This was a little shorter than I strictly liked, but not half-bad for the most part. The story works just at the length it has, but I think it could have benefited from being a few more pages longer just to let the plot breathe a bit. I’m not sure I liked the narrative style very much. It was ACCURATE to the character, but the sleepy languidness of the storytelling is not really something I personally enjoy. I did like the moments when the narrative pokes at climate change and misogyny though, as well as economic uncertainty for working people. Also really liked the narrator’s sympathy for the villain in this story, emphasizing how much people are a product of their respective backgrounds - and how what one views as good might not necessarily be good for everyone else in the world. I also thought the illustrations were a lovely touch, not least because they look like manga/manhwa panels. It’s a great nod to the original magical girls that influenced this story. Overall this was a lovely story that deals with some heavy themes while managing to maintain a rather light and wondrous tone. There were aspects of it that I personally didn’t enjoy, but it is otherwise a good novella.

Okay so. After sitting on this for a while I think I’ve got a better handle of what this does and what it doesn’t. What it does well: portray the life of an immigrant worker in an increasingly dystopian tech industry. Social media moderation and its deleterious effects have been covered in the Filipino movie Deleter (2022), and will be covered in the upcoming movie American Sweatshop (2025). While Deleter had mixed reviews, it at least had the advantage of accurately portraying who actually handles content moderation for the big social media outlets: people, typically women, from Third World countries willing to accept a fraction of the pay and thrice the psychological abuse their white counterparts would be willing to put up with. American Sweatshop, on the other hand, has a VERY pale cast, so I find myself intensely doubtful of its quality based on that alone. Moderation, however, shows the truth. The moderation team of Reeden, the fictional tech company the protagonist Girlie nominally works for (”nominally” because, like her other fellow moderators, she is a contract worker hired via staffing agency, the name of which changes every year to save costs on things like providing benefits and health insurance to employees), have more in common with the nurses, caregivers, and domestic helpers whom Girlie calls her “ancestors”, and who make up her family: people willing to clean up the shit and slop the Western world generates and refuses to deal with. Another of the novel’s strengths is how it portrays the way tech companies work: the greed, the rapacious acquisitiveness, the tendency to strip anything and anyone for everything useful and leaving the rest behind as soon as it is convenient. Everything that doesn’t materially contribute to the company’s bottom line can be sacrificed, tossed aside: from people to values to politics. Nothing matters more than the pursuit of endless growth, no matter how mythical that is. And the novel highlights the effects of such thinking - and nowhere more clearly than in Girlie’s cynicism towards the world around her: a cynicism that, ironically, makes her one of the best moderators. Alongside the themes of tech dystopia are the themes of family - especially immigrant family - life. The one that stuck with me the most was how the novel tackles the concept of utang na loob towards one’s family, especially one’s parents. Girlie’s relationship with her mother is fraught, mostly because she blames her mother’s poor decision-making leading to them losing the family home in Milpitas during the 2008 financial crisis. On top of this, there is lingering resentment towards the expectation that Girlie alter the course of her entire life, just to keep her family, and especially her mother, afloat. The moments when Girlie lets her resentment show are someone of the sharpest indictments of utang na loob I’ve read about in a while, and they speak to me very personally. But while the novel handles these ideas quite well, I do find myself wishing that the romance hadn’t interfered so much with the aforementioned themes, especially towards the end. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with a romance in a novel like this (not least because it’s a well-executed slow burn of the kind I personally enjoy), I found that the focus on it in the novel’s ending reduced the power of the narrative’s earlier concerns. While a conclusive ending isn’t necessary, I would have appreciated a more sustained focus on the issues of tech labor, immigration, and family that were a core of most of the novel. Overall, this is a very different novel from America is Not the Heart, but still a delightful read regardless. Girlie is a very fun character to read about, as well as an engaging narrator, with the writing style giving her a personality that some readers may find themselves relating to deeply. However, while the romance is pretty good, I do wish that it had not been quite so prominent towards the end, when tackling the themes of Big Tech’s failings and its effects on people like Girlie would have been a more interesting - and more timely - focus.

