cahn

4/5. I really loved this book. Though something I should say about it is that I read the kindle sample and was... not thrilled by it? A large part of it is in second person (some of it is in first person) and nothing happened in the kindle sample and I was not sure whether I wanted to read the rest. Then I happened to be in the bookstore with my kids buying a birthday party present, and read something like the first 50 pages, and Things Happened, and I was utterly hooked and I actually bought it in hardcover, which never happens, and devoured it over a weekend. (All that is to say, read the first 50 pages before giving up.)

I wish I hadn't had the spoiler about its literary antecedents, because I would have enjoyed figuring it out on my own, but even so it was a lot of fun to trace the story through and figure out the inversions and motivations and how they differ from the earlier canon. (I also am told that there is another literary antecedent which I have not read and am thinking I have to now.)

I have So Many Feelings about this book which I am struggling to articulate, because I am not entirely sure why I loved it as much as I did, and I can't say that someone else might or might not like it. I think what I love about it is how Leckie is playing with this idea of the assumptions we bring to a text, and how we fill that in. This is manifest in both the rules of the narration as set forth by the narrator (who has to be very careful about only saying things that the narrator knows to be true, and so never assigns definite motivations or feelings to a character) and the way that the entire book functions as a retelling of a story we all know. We never really get the full backstory on Eolo and Mawat; we don't really know why Eolo is loyal to him or what that loyalty looks like from the inside (from either side) at all. But because we know this story, because we know that loyalty-relationship trope, the trope works and works brilliantly even though I closed the book and thought, "Now wait a second... there wasn't any internal scaffolding for that relationship there at all, how did she do that?!"

I was entertained that Leckie appears to have read Max Gladstone, or at least we are now living in a post-Craft-Sequence god-worldbuilding world, because the conception of gods appears to have some distinct similarities, although Leckie is interested in different facets of this conceit. Really interesting how the two authors took a similar idea in two rather different directions.

The book also kind of hit the sweet spot for me between having to sit down and figure out what happened via all the intriciacies of what was and wasn't true in the narrative, and being straightforward with a level at which I could enjoy it without figuring anything out and I didn't have to work so hard that I was frustrated.

And I haven't even mentioned the delicate way the book touches on gender, without it being a big deal. There's a lot going on in this book -- it's deceptively carrying a lot of freight, I think.

(ETA: Tried not to put spoilers in this post, but spoilers in comments are fair game!)

rachelmanija posted about Ash (Mary Gentle) here. Faux-medieval history, mercenaries, framing emails -- lots of things I like here, so I downloaded the Kindle sample. Welp, very quickly I had finished the sample and bought the book.

And things keep happening in it -- it is a very plot-heavy book -- and I kept leaving comments to the post along the lines of "OMG [X] JUST HAPPENED" (I have rot-13'ed all spoilers on that post) and finally Rachel made me another readthrough post to continue basically liveblogging without having to rot13.

There is one thing that I find mildly obnoxious that might bother you not at all or might bother you much more: the "faux-medieval history" is really nothing of the sort, it is presented as one in the novel (complete with footnotes discussing translation choices) but it is very obviously a modern text, and although I certainly find 1120 pages (!) of modern text easier to read than pseudo-medieval text, the cognitive discrepancy is a bit jarring.

I can't exactly recommend it because I'm only 30% through and I've certainly had my opinion of books changed markedly between 30% and 100%, but otherwise, if you are OK with grimdark (there is a lot of rape and violence and people killing each other) faux-medieval history with mercenaries and framing emails sounds good, I would recommend trying the sample -- if it hooks you, then you may want to read the whole thing, and if not, then it's probably not for you.

(And then come read through with me on the readthrough post, which starts at 21%)

(Also, if you have already read it, rachel is hosting a spoiler post here that I am very carefully not looking at.)