18soft_green's reviews
660 reviews

This book is bad in my opinion. There are so many things wrong with it but I think it just comes down to Bradley not understanding US politics and not digging deep enough into her characters. Like, they just kept it shallow and didn’t think hard enough about the story.

None of the characters are likable. Except Aaron but we get one and a half scenes of him. Riley is a bad narrator, she’s consistingly jumping between infodumping instead of living and then being stupid. Plus, she has no friends but one straight girl and no connection to queer people even on the internet. She has no queer culture, and she lives in The City. Does Bradley know how fucking weird that is?! Is Riley actually a clone with bad programming? I grew up in a conservative rural town and I knew queer kids my age. Javita was butchered as a character, she deserved better. Why would she be friends with Riley when Riley is a blond white girl who doesn’t care about politics and is a bad listener? The story tries to tell us that Jav doesn’t understand working for Hench because it’s against her morals while she grew up in the same bad part of the city that Riley did and is a Black girl. Realistically, in the US where there are very few safety nets that are assessable to POC, Jav would have had an even harsher experience than Riley and would the first to tell Riley to do what she’s gotta do. Sherman isn’t a character, she’s two empty characters. She jumps from being the baddest of asses to a flake with no sense of self. Lissa is sweet and her relationship with Riley makes no sense. Captain is on the verge of being a whole character.

The pacing was bad. It kept jumping between Riley’s boring as hell life and the action scenes so the story had no flow, it was like being pushed in and out of the shower so you can’t acclimate.

The plot was set up pretty well in how it pieces together, its only flaw is that it doesn’t reflect capitalist government corruption at all. The US government doesn’t care about the impoverished. It gives them the worst situations with all the evidence and nothing changes because everyone is too busy to do anything about it. It’s not that the government needs to hide anything, it’s that the system they have going makes it impossible to do anything. A more accurate tale would be for Riley to gather enough followers to storm the city halls and court and business sector and force those in power to do something. Revealing corruption isn’t meaningful. Everyone already knows. The unionizing was bullshit. The Supers vs Normies was stupid. The only analogy that it reflected was rich vs poor and it didn’t even reflect just how helpless the populace truly are because Supers weren’t as powerful as the rich are.

The writing isn’t bad. The thing that hurts most about this story is that it could be good. Bradley isn’t a bad writer, they just haven’t written enough yet. Their politics aren’t bad, they just haven’t dug in deep enough yet. Their characters could be complex and lovable if Bradley just mixed their hands in the characters’ guts until they could taste Riley and Sherman and Lissa’s essence. I think the next books that Bradley publishes will be better than this one but I think this one is a failure of a story. It had dreams of flying but is only a chicken. 

It should first be stated that Sutherland is a great writer. She is good at pacing, characterization, plotting, and wording. She's pretty good at dialogue and writing emotions. She is one of the few authors who I think can write interesting, lovable feminine characters. Very rarely am I actively interested in feminine characters just for their personalities and not the overall plot.

The mystery in this story was good. Who was out killing witches and stealing their demon tattoos? I was curious. The characters of this story were also good. Emer is my favorite character, with how very Eldredge she is. Zara is interesting to me with how her practicality clashes with her separation. Jude is not interesting to me. And neither was the sexual/romantic side plot between her and Erer.

What bothers me about this book is how shallow it is and exclusive its message is. I love a rage story. I love when characters get ugly and break shit and go mad, almost nothing makes me as excited as a deranged character going apeshit. I love revenge stories! Sutherland has an obvious weakness that seems to have only grown from her last book into this one.

Sutherland writes for white girls and women and them exclusively. It's not just that they are her audience, they are the only important characters in her books. Everyone else in her books either don't exist or are bad. In the House of Hollow, there was only one person of color and she killed them. In this book the only important characters that aren't white women are men and they are the bad guys. Sutherland tethers herself to the queer community by making her characters queer but then doesn't acknowledge queer men or nonbinary people. Her message is very gender essentialist but she doesn't even include those that challenge the gender norms the most in her story. The farthest she went was lesbians and clearly stated that trans women should be included but then didn't include them. Because, unfortunately, if she had included the rest of the queer community then her whole story would fall apart in several different ways.

This story relies on the idea that men are evil and weak and bad for women. Men are harmful to women one way or another, they are predatory and selfish, and all men want to devour women. The story stresses more that men = bad than women = good. If Sutherland were to include queer men and nonbinary people she would have been forced to ask if the evil of men lay in their gender and acknowledge that men do not = bad. For some reason finding the actual root of the problem of violence against women was too complex for her. The story demands that the reader care about that women are abused in this culture several times and at one point passively admits that men are under patriarchy and that makes them the way they are, but the rest of the story shows men harming but blames these men individually. The story doesn't explain why women aren't bad, it just states over and over again that women are victims of male violence and apparently that makes them not capable of true evil. Meanwhile, it can be assumed that boys and men will inevitably do some injustice because they are boys and men. This steals all men and boys of agency and brinks on the argument that it is not what you do but who you are that is evil. This argument is used against all queer people. Our crime isn't that we are trans or differ in sexuality but that we exist. If we cannot change what defines us then we shouldn't live because we are abominations.

