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sassmistress 's review for:
The Golden Enclaves
by Naomi Novik
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Not my favorite. The ending of book 2 made this a must-read, but I did not really enjoy my experience with this book.
This book leans much heavier on the horror aspect. It's much slower-paced with a tense, building dread / realization, very few busy action sequences. The book begins with a long period of grief, there are more gruesome bodies/body horror and quite a bit of "reality distortion"-type cosmic horror. Generally, more darkness and almost zero funny. Movement and next steps are still happening, but not at the breakneck pace I loved in the first two books.
The sexual content has also been ramped up in this one, and the ending is very message-driven.
This book leans much heavier on the horror aspect. It's much slower-paced with a tense, building dread / realization, very few busy action sequences. The book begins with a long period of grief, there are more gruesome bodies/body horror and quite a bit of "reality distortion"-type cosmic horror. Generally, more darkness and almost zero funny. Movement and next steps are still happening, but not at the breakneck pace I loved in the first two books.
The sexual content has also been ramped up in this one, and the ending is very message-driven.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Confinement, Gore, Sexual content, Torture, Grief
Moderate: Child death, Cursing, Death, Drug use, Death of parent, Alcohol
Minor: Homophobia, Racism, Suicide attempt
Gore/violence
Super gross maw-mouth gore. Naked body curled up in the center of it.
A few sentences about witches being burned at the stake and not being able to escape
"the same phrases being repeated over and over in different ones: eternal life, longevity, deathlessness, and I understood in a mingling of relief and rage:Liu was alive in there. Be cause she wasn't meant to get out of this too early. She was meant to die slowly. Even if her body was being shattered and her hips and shoulders had been crushed under the weight of all these bricks, these fucking bricks that wouldn't *move*, and I gave a howl of rage and heaved the second brick up and over the edge."
Return to plot point from the first book, when a family member tried to kill El after hearing the prophecy by taking her up the mountain and leaping off with her because that was "the only way he could have borne to save the world from me."
Language:
Lots of "bl**dy" / "bl**dy h*ll" , "w*nker", "f-" and variations
Also several occurrences of "sh*g", "b*ll*cks", "up yours", "sh-", "o-m-g-" /"g-d", "d- head", "hot as Satan's t*t", "b*st*rd"
Sexual content:
Several implicit invitations to "sh*g", including an invitation for permanent threesome situation.
Three sex scenes - 2 with Liesel (FF), one of them multi-round, and one with Orion (MF). All are sensory-explicit but not visually graphic beyond the kissing and clothing removal. All are 1 full page or longer.
2pp FF, other relevant context: Portrayed as "belly-deep relief", "ridiculously easy", and sheepishly called a "moment of weakness" when her friend calls her out.
" Aadhya was fundamentally right, and I knew it. I still couldn't be sorry; even now I felt almost pathetically grateful to Liesel for the ocean-deep relief of physical release and dreamless sleep she'd given me, not to mention getting me here. "
" "I'm warning you right now that if you move into London enclave and start a ménage with Liesel and Alfie, I'm hunting you down with chains," Aadhya said. "
" "Yes." Liesel said. "Are you thinking I made things worse? I promise you," she went on, with the grim tones of experience, "to feel good in your body makes things better, even when they are very bad, and they are." "
Worldview / world-building:
Mum always asks "the universe" for food or a ride and is obliged. El can't tell if it's different for her because she's scowling or ppl are "looking at a dark-skinned girl instead of my pink-and-gold mum smiling at them, and not being able to tell only makes me scowl the more."
More "the universe" everywhere, e.g. "if the universe wills".
" The place was in beautiful repair--fresh paint in vivid colors, golden Buddhas, gilt everywhere-and it was the opposite of that pagan playground in Sintra: people still worshipped here, true believers and not just playing at it, all of them reaching out for something past the limits of reality. "
" It was Mum's choice, and I knew that at the heart, that was the choice to care about, to forgive, even the Philippa Waxes and Claire Browns of the world; even the Ophelias; the most horrid and miserable people, who didn't deserve to be forgiven, because otherwise no one deserved to be forgiven. "
" "If ever Ophelia tries to lure you back there,"' she said, "whatever she does, whatever evil she threatens, you must not go. You must hold tight to the memory of the pain I gave you, and all the love and comfort we would have given you and never did, and know that this is true: it was better. You must never fall into her power." "
Bitter view of systemic inequality and the evil "sacrifices" that wizards with means make to gain their own advantage.
