Scan barcode
gilroi's reviews
533 reviews
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.25
I want to say first that I didn't hate this novel-- it isn't bad, it's just not for me. I think if I hadn't read Hendrix's other works before this one, I'd have either liked it better, or never finished it. I do think that this is a very ambitious novel, possibly the most ambitious I've seen Hendrix try yet. I just don't think it lands, but I also think that's just because of my personal taste.
For me, a novel lives and dies on its pacing, and this is the worst paced Hendrix novel I've read (and I've read all of his fiction except Horrorstör and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires). I think the unevenness of the pacing really undercuts the themes Hendrix is trying to work with. I find those themes very admirable and interesting! I think they're also very ambitious for an author like Hendrix.
Hendrix has his predilections-- he is clearly interested in writing about southern women, specifically white women, specifically 'normal' women. By 'normal' I mean women with no supernatural powers or ridiculous skills (except being a bassist, one time), but also he wants them to have an extremely realistic psychology. They don't know they're in a horror novel, and they react accordingly-- frequently these girls are selfish, self-defeating and cowardly. Hendrix isn't interested in Strong Female Characters as a trope; these characters are meant to be relatable, not inspirational. We're not supposed to think 'I wish I was her', we're supposed to think 'if she could, maybe I can'.
And that's fine and works great, because Hendrix's stories are often campy and vaguely comedic. He can write straight-up horror-- I think The Final Girl Support Group is pretty light on comedy; everything is drenched in tension. That book also deals with the most heavy subjects of his works: murder, specifically femicide, school shootings, and dying of cancer. If you inserted comedy into that mix, it'd feel a little lopsided.
So you see where I'm going? This book deals with some pretty heavy subjects, and it's got a lot of comedy, and a very cowardly protagonist. I'm not saying the protagonist of this novel shouldn't be cowardly; one of the main themes of this book is how much the main characters are all children, and I think that's a very good and fair theme for this subject matter. I just think that the mixture of comedy, very slow pacing, and extremely serious subject matter (child sexual abuse , which is barely a spoiler as it's pretty obvious from the book's blurb and content warnings, but whatever) makes the book feel... bad. Not bad in the way a horror story should make you feel, frightened and anxious, but for me at least, it meant spending a lot of time with a girl who was doing nothing to help a very vulnerable person while the clock wound down.
A lot of this book is spent sitting, waiting and talking. I understand why-- I once spent a summer in Virginia and the summers there are slow and hot. The book brilliantly evokes this lazy, sweaty feeling. But knowing that every hour that passes is another hour closer to someone being sent back to one of the worst situations a child can land in makes me want to rip off my fingernails. Add to that a long conga of humorous scenes, and multiple instances where the main character could help but flinches away and I'm straight up not having a good time.
But it's stretching Hendrix, who usually doesn't write about people from these intense sorts of backgrounds. You can sort of feel his focus flickering, because the book also flinches away from the characters who are out of his wheelhouse-- the character with an intensely traumatic childhood, and also the Black women. This is the first Hendrix book with more than one Black character, and all three of them are alive for the whole book! It's a mixed bag for Hendrix, who kind of doesn't know what to do with these women for a lot of the novel. Without spoiling too much, they frequently feel underwritten, one of them having almost no discernible personality (beyond the fact that she never talks), and the other two existing to prop up the white main character and deliver some deus ex machinas. There's a palpable friction between the fact that Hendrix wants to write a white female character of middle class economic means as his protagonist (from the afterward, it's clear that she's based on relatives of his, so I understand this desire) and his desire to do better than his previous novels when it comes to the writing of Black and disadvantaged characters. This book really should have been about anyone but Fern, whose perspective only really gives you an everywoman account of what takes place. I wouldn't even call the underwritten aspects of the Black and disadvantaged characters an -ism, because the main character is also underwritten.
In general, this book feels like a novella stretched to fit a novel's length. There's a lot of filling, a lot of the plot not progressing for convenient reasons (for example, there's a magic book that only shows important information when the main characters 'need' it; conveniently, they only get it this info once a huge amount of time has ticked down, forcing conflict after chapters and chapters where very little happens that progresses the plot or deepens characterization). Reading the afterward and finding out that the first two drafts of this book didn't even have the titular witches really makes sense; they frequently feel misplaced, and they disappear from the story for huge swaths of time.
