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A review by ergative
The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison
3.75
Like Witness for the Dead, this had a sort of unfocused plot structure, lots of individual events winding around each other, anchored by Celehar's internal landscape which--despite being so central to so many events--doesn't really change much over the course of the book. A very slow, gentle opening up of a mostly closed-off but gentle person.
Unlike previous books, the use of pronouns for conveying intimacy felt much less consistent. People regularly blend informal 'I' and formal 'you' in the same conversation in a way I don't recall from previuos books (but possibly a reasonable middle ground between extreme formality and extreme intimacy); and there are cases where the same people in the same conversation use 'thou' in one sentence and 'you' in the next. This is a pity; I really liked this approach to linguistic worldbuilding in these books, and I would like to see it maintained more consistently.
Unlike previous books, the use of pronouns for conveying intimacy felt much less consistent. People regularly blend informal 'I' and formal 'you' in the same conversation in a way I don't recall from previuos books (but possibly a reasonable middle ground between extreme formality and extreme intimacy); and there are cases where the same people in the same conversation use 'thou' in one sentence and 'you' in the next. This is a pity; I really liked this approach to linguistic worldbuilding in these books, and I would like to see it maintained more consistently.