Revisiting a gay couple brought up in Book 2: " It was too much, a debt you could spend the rest of your life trying to pay off, and that was even before you got to Ibrahim and Yaakov's additional problem that unless they went it totally alone, then whichever family side they lived with, the other one of them would face suspicion and possibly even hatred, from the surrounding mundanes if not literally the other's relations. But everything would change if Ibrahim could offer instead a place in Dubai enclave, which is big and modern and firmly aboard the tolerance train, meaning they'll welcome anyone, regardless of their religion or their nationality or who they like to go to bed with, and let them live exactly as they like, so long as they're either spectacularly powerful in some way or have twenty years' worth of mana to buy their way in with. "
Drugs
" Yancy was there with about twenty other wizards between the ages of fourteen and eighty, all sprawled out comfortably over the green and the stones, some of them drinking but most of them gathered round a big cast-iron pot set up in one of the lanes with a balefire going underneath it. It had a lid with two big stovepipe openings that were belching irregular gouts of a heavy, iridescent smoke; they caught it in big carved-bone drinking horns and put their faces inside to breathe it in. "
" And meanwhile all the teachers at school would glare at me in particular whenever they read us the disapproving lectures about drugs: the half-Indian commune kid, obviously I was a yogurt weaving tofu welding friend of Henry the Eighth. Ha. I couldn't actually have risked any drugs even if anyone had been willing to offer me some, except the boring kind that just make you better at homework and drudgery. It's hard enough fending off every mal within a hundred miles without being in an altered state of mind that odds-on would make me believe they were even more powerful, which would cause them to in fact be so. That said, I would actually have been quite prepared to try some interesting magical drugs at a party full of grown wizards who could probably kill mals even while drunk and high as Valhalla, and do some dancing along with them It's some- thing wasn't likely to have many opportunities to try. But I didn't particularly like the idea of doing it on the actual graves of children who'd died in the Scholomance. "
MC drinks some intoxicating substance offered to her that is almost unstomachable, causing hallucinations. Comment about how a pint in the pub would be a better intro to drugs.
" Dancing and music spilled out into the alleyways, everything from traditional songs to modern pop from seventeen different coun- tries, while people rapidly got drunk on liquor and enchanted vapors and relief. "
Lots on the theme of resisting the temptation to compromise and "change from the inside" or use by sort of alliance or help from the enclaves.
Other
One spell makes the "wee" on the ground jump back up to soak the perpetrator. Another spell cleans him up quickly.
"I imagine it's always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren't going to, up to the last minute, until you do. "
" "She took a single embryo, and sacrificed it to create avery small maw-mouth, he said. "'But where enclave-builders use that power to establish a foundation, she fed it back into the child she had crushed. That was how she fused the two to- gether to create the being of her vision: a wizard directly in contact with the void. A wizard who was also a maw-mouth. "
"
Liesel's father cheated on his powerful wife and wants to keep Liesel (bastard child) a secret. Looks like the wife killed her mother. El explaining /excusing Liesel for everything she's been doing because it makes sense she'd want to get revenge on that woman.
Contains "tarot rituals and initiation rites and primitivism", mostly in a superficial-because-it-sounds-mysterious way.
Super gross maw-mouth gore. Naked body curled up in the center of it.
A few sentences about witches being burned at the stake and not being able to escape
"the same phrases being repeated over and over in different ones: eternal life, longevity, deathlessness, and I understood in a mingling of relief and rage:
Return to plot point from the first book, when a family member tried to kill El after hearing the prophecy by taking her up the mountain and leaping off with her because that was "the only way he could have borne to save the world from me."
Language:
Lots of "bl**dy" / "bl**dy h*ll" , "w*nker", "f-" and variations
Also several occurrences of "sh*g", "b*ll*cks", "up yours", "sh-", "o-m-g-" /"g-d", "d- head", "hot as Satan's t*t", "b*st*rd"
Sexual content:
Several implicit invitations to "sh*g", including an invitation for permanent threesome situation.
Three sex scenes - 2 with Liesel (FF), one of them multi-round, and one with Orion (MF). All are sensory-explicit but not visually graphic beyond the kissing and clothing removal. All are 1 full page or longer.
2pp FF, other relevant context: Portrayed as "belly-deep relief", "ridiculously easy", and sheepishly called a "moment of weakness" when her friend calls her out.
