Absolutely one of my favorite fairytale retellings. I finished this book in one sitting, I couldn’t put it down! The story line was rich. The world building was amazing within the first couple of chapters. Rosamund Hodge was very descriptive Which I loved. It created vivid scenes and made me feel all the feels. Beautiful read. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on more of her retellings.
“Don’t look at the shadows too long or a demon might look back”
“It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.”
I really enjoy these sorts of popular science books, particularly ones about math or statistics. I’m not a big math person but I am a social science person who has an appreciation of statistics, especially where the fields overlap
It’s over, and it’s not perfect, but I’m happy with it.
Yes, there was some bloat and repetition in this story. It probably could have been fifty pages shorter easily, or perhaps eighty with a more ruthless hand. But I never felt any one section was a slog more so than the others, and there was no plot point or POV character I feel needed to be cut in entirely.
I usually don’t care about spoilers in reviews, but this one I’m going to go entirely spoiler-free. I do think the setup surrounding the Final Boss of the series was good, even if the secondary antagonist below it was a little simplistic. I enjoyed the presence of the new major POV character added, and don’t agree with some other reviews I’ve read that found her pointless–I thought her character arc was solid and her role in the larger story worthwhile.
I’m mostly pleased with the way our favorite long-running characters are treated and how their dynamic has changed (or not) over the years and changes in circumstance. The major change that happened to a core character in book eight was addressed and expanded upon to my satisfaction, though again, I see other people don’t agree with me on that.
What kept this from being five stars for me was the combination of slightly more text to read than the story needed, a sort of excessive maudlin tone to one character’s POV in particular that I did not enjoy, and the wish that the proximate goal of the story (stop the secondary antagonist to hopefully thwart the primary one) had been either a little more complex, or a little better executed in its simplicity. However, overall I think this stuck the landing. Am I too used to being disappointed by the endings of major media properties? Because this isn’t the end of Mass Effect 3, here, it’s far more narratively and thematically cohesive than that pile of turds.
It causes me almost physical pain to do this, but DNF @ 33%. This is the first Stephenson novel I’ve ever given up on.
Okay, I did bounce off Anathem at first, I had to wait a little bit and start that one over, but that was more because I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I started it for something even more esoteric than his usual fare. With Reamde, I’m honestly just bored.
How has a promising beginning about the complex ecosystem surrounding a MMORPG designed from its base level to support gold farmers and money laundering degenerate into a jaw-grindingly bland and bloated action-movie script so quickly? Why are there suddenly Muslim terrorists introduced? Let me be clear, I’m aware of when this was published and I didn’t give it a try until ten years later, but I was already exhausted by the ever-present Muslim terrorist plot by 2011, so it’s not like I would have enjoyed it then, either. I don’t want to read something that relies on that overdone antagonist, and I especially don’t want to read Stephenson’s version of it.
I’m also already tired of Zula as the damsel in distress. When I decided to give up, I leafed randomly through some of the later pages looking for hints about what I was missing, and yeah, everybody is still trying to save Zula very late into the book. I’m not interested. I don’t even dislike her as a character, as much as I’ve seen her–she’s obviously intelligent, and is always trying to think of when/how to escape, how not to get herself killed, how to minimize the harm her captors are doing to others. She’s a good person. But at this point she’s the only major female character, as Yuxia is clearly a minor one and I only just got past the introduction to the MI6 spy who accidentally gets caught up in this hullabaloo, so I don’t know if she’s going to be major or not. (Though the sudden divergence from the plot we already know into her backstory and setup actually revived my flagging interest for a bit, because that’s one of the things I do love about Stephenson, the unpredictability of what he thinks is going to capture our attention. But it wasn’t enough.)
There’s a possibility I’ll go back for this someday, like I did with Anathem, but probably only if my husband (also a lifelong Stephenson fan) reads it and tells me it’s worth my time after all. I’ll move the copy to his shelf, and we’ll see what happens in the future, but for the moment it’s time for me to move on.
A beautiful narrative style that’s soft, lyrical, and comforting; a lackluster story.
I can’t say there’s nothing about this book that I enjoyed, but there was far more that troubled me. As much as I liked the ideas about the magic of the Truth Tellers and Safe Keepers, both roles come with moral challenges that the story only partially addresses. When Fiona realizes that her mother has to keep secrets that are deeply hurtful in some way, like those about abuse or other crimes, she suffers pangs of conscience and an anger that her mother can’t/isn’t doing anything about those harmful situations. I thought that was great, and later on was glad to see that she skirted the edges of her own Safe Keeper position in order to help someone in need without betraying the secret directly; but even if Fiona “saved” the girl in trouble, there was no justice for her, as the trouble she was in went unpunished, and the girl’s mother seemed very blithely uncaring that her husband might go on to molest other young girls, the implication being that they don’t matter because they’re not family. And I’m not okay with that.
