A review by bluestjuice
The Descent of Monsters by Neon Yang

4.0

I liked this the best of the Tensorate books so far, probably because I felt that the novella format (and the journal/reports/documents format) really worked best here. With both of the previous books, there was so much story included that the novella format felt too brief, like I was being cheated out of an immersion in the fascinating world and characters that Yang has spun. Here, the focus is an investigation on one particular incident, and the scope of the story is sufficiently limited to really allow the writing to shine. It's clever and creative writing, to be sure - there is an entire report that consists of 75% marked out sections! The primary character is also a new one, which worked as well despite us not having a great deal of time to get to know them very deeply. A work of fiction this short works more like a long short story in many ways than a novel, and I felt that we were able to get sufficient glimpses to keep our interest, while also having small revelations and pleasing moments with longer-established characters from elsewhere in the series. It seems that Yang's purpose in this series is not necessarily to fill out a particular narrative arc - I don't get the sense that there is an enormous metastory that is being rolled out in snippets, episode by episode. Rather, I think their purpose seems to be to explore the world and dynamics that they have written into place, and each book may simply capture a slice of what is happening in the ongoing drama of the Protectorate and the lives of Mokoya and Akeha. That can work for me.