Sutherland can't include people of color in stories like this one because European gender stereotypes have defined people of color's gender differently than they did their own. And people of color have always suffered more under Western rule than white women have. To include them would require Sutherland to be more nuanced in her gender-essentialist story and acknowledge that other people suffer. She could have included women of color but that would require her to challenge colonization and capitalism as well as patriarchy and that would threaten white women's privilege and how highly valued they are among the demographics.

To be clear, white women do suffer under patriarchy. But so do white men. And nonbinary people suffer more than both. Queer men suffer more than cis het white women. Even more than most white lesbians. White women have always been the most protected demographic, this protection was what disabled women in modern societies. White women do have reason to be angry for their own suffering but white women's biggest struggle isn't physical or sexual violence, it's the belief that they are in constant danger of being assaulted that makes them so powerless. Queer people are women of color and especially queer women of color are physically and sexually assaulted much more than white women are and it isn't talked about nearly as much as white women's stats are. As long as white women believe as they do that they are each in constant danger they will uphold the current social hierarchy and thus continue to be just as powerless as they are now. 

As for witches: The European witch hunts were horrific. Those who were burned alive, drowned, and stoned to death were just people who acted a little differently than the rest of their communities. They weren't at all medically trained, they were not scientist seeking knowledge, they were widows, disabled people, and older women with no prospects. The "witches" that were killed during the American and European witch killings were those with less power than those around them. The witches of the past were not independent women, they were women that relied on their community to survive. The symbolism that witchery has taken recently can be inspiring but the history of it is tragic. Women have always suffered because of systemic patriarchy, not because men are evil. The system requires women to fear and hate men. It isn't until you see that men are victims just as you are and see them as potential allies against the system that you will truly disrupt it. Patriarchy wants you to separate yourself from the other genders because you are weaker without them.

I bring judgement and sorrow. There will be hints and some spoilers from events in the next few books of the series in this review.

First of all, I wanted, I sooo wanted to love this series. I am weak to the icky vibes these books emit. They’re like molasses cookies to me. When I first found this series I was so excited to read them that I bought the first four books. And then read the first one in, like, a week. There was some shit in there, I was honest with myself in that. But there are four more books. All of the bullshit could be redeemed in four books. Overwhelmed with all the events and emotions I had read and experienced from reading the first book, I took a break. Once my mental stability had returned, I dove into the second book. And hated what I was seeing. So I took another break. Then dove into the third. I was shocked. I was aghast. I flipped through it, skimming as fast as I could. Oh no, I jumped into the fourth, OH NO! I come to you, dear reader, exhausted yet filled with rage.

Lyons' writing is confusing (read deceitful). She is good at writing entertainingly and creatively and has interesting story ideas. But she doesn't tell us the story she promises. It's as if the story is just one short chapter away from getting to the good and promised part, but we never get there. Every time I arrived at a revealing and/or climatic scene it was as if someone had chewed it up before I got there. Meaning: the story stopped making sense because instead everything else that feels irrelevant got dumped into the scenes. Random as fuck characters would come along, weird magical shit from out of nowhere would join to explain the happenings in the most confusing way possible. Mind you, these characters or magical things were often not foreshadowed earlier in the story. These scenes were often the moments these persons or rituals were INTRODUCED. And if they had been earlier introduced they had almost nothing that was plot relevant leading back to them except another character with random stores of information. And NEVER did these random characters and situations tie into each other in any logical way! Patient reader, this happened all the time.

