bluejayreads's reviews
849 reviews

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.

Content Warnings

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.

Content Warnings

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.

Content Warnings

Strike the Zither by Joan He

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3.25

I didn't realize when I picked this up that I'd already read one book by this author before - or at least attempted to read, as I DNF'ed Descendant of the Crane in 2021. But the back cover on this one sounded much more interesting, and I didn't DNF the other book for being bad, just because I wasn't able to get into it - which could very easily have been more about my mood than the book itself. So I gave this one a shot.

And at first, I was really glad I did. I didn't love the world-building - I've read too many fantasies set in actual ancient China, so this Chinese-inspired world felt like a discordant mishmash of ideas instead of a cohesive world, but I could live with that. What I did like was Zephyr, who was clever, calculating, always three steps ahead of everyone else (a trait I love in a character), and some intriguing combination of dedicated to her warlordess and desperate to prove herself useful. And even though the plot involved a lot of politics, it wasn't slow and managed to involve a fair bit of action and intrigue along the way.

The back cover really doesn't tell you much about what's in the book. The infiltration happens almost immediately, and while Crow is definitely an antagonist, he's not really a major player in the story. Just about every bit of the story you think you're going to read wraps up in part one. Then in part two things go way off the rails, and that's where I started to really struggle.

My big criticism of the story itself is that it sacrifices background for speed, and that blunts any potential emotional impact. I don't disagree with the choice - a long setup would have done the story a disservice. But often the reader finds out about crucial pieces of information the moment they're supposed to be connected to an emotional moment, so the emotions have to share my attention with the process of mentally putting this new information into the overarching picture of the book. This also makes the big revelation at the start of part two feel unexpected, but in a jarring, random way. I may have had a different experience if I'd read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Chinese classic that this series is based on, but I haven't. So maybe this is true to the original, but it was still difficult for me.

The problem I had with part two, and the reason I won't be continuing the series, is definitely a case of it's not the book, it's me. A major event at the end of part one and a character's response to it at the beginning of part two resulted in one major character ending up in the body of another major character. I do not like body-swapping. I can't even really explain why, it just makes me extremely uncomfortable. It's worse if the body-swapped characters try to pretend that they are the person whose body they're in, which also happens here. So I spent most of part two wanting to leave the situation but also hoping that the characters would get back to the right bodies, because I was sure I would start to like it again once the body-swapping thing was fixed. But based on the ending and reading the back cover for the sequel, I think the characters are likely to stay in the wrong bodies until near the end of book two. And I do not want to deal with that.

On the whole, this is not a bad book by any means. It had a lot of aspects that didn't do it for me, personally, but that's not a judgement on the book itself. I'm having a hard time expressing any sort of overall opinion about it because the biggest thing I didn't like about it (and quite possibly the smaller thing I didn't like as well) were all matters of personal opinion. I like the ideas, it's well-written, and it kept my interest despite being fairly politics-heavy. It just has some elements that aren't for me, personally - but might be for you.

Content Warnings

Bloodshot by Cherie Priest

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4.0

My literary coming-of-age was in the mid-to-late aughts and early 2010s, beginning around the height of the vampire/paranormal romance era of YA literature and spanning its decline and the rise of dystopia as the hot new teen genre. But despite having a lot of available options for vampire books, I didn't read many vampire books. Vampires just were not interesting to me.

This provides a little bit of context for part of why I didn't expect to like this book. The other parts are that I generally don't tend to enjoy books where solving a mystery/doing detective stuff is a major element, and urban fantasy is not my genre. I also picked up Cherie Priest's Boneshaker many years ago, but never finished it as I found it lame and disappointing. But at a family gathering a few years ago, I somehow got to talking about books with one of my husband's cousins, and she recommended this one. I had my doubts, but I do generally attempt to read books that are recommended to me. So while I fully expected to find it uninteresting, poorly written, and/or leaning towards the pulpy/trashy side, I gave it a shot. And, as you might expect from the fact that this isn't a DNF review, I was pleasantly surprised.

While the standard urban fantasy elements are kept to a minimum (limited, in fact, to two characters being actually vampires and some references to the existence of vampire "Houses" and their politics), the thrust of the plot is a mystery. Raylene is trying to track down and steal some papers. However, it feels less like a detective story and more like an action movie because the government picks up pretty quick that someone is after information they'd rather not have anyone find. So yes, Raylene is trying to follow clues and find what she needs, but this also involves breaking into secure government bases, running across rooftops and rappelling down buildings to evade government agents, and generally feels more like Jason Bourne than Perry Mason. I may not be a fan of straight-up detective stories, but I can appreciate a good old-fashioned following the trail of clues when the antagonists are government agents who aren't afraid to get into a firefight.