Another issue is the incredibly ableist attitudes of most of the characters, which I found surprising and disturbing. At this point I’ve read most of Shinn’s catalog of works, with only some of the most recently published that haven’t crossed my path yet. And I genuinely don’t remember any of them being this ableist. One of the minor characters is described as weak and frail due to an accident when she was younger. Her fiance marries her anyway, despite her telling him she doesn’t believe she could ever bear children, because of her health–he insists he marries her for love and will live with the disappointment of not having children. When truths and secrets come out later in the story, it becomes clear that a) she probably could have safely had kids, and b) having a kid was the husband’s deepest wish. So everybody in that marriage was suffering, and fair enough, but the blame is laid entirely on the disabled wife for her selfishness and frailness. Everyone who knows them sees the husband as the nobly suffering victim of his situation, while ignoring the actual physical pain of the wife, and whatever presumable emotional trauma she dealt with from being branded as the disappointing wife who the husband so nobly endures. Fiona, our main character, immediately hates the wife because of this situation and says some pretty awful things about her. I thought at first that it would be a character flaw of hers that got resolved somehow later, but no, everybody else goes along with it, and the ending makes it very clear that the wife was in the wrong.
Which, in a larger sense, is also pretty misogynistic, because the story definitely looks down on a woman who doesn’t want to be a mother. Yes, apparently she lied about her ability to be one and that’s not great, but since the couple’s childlessness is the source of the husband’s suffering and that’s treated more seriously by the narrative that the wife’s actual pain…yuck. Just yuck, all around.
There are other problems with the ending, too. I figured out some of the secrets revealed, but not all of them–I’m not convinced that one in particular wasn’t a total ass-pull that would have been impossible to determine ahead of time. But despite all these dreams being granted and all this secret knowledge shared, somehow the ending still feels incomplete, and the preview chapter for the next book seems to be dealing with entirely new characters, so I’m not sure any further resolution would be forthcoming if I kept reading. I don’t think I will.
This started off reasonably well but became tedious long before the end. I kept going in case the ending redeemed it and made me want to continue the series, but alas, it did not.
The characterization is good and most of the characters I liked, or at least liked to hate in a few cases. And I thought the gradual expansion of the cast of POV characters was a wise decision, to reflect Firekeeper’s growing circle of acquaintances; I thought so right up until the introduction of Prince Newell as a POV antagonist, because his scenes are dull, plodding, and expository, completely destroying any mystery about the political intrigue by walking the reader through exactly what he had planning. The second half of the book became a repetitive slog of “watch Newell’s latest scheme fail, then listen to him plot something else.”
The main question the plot was seeking to answer was the identity of the king’s heir, and the ending does resolve that. But long before the final pages we know at least one person it’s not going to be, and ultimately that knowledge robs the ending of any of its satisfaction. Once the heir was revealed, did I care? Not really.
Also, the political maneuvering on a personal level I often found intriguing–especially everything surrounding Elise–but on the macro level, I literally don’t understand why there was a war at the end of the novel. I reread the scene where the King decides to declare war twice, and I simply don’t follow the logic. Plus, calling one day-long battle a “war” felt more than a little silly, especially when the on-page battle is breezed through so fast that several named-but-not-major characters die on a single page, in neat little paragraphs summing up their final moments. There’s no drama. It read like someone checking items off a to-do list.
The world-building leaves a great many questions unanswered that will presumably be addressed in future works, but it did leave one hole that I also felt weakened the plot: sorcery. So much of Elise’s subplot is tied up in the debate over whether sorcery is real or not, and whether the curse she and several other people believe themselves to be under is magic or merely suggestion. I actually liked that wrinkle; but treating magic so lightly in the narrative, leaving it open to question, undermines the reason for the “war” at the end of the story (which I already thought was weak to begin with.) The reasoning behind the battle, as much as I understand it, has to do with sorcery being very real and very dangerous, which I felt was inconsistent with the tone of Elise’s plot.
I think this had some interesting ideas and fun characters, but the plot needed fine-tuning, the overall style needed some editing for clarity and length, and the ending needed to feel more impactful.
The graphic artist Rachel Ignotofsky has had a remarkable success these last years.
I stumbled on this book of hers, “What’s Inside a Flower”, but I have already ordered some others and eagerly await her book on the birth of computers which gets released this month.
These volumes are probably children’s books but the quality of her work makes that irrelevant.
“Our love is stronger than time, greater than any distance. Our love spans across stars and worlds. I will find you again, I promise.” ― Sarah J. Maas, House of Sky and Breath
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