive waste of everybody’s time. What on earth was {spoiler}’s goal then??? If {spoiler} wanted {spoiler} then there were much, MUCH simpler ways of making it happen than the entire plot of the book. What even.
Argh.
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
DNF @ 15%
A narrator makes or breaks an audiobook and unfortunately, I couldn't do this because the narration really bothered and distracted me :( will probably read this physically
A narrator makes or breaks an audiobook and unfortunately, I couldn't do this because the narration really bothered and distracted me :( will probably read this physically
I originally rated this 2-stars, but as I sat back to reflect on my experiences to write this review I decided that it really was only deserving of 1-star. This book reminded me a lot of Baker Thief in the attempt at queernorm and high concept worlds, but with much deeper structural & narrative issues. Which is impressive, because I really didn't like reading Baker Thief. I decided to read it based on a trifecta of a very cool cover, an intriguing title, and the description of it being a space opera. Anyone who knows me well will know I'm a massive slut for a space opera, so I was excited. I love giant machinations and drama on an inter-planetary scale, and the addition of mechs and holystone seemed like it would only make it cooler. Oh, how wrong I was. It wasn't even a space opera! (It was also neither Pacific Rim nor Joan of Arc, ignore the blurb completely). I want to talk about what I think was good first, because the rest of this review will just be me ripping into it.
Good:
1. Holystone & the nullvoid & the other concepts introduced within this novel are really cool, if a little more fantasy than sci-fi in a way I'm not a total fan of. An effort was clearly made to differentiate this world from many others within the sci-fi space, and I respect that.
2. The attempt at queernorm was good, if not successful in my opinion. I appreciate that Yang includes characters that use a number of different pronouns and present in different ways and so forth.
3. There is a strong attempt made to have a fascinating narrative style, with the framing of the novel around a conversation. I also appreciated the use of different systems of military terms and the like, for example describing miltary units in terms of banquets/dishes/servings, which was unique and added interest to the world
Unfortunately, that's sort of all I liked, and it's mostly confined to concepts & ideas rather than any of the actual execution on Yang's part. Let's get on to my gripes, which the more I think about them the more they unfold in dizzying fractal spirals of deepening annoyance. Dear, reader, I will try my best to summarise them for you.
1. This book is almost painfully shallow in the way that it addresses everything. Characters have very little depth beyond being playthings for the main character Misery, and there's so many of them that they all resolved into one mush in my head. There's little evidence of who they actually are as people when she's not in the room. The world, too, is very shallow. I'm broadly in the camp of sci-fi should explain big concepts less to enable more belief in them (except when Alistair Reynolds does it - he could explain the minutiae of how the physics for anything works for however long he'd like), but c'mon, you have to at least explain it a little. Misery goes through the world in a very bull-headed way, and the narrative is the same. Nothing is explained beyond the obvious, and it just doesn't allow the reader to engage with the world at all. What do the Faithful even believe in anyway? What do they think the Larex Forge is? What does normal life look like for literally any citizen of this world? It was frustrating to find everything under-explained, but be expected to believe in the world & religion & Misery's destiny. Finally, for a book that is so repeatedly conscious about gender (& sexuality, to some extent) I found it to be very shallow in this respect too. There's a lot of talk about it, but little depth as to how any of these characters differ from each other, or who they are beyond the pronouns that they use. And in terms of sexuality, Misery fucks a bunch of people but it never really felt like it meant anything and was kind of just. There. I disliked this aspect a lot for hopefully obvious reasons (If there's going to be gratuitous sex could you at least make it relevant to either the plot or the character or the themes or ANYTHING?! I saw reviews saying it wasn't even hot so like. WHY)
2. Another major issue is that this book suffers from really clunky writing throughout. Good prose should flow easily, and almost fade into the background behind the story itself, supporting it & emphasising important aspects. It can be beautiful, but should not exist for the sole reason of being beautiful. This prose, however, seemed like the author had tried desperately awfully hard to make it capital-G Good, and had therefore instead written a clunky, difficult-to-read attempt at a masterpiece that repeatedly falls flat. One of the biggest issues in my opinion was the constant focus on character's pronouns. Rather than them being natural and falling into the background, there's a constant consciousness in the writing of the author working out how to tell the reader any random character's pronouns and name, whether it's relevant or not. It constantly breaks up the narrative by pausing the action for Misery to note a character's badge, have an unnecessary conversation, or exageratedly note how she doesn't know a character's pronouns. It's fantasy, people! Could we not have just accepted that for the sake of narrative these interactions and so forth were left out? Rather than being a liberating powerful story that normalises this sort of consciousness, it creates an infectious and insidious obsession with working out the gender of every single character, whether in the foreground or not. Is that not the opposite of what we should want? Who cares the gender of a random grunt who is working in a space station. Why should it be relevant to you? This was really only the worst offender in a whole book of actively difficult-to-digest prose, but it was in my opinion the worst offender.
