Looking Glass Sound (Ward)

rachelmanija and I have a whole system now when a new Catriona book comes out: we are extremely excited and promise that we'll read it together ASAP, and then inevitably one of us is busy and the other one is busy and then Yuletide happens and then someone else has checked it out of the library and... BUT the stars finally aligned and we read it together during chat! (Actually kind of a while ago, but I'm really behind in book writeups.)

This is a kind of amazing book. First of all, a novel's worth of twists and turns is crammed into the first third of the book! (Which is largely its own self-contained novella, though it of course also sets up the rest of the book.) Honestly, the first third would have been a perfectly good story all by itself for any other author, but then the rest of it is -- well, both rachel and I kept chatting each other with connections we'd noticed and of course we were trying to figure out what was going on the whole time, and as the book went on we started chatting things like, "This is BONKERS!" and "WTF is all this?!" And a few pages left to go I was still like, "...how is she going to make everything work?" And then we got to the end and started teasing apart the strands of, wait a second, that means this, and this makes sense of that part... it was a wild ride!

I don't know that this is my favorite Ward -- I think Little Eve is still my favorite because I loved Eve and Christopher Black and how they related to each other so much, whereas I didn't feel nearly as strongly about these characters or their relations with each other (and in fact almost all of the characters are rather unlikeable -- one of them ends up being likeable, actually, but because of the way the book is structured it sort of becomes clear very late in the game). But I think it is the Ward book that I am most impressed by, because pulling that whole thing off really just clearly took so much skill.

Spoilers: discussing the end

The implications of the very end are so fascinating. How does it work for them to be in the book? How does Wilder communicate via typewriter?? The communication clearly implies he has some sort of independent agency; he's not just a character, once he's in the book. Also, I felt so bad for Wilder: he was much nicer than Sky(e) thought he was, and I like to think that in the AU where he'd actually had his future (in the outside world) that it would have turned out much better than Skye had imagined. (And what happens if Pearl writes a book with that AU?)

Also, there is a completely gratuitous severed finger in this book, and I am convinced she put it in specifically for our bingo board :PP (Oh, I suppose I should do content notes. Umm, there's a serial murder/murderer involved, and some non-explicit descriptions of same, and a very creepy doll made out of hair. Also at least one death occurring on stage. I don't think there was actually much animal harm in this book, surprisingly!)