" Aadhya was fundamentally right, and I knew it. I still couldn't be sorry; even now I felt almost pathetically grateful to Liesel for the ocean-deep relief of physical release and dreamless sleep she'd given me, not to mention getting me here. "
" "I'm warning you right now that if you move into London enclave and start a ménage with Liesel and Alfie, I'm hunting you down with chains," Aadhya said. "
" "Yes." Liesel said. "Are you thinking I made things worse? I promise you," she went on, with the grim tones of experience, "to feel good in your body makes things better, even when they are very bad, and they are." "
Worldview / world-building:
Mum always asks "the universe" for food or a ride and is obliged. El can't tell if it's different for her because she's scowling or ppl are "looking at a dark-skinned girl instead of my pink-and-gold mum smiling at them, and not being able to tell only makes me scowl the more."
More "the universe" everywhere, e.g. "if the universe wills".
" The place was in beautiful repair--fresh paint in vivid colors, golden Buddhas, gilt everywhere-and it was the opposite of that pagan playground in Sintra: people still worshipped here, true believers and not just playing at it, all of them reaching out for something past the limits of reality. "
" It was Mum's choice, and I knew that at the heart, that was the choice to care about, to forgive, even the Philippa Waxes and Claire Browns of the world; even the Ophelias; the most horrid and miserable people, who didn't deserve to be forgiven, because otherwise no one deserved to be forgiven. "
" "If ever Ophelia tries to lure you back there,"' she said, "whatever she does, whatever evil she threatens, you must not go. You must hold tight to the memory of the pain I gave you, and all the love and comfort we would have given you and never did, and know that this is true: it was better. You must never fall into her power." "
Bitter view of systemic inequality and the evil "sacrifices" that wizards with means make to gain their own advantage.
Revisiting a gay couple brought up in Book 2: " It was too much, a debt you could spend the rest of your life trying to pay off, and that was even before you got to Ibrahim and Yaakov's additional problem that unless they went it totally alone, then whichever family side they lived with, the other one of them would face suspicion and possibly even hatred, from the surrounding mundanes if not literally the other's relations. But everything would change if Ibrahim could offer instead a place in Dubai enclave, which is big and modern and firmly aboard the tolerance train, meaning they'll welcome anyone, regardless of their religion or their nationality or who they like to go to bed with, and let them live exactly as they like, so long as they're either spectacularly powerful in some way or have twenty years' worth of mana to buy their way in with. "
Drugs
" Yancy was there with about twenty other wizards between the ages of fourteen and eighty, all sprawled out comfortably over the green and the stones, some of them drinking but most of them gathered round a big cast-iron pot set up in one of the lanes with a balefire going underneath it. It had a lid with two big stovepipe openings that were belching irregular gouts of a heavy, iridescent smoke; they caught it in big carved-bone drinking horns and put their faces inside to breathe it in. "
" And meanwhile all the teachers at school would glare at me in particular whenever they read us the disapproving lectures about drugs: the half-Indian commune kid, obviously I was a yogurt weaving tofu welding friend of Henry the Eighth. Ha. I couldn't actually have risked any drugs even if anyone had been willing to offer me some, except the boring kind that just make you better at homework and drudgery. It's hard enough fending off every mal within a hundred miles without being in an altered state of mind that odds-on would make me believe they were even more powerful, which would cause them to in fact be so. That said, I would actually have been quite prepared to try some interesting magical drugs at a party full of grown wizards who could probably kill mals even while drunk and high as Valhalla, and do some dancing along with them It's some- thing wasn't likely to have many opportunities to try. But I didn't particularly like the idea of doing it on the actual graves of children who'd died in the Scholomance. "
MC drinks some intoxicating substance offered to her that is almost unstomachable, causing hallucinations. Comment about how a pint in the pub would be a better intro to drugs.
" Dancing and music spilled out into the alleyways, everything from traditional songs to modern pop from seventeen different coun- tries, while people rapidly got drunk on liquor and enchanted vapors and relief. "
Lots on the theme of resisting the temptation to compromise and "change from the inside" or use by sort of alliance or help from the enclaves.
Other
One spell makes the "wee" on the ground jump back up to soak the perpetrator. Another spell cleans him up quickly.
"I imagine it's always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren't going to, up to the last minute, until you do. "
" "She took a single embryo, and sacrificed it to create a
Liesel's father cheated on his powerful wife and wants to keep Liesel (bastard child) a secret. Looks like the wife killed her mother. El explaining /excusing Liesel for everything she's been doing because it makes sense she'd want to get revenge on that woman.
Contains "tarot rituals and initiation rites and primitivism", mostly in a superficial-because-it-sounds-mysterious way.