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connor1736 's review for:
Written in Red
by Anne Bishop
If you enjoyed My Little Pony, then you’ll love Written in Red.
In this alternative North America, rather than being inhabited by Native Americans before the arrival of European colonists, there are crazy-powerful shapeshifters instead. These “Others” include vampires, werewolves, and other more unique creatures. Somehow, the European colonists had the balls to settle in America anyway, and now try their best to coexist with beings far more powerful than themselves.
Our main character, Meg, is a cassandra sangue. This means that when she gets cut, she receives a prophecy (and sometimes a bonus orgasm). Before the events of this book, she is held captive by people who sought to profit off of her prophecies. She spent her entire life being trained to recognize objects in images so that she can interpret them in prophecies.
Put another way, Meg is basically trained as a shitty neural network. I bet she would nail the “select all images that have a traffic light” CAPTCHA if asked.
The book begins with Meg escaping captivity and finding refuge among the Others. We then spend 70% of the book discovering how exceptional she is at delivering mail. When we aren’t watching her deliver mail, we instead see her chiding grown men who decide to act like children in her office. It’s kinda cute and funny, but also, I’d like a protagonist with a little more autonomy instead of just being a mom.
The best part of this book by far were all the Other side characters. Anne Bishop does a great job of creating characters who are very much not human but are trying to fit in with the humans. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings and small conflicts, but there are also so many brilliant heartwarming moments, too. There are a ton of characters to keep track of, but almost all of them have distinct personalities and a well-defined purpose in the story. I did not like the human characters quite as much (e.g. Monte, Kowalski, Darrell), but the Others are fantastically written.
Who would I recommend this book to? Honestly, this reads a lot like a Brandon Sanderson book, in my opinion. Hear me out:
• This book has a very slow-moving plot through most of the book, with an extremely fast-paced (and somewhat predictable) ending.
• The prose is simple, and there is lot of focus on the minutiae of characters’ lives.
• There is a large cast of characters, each with their own flaws, but you grow to love all of them anyway.
• There are very clear-cut villains who don’t have a ton of nuance.
• There are lots of different kinds of magic going on.
Taken as a whole, this was a really enjoyable story.
In this alternative North America, rather than being inhabited by Native Americans before the arrival of European colonists, there are crazy-powerful shapeshifters instead. These “Others” include vampires, werewolves, and other more unique creatures. Somehow, the European colonists had the balls to settle in America anyway, and now try their best to coexist with beings far more powerful than themselves.
"Do you know the joke about what happened to the dinosaurs? … The Others is what happened to the dinosaurs."
Our main character, Meg, is a cassandra sangue. This means that when she gets cut, she receives a prophecy (and sometimes a bonus orgasm). Before the events of this book, she is held captive by people who sought to profit off of her prophecies. She spent her entire life being trained to recognize objects in images so that she can interpret them in prophecies.
The girls had spent an entire week one year looking at captioned pictures of different kinds of fruit, from fresh to rotted.
Put another way, Meg is basically trained as a shitty neural network. I bet she would nail the “select all images that have a traffic light” CAPTCHA if asked.
The book begins with Meg escaping captivity and finding refuge among the Others. We then spend 70% of the book discovering how exceptional she is at delivering mail. When we aren’t watching her deliver mail, we instead see her chiding grown men who decide to act like children in her office. It’s kinda cute and funny, but also, I’d like a protagonist with a little more autonomy instead of just being a mom.
The best part of this book by far were all the Other side characters. Anne Bishop does a great job of creating characters who are very much not human but are trying to fit in with the humans. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings and small conflicts, but there are also so many brilliant heartwarming moments, too. There are a ton of characters to keep track of, but almost all of them have distinct personalities and a well-defined purpose in the story. I did not like the human characters quite as much (e.g. Monte, Kowalski, Darrell), but the Others are fantastically written.
Who would I recommend this book to? Honestly, this reads a lot like a Brandon Sanderson book, in my opinion. Hear me out:
• This book has a very slow-moving plot through most of the book, with an extremely fast-paced (and somewhat predictable) ending.
• The prose is simple, and there is lot of focus on the minutiae of characters’ lives.
• There is a large cast of characters, each with their own flaws, but you grow to love all of them anyway.
• There are very clear-cut villains who don’t have a ton of nuance.
• There are lots of different kinds of magic going on.
Taken as a whole, this was a really enjoyable story.