This took a loooong time to read. Thoughts, in no particular order:

-interesting interpretations of the Christian god. Grossman is brave here; he can go hard on places that many writers are afraid to trod. I thought the angels were cool. -does that exhausting thing of modern fantasy where everyone has prejudices EXCEPT the ‘good guys’/core cast, who are 100% accepting of each other and boast 21st century morals. There is an anxious correctness that really prevents the sort of juicy, nuanced character dynamics you’d want from an ensemble fantasy adventure. -Features an ham-fisted romance arc speed run done by someone is obviously thinks romance is embarrassing, between characters who have no chemistry or meaningful interactions. I can see Grossman trying rather valiantly to make Nimue a complex character, but Collum himself doesn’t do that. His mooning starts and ends with ‘wow she’s pretty!’ I generally don’t enjoy the only woman in a group being paired off with someone anyway, especially when that someone (as is usually the case) is the newcomer male lead. What was the purpose, other than to further Collum’s self-actualization? Feels very ‘wow you did it! Here’s your trophy, a beautiful girl!’ At one point she basically turns to the camera and spouts Collum's character development arc like she read it off the word doc. (You were a true knight all along, you just didn't know it yet' girl be so fr) -Speaking of, I don’t care for Collum. He means nothing to me and every other character is vastly more interesting. I heaved a sigh everytime we went from flashback to Collum-POV reality. I heaved even more sighs when anyone took this dude seriously. -PALOMIDES, on the other hand, I have a desperate crush on. -It's difficult to render big figures of legend with the appropriate amount of Pomp, but I think Grossman really nails it with Arthur. He appears rarely, but with a palpable energy and charisma. THAT'S the king, bitch!!!! -that final battle was sexy af. Yeah Grossman flounders in romantic territory, but he’s right at home in a fight. I’m usually uninterested in the parry-jab-thrust of sword duels, but this one was so well-executed. Nail-bitingly tense, with choreography inspired by the psyches of both characters, and almost disgustingly visceral (fuck yeah). The victory felt earned! -hello pacing issues. This is usually inevitable in a traveling/adventure story plot where we’re praying for god to show us signs but so much of this is just characters walking around not knowing where to go next until some contrivance of nature plops them into the right direction. A huge chunk of the middle is Collum going on trippy journeys through wells and fairyland and wow I couldn't have given less of a fuck! Switch back to Palomides. -Grossman is on twitter too much and his characters all have the snark to prove it. There were a few clever bits of dialogue, but more often, very corny rebuttals and one-liners. I do like the /narration/ itself though, wry and standoffish. The prose is nice enough and peppered with evocative turns of phrase, especially about landscapes (that most beloved british tradition lol). Just skimming through the pages:

A different sun hung over Britain, a worn, debased tin version of the great golden coin that stared unblinking down at Rome. 

The fabric of Britain was laid out under them like a counterpane—the stuff of the world looked so much softer and smoother from here. Woods were dark coarse wool, fields a lighter velvet with its nap brushed different ways. A road wound through them like a seam, and there was a darkened village for a button. 

-Looking at some of the other more negative reviews makes me want to rate this higher; so many bitter homophobes complaining about “wokeness” aka not everyone in the world being straight and white to an extent that isn’t even mirrored in the ORIGINAL story. You’re mad that MERLIN was portrayed poorly? How can you look at the events of Author’s conception—generally agreed upon to be a coercive rape any way you spin it—and believe that Merlin was a Nice Guy??

-This book is very uniquely interested in masculinity: the brittleness of its construction, the restriction of its borders, its dismantling and pitfalls. This is a book about fathers that don't come back, and little boys that grow up unloved, or unable to measure up. Can your liege lord be a surrogate, is god like a daddy? What happens when they leave, especially without knowing why? God is an absent father, Arthur is an absent father, and the rest of the plot is the remainder of his children struggling to cope with that loss. The actual father/son pairs in the book are, naturally, insane: Galahad/Lancelot, Mordred/Arthur, Collum/(spoiler). They kill each other, take each others names and armor, replicate each other's mistakes even as they take drastic measures to avoid them. It's all very interesting and I'd like to see more of this sort of reckoning in media, but most men seem uninterested in these internal issues as they are in policing women cough cough. i know its hardly chic to say 'think of the men!!" but damn ....ur dads are failing u and that's why alt-right podcasts are being entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist. You have no king! You have no god!!