But what really carried the story was Raylene herself. I've read my fair share of snarky narrators with lots of commentary, and most of them quickly get annoying, frustrating, or boring. But Cherie Priest actually pulls it off. Raylene is snarky and sarcastic and intersperses the actual telling of the story with a ton of commentary, a "voicey" quality that puts her as a character, not the plot or action, at the heart of the story. And I think it works. "I'm a vampire, a famous thief, and you can hire me to steal things for you" leaves a lot of opportunity to create a more flat character, which can work in a plot-focused story. But Raylene is full of nuance and flaws. She may be really good at what she does, but she also has pretty bad anxiety which leads to overpreparedness, as well as a deep well of compassion that she tries to convince herself doesn't exist and a reckless, almost self-destructive streak that she doesn't yet recognize. Plus, her extreme confidence in her vampirism-enhanced physical abilities gives her a dash of that absurdly powerful protagonist trope that I love so much. I didn't expect such a nuanced character with such an enjoyable voice, and I was surprised and delighed by how much I enjoyed following her through this story. There's a lot of opportunity for growth in future books, and I think that could be really great to watch.

Speaking of future books, I didn't know going into this that it had a sequel - although I probably could have suspected, because what urban fantasy book is a standalone these days? Regardless, this book stopped at a reasonable ending point, but the story itself is definitely not over. I'm not entirely sure if I so much care about how the story ends, but I do want to see what happens with Raylene personally. This is one of those books that nobody would call a masterpiece - it's good and well-written, but it's not deep or profound or thought-provoking. What it is, though, is enjoyable, engaging, and entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, and I will be reading book two, if for no other reason than I really like Raylene.

Content Warnings

A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease by Sara Elise

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3.0

I had really high hopes for this book. The title and back cover sound exactly like something I'm looking for, and I was excited for the perspective that a queer, autistic, polyamorous, and Black & Indigenous author primarily doing creative-type work could bring to the ideas. And as much as I have some reservations about the entire self-help genre, I am still vulnerable to the appeal of the modern iteration of self-help - the kind where instead of teaching you how to do it all, succeed at work, "win" capitalism, etc., they're teaching you how to enjoy life, experience inner peace, and free yourself from the pressures and hurry of capitalism. I know it's basically the same ideas repackaged for a generation that cares more about personal fulfillment than career success, but there's still a part of me that wants a book to tell me how to feel pleasure again.

Anyway. That's what led me to pick up this book and expect to enjoy it immensely. But reading it is such a strange experience. Sara Elise clearly has some deep, interesting ideas and thoughts on how best to live life. But I couldn't really identify what exactly she was trying to say in this book.

Sara Elise is very deeply into things my skeptic husband describes as "woo" - energy healing, astrology, higher powers/Universe Energies, manifestation, Earth wisdom, drugs as a method of spiritual healing, that kind of thing. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but I get strong "Tumblr witch" vibes. (Admittedly, I myself spent a few years as a Tumblr witch, so even though this added some slightly uncomfortable nostalgia to the book, I at least didn't have any trouble parsing some of the unusual phrases and ideas here.) Though I'm still open to some woo, she is way beyond what most people would consider a reasonable amount of it. It's obviously working really well for her, which is great. But if you're not as far as she is on the skeptic-woo spectrum, you'll probably be weirded out by some of this.

Although honestly, there's a lot in here to be weirded out by that's not woo. Sara talks about her commitment to being open and vulnerable. And that includes being extremely, uncomfortably open in this book. If feels like the book form of that person who you just met five minutes ago but is already telling you about their childhood trauma, the years when they did as many drugs as they could get their hands on, and how much they're into BDSM. (All things Sara talks about in this book.) There is a place to be open about your personal struggles and/or sexual proclivities in your book, and that can be done really effectively. But since very little of it seemed to connect to an actual point, I ended up with the same very-uncomfortable-but-don't-want-to-be-rude feeling that you get when someone starts talking about how their parent abused them on a first date. I barely know you and I'm trying to find out how to get more abundance and ease in my life - why are you telling me about your BDSM parties and how your father used to beat you?