This book feels extremely sophomoric for a writer of Hendrix's caliber, and I don't mean that in the sense that he's a perfect writer with no flaws; I mean that his previous two novels-- which I really, really loved-- are head and shoulders above this one in terms of craft. (You can weigh the merits of his attempts at representation for yourself.) While I have other gripes with this book*, those are very much my personal feelings, which is fine, because in the end, this book isn't made for me. It kind of feels bad, I guess, because his previous books were, but I can get over that.
If you want a very quirky and slightly twee story that is very light on actual horror (except for all the gore), this is a great book for you, especially if you want a story about the power of female friendship, motherhood, and a very well researched period drama.
*I just don't think he did enough academic research on the history of 'witchcraft' but I do appreciate that his witches were at least not more fucking Gardnerians. I deeply resent that ridiculous speech about The Burning Times-- yes, it was capitalized like that-- but I understand that it was given from the perspective of a 'witch' who was raised in a western / Mediterranean-inspired tradition, and that erroneous and ridiculous perspective is very alive and well today. We can see from the covens Hendrix thanks in the afterward that he probably picked it up from one of them, which, fine, whatever, I just hate it. (For more on this, I encourage you to read The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present, which is excellent, informative, and is a comparatively very easy read. Apparently Hendrix did research the history of witchcraft, he just portrayed it in a way I didn't personally like, which, again, this is very much a personal quibble than an objective mark of quality. Happy to be wrong!
Also I just hated the epilogue, but I can tell that's a personal feeling and half because it's pages and pages of italics. As a dyslexic: don't do that shit to me.
For me, a novel lives and dies on its pacing, and this is the worst paced Hendrix novel I've read (and I've read all of his fiction except Horrorstör and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires). I think the unevenness of the pacing really undercuts the themes Hendrix is trying to work with. I find those themes very admirable and interesting! I think they're also very ambitious for an author like Hendrix.
Hendrix has his predilections-- he is clearly interested in writing about southern women, specifically white women, specifically 'normal' women. By 'normal' I mean women with no supernatural powers or ridiculous skills (except being a bassist, one time), but also he wants them to have an extremely realistic psychology. They don't know they're in a horror novel, and they react accordingly-- frequently these girls are selfish, self-defeating and cowardly. Hendrix isn't interested in Strong Female Characters as a trope; these characters are meant to be relatable, not inspirational. We're not supposed to think 'I wish I was her', we're supposed to think 'if she could, maybe I can'.
And that's fine and works great, because Hendrix's stories are often campy and vaguely comedic. He can write straight-up horror-- I think The Final Girl Support Group is pretty light on comedy; everything is drenched in tension. That book also deals with the most heavy subjects of his works: murder, specifically femicide, school shootings, and dying of cancer. If you inserted comedy into that mix, it'd feel a little lopsided.
So you see where I'm going? This book deals with some pretty heavy subjects, and it's got a lot of comedy, and a very cowardly protagonist. I'm not saying the protagonist of this novel shouldn't be cowardly; one of the main themes of this book is how much the main characters are all children, and I think that's a very good and fair theme for this subject matter. I just think that the mixture of comedy, very slow pacing, and extremely serious subject matter (
A lot of this book is spent sitting, waiting and talking. I understand why-- I once spent a summer in Virginia and the summers there are slow and hot. The book brilliantly evokes this lazy, sweaty feeling. But knowing that every hour that passes is another hour closer to someone being sent back to one of the worst situations a child can land in makes me want to rip off my fingernails. Add to that a long conga of humorous scenes, and multiple instances where the main character could help but flinches away and I'm straight up not having a good time.
But it's stretching Hendrix, who usually doesn't write about people from these intense sorts of backgrounds. You can sort of feel his focus flickering, because the book also flinches away from the characters who are out of his wheelhouse-- the character with an intensely traumatic childhood, and also the Black women. This is the first Hendrix book with more than one Black character, and all three of them are alive for the whole book! It's a mixed bag for Hendrix, who kind of doesn't know what to do with these women for a lot of the novel. Without spoiling too much, they frequently feel underwritten, one of them having almost no discernible personality (beyond the fact that she never talks), and the other two existing to prop up the white main character and deliver some deus ex machinas. There's a palpable friction between the fact that Hendrix wants to write a white female character of middle class economic means as his protagonist (from the afterward, it's clear that she's based on relatives of his, so I understand this desire) and his desire to do better than his previous novels when it comes to the writing of Black and disadvantaged characters. This book really should have been about anyone but Fern, whose perspective only really gives you an everywoman account of what takes place. I wouldn't even call the underwritten aspects of the Black and disadvantaged characters an -ism, because the main character is also underwritten.