3. Finally, my last big issues with this book is that the final twist is easy to guess from about 20 or so pages into the novel. It should be immediately obvious to any reader when they're told that the Heretics are the "big bad" but with no actual elaboration as to why other than religious fanatacism, that this is an opinion that should be questioned. However, despite the fact that Misery begins the novel slightly questioning the Church of the Faithful and the whole artifice of society, she is instead taken in to their ideology throughout the book. And not even really in an interesting look-how-they-corrupt-the-mind way, but in a self-important self-righteous Messiah kind of way. It was sort of painful to watch Misery blithely ignore any actual explanation that is given for what she experiences besides being blessed by the Forge. I also understand that she is supposed to be a character who has had a lot taken away from her by the so-called nullvoid, but her complete refusal to even attempt to talk to a Heretic and understand who they even really are is extremely frustrating, especially because the narrative is so very confined to only her perspective and so we as readers never get to see that probably quite interesting context. At the end, there's, I imagine, supposed to be a kicker that HAHA! She's an unreliable narrator! But she actually managed to convey the actuality of the situation quite well, while somehow being completely oblivious herself. It's sort of impressive, actually. It just drove me completely crazy to watch the main character who I imagine I'm at least somewhat supposed to root for go on a revenge-fuelled cruel crusade against a massive assortment of characters who have done absolute nothing other than sort of be in her way or be religiously condemned in her mind somehow.
I hope I have successfully conveyed just how much I didn't enjoy reading this book. Unlike Fangirl which was at least funny in how very bad it was, this was just oh-so-boring and infuriating to read. I would not recommend that anyone else does so! I only finished it because I kept hoping that Yang would turn it around somehow at the end and I would have some slightly nicer things to say to balance all the annoyances. I was wrong. There are many other complaints I could make, but I have decided I really can't be bothered. It doesn't deserve more of my time.
Good:
1. Holystone & the nullvoid & the other concepts introduced within this novel are really cool, if a little more fantasy than sci-fi in a way I'm not a total fan of. An effort was clearly made to differentiate this world from many others within the sci-fi space, and I respect that.
2. The attempt at queernorm was good, if not successful in my opinion. I appreciate that Yang includes characters that use a number of different pronouns and present in different ways and so forth.
3. There is a strong attempt made to have a fascinating narrative style, with the framing of the novel around a conversation. I also appreciated the use of different systems of military terms and the like, for example describing miltary units in terms of banquets/dishes/servings, which was unique and added interest to the world
Unfortunately, that's sort of all I liked, and it's mostly confined to concepts & ideas rather than any of the actual execution on Yang's part. Let's get on to my gripes, which the more I think about them the more they unfold in dizzying fractal spirals of deepening annoyance. Dear, reader, I will try my best to summarise them for you.
1. This book is almost painfully shallow in the way that it addresses everything. Characters have very little depth beyond being playthings for the main character Misery, and there's so many of them that they all resolved into one mush in my head. There's little evidence of who they actually are as people when she's not in the room. The world, too, is very shallow. I'm broadly in the camp of sci-fi should explain big concepts less to enable more belief in them (except when Alistair Reynolds does it - he could explain the minutiae of how the physics for anything works for however long he'd like), but c'mon, you have to at least explain it a little. Misery goes through the world in a very bull-headed way, and the narrative is the same. Nothing is explained beyond the obvious, and it just doesn't allow the reader to engage with the world at all. What do the Faithful even believe in anyway? What do they think the Larex Forge is? What does normal life look like for literally any citizen of this world? It was frustrating to find everything under-explained, but be expected to believe in the world & religion & Misery's destiny. Finally, for a book that is so repeatedly conscious about gender (& sexuality, to some extent) I found it to be very shallow in this respect too. There's a lot of talk about it, but little depth as to how any of these characters differ from each other, or who they are beyond the pronouns that they use. And in terms of sexuality, Misery fucks a bunch of people but it never really felt like it meant anything and was kind of just. There. I disliked this aspect a lot for hopefully obvious reasons (If there's going to be gratuitous sex could you at least make it relevant to either the plot or the character or the themes or ANYTHING?! I saw reviews saying it wasn't even hot so like. WHY)
2. Another major issue is that this book suffers from really clunky writing throughout. Good prose should flow easily, and almost fade into the background behind the story itself, supporting it & emphasising important aspects. It can be beautiful, but should not exist for the sole reason of being beautiful. This prose, however, seemed like the author had tried desperately awfully hard to make it capital-G Good, and had therefore instead written a clunky, difficult-to-read attempt at a masterpiece that repeatedly falls flat. One of the biggest issues in my opinion was the constant focus on character's pronouns. Rather than them being natural and falling into the background, there's a constant consciousness in the writing of the author working out how to tell the reader any random character's pronouns and name, whether it's relevant or not. It constantly breaks up the narrative by pausing the action for Misery to note a character's badge, have an unnecessary conversation, or exageratedly note how she doesn't know a character's pronouns. It's fantasy, people! Could we not have just accepted that for the sake of narrative these interactions and so forth were left out? Rather than being a liberating powerful story that normalises this sort of consciousness, it creates an infectious and insidious obsession with working out the gender of every single character, whether in the foreground or not. Is that not the opposite of what we should want? Who cares the gender of a random grunt who is working in a space station. Why should it be relevant to you? This was really only the worst offender in a whole book of actively difficult-to-digest prose, but it was in my opinion the worst offender.
