Rtc!

Clunkier than the first book, but still fun!

I give up. I made it to 63%, but my heart isn’t in it: every time I set it down, I don’t want to pick it up again. Final straw when we got the big revelation around the 60% mark re What’s Going On With the Queen, and it’s just told to us. We had no way to piece that together. The (really important!) messaging about diversity and change is just – flatly stated to us. We didn’t see it, we didn’t feel it, and honestly no, I don’t think the groundwork was laid for it.

I love the message, Suri is so completely correct – but story-wise, it came out of NOWHERE.

And this is after a lot of other very blunt reveals, too.

I don’t want to say this was objectively bad. But I was so, so bored. I think partly because of the setting – we’re in a magical sort-of-Elizabethan?-version of England, it’s hard to make me interested in that after I’ve seen it so many times. For all that this society is woven through with Incarnates, people who are destined/compelled to live out specific stories/folktales/legends, this hasn’t really changed it in any way from anything we’d recognise. The queen on the throne is immortal, but if that’s affected anything we don’t see it; the fae exist, and even appear at the human court sometimes, but again, we barely glimpse them, they’re only around the edges (I was genuinely miffed when a pov-switch meant we didn’t get to see inside Faerie when one of the characters was there overnight. Please show me Faerie! I will always want to see it!) The Archivists function as governmental censors, but again, we don’t see how that affects people’s lives on a daily, practical basis.

Simran is our witch, and I liked her: she’s spiky and Unimpressed and out to rescue and save her best friend. Vina took a while to grow on me; she has a carefully maintained facade of being a happy-go-lucky louche, but as the story went on we gradually saw more and more of what lies behind that facade. They’re both brown in a xenophobic England; Simran was born abroad, and Vina is biracial. On an intellectual level, I thought it was interesting to see Suri play with insta-love – because, compelled by the tale they’re Incarnates for, Simran and Vina are kind of magically pressured to love each other – while trying to balance that by having them develop not-magicked feelings too. But I wasn’t very invested in the romance; I found the characters more interesting as individuals than as a combination – I can’t believe I’m saying this of a sapphic romance, but I’d have been happier if things had stayed platonic instead of becoming romantic. I just didn’t think they had that kind of chemistry? But as partners working together to solve the serial murders, and dig into wtf is behind all the stories – there they make a decent team.

But on the whole…I was bored. Things happen, but they felt disjointed to me, and passionless? Not formulaic, but not hitting as hard as they were clearly meant to. There’s a lot of travelling, and the side-quests were sometimes intriguing but didn’t actually tell me anything more about the world or the Incarnates and all. Reveals came very abruptly and with a lot of telling, and I KNOW the archetypes Suri is playing with, this kind of folklore is my jam, but even being so familiar with them, I didn’t see them coming because…there was no way to. We didn’t get the clues we needed. There was no looking back, after the reveal about the assassin’s identity and mission, and thinking ‘oh! of course! how did I miss that?’ The same is true when we learn why the stories of the Isle are dying. I know this doesn’t bother everybody, but I HATE when books do this – I don’t need to figure everything out before it’s revealed, but I DO need to be able to see that the reveal fits perfectly into what we already know, that all these subtle or not-so-subtle details were clues or hints that I missed. And there’s none of that here.

We know the Archivists are evil because censors always are – because it’s a genre trope/convention. But even with the excerpts from censored or approved texts at the beginning of each chapter, all that’s clear is that the Archivists suppress anyone saying that the queen isn’t perfect, or that being an Incarnate must suck, actually. That’s bad, obviously, but it’s not EVIL. We have to be told, flatly, that they’re evil, because it’s not shown.

I love the idea. I love the core message. But as a book, this doesn’t work for me. The plot is really choppy. I can’t forgive the abrupt, careless revelations. The world is dull. The whole first half should have been showing us how stagnant the Isle is, laying the groundwork for The Truth, and for some reason it didn’t even try to do that. The protagonists are not bad at all, but they don’t stand out, either. The prose is lovely – Suri’s always is – though I think it suffers from the lack of beautiful, epic visuals that Suri’s previous books have always been full of. The magic system is neat. I can see why I’m supposed to love it, but it all feels…shallow and rushed.

I’m not forcing myself to read any more of it.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I’ve been trying to read this for over a year, and I think it’s time to admit that I just do not care. I made it to 74%, I probably could have pushed through and finished it, but I was so annoyed by the setting-up of the climax that I really don’t want to.

On paper, this is great, and I don’t think the prose is bad. I loved the premise, the lore, the film theatre, the Jewishness infusing every aspect of the book (there was probably so much more than I caught); I thought the sisters, Clara and Molly, were great, especially Clara, and Clara and Boaz’s entanglement had so much potential to it.

