Scan barcode
riften's reviews
287 reviews
Where the River Runs Gold by Sita Brahmachari
2.0
This novel is clumsy. It starts out as an uninspiring dystopia, borrowing indiscriminately from a well-saturated genre without contributing much back. It is lauded as an exception from the genre for its environmentalist focus, but really, aren’t most dystopias implicitly environmentalist? The message alone doesn’t seem like enough to redeem this book.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but the novel comes into itself in the final third. Here Brahmachari drops the futile attempts at worldbuilding (which, up until this point have been not only unoriginal and boring, consistently undermines its own logic) and transforms the story into something more whimsical, more suspended, more mythical. The final third reads very much like a fairytale. It has a hazy, lyrical quality of a story passed down orally. This matches the characters and themes of the books well: Shifa and Themba are raised on forbidden storytelling, and this is imbued in their moral code. If only the first two-thirds of the novel retained this quality, i would be a lot more forgiving.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but the novel comes into itself in the final third. Here Brahmachari drops the futile attempts at worldbuilding (which, up until this point have been not only unoriginal and boring, consistently undermines its own logic) and transforms the story into something more whimsical, more suspended, more mythical. The final third reads very much like a fairytale. It has a hazy, lyrical quality of a story passed down orally. This matches the characters and themes of the books well: Shifa and Themba are raised on forbidden storytelling, and this is imbued in their moral code. If only the first two-thirds of the novel retained this quality, i would be a lot more forgiving.
The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman
3.0
for a short read this was good! i am not a fan of the genre, and had my usual issues with bad characterisation on top of Victorian-specific empire awkwardness. But it was snappy, and easy, and pretty fun :)