In general, this book feels like a novella stretched to fit a novel's length. There's a lot of filling, a lot of the plot not progressing for convenient reasons (for example, there's a magic book that only shows important information when the main characters 'need' it; conveniently, they only get it this info once a huge amount of time has ticked down, forcing conflict after chapters and chapters where very little happens that progresses the plot or deepens characterization). Reading the afterward and finding out that the first two drafts of this book didn't even have the titular witches really makes sense; they frequently feel misplaced, and they disappear from the story for huge swaths of time.
This book feels extremely sophomoric for a writer of Hendrix's caliber, and I don't mean that in the sense that he's a perfect writer with no flaws; I mean that his previous two novels-- which I really, really loved-- are head and shoulders above this one in terms of craft. (You can weigh the merits of his attempts at representation for yourself.) While I have other gripes with this book*, those are very much my personal feelings, which is fine, because in the end, this book isn't made for me. It kind of feels bad, I guess, because his previous books were, but I can get over that.
If you want a very quirky and slightly twee story that is very light on actual horror (except for all the gore), this is a great book for you, especially if you want a story about the power of female friendship, motherhood, and a very well researched period drama.
*
Also I just hated the epilogue, but I can tell that's a personal feeling and half because it's pages and pages of italics. As a dyslexic: don't do that shit to me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Sexism, and Vomit
Minor: Child abuse and Rape
Intense and graphic birthing scenes.
Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Greaves
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
I have a few quibbles with this book, mostly on the subject of pacing and focus, but I'm not going to factor that into my ultimate score or feelings on the book. This was originally published on the AO3 and other serial fiction sites, and while it isn't fanfiction, it does share structural similarities with that type of work. I haven't read fanfiction regularly for over eight years; me whining about its structure would be like saying a soap opera is kind of long.
More to the point: This novel is for, by, and about trans women. I am not a trans woman, so when I went in reading this I tried very hard to keep my goal in mind while reading it. I read this because I want to better understand the art trans women enjoy, and in that sense, this book really succeeded. I think it's a lovely, fun story that plays with dark themes without getting too dark. (I know for my own self, I really prefer bleak dark fiction, so I wasn't totally caught up in the emotion of the story, but as I said before, I'm not the intended audience for this book. If I am not entirely on board with it, that's not the book's fault.)
This book really is a celebration of trans femininity, though, and I found that extremely inspiring. As someone who has a lot of difficulty with femininity in any form, it was very enjoyable to see people, well, enjoying femininity. At the same time, it was also very healing to see femininity celebrated in a way that didn't feel like everyone was in a cult. In her work, Gretchen Felker-Martin describes cisness as very sterile, and while I don't always feel that way, it does apply to how I find a lot of just-for-us-girls depictions of cis femaleness. This celebration of trans femininity was free of that sterility, and really wanted to both enjoy and interrogate femaleness. I loved reading that part of the book. It made femininity feel like a gift, one I willingly gave away. Reading this book was like watching someone try on a dress I'd donated to a consignment shop, a dress I hated, and watching their expressions fill up with light when they tried it on. I've never felt like that before, and it was wonderful.
More to the point: This novel is for, by, and about trans women. I am not a trans woman, so when I went in reading this I tried very hard to keep my goal in mind while reading it. I read this because I want to better understand the art trans women enjoy, and in that sense, this book really succeeded. I think it's a lovely, fun story that plays with dark themes without getting too dark. (I know for my own self, I really prefer bleak dark fiction, so I wasn't totally caught up in the emotion of the story, but as I said before, I'm not the intended audience for this book. If I am not entirely on board with it, that's not the book's fault.)