Narratively, I have two problems with the Chorus of Dragons series. Starting with the lighter of the two, what is with this magic system? Maybe it'd be more accurate to say systems? I love a good mind fuck but Lyons takes it to an extreme I didn't know was possible. She has wacky (in my opinion, stupid) ideas such as : putting the majority of the story arch inside a villain’s brain, doing soul and body switches, jumping into the afterlife, and making the most complicated family trees known to fiction. I hate it. Patient reader, I don’t hate creative story ideas. I hate how meticulous and detailed each of these plot devices and choices are. Oh and, Lyons starts every book with the characters rehashing what happened, instead of like, just following them through the story. I can only assume she does this so her meta commentary on the events and people fits inside the story HOWEVER sometimes the writing is flowery writing but according to the beginning of the chapters these are the exact words the characters are using while telling the events to someone else. I hate it! This is a me thing, I know that. I am bad a suspending my disbelief when it comes to these types of things (can you imagine how stressed the listener is when they just wanted the sequence of events and Kihrin (the main character) is describing how beautiful the sunset was and how horny he was for Teraeth?). The darker of the two: Lyons took it upon herself to discuss slavery in depth (her idea of it) but like, she's white. To be clear, I am also white, and I'm not saying that white people can't discuss slavery in a complex way in a story. Lyons just did it bad. Instead of taking an in depth, systemic, social perspective on the matter, Lyons decided to make the slavery discussion complex by describing how unpleasant it is to be a slave. So a side plot of the series is destroying slavery. I just feel like, when slavery is this prominent of a feature of a story and the characters decide to fight against the injustice of it, it shouldn't be a side gig. And there were these weird moments where we're in Kihrin's (the main character) pov and he's like, "Wow, this person was a slave and that's fucked up because slavery is painful and they're such a nice person." And that's not the profound statement the story acts like it is. And like I said earlier, Lyons didn’t pay narrative attention to the actual harm that slavery does to a culture but the story acts like she did. Like so many of her story plots, she made it a prominent part of the story then later said that with time and friendship the problem resolved itself. But Lyons, YOU SAID that this was a TRAUMATIC and COMPLICATED ISSUE YOURSELF!

Onto my next accusation:
I love Kihrin as a character, for the most part. He’s funny, traumatized, powerful, compassionate, loyal, intelligent, you know, a good character. In theory. He was written badly. Because the problem with this series was not the story, dearest reader. I have read stories where the shit is fucked up, the stakes are high, the characters complex, the romance potentially problematic, and yet, the books were so good. This series was not bad because the story was bad. It was fucked up because Lyons is fucked up. I cannot say if it is her personality that is questionable or just her writing, but let me tell you, my good readers, if you are a normal person with any bit of media literacy and political sensitivity, this series will tear your mind to pieces.

I confess, in my opinion, Lyons is just bad at letting her characters be relatable and complex. They feel like caricatures, ideas for characters, not someone you can talk with, they are someone that talks AT you. Her characters have traits, they have quirks, they even have different ways of talking. But they never have stripped-down, vulnerable moments where they become someone you feel close to. They stay in that sarcastic, motivated, before-you-learn-their-backstory stage throughout the whole series. In certain scenes Lyons pretended they were heartfelt moments, but in those moments the writing would feel like someone was grading Lyons on emotional writing. It felt, to me, like these were required bits of the story that Lyons didn't know how to write on her own so she followed a special format with suggested wording. Even if that isn't true the writing is bad, and I hated those scenes because it felt like it was trying so hard to be profound and vulnerable but Lyons was watching you while you read it and her eyes were pleading you to relate and care about her sexy, smart characters.

Onwards and upwards, Lyons is weird about sex. Everyone, all the time was horny and apparently everyone, all the time was also sexy. I am demisexual, I don’t experience sexual attraction often but when I do it’s nothing like how Lyons described. On top of that, Lyons took time to write that her characters were horny in the midst of survival. While running into a physical confrontation her character would think to themself, hmm, this other character is hot. I just feel like that not important for the readers to know. But every other moment in the story also let the reader know on a scale from one to ten (not literally) how horny the character was at the time. And just… why? It NEVER felt like normal hormones either. Lyons always made it weird, by mentioning some sort of kink or taboo. She also let us know how sexually attracted each character we read the POV was to many of the characters around them including characters you wouldn’t think were even options. It’s almost like she can't talk about sex in a normal way. I wonder if she has had kinky sex because the way she writes sex in general indicates that no, she has not. She writes of sexual encounters as if she is a fifteen-year-old set loose on the internet and just emotionally contained enough to know that there IS a line to toe but not exactly sure where that line is. Our lovely hero, Kihrin, he is barely fifteen at the start of the story and his kind of godmother, a brothel owner who knows her kind of godchild has just experienced trauma, encourages him to release his emotions ON HER EMPLOYEE! Later, when Kihrin has been displaced into the abusive arms of his father at the awkward age of sixteen, he falls victim to his not-stepmom and partakes in bondage play. At the time he HAD thought he was having sex with his stepmom but later found out he had sex with a shapeshifter. And then later he is extremely attracted to this guy named Teraeth and their slow-burn romance begins only for it to be revealed that Teraeth inhabits the BODY of Kihrin’s BIOLOGICAL COUSIN. No!!! That was my gay ship! Now it’s incest, Lyon’s how could you?! It was at this point that I first thought about giving up. The sex stuff is just so weird. I persisted. Lyons continues writing the characters’ slow burn romance.
There was a cliche soulmate thing revealed in the first book between Kihrin and a girl with red eyes. (That's creepy but okay) Her name is Janelle. In the second book, she and Kihrin hit it off. No, Lyons!! My problematic gay ship, YOUR problematic gay ship! Fear not, polyamory was encouraged in this series, the problematic gay ship was secure.