3. Finally, my last big issues with this book is that the final twist is easy to guess from about 20 or so pages into the novel. It should be immediately obvious to any reader when they're told that the Heretics are the "big bad" but with no actual elaboration as to why other than religious fanatacism, that this is an opinion that should be questioned. However, despite the fact that Misery begins the novel slightly questioning the Church of the Faithful and the whole artifice of society, she is instead taken in to their ideology throughout the book. And not even really in an interesting look-how-they-corrupt-the-mind way, but in a self-important self-righteous Messiah kind of way. It was sort of painful to watch Misery blithely ignore any actual explanation that is given for what she experiences besides being blessed by the Forge. I also understand that she is supposed to be a character who has had a lot taken away from her by the so-called nullvoid, but her complete refusal to even attempt to talk to a Heretic and understand who they even really are is extremely frustrating, especially because the narrative is so very confined to only her perspective and so we as readers never get to see that probably quite interesting context. At the end, there's, I imagine, supposed to be a kicker that HAHA! She's an unreliable narrator! But she actually managed to convey the actuality of the situation quite well, while somehow being completely oblivious herself. It's sort of impressive, actually. It just drove me completely crazy to watch the main character who I imagine I'm at least somewhat supposed to root for go on a revenge-fuelled cruel crusade against a massive assortment of characters who have done absolute nothing other than sort of be in her way or be religiously condemned in her mind somehow.
I hope I have successfully conveyed just how much I didn't enjoy reading this book. Unlike Fangirl which was at least funny in how very bad it was, this was just oh-so-boring and infuriating to read. I would not recommend that anyone else does so! I only finished it because I kept hoping that Yang would turn it around somehow at the end and I would have some slightly nicer things to say to balance all the annoyances. I was wrong. There are many other complaints I could make, but I have decided I really can't be bothered. It doesn't deserve more of my time.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was my first read where a character’s gender identity was exactly like mine so this book will always have a special place in my heart.
Genesis of Misery is a queer normative and diverse retelling of Joan of Arc as an epic space opera of religious prophets, mental health, giant ass mechs, and political fanaticism! Each character immediately had their chosen pronouns listed and it was so straightforward that it was refreshing.
This narration story telling style might not be for everyone but it was totally for me. I highly advise checking content warnings as there was a scene that made me full stop and pull away for some time. However, I still recommend if you can consent with content warnings.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I'm a huge fan of Neon Yang's writing style, their Tensorate series is definitely a favorite fantasy series for me; but I think this book made me fully realize that science fiction may not be for me. I was a fan of the main character and her enemies-to-lovers relationship with the princess, I think their dynamic was paced very well and each of their character developments felt natural to their plotlines. The interplay of power and religion were interesting, maybe a little heavy handed at times, but I think the overall themes and the nuance with which Yang wrote these topics was done well.
However, I could not stand the pacing and writing structure. Everything felt so abrupt and blunt, with every action feeling so rushed. It felt like the characters were constantly just doing action items for the sake of doing an action, with little to no time to let these scenes percolate and digest. The interludes definitely helped a little on that front, but sometimes they felt so out of left field that I was left wondering how those interludes played back into the larger story. I also felt like the pronoun introduction for new characters felt far too stilted and unnatural, I wish the author had just seamlessly blended them into the dialogue instead of stating each character's pronouns at every single introduction.
All in all, this wasn't a BAD book per se, just not the book for me. Also, if I had a nickel for everytime I read a book with a main character named Misery, I'd have 2 nickels. Which isn't many, but isn't it wild that it's happened twice.
However, I could not stand the pacing and writing structure. Everything felt so abrupt and blunt, with every action feeling so rushed. It felt like the characters were constantly just doing action items for the sake of doing an action, with little to no time to let these scenes percolate and digest. The interludes definitely helped a little on that front, but sometimes they felt so out of left field that I was left wondering how those interludes played back into the larger story. I also felt like the pronoun introduction for new characters felt far too stilted and unnatural, I wish the author had just seamlessly blended them into the dialogue instead of stating each character's pronouns at every single introduction.
All in all, this wasn't a BAD book per se, just not the book for me. Also, if I had a nickel for everytime I read a book with a main character named Misery, I'd have 2 nickels. Which isn't many, but isn't it wild that it's happened twice.