I DNFed this when it was released, and apparently my tastes haven’t changed enough because yep, this still doesn’t work for me.

I can see the appeal this time, though. The worldbuilding at the line-level is genuinely impressive – by which I mean, the Big Picture is kind of generic-feeling, but Shannon shines in the details; food and vocabulary, cultural sayings and truisms, fauna, fashion. Instead of marriage, Virtudom has companionship; you have a companion, not a spouse – which lets Shannon side-step all the historical baggage tied up in our Western ideas of marriage. She also follows through in saying this is a setting where men and women are equal; it’s very common for Fantasy worldbuilders to claim this, then not realise they’ve left the entire background populated by men, and that’s not the case here. I loved the religious divisions, Virtudom telling one story about these sainted figures, and the Priory telling a very different one – religious splits are such a simple, realistic thing to include, but we see them so rarely in Fantasy! And I appreciated how often I had to look up words that showed up in the narrative or dialogue, because Shannon uses period-appropriate terminology all over the place (and to be clear, in a way that I think flows really well; it never seemed forced to me). There’s also a lot of lovely imagery; instead of rehashing ones we’ve seen thousands of times, the similes often feel very unique, and are still beautiful and effective.

But the writing’s not perfect (imo). Breaking every Le Gasp! sentence into its own paragraph got old very quickly; by a third of the way through the book, it seemed like we were having multiple instances of it per chapter. Far too many important character decisions rest on inexplicable leaps of logic, where either things weren’t fully explained to the reader or the characters didn’t have the evidence for the conclusions they reached. See: Ead deciding Saban going on a tour would be unacceptably dangerous, because assassins! But…Ead, you already concluded the Night Hawk was the one sending the assassins, and he has no reason to now. What??? Or: Niclays getting it into his head that he’s going to be allowed stay outside Orisima permanently, when absolutely no one has even hinted at such a thing. Sir, wtf??? Or there’s things like – in Tane’s duel with another top student, Onren, she notices that Onren has a weaker side because of an old injury, and Tane takes advantage to win the fight. But – Onren is the top student in her House, just like Tane is the top student in hers. You’re telling me that Onren hasn’t long-since compensated for that injury? And that no one else has ever noticed it? It would have been possible to set this up as, it’s a super subtle thing and Tane is a genius for having spotted it – but it wasn’t written like that.

The history around the Western dragons didn’t make a lot of sense to me. The Nameless One did a little rampaging, went to sleep, and later some other dragons showed up and did a lot more rampaging? So why is it the Nameless One who’s considered the Big Baddie? On that note, why would anyone switch from worshipping the Saint to worshipping the Nameless One? He’s a dragon who hates humans. You’re literally worshipping a god who wants you wiped from the earth. What??? Sure, I could believe in a few fairly small cults of Nameless One worship here and there, but a whole country? Yes I KNOW what the not-actually-evil princess said, but I still don’t buy it. Religion is hugely important to humans, it needs to give people a lot of different things, and most of them are predicated on the idea that your divine being cares about you. Are people getting a sense of solace, peace, strength from praying to a dragon under the earth who wants them dead? No. The whole set-up is cartoonishly evil and ridiculous. How are even the 1%ers benefiting from this arrangement?

And don’t get me started on Sabran’s marriage. RULING MONARCHS DON’T MARRY OTHER RULING MONARCHS. WHO THE FUCK IS RUNNING MENTENDON WHILE YOU’RE IN INYS, AUBRECHT??? HMMMMMMMMMMMM? OH, YOUR SISTER???????????????????? I’M SURE THAT’S FINE. HISTORICALLY, NOTHING BAD HAS EVER HAPPENED TO A KING WHO LENDS HIS THRONE TO SOMEBODY ELSE, NOPE.

Cast-wise…I hated almost everybody. Ead is great, but she’s stuck in an incredibly dull position, in the setting that gives most of the ‘generic Medieval Fantasy’ vibes. Loth is so sickeningly sweet I actively despise him as a character; Niclays is shockingly boring for an alchemist. Tane is incredibly one-note. Sabran is a brat. (Yes, she’s clearly undergoing character growth, but she’s not interesting enough for me to want to watch it.) What this means is that none of the four character arcs/plots were holding my interest.

(This does mean that I’m tempted to try the other books in this setting, because maybe I’ll like those characters better?)

The Western vs Eastern dragons motif is a very cool idea, and I really liked the contrast in how the human cultures involved felt about dragons, and how idiotic they each thought the other side was. I loved Ginura and Seiiki, everything from the sea-silk to the silver crabs and the season-trees. If the story had been set solely there, I could have put up with one-note Tane to revel in all the pretty!

