bluejayreads's reviews
816 reviews

Did not finish book. Stopped at 23%.

My first DNF book of 2024, and it has nothing to do with the book's subject. I'm a huge Ancient Egypt fan and I loved the idea of a story focused on women's power and featuring the daughter of one of the very few female pharaohs. But it really failed in execution. Malayna has clearly done her research and knows a lot about the history and the time period. But it feels anachronistic in a way that's really hard to place. I think it has something to do with the characters, who feel like a variety of modern people who just happen to live in a world that looks like Ancient Egypt. Modern values and opinions seem plastered over the trappings of the time period. Though it's definitely not a YA book, stylistically it seems closer to something written for the younger teens. It also feels unpolished, like either the writer is either fairly young or this is one of their earliest forays into fiction. The characters are unremarkable and don't seem to have any real goals or desires. Supposedly they have relationships to each other, but there's never a sense that our titular protagonist actually cares about any of them. I think Neferura's emotions were the most confusing thing about her, because they never seemed to fit what a normal person would feel. Simple, inane things leave her struggling not to cry from sheer frustration; her mother's casual cruelty doesn't seem to even register. I feel like a real pharaoh's daughter would not make it to adulthood being as naïve and gullible as she is - she'd either get wise or be chewed up by the allegedly-ruthless court. And don't even get me started on the body-shaming and fat-shaming in this book. The very first line is Neferura getting body-shamed by her mother. In the first twenty-four pages, she is fat-shamed by her mother twice, by her own narration three or four times, and she fat-shames her mother once. It's excessive and entirely unnecessary to anything in the story. So on the whole, while I think the concept is interesting and I would definitely be open to a book exploring Ancient Egypt with Nefertiti's daughter, this book does not do that idea justice.

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Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

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5.0

I am not generally into books about time travel shenanigans. Not because I have anything against time travel in particular, but it just seems to be rare to have it done well, or at least in a way that I find enjoyable to read about. But, as usual, Sir Terry pulled it off.

I think a lot of that has to do with the character of Commander Samuel Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Due to some unfortunate wrong-place, wrong-time magical happenstance, Vimes ends up in his own past – the Ankh-Morpork of many decades ago, when he had just joined the Watch and things were, objectively, much worse than they are now. But one of the things that I appreciate most about Commander Vimes is that he is a relentlessly practical man. I recognize a kindred spirit in that, but it also means that the situation may be weird and fairly unpleasant, but he gets right on with dealing with it, with very little pining or philosophizing and absolutely no dithering or worrying about paradoxes.

That’s not to say that he’s emotionless, though. In fact, what makes Vimes so stellar as a character to me throughout this whole series is that he is competent, practical, and stays focused on the problem(s) in front of him instead of wasting time with excessive introspection or philosophizing, but he also has a strong set of personal values, cares deeply for the people around him, and feels his emotions intensely. He doesn’t do the introspection on the page because he doesn’t need to; he already knows himself thoroughly and is in control. To use the cliché, he is in touch with his feelings, but though they may tempt him to act against his values, they never control him. In so many ways, he is a paragon of positive masculinity – competent, principled, practical, honorable, caring, willing and able to experience great depth of feeling, never letting his feelings overrule him. He’s the rare character who is great to read about as a character, and also someone I think I would like, or at least respect, in real life.

Apparently this is the Sam Vimes Appreciation Review. That does make sense, because he really is the star of this book. Sure, there’s the whole time travel thing. There’s the murderer he’s tracking who also got zapped into the past and has the same future knowledge that Vimes does. There’s the fact that this point in the past is a particularly sticky one for Ankh-Morpork. There’s the sheer delight of a character being spectacularly good at what they do (some of it because Vimes has future knowledge, but much of it because he’s just a really, really good watchman). All of that is quite enjoyable to read. But this is a book that pushes Commander Vimes to his limits, and that means that he, as a character, is really what carries this story.

The Discworld series doesn’t generally shy away from getting dark in places. But this book is probably the darkest that I’ve read so far, and since the City Watch sub-series tends to be less funny in general, it’s not tempered with humor into something darkly funny. It’s just dark. Not at all in a bad way, to be sure. As I said, these events push Vimes to his limit, and it’s hard to do that without delving into some darkness. But even in terms of sheer numbers of deaths and injuries, this has got to be one of the more violent Discworld books. It’s not unnecessary violence when it comes to the plot, but it definitely goes (and takes Commander Vimes to) some very dark places.