This book really is a celebration of trans femininity, though, and I found that extremely inspiring. As someone who has a lot of difficulty with femininity in any form, it was very enjoyable to see people, well, enjoying femininity. At the same time, it was also very healing to see femininity celebrated in a way that didn't feel like everyone was in a cult. In her work, Gretchen Felker-Martin describes cisness as very sterile, and while I don't always feel that way, it does apply to how I find a lot of just-for-us-girls depictions of cis femaleness. This celebration of trans femininity was free of that sterility, and really wanted to both enjoy and interrogate femaleness. I loved reading that part of the book. It made femininity feel like a gift, one I willingly gave away. Reading this book was like watching someone try on a dress I'd donated to a consignment shop, a dress I hated, and watching their expressions fill up with light when they tried it on. I've never felt like that before, and it was wonderful.
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood
dark
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
emotional
hopeful
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Writing a novel is hard. Writing a first novel is presumably very hard. Shaun Hamill might have bitten off more than he could chew by trying to make a very complex novel out of his first go. The first 2-3 chapters are exellent, exciting and almost perfect, then the book falls off steeply. Noah is just not interesting or sympathetic like the first part of this novel's POV characters, and Hamill cannot yet write a romance that I care about. While this is nominally a horror, it's really a supernatural family drama. The ending is incredibly pasted on, and everything just kind of happens because the book is running out of space. Hamill does have promise, though, so I'll check out his other books... in a little while.
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
challenging
dark
emotional
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master by K. Ritz
I haven't really liked any straight up fantasy books (as opposed to fantasy horror or historical fantasy) in a few years. They just didn't vibe for me. I'm so glad I read this one, so glad it was published, because it's what I've been waiting for: someone using fantasy as an excuse to do an anthropological deep dive on a culture they made up, but without getting self-consciously pretentious about it like most Le Guin descendants tend to. Essentially, I applaud K. Ritz for having the determination to write something that is kind of unmarketable, and having read it, it's more than understandable to me why it came through a vanity publishing micropress.
To be clear, this book is great. I think it's amazing. I loved it. But I can readily admit it's not for everyone, and the necessities of its shape and style mean it loses the easy audience a more conventional novel would have. I'm not saying it's too deep for normies to understand-- much the opposite, in fact. This book is fantasy, but it's not epic fantasy about world changing events, so it loses the Sandersonian crowd; there are stakes, but no battles and all the sex and violence is off screen, so it loses the ASOIAF crowd; it's fantasy about small events and bucolic experiences, but some very not cozy things happen in it, so it loses the Legends & Lattes crowd; it's got incredibly intricate aspirations in its construction, theme, and pacing, but it's written with very accessible and at times simplistic prose, so it's going to lose out on the literary fantasy crowd.
To be clear, of it changed any one of these things, it would fail to achieve its goals, but in doing so it makes itself very difficult to find a ready-made audience. I firmly believe if this was published ~20 years ago, it would have made a huge splash, but in the current landscape of over-genrefied marketing, it doesn't fit easily into a prescribed box.
What the fuck am I talking about?
Sheever's Journal is the journal about a man named Sheever, who is a poisoner, and it details a huge chunk of his life as he works in the kitchens of a noble house in a fantasy land of the author's creation. You would think this means it's a book about court politics and intrigue. It's not. It's about being Sheever, and what that means to Sheever, written as though it was a normal human's journal. I've read diary-fiction, and most of them cut corners with the diaryness to make themselves more literary; nobody has that good a memory, and almost nobody would write novelesque prose in their diary, but we expect it because we all know it's a novel and this is what we want to read, in the same way that even the most 'grounded' movies still star the world's most beautiful people. K. Ritz has no interest in this. Her novel refuses to ever forget that it's Sheever's Journal-- sentences are simple and short, written quickly, several scenes don't make sense, and things are frequently unexplained. The political situation of the world Sheever inhabits is extremely multilayered and complex, and you're not supposed to understand all of it-- if someone from another world read your journal, would they know the difference between Christianity, Christ, a Christian, and Christina Aguilera? In this book, you'll meet Dyns, Drays, and a man called Dyn; good luck keeping them straight. In the end, you don't really need to. It's supposed to be confusing. Indeed, multiple questions the novel asks, mysteries the characters entertain, are unresolved.Is Sheever in love? Is the prophecy real (and what about his visions? His horoscope)? Is magic real? How does Mearan culture work? What is Tiarn rebuilding from? Who is the man in the prologue? How was this journal discovered? Is Sheever even running from a real thing? These questions are never fully answered, either because Sheever doesn't know, because he already knows, or because it will be covered in the next book.