(there's a unsubtle and probably unconscious equating in this book of feminine with pagan/mystical/unknowable wilderness and masculinity with christianity/logic/roads but I'll let Ursula Le Guin haunt Grossman for that)

I'm always so cautious about works that feature my area of particular familiarity, especially when they're as lauded as this one, because I'm so distrustful of the hype; many of the positive reviews invariably stem from readers unfamiliar with MENA/Islamic history and theology and thus such work reads unique and novel (and educational, lmfao) to them, while others are from people FROM those regions who are pleased to be represented. Is this better than the Jasad Heir? Immeasurably. But is it good--not to me personally no, but your mileage might vary. Me and Chakraborty start off on the wrong foot literally from the cover of the book, because I think it's kind of slimy that she obscures her first name. To be clear, I think there is ZERO issue in her working with Islamic mythology/history even if she wasn't a revert muslim, but come on, the optics here are crazy?? (her recent books have changed the pen name to Shannon Chakraborty) We get into more beef on the first page, where the map transposes her made-up Literal City of DEMONS flat onto my native country. What the heck man. Americans leave us alone challenge. I also really don't like Chosen One/Last of the Bloodline stories, and that's our protagonist's only deal. Nothing Nahri does in the novel has any weight, none of her choices matter. She is dragged, pushed, and coerced along the plot. Her character arc is a flat line. The first half of the novel is all in her POV, an excruciatingly long journey-plot whose only purpose is to force romance between our 20 year old protagonist and ageless-immortal warrior protagonist where none exists. By the end of like, what, 2 months? They are, somehow, head-over-heels in love with each other. This might make sense on her end, a young girl trauma bonding with the hot magic man, but I feel like the 900-year-old should know better. There is n o chemistry. The romantic scenes read like Chakraborty is embarrassed by hand-holding. The ~~banter (god i hate that word) is painful. (but the plot wouldn't work without this implausible insta-love, so onwards i guess) At the half-way mark we finally get to The City, and the POV switches to someone with some actual damn agency. Alizayd is fun. I like him. I think the author likes him too, but her plot hinges on Nahri being the Special One, so here we are, forced back into her head as she plays sitting duck for another 200 pages. The love triangle made me cackle--VERY twilight in the "Bella, he's KILLED people" "lol i don't care!"

Sometimes...SOMETIMES...we get a glimpse of what this could be--a nice bit of dialogue, an interesting action sequence (i really liked the sparring scene between Alizayd and Dara), but things get corny again. sigh. I can see, by the end, why certain decisions are made--she's obviously setting up an interesting chess board to play out in the next book, but god, what a ponderous way to go about it.

Chakraborty does this other thing that many writers working with a non-english speaking culture where she peppers her English dialogue with little sprinkles of foreign dialogue; not to differentiate between languages being used, or to convey an untranslatable concept like hijab or fajr(cases that would make sense) but as a kind of...seasoning. A show of, 'don't forget, this is exotic and foreign!!'. girl. i am rolling my eyes. You don't need to add akhi or madar into dialogue--English has equivalents for those words!

we firebomb walmart at dawn

I talk a lot about authors who, cloistered by the unholy mother that is The Algorithm, live perpetually on please-don't-be-mad-at-me island. Their prose is mincing, batting away any possibly problematic interpretation before it can be born. Their characters are Correct, dialogue couched in therapy speak (or, in the case of some, given footnotes so we know That Was A Racism!). Metal from Heaven punches through this, blaring heavy rock, smearing neon paint on the shattered walls. It's lurid, it's violent, it's utterly un-selfconscious. It is so so so stylish--establishing an aesthetic that sizzles and sparks off the page, rocketing off at breakneck speed, thrusting idea idea idea idea, trusting you to hold on--you can, you certainly can, but it demands your attention in a way that a netflix show or new-gen fantasy is scared to allow. The Princess Bride is a comp, but I think Arcane, in its gritty delicious stylization, is more equivalent. The way the strokes are brushed thickly on characters, the way juicy attention is given to shadows and hollows and bruises, that's the best comparison to how Clarke writes. You get a sense that Clarke, god bless, is not on the internet a lot. You get a sense that Clarke understands history/economics/violence/humanity on a deep level (classics major!!! woohoo!!!) or at least isn't afraid to put forth their understanding of it.