I can’t necessarily say that Night Watch has replaced Interesting Times as my favorite Discworld book. The two are so different in mood, tone, theme, and content that it’s hard to do a direct comparison. But I can definitely say that Night Watch is among my favorite Discword books. If you like Commander Vimes as a character, love stories where protagonists are pushed to their limits, or just enjoy the very specific trope where a character is sent back in time and has to relive a difficult part of their life from a new perspective, I think you’ll agree.

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Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

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3.0

I keep forgetting that Jenny Odell writes works of philosophy, not how-to books - although to be fair, her titles are incredibly misleading on that point. I read and enjoyed her book How to Do Nothing, but was mildly disappointed to find that it wasn't actually about "how to" anything. I don't know why I expected anything different from her second book, but I did in fact have the ridiculous expectation that this book might tell me something about discovering a life beyond the clock. Instead, just like with How to Do Nothing, I got only philosophy, in this case philosophy of time. Admittedly, quite a bit of it was interesting. The section discussing how our modern concept of time came to be what it is was quite fascinating. But much of it is about how other cultures conceptualize time differently, how nature's time scales are different than the ones we humans created during the Industrial Revolution, and mostly about how much climate change is destroying everything. It was something I noticed in How to Do Nothing too, but it's much stronger here. I hesitate to call it "climate despair," but Jenny's writing is clearly and overwhelmingly influenced by fear and grief over the climate crisis. This in itself isn't necessarily bad. What I struggled with most was actually connecting anything this book said to, well, anything. It could very well be nothing to do with the book and just be about me, but so much of this felt difficult to grasp, and whatever I did grasp felt abstract. There was a lot of information here, but it didn't feel like a coherent narrative so much as an acquaintance handing me a box full of papers, each one containing a variety of facts and opinions about time. My reaction to that scenario would probably be the same as my reaction to this book: "Great, thanks! But what am I supposed to do with this?" And that's a question that Saving Time never really answers.

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Liftoff: Couch to Barbell by Casey Johnston

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5.0

This is a rare book that does exactly what it says on the tin - it will take you from couch (don't know what you're doing with weights) to barbell (can lift a barbell, have enough knowledge to do so without hurting yourself). It's straightforward, no frills and no fancy layouts and not even any pictures (though it does come with a spreadsheet full of video links) and has the general vibe of a self-published book in the most positive way possible - it doesn't have a publisher insisting on a certain page count or a specific narrative voice, so it skips all that and goes straight to providing practical, useful information. It also spends a lot, arguably more, time on the stuff you do outside of the gym to support your weightlifting journey - mainly eating and resting. I understand the logic with that, though, because for those of us who are aware of modern exercise culture (read: all of us), the idea of resting, not working out all the time, and eating more to fuel growing muscles are the parts we're probably going to struggle with more than the actual "go to the gym and lift heavy stuff" part. And as someone with a history of eating disorders, I found the whole idea suspiciously easy. You're telling me I can lift some weights for around half an hour three times a week, eat half again as much as I have been eating, and still see health and strength (if not necessarily weight or size) results? Sounds fake. But also I'm five weeks into this program as of writing this review and it seems to be working so far. Turns out for me, lifting heavy stuff is infinitely more enjoyable than anything cardio-related. And though I've been in recovery from my eating disorder since 2017, doing this program has made it feel possible to be recovered. Take that with a grain of salt because it's just one person's perspective, but I've found it incredible.

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How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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4.25

A very strange book. It's basically a series of short stories combined into one volume, but the characters are all connected in some ways and taken together they tell the story of how life on Earth was decimated by a plague and climate change and what people did afterwards. The final connections and the overarching narrative of the story doesn't become clear until the last chapter/story, which pulls everything together. It's also an exercise in memory, because the whole thing fits together like an intricate puzzle and if you aren't able to remember details you're going to miss a lot of the connections. It's an emotionally heavy story of an uncomfortably possible apocalypse and it made me tear up quite a few times, but also didn't quite have the emotional impact I think it could have had because I was so busy trying to keep track of how all the different stories fit together and place them in the timeline and the overarching narrative. However, I have a notably terrible memory, so that may be less of a problem for other people. It's unusual and clever, an interesting story told in a unique way, and worth the read if you like apocalypses with a sci-fi edge or if you just want a book unlike anything you've read before.

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Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

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3.0

I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore.

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty.

Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.

One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers.

Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book.

The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually.

I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice.