And that's what makes it great, for me. It's a book that's unflinchingly itself, and damn the consequences. It's also frequently heartbreaking and deeply evocative; some scenes in this book are going to be tattooed on my memory for years to come.
If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, don't walk but run to read this novel. But if it sounds like it's not for you, don't force it. This book exists for itself, and in a world with an eternally shrinking quantity of midlist authors-- especially in genre fiction-- I think that's a fantastic accomplishment.
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
To be clear, this book is great. I think it's amazing. I loved it. But I can readily admit it's not for everyone, and the necessities of its shape and style mean it loses the easy audience a more conventional novel would have. I'm not saying it's too deep for normies to understand-- much the opposite, in fact. This book is fantasy, but it's not epic fantasy about world changing events, so it loses the Sandersonian crowd; there are stakes, but no battles and all the sex and violence is off screen, so it loses the ASOIAF crowd; it's fantasy about small events and bucolic experiences, but some very not cozy things happen in it, so it loses the Legends & Lattes crowd; it's got incredibly intricate aspirations in its construction, theme, and pacing, but it's written with very accessible and at times simplistic prose, so it's going to lose out on the literary fantasy crowd.
To be clear, of it changed any one of these things, it would fail to achieve its goals, but in doing so it makes itself very difficult to find a ready-made audience. I firmly believe if this was published ~20 years ago, it would have made a huge splash, but in the current landscape of over-genrefied marketing, it doesn't fit easily into a prescribed box.
What the fuck am I talking about?
Sheever's Journal is the journal about a man named Sheever, who is a poisoner, and it details a huge chunk of his life as he works in the kitchens of a noble house in a fantasy land of the author's creation. You would think this means it's a book about court politics and intrigue. It's not. It's about being Sheever, and what that means to Sheever, written as though it was a normal human's journal. I've read diary-fiction, and most of them cut corners with the diaryness to make themselves more literary; nobody has that good a memory, and almost nobody would write novelesque prose in their diary, but we expect it because we all know it's a novel and this is what we want to read, in the same way that even the most 'grounded' movies still star the world's most beautiful people. K. Ritz has no interest in this. Her novel refuses to ever forget that it's Sheever's Journal-- sentences are simple and short, written quickly, several scenes don't make sense, and things are frequently unexplained. The political situation of the world Sheever inhabits is extremely multilayered and complex, and you're not supposed to understand all of it-- if someone from another world read your journal, would they know the difference between Christianity, Christ, a Christian, and Christina Aguilera? In this book, you'll meet Dyns, Drays, and a man called Dyn; good luck keeping them straight. In the end, you don't really need to. It's supposed to be confusing. Indeed, multiple questions the novel asks, mysteries the characters entertain, are unresolved.
And that's what makes it great, for me. It's a book that's unflinchingly itself, and damn the consequences. It's also frequently heartbreaking and deeply evocative; some scenes in this book are going to be tattooed on my memory for years to come.
If any of this sounds remotely interesting to you, don't walk but run to read this novel. But if it sounds like it's not for you, don't force it. This book exists for itself, and in a world with an eternally shrinking quantity of midlist authors-- especially in genre fiction-- I think that's a fantastic accomplishment.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Fortune's Favorites by Colleen McCullough
adventurous
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.75
The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough
adventurous
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.75
Was Ancient Rome a cancerous state built on oppression? Can a 'good' state exist if it requires slavery and colonialist expansion to function? Are the patrician nobility of Rome good people, even if they are to a man slave owners? Did women within Ancient Rome's patrician class feel empowered by their wealth or held back by contemporary sexism?
Colleen McCullough confidently answers: Uh, iunno.
Look, I didn't love Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy either, but it at least played with a few of these questions. It cared about the historiography of Rome. It was told from the perspective of a slave who loved his master and had no particular opinions about being an enslaved person, but it was at least in conversation with I, Claudius and, like, scholarship. It engages with the legacy of Rome. That's really all I'm asking for, here. What are we talking about when we talk about Rome?