I think my biggest criticism of the book is that I am really not sure what it's trying to say. The chapter titles and subheadings have some standard self-help concepts ("Give Yourself Permission to Change," "The Myth of Productivity") and some slightly more interesting concepts ("Invest in Your Pleasure," "Allowing Good Feelings"). I think if you took the headings and used them as an article to write a longform article, you'd get something with more clarity and a more direct point. There's so many different types of content packed into 220 pages that it's hard to combine the variety into something cohesive.

And when I say "types" of content, I do mean types. This isn't just Sara Elise writing a book about a topic. That part is definitely there, but it's also interspersed with a lot of other things.

There are short essays written by other people, several of whom I think are her romantic partners, which range from actually quite interesting ("A Journey in Black Minimalism") to vaguely incomprehensible ("Natural State").
There's a self-portrait of someone else.
There's a literal recipe (for a Roasted Squash and Garlic Ricotta Buckwheat Galette).
There's instructions for how to eat something delicious. I actually read this one to my husband, and he described it as "woo meets vore."
The second-to-last chapter is almost entirely a "minimally edited" transcription of a conversation between Sara and some of her friends, but I'm not sure I believe how real it is because in my experience, real people don't talk like that. (One example, starting on page 190: "Our queered model and practice of friendship defies the way that freedom gets defined by whiteness and by capitalism, so the dominant culture that we're living in defines freedom as an island and that being free means unaccountable and being able to do whatever you want.")
Quotations - Sara quotes a ton of other people in this book. These include bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah, books like Wintering and Do Nothing, Instagram accounts, and podcast episodes. It gave the whole book a strange sense of trying to be academic by including a bunch of citations, but also completely failing because half the time the citation is just something somebody said on social media.
Varous reflection questions are scattered throughout the book, and they're the only actually actionable thing in it.

It's possible my fundamental problem here is that I went in thinking this was something it's not. I was expecting and hoping for a how-to - for Sara to give me the ingredients for me to cook up my own life of abundance and ease. But that's not really what this book is about. I think it's more a combination of philosophy and memoir. Sara isn't here to tell you how you can do this for yourself. Instead, she's here to share her philosophy on living, experiencing life and its sensory pleasures, feeling abundance, and adding more ease into existence, and along with that philosophy share a radically open story of how she built this philosophy and uses it in her own life. Despite how critical this review has been, I don't want to be overly critical. Most of my complaints came from my own expectations and desires for a how-to manual. I think if I had known in advance that it was more a work of personal philosophy, I would have looked at it with different eyes and maybe been better able to see what's actually there. Because I do feel like there's something worthwhile here. I just wasn't able to grasp it.

Content Warnings

The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang

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4.75

I picked this up for two reasons: a nonbinary protagonist and the idea of Joan of Arc but in space. And you know, this book definitely has both of those things. Misery is most definitely nonbinary. And there definitely are Joan of Arc-type elements to the overarching plot (although you probably have to know that's what it's supposed to be to spot them - it's definitely more "Joan of Arc-inspired" than "space opera retelling of Joan of Arc").

But if you go in expecting just that, you are not at all going to be prepared for what *The Genesis of Misery* is going to throw at you. Because like I said, those elements are there, but they are definitely not the main thrust of the story.

Before I go too far, I do want to talk about Misery for a moment. (I'm going to be using she/her pronouns here, because while Misery uses both they/them and she/her, the narrative primarily uses she/her.) She's an interesting character by herself. She's a bit of a troublemaker - not for the sake of making trouble or being rebellious, but because she just has other priorities that rank higher than "obey the rules." One of those priorities is self-preservation. Born with the disease that killed her mother, and experiencing the delusions and hallucinations that the disease causes, her driving motivation at the beginning of the book is survival. And the best way to do that seems to be to convince everyone that the symptoms of her terminal illness are actually symptoms of being god's chosen messiah. All of that makes for a very interesting character. Her tenacity, resourcefulness, and general focus on prioritizing what matters to *her* over what people around her want her to do made her compelling and enjoyable to read about.