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Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

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3.5

Very weird, very short, very disturbing. It had some strong magical realism elements, but since the narrator was the only person to experience anything weird, it didn't feel like magical realism so much as one of those books where you're not sure if there's actually something supernatural going on or if it's all in the protagonist's head. But the back cover also calls it "deeply rooted in the contemporary Native American experience," so maybe it's actually including a particular tribe's understanding of or mythology around ghosts and I'm just missing the context to understand. This whole novella gives me a feeling that I'm missing something. By itself, it's a disturbing, incredibly dark horror story that never quite answers the question of whether or not any of this actually happened. But I also get the sense that there's deeper ideas that I just don't have the context or the analysis stills to really grasp.

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Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans

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4.0

This was one of my less-researched picks. It made it onto my reading list somehow, but by the time I grabbed it from the library I’d forgotten what it was really about or why. The only thing I knew about it was there was some kind of magic involved (obvious from the title) and the protagonist was queer in some capacity.

So I went in with very little context. But to be fair, I don’t think more context would have necessarily helped with my primary complaint – I had no idea what was going on with this world. The names were all long and hard to keep straight, especially since most characters had a first name, a last name, and a title, each of which could be used for the same character in different contexts. I got better at it as the story went on and I spent more time with the characters, but almost every name in the book at some point gave me a moment of “wait, do I know this person?” And the worldbuilding was clearly detailed and done with a lot of care and thought, but I also had a really hard time figuring things out. Part of the city fell into the sea, but I think it’s still around just a couple hundred feet lower than the rest of the city? I don’t really understand how the Bravi tribes work or what their role actually is in the city. There’s a huge class divide between the azatani and everyone else, but I’m not clear what defines an azatani or even whether it’s a racial category or a title. The magic system is fascinating and complicated but there’s a clear difference between alchemy, which is acceptable but regulated, and sorcery, which is very illegal (and I think “magic” is a separate third thing, maybe?).

So while the world was quite detailed and vibrant, I really didn’t have any idea of how it worked, or the rules of the magic system, or anything. (Although part of the plot of the book is figuring out that hte old rules of the magic system didn’t work anymore, so I’ll forgive that one.) But the weird part about the story, and I guess what best illustrates how enjoyable it really is, is that I didn’t mind all that. Sure, I wasn’t really sure how all the pieces of the world fit together, but even the confusing parts were just relentlessly cool. Daring street gangs getting up to hijinks, plucky underdogs who happen to be really good at what they do, and of course a whole lot of high-stakes magical shenanigans – it was a ton of fun. I enjoyed Siyon, I enjoyed the magical adventure, I enjoyed that it felt like a “protagonist has a big goal but accomplishing it is way more complicated than initially thought” plot and an “I only wanted to do this one small thing how did it get so out of hand” plot at the same time. I even in some ways enjoyed trying to fit new pieces of information into the story and the world.

This is a hard book to review because it absolutely has some pretty major flaws. Normally I wouldn’t even finish a book where I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on the world. But somehow this book managed to be so absolutely stellar in every single other aspect – plot, characters, romance, descriptions, the writing itself, coolness factor, being just plain fun and interesting to read – that it downgraded “I have no idea how this fantasy world works” from a dealbreaker to a minor annoyance. Which says a lot about the quality of the book itself, I think. This is also the author’s debut novel, so I have extremely high hopes for future books overcoming the worldbuildling issues. I fully intend to read book two.

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Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No

4.75

I still occasionally talk about the AP English Literature class I took my freshman year of high school. As I wrote in 2022, “Every single novel I had to read for the class was about divorce, marital infidelity, or divorcing over marital infidelity. All of these novels were the ‘literary’ kind. And I hated every. single. book.”

Fleishman is in Trouble is a literary, largely plotless novel about a middle-aged man going through a divorce and having a lot of sex to try to deal with it. So I bring up this literature class yet again to emphasize how astonishing even I find it that not only did I pick up this book, and not only did I finish it, I actually enjoyed it. (Up until the end, which I’ll get to in a second.)

These characters and this world feel like the embodiment of a “live your best life,” “#girlboss,” “you can have it all” aesthetically-pleasing rich-girl Instagram account. You know the type. The primary characters in this book (a New York City doctor divorcing his millionaire publicist wife) are aggressively unrelatable to me (a secretary living on 75% of the national average salary in the Midwest). It has very little in terms of a plot. But the thing that this book does so well, and that made me eager to keep reading despite all these factors that should have made it feel exactly like the books I hated in AP Lit, is that it so perfectly captures the tensions of living your “best life” in the modern world. You’re already stretched to your breaking point but the mandate of self-actualization demands you do more. You hate these people and everything they stand for and yet you must also fit in and earn their respect, if not admiration. You’ve been dealing with burnout for so long that you can’t even recognize that’s what it is. You simultaneously feel that you’re doing the bare minimum and that you’re doing too much. You just want those closest to you to recognize – not even necessarily appreciate, just recognize – how much time and effort you’re putting into keeping so many different things running – for them! – but all they ever seem to notice is the things you don’t do.