The First Man in Rome functions as a romance-- not a romantic romance, but the original meaning of a romance, an adventuresome story about heroes, told in a vernacular style. (I can't say McCullough's prose is ever particularly sparkling.) I don't really understand why these books are as popular as they are, but I don't generally understand why generational stories that have extremely simplistic morality are popular (Sorry, Mr Follett).
This is a story about heroes fighting a justified battle against savage barbarians (who are given no characterization) for the glory of their country (the nature of its glory is not considered); the generals of this war are brave and enterprising men (who own slaves) with wives who love them (even though they're sometimes selfish bitches) and deserve good things. It has the morality of a pulp story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it was published in 1990.
Colleen McCullough confidently answers: Uh, iunno.
Look, I didn't love Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy either, but it at least played with a few of these questions. It cared about the historiography of Rome. It was told from the perspective of a slave who loved his master and had no particular opinions about being an enslaved person, but it was at least in conversation with I, Claudius and, like, scholarship. It engages with the legacy of Rome. That's really all I'm asking for, here. What are we talking about when we talk about Rome?
The First Man in Rome functions as a romance-- not a romantic romance, but the original meaning of a romance, an adventuresome story about heroes, told in a vernacular style. (I can't say McCullough's prose is ever particularly sparkling.) I don't really understand why these books are as popular as they are, but I don't generally understand why generational stories that have extremely simplistic morality are popular (Sorry, Mr Follett).
This is a story about heroes fighting a justified battle against savage barbarians (who are given no characterization) for the glory of their country (the nature of its glory is not considered); the generals of this war are brave and enterprising men (who own slaves) with wives who love them (even though they're sometimes selfish bitches) and deserve good things. It has the morality of a pulp story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it was published in 1990.
The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey
dark
informative
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
This is a weird book, but not because of anything the book itself does (or does not do). In a vacuum, The Mercy of the Gods is a fairly boilerplate, run of the mill 'hard' SF novel; if you like SF door-stoppers that focus more on plot minutia, passably plausible future-tech and encyclopedic worldbuilding detail, than characterization, emotion, or cultural worldbuilding detail, this book is perfect for you. Ignore the rest of this review and read it now.
However, when viewed within the body of work the authors have published beforehand, The Mercy of the Gods is kind of bizarre. The previous series written by James SA Corey, The Expanse, is radically different than TMoG, and not just in terms of thematic tropes. It's also structurally differnet, and not really in a good way. Thematically, the Expanse was notable (to me) and enjoyable (for me) for focusing on cultural and sociological worldbuilding, being concerned with the politics of class, having dense characterization. Structurally, the books used changing POVs to move the plot forward and show different perspectives on plot development, and while the books were never briskly paced, they never wasted their time or felt like a slog (to me).
None of this is true of TMoG, which has a huge cast of largely identical characters (there are three categories of character, of which there are three to four examples of each: Leader Guys In Conflict, Women Who Are Emotionally Unpredictable / Ambiguous For A Tragic Reason, and Support Guys Who Are There For The Other Two Types Of Characters To Bounce Ideas Off) all from the same profession and class background, from a world with no discernible difference from Earth save that it has different country names and a higher technological level. As such, every POV feels roughly the same except Jessyn's, because her mental illness is very deftly written (I suspect this is because she is based on a real person in the author's life, and while I also suspect I can guess exactly who that person is because I've read several interviews with them, I'm not going to out and say it because that sounds extremely creepy). As such, it's not clear who'se POV it is in almost all chapters.
The plot is extremely meandering but also emotionally distant-- monstrous events like the colonization of Earth take place, but everything feels very detached. This is especially strange because these chapters feel very much like the part of the Expanse where Earth is bombed from orbit, but it lacks all emotional resonance or feeling. Same with a section where the main cast is held captive by the aliens-- there is striking resemblance to an excellent part of Cibola Burn where colonists on an alien world are trapped underground, but there is again no real emotion present in these sections because there's no sense of perspective. While every chapter is told in the third person from the POV of a named character, things frequently feel like they're written in omnipotent POV because the main cast has so little discernible difference in perspective from each other.
It's also horribly paced, with several (very very long) chapters in a row that don't really move the plot along or acclimate the characters to their surroundings; it just feels like they're there so the writers can figure out the plot and the worldbuilding as they go along, but they forgot to edit the extremely bland chapters out. This book would be 2x stronger if it was half its size.