I haven't read many unreliable narrator stories - not intentionally, that just hasn't been a big aspect of my reading in general. Misery definitely qualifies as one, though, and in a really interesting way. She's unreliable because she experiences hallucinations and delusions as a symptom of her illness, and she is very aware of that fact. So I may not be able to tell if the narrative is telling me the truth, but neither can she. In fact, she was so unreliable that I ended up believing the exact opposite of whatever she believed. At the beginning, she was 100% sure it was just hallucinations and she was faking the messiah thing as a survival strategy. At that point, I figured the twist would be that she was really divinely chosen after all. But as the story goes on, she began to slowly begin to think that maybe she was god's chosen after all - and I began to doubt that she really was the messiah, or even that this deity existed in the first place. It wasn't really an unpleasant experience, but it was weird to basically switch opinions with the protagonist throughout the course of the book.

This review is already pretty long, and I haven't even gotten into the plot. But honestly, the plot is not really all that important here. In fact, you could argue that there really isn't much of one. Misery's people are at war with the Heretics, who have rejected their god and are trying to invade. Misery is playing messiah (or growing into the role of messiah, depending on who you believe) to cover for the fact that she has a fatal disease. A lot of people are doing politics and such around Misery and have big plans for this and that, but for the most part Misery is doing her best to 1. Stay alive, 2. Stay not imprisoned, and 3. Convince people that the weird stuff about her is from messiah-ness instead of mind-altering space disease, in that order. Sure, there's some *Pacific Rim*-style mech battles in space

What really makes this story work is the religious aspect. This society has one god, the one true god, who agreed to help the humans who dispersed among the stars. This deity chooses saints, identifiable by their iridescent hair, who have powers to activate and control special types of stone that are used for all kinds of things through this society. This religion is integrated so deeply with the society that they never actually talk about a religion or name the faith - knowledge of this deity, following religious observances, the way the saints' ability to control special stones make society function, it's just part of how things *are*. At the beginning, despite being raised in the church, Misery doesn't even believe in this deity. But ideas of heresy, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, paying lip service to religious rules while doing what you want anyway, the difference between ethics and religiosity, power structures, belief, and fanaticism are wound throughout the whole story. I don't really know how to describe it. As someone raised in a religion that was big into fanaticism, private hypocrisy, and ignoring the spirit of the rules where possible, I found it both strange and sci-fi while simultaneously intimately and painfully familiar. Watching Misery start to believe that maybe she was the messiah had a similar ring - it was nearly the same process as my journey out of religion, but the opposite direction. It left me feeling a bit disoriented - which is, honestly, an appropriate feeling for this book.

I don't think I have adequately expressed yet my overall opinion of this book. It's good. It's very, very good. But it's an uncommon type of good. Some really good books hype you up. They get your adrenaline pumping, leave you emotionally exhausted at the end, and make you want to yell from the rooftops that everyone should read this book. (Honestly, as much as I liked it, if you're not up for a book that's heavily about weird space religions, you probably won't enjoy it very much.) Instead, it's a much quieter kind of good. It makes me want to slow down, savor the story, and appreciate the richness of the world and the journey. It makes me want to think and linger over all the religious elements, both thematic and emotional. There's some bittersweet tones as I understand exactly why Misery is doing what she's doing but I'm pretty sure it's going to be painful for her. I can already tell I'm going to be thinking about this one for a while.

Content Warnings

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost

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4.0

I picked this up mainly because the second half of the subtitle ("the Meaning of Things" bit) sounded interesting to me. I wasn't all that interested in hoarding itself. At least I wasn't before I read this book. Because this was actually fascinating. Hoarding is one of those things that people think is a moral failure of some kind, but this book really highlighted the mental health aspect of it and the different psychological aspects involved (although whether they're symptoms or causes or both is arguable). What I didn't expect was some insights into myself. I'm not a hoarder, but I do have a complicated relationship with stuff and the act of owning it. I expected to learn about hoarders. I did not expect lines like "Physical objects provide clear and tangible verification of mastery over the world" and "Violations of ownership lead to extreme feelings of vulnerability" to explain some things about my fraught relationship with stuff. So in addition to being quite interesting, I learned a lot about the psychology of hoarding, and also myself.

Content Warnings

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

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5.0

This book is a strange reading experience and not exactly easy to review. Don't get me wrong, it's very good. But it's hard to put into words my thoughts on the matter.