With such a wildly intense swing, problems are bound to surface. I think that the book's claustrophobic first-person, while bang-on for the narrative, sometimes crosses the line from blurry to incongruent. Things really do just Happen sometimes, scenes fracturing from one to the next with very little connective tissue. There are TONS of characters, and while each is described in stunningly unique ways, their actions, dialogue, and motivations are either oblique or confusing, rendering them kind of unmemorable. It makes sense for the pov character, Marney, addled with PTSD and often in the grips of the world's worst high, to have a sort of numb affect, but I never get a read on anyone else either. What is/isn't acceptable in the futuristic society established here is also foggy. Sometimes characters say things that are absolutely batshit insane--monologues that would make a tyrant dictator cower, a serial-murder spree in the middle of the night--and all present respond as though they had just witnessed a minor rudeness, like someone coughing without covering their mouth. Other times, things are rather normal (a character showing up as a gaudily dressed valet with a gaudy car) and everyone responds in complete shock. What's acceptable in this society? who the fuck knows!! It's still a wild enough ride, and so unique from others in the genre, that i heartily recommend picking it up.

I can see the shape of what this was supposed to be, and to be fair, it is a difficult net to weave. Tao is not up to the task. Clunky prose, the world’s shallowest treatment of class/gender dynamics, and abominable pacing drag us through this mess. Tao doesn’t trust her readers to pick up anything. Every piece of plot is explained in tedious detail, every chain of thought painfully linked as though Tao is working to a word count. The world Tao builds here is beautiful in theory, but no amount of generic descriptions of pavilions, pagodas, and plant-animal hybrids makes this believable. Poetry, supposedly, is at the heart of the book and magic system, but this is never explored in detail, and nothing is poetic. Tao almost resents the ‘literomancy’ she’s built, resorting to it only when plot convenient. She does everything she can to wring emotion from the reader—detailing tearful children toddling around, reams of animal torture, sword-based interior design, a long, long list of heinous actions—and it reads like a grocery list. There’s no narrative weight to anything, all rendered in lackadaisical, stripped prose. Our main character, a more hollow skeleton of plot device I’ve yet to meet, reacts to insidious, gruesome, inventive torture the way a child does cough syrup. There are no psychological repercussions, no internal or external damage. She is the Ultimate Victim, perfect in her passivity, infinite in her compassion, and single-handedly inventing modern feminism (as so many of these YA heroines seem to do?). This, Tao insists, is because Wei was born poor. Maybe there’s a point to be made here, but its done so clumsily that the incisive class commentary just seems, bizzarely, to boil down to ‘poor people are great at being tortured’ / ‘poor is when kind and rich is when moral decay’. After a good chunk of torture-porn-as-shock-value, the narrative structure gets even clumsier. Tao decides that the heart of this novel shouldn’t be Wei learning to survive concubine politics, grappling with complexities within herself, or clawing up the chain of power, but a series of clunky, info-dumping flashbacks from not one, not two, but three character perspectives, as Wei unravels why her husband is evil. She thinks that this unraveling will help her with a killing spell that only works if you…love the victim? This COULD be interesting and dark as fuck, but Wei turns it into a research project. For some reason, the narrative acts like knowing a person’s backstory is equal to loving them? This makes no sense (like a lot of the plot, tbh) but Tao is very insistent on making absolutely positive that there is No Romance here! Because romance in this kind of relationship is icky and no one in their right minds would love their abusers—(though isn’t that the kind of moral complexity we should be grappling with here? You promised messy. Depth isn’t just when child abuse or Loving Your Little Brother.) The bulk of the book is the trite realization that ‘hurt people hurt people’….and we’re supposed to be wowed and impressed by this. Though Wei is a hurt person, this realization makes her decide to end the cycle. But then she doesn’t. Another graduate of don’t-be-mad-at-me-island, Tao is desperate to reiterate that murdering people is Bad Actually and, through the novel’s ending, refutes the themes of compassion and restoration that the book spends so much of its overstay building; never forget that the only justice is punitive and we can’t have difficult feelings because someone on twitter will write a call-out post. Looking back, there are actually quite a few other characters in this book, but they’re mostly interchangeable stock characters; the conniving concubine, the scheming eunuch, the heart-of-gold peasant. “Since you will soon be dead, I may as well tell you everything” is an actual sentence said scheming eunuch actually says. This is what I mean—there’s no subtlety, no elegance, no poetry, in the Poet Empress.