So…yeah. Lots of good stuff, but too much annoyed or bored me – or both! Sigh.

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.

Highlights ~go big or go home ~go big to go home ~one (1) unicorn ~magic prosthetics ~Silk is Syr

:implicit spoilers for The Mercy Makers ahead!:

Shape of Monsters is unlike its predecessor in all ways but one – it’s excellent.

This is a slower, more thoughtful book than Mercy Makers was; there’s much less forward momentum, and for the first half or so there is less of a unifying plot. But there are many smaller plotlines, intimate and emotion-heavy, philosophical while focussing on the human element of every Big Question. Iriset and Lyric both have to deal with the reality of their relationship, and both of them undergo a lot of growth, albeit in pretty different directions. There are new characters to fall in love with, and a lot of revelations, including many retroactive ones. And all the wonder and beauty and magic of Mercy Makers is on full display in its sequel.

Thought strips away, worries and wonder, everything, until Iriset is sensation, she is wind and starlight, laughter.

In Shape of Monsters, Iriset and Lyric are transported far from the world they know, and in so many ways that strikes me as genius, because who are they – who are they to each other – outside of the context they’ve always known? What happens when Lyric is no longer a goddess-ordained emperor, but someone with no power at all? What is Iriset when she is no longer a heretic, but is free to practise her magic openly, surrounded by peers? Was it only their context that made their love so terrible, can they make something real outside of it? The dynamic between them is reversed; suddenly Iriset is the one with all the influence, respect, the one people listen to and revere and consider important, and Lyric is only her spouse.

Iriset is more powerful than Aharté.

It’s the way Shape of Monsters is written, even more than the story itself, that delights me. As in Mercy Makers, Gratton does so much with tenses, with gleefully casual asides to the reader, dropping details that rip the rug out from under us as if they’re nothing. It starts on the very first page, when someone we know is dead is referred to as very much alive, and that is only the start of the oh, fuck moments, the mic-drops and table-flips. Mercy Makers challenged genre conventions in a lot of ways; Shape of Monsters does the same, but tackles different conventions, different reader expectations. The entire book hinges on something that’s usually considered a sci fi trope, not a fantasy one; the shape of the story itself completely disregards the typical three-act structure most of us take for granted; but maybe most shocking is the realisation that none of these characters are safe. Which shouldn’t be shocking, we should have already known that after what Gratton pulled in Mercy Makers – and yet!!! Shape of Monsters is gutting, and it hurts worse and cuts deeper because so much of it feels soft. The unhurried pacing…it got me to lower my walls, made me unafraid, and THAT WAS A MISTAKE.

“That is what you fail to understand, Lyric Aharté,” the (spoiler) croons softly. He caresses Lyric’s cheeks. “I am a monster of extravagance, of ambition. Excess and splendor. I don’t do little things. It’s a waste of my time.”

I adored the worldbuilding in Mercy Makers, and despite Shape of Monsters taking place in a different setting, we actually still learn a lot about Moonshadow City and the Empire of Silence. We learn about it through contrast, and it’s just GENIUS. Things we never learned in Mercy Makers, because Iriset took them for granted and thus never drew the reader’s attention to them, are revealed now that Iriset is somewhere different. My favourite example of this was the trees: in seeing what we would consider normal trees, Iriset realises that trees and other plants don’t naturally grow full of right-angles – because apparently that’s how trees grow in Moonshadow City. And we never knew that! That kind of – shockwave of realisation, that flows backwards to alter what we thought we knew – EEE! It’s SO COOL and SO CLEVER and I love love loved it!

But that contrast – between Moonshadow City and where Iriset and Lyric end up in Shape of Monsters – between the way of life that is Aharté’s Silence and a place that’s never heard of such a thing – it’s more than just delightful for worldbuilding obsessives like myself. Gratton is showing us, teaching us, important fundamentals about this world, about the regime Iriset (and me, and presumably most readers) hated in Mercy Makers. It’s not a lecture, but it does feel as though we’re being encouraged to consider…not which way is better so much as, the pros and cons of both. Iriset idolised the Apostate Age, when there were no rules at all governing what design magic could be used for – but maybe it’s not such a great idea to have no rules at all? Maybe it’s more complicated than saying all the rules or no rules? I never got the sense that Gratton had an ideal, a clear conclusion they wanted readers to come to – more like they ‘just’ wanted their readers to think.

I am very much in favour of books that want me to think.

Click here to read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!