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fionamclary 's review for:
The Mimicking of Known Successes
by Malka Older
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Sooo this was a big disappointment.
I have been hugely looking forward to cozy sapphic Holmes & Watson in space ever since I heard of this novella, but unfortunately my expectations remain unmet. The worldbuilding is under-explained, the characters are flat, and worst of all is the writing.
The setting is, in principle, really cool: Humans have built intersecting artificial rings around Jupiter, orbiting high in its atmosphere, and live in cities constructed on these rings. They travel by (presumably autonomous?) railcar between rings and platforms. The descriptions of the pale, orangey fog and moody storms establish an optimal setting for a gaslamp mystery. Unfortunately, many elements of the world are just not fully explained to the reader. Although this lessens as the story goes on, it makes for a great deal of confusion for the first third of the book or so, and by the end I still didn't understand some things. For instance, I still don't know what exactly at atmoscarf is.
As for the characters, we spend the book in Pleiti's first-person perspective, with the exception of a third-person prologue in Mossa's POV. Yet I felt like we could have been in literally anyone's head. Pleiti was such a cardboard box whose own voice wasn't even consistent. Even with the knowledge that they're supposed to be Holmes & Watson, but space lesbians, I found them to be woefully underdeveloped. I don't even know what they look like, just that Mossa has short hair. That's it. We don't even know if Mossa and Pleiti are first names or last names, even though everyone else on Jupiter appears to have our own Western two-name structure. There's a point where Mossa says that some people don't like to see a person like her as an Investigator, but that just confused me because the book never indicates why. Is it misogyny? (Of which there is otherwise no indication in this culture!) Is she a racial or ethnic minority that never gets mentioned? It is never explained.
The book's greatest sin for me was the writing. An obvious attempt at emulating the style of 1890s-1900s writing, it came across as try-hard, overwritten, clunky, and a poor mask for an empty POV character. The worst moment for me was when the word "expostulated" got misused. First line of chapter 11: "'How could he be so dismissive?' I expostulated, when we were finally alone." I shared this with others to make sure I wasn't crazy and this was indeed an incorrect usage, and everyone agreed with me that it was off. In this moment I felt that the writing style was all to sound fancy, but with no substance, and that my efforts to understand sentences so complex and thick with nested clauses were pointless if there was no guarantee of real meaning in the end. Another problem was restating the same thing in multiple ways, such as: "I intended to let Mossa sleep in the morning, had plans in fact of ordering up those scones again—for I remembered her tendency towards baked goods at breakfast—as an anticipation of her wants. A treat." You see how that says the same thing three times using different words? It did not have to say "as an anticipation of her wants" or "a treat"; I already inferred that those things were the case from the aside set off with em dashes. This was not the only example of such overwriting. As the book progressed, the plot engaged me enough to notice the bad writing less, but it never lost the sense that the inside of this presumably 20 to 30 something woman's head sounded like that of a middle-aged man from the 1890s.
I don't know where to put this but it was funny to me that "conservative" is literally a slur.
The end of the story was pretty decent; the mystery was definitely the best part of the book, and I liked how the end tied back to the author's epigraph at the start: "Demand better than back to normal." Unfortunately, I don't think I can put myself through another page of this contrived and convoluted writing, so I will probably not continue the series.
I have been hugely looking forward to cozy sapphic Holmes & Watson in space ever since I heard of this novella, but unfortunately my expectations remain unmet. The worldbuilding is under-explained, the characters are flat, and worst of all is the writing.
The setting is, in principle, really cool: Humans have built intersecting artificial rings around Jupiter, orbiting high in its atmosphere, and live in cities constructed on these rings. They travel by (presumably autonomous?) railcar between rings and platforms. The descriptions of the pale, orangey fog and moody storms establish an optimal setting for a gaslamp mystery. Unfortunately, many elements of the world are just not fully explained to the reader. Although this lessens as the story goes on, it makes for a great deal of confusion for the first third of the book or so, and by the end I still didn't understand some things. For instance, I still don't know what exactly at atmoscarf is.
As for the characters, we spend the book in Pleiti's first-person perspective, with the exception of a third-person prologue in Mossa's POV. Yet I felt like we could have been in literally anyone's head. Pleiti was such a cardboard box whose own voice wasn't even consistent. Even with the knowledge that they're supposed to be Holmes & Watson, but space lesbians, I found them to be woefully underdeveloped. I don't even know what they look like, just that Mossa has short hair. That's it. We don't even know if Mossa and Pleiti are first names or last names, even though everyone else on Jupiter appears to have our own Western two-name structure. There's a point where Mossa says that some people don't like to see a person like her as an Investigator, but that just confused me because the book never indicates why. Is it misogyny? (Of which there is otherwise no indication in this culture!) Is she a racial or ethnic minority that never gets mentioned? It is never explained.
The book's greatest sin for me was the writing. An obvious attempt at emulating the style of 1890s-1900s writing, it came across as try-hard, overwritten, clunky, and a poor mask for an empty POV character. The worst moment for me was when the word "expostulated" got misused. First line of chapter 11: "'How could he be so dismissive?' I expostulated, when we were finally alone." I shared this with others to make sure I wasn't crazy and this was indeed an incorrect usage, and everyone agreed with me that it was off. In this moment I felt that the writing style was all to sound fancy, but with no substance, and that my efforts to understand sentences so complex and thick with nested clauses were pointless if there was no guarantee of real meaning in the end. Another problem was restating the same thing in multiple ways, such as: "I intended to let Mossa sleep in the morning, had plans in fact of ordering up those scones again—for I remembered her tendency towards baked goods at breakfast—as an anticipation of her wants. A treat." You see how that says the same thing three times using different words? It did not have to say "as an anticipation of her wants" or "a treat"; I already inferred that those things were the case from the aside set off with em dashes. This was not the only example of such overwriting. As the book progressed, the plot engaged me enough to notice the bad writing less, but it never lost the sense that the inside of this presumably 20 to 30 something woman's head sounded like that of a middle-aged man from the 1890s.
I don't know where to put this but it was funny to me that "conservative" is literally a slur.
The end of the story was pretty decent; the mystery was definitely the best part of the book, and I liked how the end tied back to the author's epigraph at the start: "Demand better than back to normal." Unfortunately, I don't think I can put myself through another page of this contrived and convoluted writing, so I will probably not continue the series.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide
Minor: Violence, Blood, Murder