First of all, Thief of Time is part of the Death sub-series, and I have struggled with nearly every book in the series for various reasons (although, in the case of Hogfather, that reason was more the circumstances in which I read the book than the book itself). In this case, the book doesn't follow the same pattern of most of the Death books, wherein Death has a crisis about not being human and makes a stupid decision and the rest of the book is spent trying to fix what he screwed up. In fact, it feels weird to call this a Death book at all, since Death is hardly in it. I think there were Rincewind books that had Death in more scenes than Thief of Time. However, Death's granddaughter Susan (who is at this point a favorite of mine) does show up and is pretty crucial to the ending, so maybe that's why it counts? Regardless, Death is not actually a major player in this book.

There are actually a lot of players in this book. If you had to name protagonists, you would probably identify Lopsang Ludd, apprentice History Monk who somehow already seems to know the time tricks the monks are supposed to be teaching him, and Jeremy, obsessive and extremely talented clockmaker with some kind of mental illness. But there's a definite third-person omnicient vibe in this story. Even if you only count characters who have point-of-view scenes, there's also Death, Susan, Lu Tze the janitor monk, Nanny Ogg, Myria LeJean the … well, you should just read about that one, Ronnie the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, and probably a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head. And each of those has a cast of secondary characters that only sometimes overlaps. There's a lot of characters happening. None of them were bad and I liked all of them in their own way, but the frequent jumping between characters and places sometimes left me feeling a bit unfulfilled, like I wanted more out of the scene I just had before it switched to a different scene.

And now that I've covered the basic bookish stuff that feels like I should at least say it, let's get down to the weirdest thing about this book: It does not feel like a Discworld book. It is funny, sure, and full of Sir Terry's signature wit, but in a way that's gently amusing, not laugh-out-loud hilarious. Even though the fate of the entire world and existence is at stake, it lacks true urgency. Instead, it's slightly slower than you would expect for a book so full of characters and stories, it's thematically rich, and above all it's deeply philosophical. It pokes fun at a lot of ideas, but it also meditates on the nature of time and what it means to be (or become) a human being. I have really enjoyed most of the Discworld books I've read. Many of them have had interesting themes worth thinking about. But this is the only one where I really felt like it was touching on something real and meaningful and was actually expanding the way I think.

I really do not know what to make of this. Out of all of the books in this series, I really want this one to become a movie. I want to study it for the wisdom it contains. It's a silly funny fantasy story while simultaneously giving me that expanded, slightly-off-kilter feeling of really good magical realism. I've learned so much. I know nothing. There are layers of meaning here that I haven't yet unpacked. A very confused monk apprentice is following his master the janitor on a quest to smash a really fancy clock. Meaning is a glass clock, clear as a mountain stream yet distorted and obscured by joints and angles. This is a Discworld book.

I have maintained for most of my Discworld reading experience that Interesting Times is my favorite. Rincewind is still one of my favorite characters, and not only is it the best of his books, it's so far the best combination of thematic depth and laugh-out-loud humor. But this one … it is so strangely, confusingly, almost unbelievably good. It does not feel like a Discworld book. It feels momentous. It feels like a book that wins literary awards and deserves them, and like Lu Tze is a powerful monk in the humble guise of a janitor, Thief of Time is a powerful work in the humble guise of a simple funny fantasy story. It hits so far above its weight class and goes so much deeper than it claims that I have no idea how to properly convey what I'm feeling. It's a good and enjoyable story, but it's so much more than that. I feel closer to enlightenment having read this. It is such a dramatic departure from anything I expected from a Discworld book, but it is so, so good.

Content Warnings

How to Set a Table: Inspiration, Ideas, and Etiquette for Hosting Friends and Family by Potter Gift

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4.0

This is a thin little book with no credited author and is obviously a gift book more than anything else. But it is full of gorgeous photos of tablescapes. And even though I doubt I will ever be hosting (or, honestly, attending) a meal fancy enough to require multiple clearings of the table, I feel slightly more cultured knowing what a charger is and the proper order for wineglasses. There were definitely some good ideas in here - although largely leaning towards the formal and fancy, there's no reason most of it can't be toned down to fit a more casual modern lifestyle. Although perhaps adding a little more fanciness and polish to regular meals can be a good thing, too. And there are some interesting ideas about nontraditional meal settings, like how to set the table for a buffet or pack for a picnic. If nothing else, the photos are gorgeous and it inspired me to update my table linens. I'm going to keep it around and go through it again once I have a house and more space to collect linens and nice dishes.

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bluejayreads's reviews 849 reviews

bluejayreads's reviews
849 reviews