A woman has never been less surprised to turn to the end of this book, which sports an absolutely mad structural twist, and find 'thank you to my editor Carl Engle-Laird' in the acknowledgements... OH I'M SURE. If it's Tor and it's weird and meddling with timelines he's there, and I have to applaud it.

Anyway, strong standalone reflection on the power, misuse, and weaponisation of art, what 'counts' as art and who gets to decide that, who gets to make it, how, and when, should the state have control over it... and so on. I don't know what I think about the Mervyn Peake comparison but decadent is definitely the right word for a great deal of this, and also, yes, grotesque... As an asthmatic prone to childhood chest infections I had to desperately skim over a few of the descriptions of the Coughing Up Stuff because they were a little bit too good. Eugh. Good old yarn (ha ha), excellent prose control, incredibly strong worldbuilding; I think in places a little too tangled and convoluted in its execution, though. I'll need to put a bit of thought into parsing out exactly where everything comes in and how the narrative runs, I do think it's a little bit obscure on purpose (much like this review to avoid spoilers) but... Hmm. I also mostly enjoyed Ennes' characters, particularly Elspeth, although I felt Guylag was a bit of nothing sometimes and I was terribly disappointed about a certain someone... But I'm partial to horrible old women. I'm also still annoyed I didn't realise what was going on with the structure of this until about about page 350, but that is entirely on me. At least I noticed eventually eh.

Beautiful old story with a beautiful old cover, about boundaries and liminality and the bleed between them. Even though it's listed as YA often, I'm not sure there's really anything about it that makes it YA or Adult; certainly it would be accessible to anyone really, and it reminded me a lot of some of the very YA fantasy I read as a kid like Inkheart, which was really nice. (But I don't think it was originally sold as YA; it wasn't really a defined publishing category for longer than that). Anyhow, I really enjoyed; I didn't think the characters or the intrigue went particularly as deep as all that (although I loved Faey, she was great fun), it has just under 300 pages and has a lot to do in all that time... but the world is really startlingly vivid, mostly by virtue of the actual writing. This book is the EXACT opposite of all the times I've complained that loads of new SFF books are underwritten and lacking in their prose. A relatively simple narrative is really effectively gilded with the lush prose; it teeters on overwriting on occasion, but I totally went in for it, it really did feel like a fairytale and it sold the entire thing very effectively. I'd definitely like to read some more McKillip, I think her work was really lovely.