But I didn’t care. I didn’t click with the story, I was never emotionally invested. I’m inclined to think it’s mostly an issue of me being the wrong reader for this particular book, because I can’t pick out any actual problems with it. I really didn’t like the sudden reveal into the mystery of Boaz’s missing father that came around the 70% mark, and I rolled my eyes very hard when it became clear that the climax is going to involve – what it’ll involve; the former seemed to come out of nowhere, and the latter felt very cliche, very expected. But neither of those are objectively bad writing, they’re just not to my taste, and I’m not marking the book down for them.

I think it’s objectively good, but I have no interest in pushing through it. The spark’s not there, for me.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I think I have an Anton Hur problem, because so far, every translation of his I’ve tried to read has had me grinding my teeth at the awkward prose and jerky writing rhythm. Unfortunately, that includes Heart of the Nhaga.

I don’t want to give this a rating, because it seems so unfair: it’s not as though I can judge Young-do’s writing, because I can’t read Korean, and I can’t say Hur’s translation is actually bad for the same reason; I’d need to be bilingual to have an opinion, surely. All I can say is that I really don’t enjoy reading the translation. Quotes at the link (because I can't format them properly on Pagebound), and if the quotes don’t bother you – and/or you’ve enjoyed Hur’s translations before – then you can ignore this entirely.

Link

I loved the first book of this duology so much, but Lonesome Shore is such a freaking SLOG. When I realised I was dreading picking it up again every time I paused… I decided it was time to DNF.

It’s just so slow, and the central setting – the place Henerey and El end up after the events of the first book – was so BORING. It wasn’t interesting visually or culturally, and the inhabitants refuse to tell Henerey or El anything, which is something I can never stand – it takes a lot to convince me people don’t do better with more information, and so often (as now) it just feels like secrets are being kept Because Plot. (In fairness, since I DNFed I can’t be sure there wasn’t a really good reason for keeping the truth away from our protagonists – but I’m not betting on it.) Henerey and El getting to spend time in the same location was incredibly sweet – they’re both SUCH sweethearts, and I was so happy that El was managing her anxiety/OCD as well as she was!

But other than those two being cute together…nothing seemed to be HAPPENING. I read through to the 33% mark – significantly more than my usual cut-off point, which is 25%! – and the only thing of interest to happen in all that time was the appearance of a giant mermaid creature, which Henerey and El were being kept away from and denied info about. ARGH.

And from skimming other reviews, it does not at all sound like the payoff for getting through the rest of the book is worth it. I was incredibly curious about the various mysteries we were left with at the end of the first book…but reading this one is so mind-numbing it’s killed that curiosity. I’m just going to headcanon a happy ending and leave it at that.

(Would I be willing to try this author again? I think so – I’ve loved one book from her and DNFed another, so I probably won’t preorder her next book, but I’ll definitely give it a try.)

Quality-wise this seems excellent, and I wish I could finish it; unfortunately I must DNF, because I can't handle child abuse stories, and that's very much what this is. More Literary Fiction than SFF, somewhere along the speculative fiction/magical realism spectrum.

It feels kind of heartbreaking to DNF this one, because the author’s created a really interesting setting, and a very compelling disaster-in-progress for the main character. And for half a page, even a whole page at a time, the prose is perfectly good.

And then we get smacked in the face with lines like these

:on the sour side of fifty

I’m not trying to be snarky, I genuinely don’t know what this means. Are you saying this person is younger or older than fifty? Some things go sour when they’re too old, but fruits are sour until they’re ripe, so I have no idea which you mean. (It’s not clear from context.)

:Lorne wanted to say he would listen, but truthfully, Tahj’s anxious compulsions were a lower priority than putting this disruption to bed.

Awkward phrasing.

:Rita stood in the space, staring daggers at him.

Shouldn’t that be glaring daggers?

:She never asked about him. They never spoke and that made her about Lorne’s favorite person in the world.

I get what this is supposed to mean, but ‘about Lorne’s favorite person’ is terrible phrasing.

:“Where are the city records?” he accused.

You mean ‘asked accusingly’. He’s not actually made an accusation here, only implied one.

:He pursued Rita to her workspace

Why would you phrase it like that?

:“Lorne Atwater.” He applied a warm smile as he approached the desk

Again, I get what’s meant, but ‘applied a warm smile’ is awful. ‘Applied a warm smile to his face’ would have been fine, I think, but without that specification it sounds deeply weird.

Sigh.

I think this is objectively great - VERY funny, poignant, featuring teenagers who read and feel like ACTUAL TEENAGERS - and I'll be passing it on to my teen siblings. I think I'm just losing the taste for YA? So don't hold my DNF against this one - the quality is excellent, it's just not for me personally!