I have a lot of feelings about modern life, how doing it “perfectly” requires multiple conflicting things to be true at the same time, and how keeping on top of everything you’re “supposed” to do won’t result in a feeling of accomplishment or peace but in constantly feeling stressed and behind. And this book puts those feelings into words better than I ever could. In fact, I think making the story about rich people living dramatic lives in New York City is actually a better choice than something more easily relatable. Big lives enable the problems to become bigger, more obvious, almost caricatured to make the point. And it works.

Toby and Rachel are both not great people for different reasons. They’re both victims but they’re both victims of their own decisions. Their multiple penthouses and multi-million-dollar deals set them a world away from most things relatable to the average reader. But if the question is relatability, I will always choose Rachel. Toby has his own struggles and his story isn’t bad. Rachel throughout the book is portrayed as a monster. And though she’s definitely not as terrible as Toby thinks, she’s not a good person. But despite possessing wealth that I can only dream of, despite having the type of high-powered job that I neither want nor am likely to get, she was still relatable. She was relatable in being a person doing too much in a world that always demands more, and in being a woman and primary breadwinner in a heterosexual relationship that is unequal not due to any particular malice on the part of her male partner, but because the system of heterosexual relationships is inherently unequal and he has never bothered to consider how he might be passively benefitting at her expense.

The other thing that this book does wonderfully, but more subtly, was explore both sides of this kind of relational destruction. Even through the filter of Toby’s hurt and rage, I could still easily understand Rachel’s thought process and emotional state. But with Toby as the protagonist, I also saw his thought process. It was, above all, a failure to communicate on both sides. But it did do an interesting job of illustrating how even though it can feel like this person is just overtly refusing to meet your needs, chances are they also feel like you’re refusing to meet their needs. (Although the communication scholar in me wants to yell at them that if they were better about communicating what it actually was they needed they could avoid a lot of problems.)

The final thing I want to touch on as I start bringing what could be a really long review into some sort of ending is not so much something the book does or accomplishes, but a major theme that it touches on. And that is the theme of how relationships threaten female identity. A single woman, unattached, can be herself. A married woman must remove some of herself to make room for her new identity of wife. A mother must remove even more to take on the new identity of mother. Both of these other identities, taken on not because the woman chose to but because of her ties to someone else, have the potential to grow and push out even more of an individual identity – motherhood especially, until there is no more I, only Mother. I did not expect a book largely focusing on the man’s side to come out in such support of the woman, and women everywhere. It’s a deep, subtle exploration that may not even be recognized for people who don’t relate but will be blatant and resonant for anyone who is or has experienced similar feelings.

I went through most of this book ready and eager to write a glowing review (in case you can’t tell from the fact that my review so far has been so positive). There were a couple points where I actually had to stop myself from starting the review before I finished it because I was so eager to share how good this book was. And there’s a reason for that, and that reason played out especially true for this book. That reason is sometimes the ending doesn’t live up to the rest of the book. And when I say “ending” here, I’m mainly talking about the last few pages. The whole long, rambling story up to that point subtly and masterfully explored unique ideas and interesting themes – I hesitate to say “the human condition” because that’s very broad and also somewhat pretentious, but perhaps “the modern human condition” is fitting. And then in the last few pages, this previously rich and subtle book starts jumping up and down waving its arms in the air and shouting, “Hey! Here’s all the themes we’ve been talking about for the past 400 pages! Pretty neat, huh? Here’s an easy and quick answer to these big questions!” It felt jarring and discordant with the rest of the book, like the author didn’t quite know how to end it but wasn’t comfortable leaving the readers with no answers. It also felt cheap and almost dismissive, as if nothing it touches on actually matters because there’s a quick answer. Though it didn’t technically ruin my experience of reading the rest of the book, it thoroughly dampened my enthusiasm.

Sometimes books just come to you at the right time. I can guarantee that if I’d have picked this up even a few years ago, I probably would have found it dull and unlikeable. In fact, a few years ago I probably wouldn’t have picked it up at all. But I think I’m at the point in my life where I can appreciate the thematic resonance of a book about divorce featuring generally unlikeable characters. Despite my feelings about the ending, I still appreciate what the rest of the book had to say. It was definitely a different reading experience than my usual fare, but sometimes looking somewhere new leads to a surprise gem. And this is a book worth reading.