I’m glad I decided to reread Blood and Beauty before starting this novel, not only to refresh my memory of the Borgia’s story, but also to experience the full arc of their history as interpreted by the author. Or nearly full, anyway, given where this novel cuts off. Plotwise there’s a bit less drama between the Borgias in this one than there was in the first novel, since the focus of this book is more on the political intrigue and scheming that Cesare, Alexander, and Lucrezia engage in as part of the project to elevate the Borgia family to the greatest heights possible. But whatever drama there is, is pretty well done - especially where Lucrezia is concerned. As in the first novel, she appears to have received the best characterization, even though the arc of her development follows what other authors who’ve written about Lucrezia have done: which is to say, they tend to paint Lucrezia in a more sympathetic light than the historical accounts have. But even though other authors have already done the same thing, the author’s specific characterization of Lucrezia is distinct, and makes her an utter delight to read. Unfortunately the same cannot exactly be said for Cesare and, to a lesser extent, Alexander. Alexander’s personality seems to have remained largely static, though that’s in some ways forgivable because a lot of people become set in their ways as they age. Cesare, though, is a different story. The histories record Cesare as a vicious sociopathic monster of a man, and his characterization in this novel certainly follows that - but that’s all it does. There is no additional depth, no additional nuance to add complexity to Cesare as a character. Unlike Lucrezia’s characterization, which portrays her as largely innocent of the more egregious accusations levelled at her by history, while still being a flawed person, Cesare’s portrayal feels a bit one-note. I don’t expect the novel to absolve him of his sins, or make him less evil, but surely there was a way to portray him as the complex, complicated man he likely was while he was alive? Honestly this is a similar issue I had in the first book, mostly with the portrayal of Juan. As with Cesare, I never expected Juan to be absolved of any of his sins, but his portrayal did feel rather one-note. In my review for that novel, I opined that, as a work of fiction, surely there was room to add more facets to Juan than to simply follow what the historical accounts said about him? After all, what would be the point of writing a fictional account if one doesn’t fictionalize a little bit, right? I raise that same question again in this review, but this time for Cesare: adhering to historical accounts is all well and good, but this is a novel, a work of fiction, for a reason. Surely it would have been possible to add depth and nuance to Cesare’s characterization by fictionalizing his character a bit, instead of just sticking to what the historical accounts said about him? Accounts that, by and large, were biased against him in the first place? Another issue I have is with the way Machiavelli was used in this novel. When I found out that he was going to be in the novel I was very interested; after all, Machiavelli’s book The Prince was supposedly inspired by Cesare, especially by his actions while conquering the Romagna in the early 1500s. In this novel, his primary role appears to be to comment on what Cesare is doing (or not doing, as the case may be), but he doesn’t really grow beyond that. In fact, he seems to just pop up at random moments throughout the novel, comment on what he thinks Cesare is doing, and then disappears again. Given that he’s the character that opens, and ends, this novel, I was hoping that he’d been a bit more important to the narrative than he actually is, or that he’d have better characterization. Sadly, he gets neither, which is sad because I rather like him as a character: there’s a certain level of nuance and complexity to him that doesn’t get explored as fully as I might like. Overall, this novel isn’t that bad a read, and wraps up the story of the Borgias in a way that’s satisfying enough, but not necessarily worthy of a standing ovation, so to speak. Lucrezia is the standout character, as she was in the previous novel, but Cesare suffers from being a bit flat, lacking the kind of depth and complexity Lucrezia is written with. As for Machiavelli, he could have been a potentially interesting character, but he too suffers from a certain lack of development. This is a problem I also noticed in the previous novel, and it is one that carries over into this one: sad, given that it would have been very interesting to see an author as skilled as this one try to portray people as complicated and complex as Cesare Borgia and Niccolo Machiavelli as characters in a story.