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A review by naye
The Scarab Path by Adrian Tchaikovsky
4.0
What a thrilling installment! Definitely my favorite to date, with a couple of deeply satisfying emotional developments (I may have been into the Che/Talric ship for more books than I want to admit, so that final confrontation had my heart doing somersaults) and a fantastic, intriguing plot. Definitely four and a half stars!
The mystery of Khanaphes was incredibly well structured - hints enough to show that there was definitely more than superstition to it, and then the slow horror of the reveal. Should have guessed Slugs, especially as they are referred to in earlier books as a mythical kinden, but I was happy to be surprised by that, and really fascinated by what it all adds to the world building.
Again though, this is not quite a five star book for me. It's because of personal issues, so I still warmly recommend the books to anyone looking for inventive fantasy with amazing world building and characters you end up deeply invested in.
The rest of this is just going into details if anyone is interested in why it didn't fully hit the spot for me personally.
Some of it are personal issues I've covered in previous reviews (a world without queers is not a world I can fully endorse) and also a combination of battle-description fatigue (we get it - lots of people are dying in horrifying ways, now could we get back to the plot?) and incandescent loathing of the Nice Guy trope deployed for sympathy (I think? I obviously felt the exact opposite of sympathy) and having our amazing Che forced to do all the emotional labor to fix something that was NOT HER PROBLEM but it seemed the story wanted me to believe that a man obsessed with a woman for five books is at least half the woman's fault? Nope. Nope nope nope nope do not put ANY of that on her shoulders that is all in Totho's head and I kind of wish she'd just stabbed it out of him. Sorry - that's what you get for being a self-pity whine fest obsessed with a woman who has repeatedly turned you down.
Also REAL uncomfortable with how Totho's self-loathing is tied to (fantasy) race issues and how a lot of the "savages" and backwards folks are basically fantasy people of color, while the learned/civilized folks are fantasy Europeans. Previous installments haven't been quite so explicit, having various pseudo-European and Asian cultures representing the good/bad/neutral spectrum of enlightenment, imperialism and industrialism, but here the coding of the various groups was hugely cringey. I don't think it was intended to be read that way, but... yeah, whoops, that's what happens when books don't exist in a perfect vacuum.
The mystery of Khanaphes was incredibly well structured - hints enough to show that there was definitely more than superstition to it, and then the slow horror of the reveal. Should have guessed Slugs, especially as they are referred to in earlier books as a mythical kinden, but I was happy to be surprised by that, and really fascinated by what it all adds to the world building.
Again though, this is not quite a five star book for me. It's because of personal issues, so I still warmly recommend the books to anyone looking for inventive fantasy with amazing world building and characters you end up deeply invested in.
The rest of this is just going into details if anyone is interested in why it didn't fully hit the spot for me personally.
Some of it are personal issues I've covered in previous reviews (a world without queers is not a world I can fully endorse) and also a combination of battle-description fatigue (we get it - lots of people are dying in horrifying ways, now could we get back to the plot?) and incandescent loathing of the Nice Guy trope deployed for sympathy (I think? I obviously felt the exact opposite of sympathy) and having our amazing Che forced to do all the emotional labor to fix something that was NOT HER PROBLEM but it seemed the story wanted me to believe that a man obsessed with a woman for five books is at least half the woman's fault? Nope. Nope nope nope nope do not put ANY of that on her shoulders that is all in Totho's head and I kind of wish she'd just stabbed it out of him. Sorry - that's what you get for being a self-pity whine fest obsessed with a woman who has repeatedly turned you down.
Also REAL uncomfortable with how Totho's self-loathing is tied to (fantasy) race issues and how a lot of the "savages" and backwards folks are basically fantasy people of color, while the learned/civilized folks are fantasy Europeans. Previous installments haven't been quite so explicit, having various pseudo-European and Asian cultures representing the good/bad/neutral spectrum of enlightenment, imperialism and industrialism, but here the coding of the various groups was hugely cringey. I don't think it was intended to be read that way, but... yeah, whoops, that's what happens when books don't exist in a perfect vacuum.