I don't know why they changed so much, why it's so different on every level. I strongly suspect, though, that the writing duo that is James SA Corey benefited hugely from their first few Expanse books detailing a structured TTRPG adventure. At almost all times, it feels like the Expanse knew where it was going; TMoG never really does, and every plot development feels like it just appeared there suddenly, with very little buildup or foreshadowing despite having a wealth of paged in which to do so. I also think James SA Corey benefited from being less well-known when the Expanse came out, and thus they were more heavily edited-- the books ended up more polished. Now that the Expanse is extremely well-known in SF circles, James SA Corey are probably edited less, and can throw their weight around more to keep in things that an editor might want them to cut.
In a nutshell: if you loved the Expanse for any other reason than it was long and moderately hard-SF, you might still like The Mercy of Gods! But if you like both, you'll probably like them both for very different reasons, because they are such different book with such a variant level of quality that if I didn't know better, I'd assume TMoG was written years and years before Leviathan Wakes. It feels, at best, like a sophomoric attempt made by authors who have the capabilities to do much, much better.
However, when viewed within the body of work the authors have published beforehand, The Mercy of the Gods is kind of bizarre. The previous series written by James SA Corey, The Expanse, is radically different than TMoG, and not just in terms of thematic tropes. It's also structurally differnet, and not really in a good way. Thematically, the Expanse was notable (to me) and enjoyable (for me) for focusing on cultural and sociological worldbuilding, being concerned with the politics of class, having dense characterization. Structurally, the books used changing POVs to move the plot forward and show different perspectives on plot development, and while the books were never briskly paced, they never wasted their time or felt like a slog (to me).
None of this is true of TMoG, which has a huge cast of largely identical characters (there are three categories of character, of which there are three to four examples of each: Leader Guys In Conflict, Women Who Are Emotionally Unpredictable / Ambiguous For A Tragic Reason, and Support Guys Who Are There For The Other Two Types Of Characters To Bounce Ideas Off) all from the same profession and class background, from a world with no discernible difference from Earth save that it has different country names and a higher technological level. As such, every POV feels roughly the same except Jessyn's, because her mental illness is very deftly written (I suspect this is because she is based on a real person in the author's life, and while I also suspect I can guess exactly who that person is because I've read several interviews with them, I'm not going to out and say it because that sounds extremely creepy). As such, it's not clear who'se POV it is in almost all chapters.
The plot is extremely meandering but also emotionally distant-- monstrous events like the colonization of Earth take place, but everything feels very detached. This is especially strange because these chapters feel very much like the part of the Expanse where Earth is bombed from orbit, but it lacks all emotional resonance or feeling. Same with a section where the main cast is held captive by the aliens-- there is striking resemblance to an excellent part of Cibola Burn where colonists on an alien world are trapped underground, but there is again no real emotion present in these sections because there's no sense of perspective. While every chapter is told in the third person from the POV of a named character, things frequently feel like they're written in omnipotent POV because the main cast has so little discernible difference in perspective from each other.
It's also horribly paced, with several (very very long) chapters in a row that don't really move the plot along or acclimate the characters to their surroundings; it just feels like they're there so the writers can figure out the plot and the worldbuilding as they go along, but they forgot to edit the extremely bland chapters out. This book would be 2x stronger if it was half its size.
I don't know why they changed so much, why it's so different on every level. I strongly suspect, though, that the writing duo that is James SA Corey benefited hugely from their first few Expanse books detailing a structured TTRPG adventure. At almost all times, it feels like the Expanse knew where it was going; TMoG never really does, and every plot development feels like it just appeared there suddenly, with very little buildup or foreshadowing despite having a wealth of paged in which to do so. I also think James SA Corey benefited from being less well-known when the Expanse came out, and thus they were more heavily edited-- the books ended up more polished. Now that the Expanse is extremely well-known in SF circles, James SA Corey are probably edited less, and can throw their weight around more to keep in things that an editor might want them to cut.
In a nutshell: if you loved the Expanse for any other reason than it was long and moderately hard-SF, you might still like The Mercy of Gods! But if you like both, you'll probably like them both for very different reasons, because they are such different book with such a variant level of quality that if I didn't know better, I'd assume TMoG was written years and years before Leviathan Wakes. It feels, at best, like a sophomoric attempt made by authors who have the capabilities to do much, much better.