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Hild by Nicola Griffith

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

5.0

This book has been in the back of my head for a while. I saw it somewhere, possibly a bookstore when it first came out, and the idea stuck in my head. I'm not sure if it was the idea of a fictionalized story of a saint's childhood, or the idea that it was set in a place and historical period that I know nothing about but is far enough back to be interesting to me, or the concept of a young girl in a very man-centric society gaining power and influence through her own cunning. Or possibly it was the cover, which is not all that spectacular but for some reason grabbed me. Whatever it was, Hild has been lodged in my thoughts for a long time, and when it finally resurfaced again I decided to give it a shot.

It took me a long time to get through this book. Not because it was slow or boring or anything, but because it's long and dense with detail, and also because I read it as an ebook which is not the best format for me to actually get through books quickly. I didn't realize before picking it up that it was written by the same person who wrote Spear which I DNF'ed last year. But I think my issue with Spear might have been format-related, because Hild is told in an almost identical style - straightforward and unadorned, heavy on telling over showing - and I enjoyed this book so much.

I normally am not much for historical fiction because I usually find it boring. But a lot of that is because I just don't find the time periods from the 1700s-ish on to be all that interesting - I much prefer ancient history. The British Isles in the 600s was far enough back to find interesting, and Nicola Griffith clearly did her research. I easily got wrapped up in the day-to-day of life in this world, which was richly detailed, fascinating, and not really what I would have expected. Though it wasn't a central conflict of the book, there was always a simmering undercurrent of struggling against the land and weather for survival, which I suppose might have been an accurate feeling for the time period.

I know that this is a novel and therefore it's hard to figure out the line between "accurate to research" and "made up for a better story" and therefore probably not accurate to say that I learned something. But in addition to being absorbed in a good story, I do feel like I learned something. Whether or not the wars and political machinations are true to history, and even if the details weren't necessarily how things would have happened, I feel like I have a sense of what life, on the whole, might have been like in this time and place. And that was really cool.

I've been going on about the world for a while now, and that's because everything that happens in this book is grounded in the reality of land and geography and the peoples who inhabit it. But what really made this book sing for me is Hild herself. She's both an interesting, engaging character in her own right and a type of character that I really love to read about. It starts with her as a very small child, suddenly the only heir of a threat to the throne, being guided (or some might say manipulated) by her mother into a very specific role. But she is clever and observant and carves out a place for herself in the seer role. As the reader, I got to see inside her head and her thought processes and I know that everything she "sees" is just a prediction based on other patterns she's observed. But even from her own point of view she comes across as a strange and uncanny child and young woman, and even though I know there's no magic involved, I completely understand why others call her a witch. She inhabits the strange space of a child who had to grow up too fast, who is always in danger and must stay three steps ahead of everyone else to protect her life and the lives of those she loves, and who therefore acts and reacts in ways that someone on the outside might describe as strange and fey.

I think what I loved so much about this book, though, is that it covers so much. There's not particularly a central plot. Hild's driving goal is to keep herself and her loved ones safe from all the dangers the ever-shifting alliances and machinations of the power players of the day. She claws out as much agency as she can under the circumstances, but the context in which she acts is within the court of Edwin Overking, whose goal is to be king over all the kings of the land that will eventually be known as England. There are conflicts and challenges and small periods with defined goals, but overall it unfolds much as life does - piece by piece, event by event, with little in the way of a structured plot.

But the story opens with Hild as a young child, maybe five, and ends just as she blooms into an adult. And through it all, the world changes around her, and she grows and changes - from a child working hard to fit into the seer role and please the king to a young woman with her own agenda. I loved her grow into her role and then beyond it, pushing the boundaries. I loved her for her in-between-ness, a woman taller than most men, deft with healing herbs and spindle and equally deft with the war dagger she wears at her hip like the king's fighting men. I loved her for the way she refused to take anything sitting down, determined to understand what had happened and what might happen, taking every opportunity she had to turn the situation her way.

This review is already absurdly long and I haven't even touched on everything I could say about this book. It's very long but it's exactly as long as it needs to be. It is rich and atmospheric and so steeped in something undefinable and deeply engrossing that despite everything happening being completely earthly, there's a mystic feeling that gives the whole story an air of being some kind of fantasy. I didn't know going into this that there was a sequel, but there's space for one and I want it. This book was so good and so much; I want to see where Hild directs the world next.

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bluejayreads's reviews 816 reviews

bluejayreads's reviews
816 reviews