So here, I pause. Let’s take a moment to consider the themes of this story. We got mind games, weird family trees, and kind of incest but not quite incest. Clearly, incest is important to the story, yes? No. Incest is not in the story because Lyons has any commentary on it other than it's taboo and makes the story more. . . Gross. At any moment in the story, Lyons might spring incest on us. Teraeth, Kihrin’s slow-burn love interest, in soul, is NOT related to Kihrin. Reincarnation is something he experiences and because he is sexy, special demigod he gets to keep his memories of his past lives and his time in the afterlife. In this story, he is reincarnated into the body of Kihrin’s cousin. Lyons dares us to ask, if they got together, would that be incest? Personally, I think it would. Lyons says that we do not need to worry because Teraeth’s SOUL is not related to Kihrin’s soul. But I dare us to ask, can souls be related? And um, IF THEYRE NOT RELATED WHY ARE THEY STILL RELATED LYONS?!?! She was so careful to make sure we, the readers, her audience, KNOW that her characters, who are sexually and romantically interested in each other ARE TECHNICALLY RELATED! there is no plot-relevant reason for them to be related in the story. Lyons didn’t need to give us incest jump scares. This is a made up, fantasy story where Lyons can do anything she wants. For example, she can make dragons fall in love, she can make flying ships.  But she, VERY METICULOUSLY(!) created weird incest situations. Are we exploring the trauma and ethics of incest in this series? Is there some emotional or political lesson to be learned in this story? No! The ONLY evident reason for there to be an INCEST romance is because Lyons thinks it’s, I don't know, edgy, hot, mature, sweet?

So that was fun, do you want to see how else the Chorus of Dragons series was queer-inclusive?

I’ll give you one guess.
WRONG!
It’s horses. Like this 🐎

We got trans representation by way of equines. How? So Janelle, our other love interest, isn’t a woman. She is a stallion. What, you ask. Yes, you see, in Janelle’s homeland, gender binaries were stored in the horse. A stallion was a masculine horse and a mare a feminine horse. Because Lyons, despite the hardship of being cis-gendered, was creative. Never mind that stallions are male horses and mares are female horses. It’s DIFFERENT from the human social gender binary system because Lyons said so. So Janelle's human culture determines their gender hierarchy based on the masculine-to-feminine binary - that humans have placed on horses - of horses. And Janelle, though not male (it is important to Lyons that we know that Janelle is a biological human female) was in her culture a stallion. So she had more political power than a mare (human) would. Janelle hated being called a woman, it was important to her that her partners recognized her as a masculine person and validated her gender as a stallion. But Kihrin and Teraeth didn’t. Not only did they see her as a woman but so did the general narrative of the story. Janelle was consistently referred to as a noblewoman, as on the feminine end of the cultural binary in almost all things. And when Janelle would take offense to this it was supposed to be funny.

So fuck non-binary people I guess.

And how else was the story transphobic? Kihrin, in the beginning of the story, was ashamed of being attracted to not only women. In the third book he had a small character growth moment where he said fuck it, and kissed Teraeth. It was cringy. But uh, he was already with Janelle at that point. And Janelle wasn’t ever a woman. So non-binary people’s experience of their own gender WAS NOT seen as valid. Got it Lyons. 

Would never recommend. 2/5 because the writing was good sometimes.

Imma say this right off the bat to make sure I'm being fair. I am an atheist, ex-Christian. I'll be completely honest, I read this mostly because I thought it'd be funny and partially because I like to challenge my beliefs. I'm still young and I've only been an atheist for roughly two years but I've been doing research on the Christian faith for the past seven-ish years. I take my beliefs very seriously and I love research, philosophy, and the study of ethics. So this book wasn't very challenging for me but I can see plenty of people floundering with some of its confrontations. I'm kind of peeved that it didn't address the whole LGBTQIA+ topic but I understand that if it did then Shaw would have been "persecuted".

First point. Without god, there is no purpose in life. I'm chill with that. I don't need a greater power to give me purpose. Our existence is random, which makes it that much more miraculous and beautiful. How lovely it is that I get to exist on the same planet dinosaurs roamed, that has four seasons, that tulips grow on, that I share with you. I exist on a planet where we describe bird calls singing, and evolved with arms because we survived by holding each other. Where we are animals yet see the difference between ourselves and the deer. That's just so weird if you think about it and yet so lovely. We share DNA with alligators! We were unplanned and still we are here. 

Second point: The Christian Faith is credible. Shaw really flaked on this point. He didn't so much explain these credible points as name some smart people who believe(d) in the Christian god. There are a million different ways to be Christian, some conservative like Shaw, and some progressive like some of my friends. Yet he argued as if they all believed the same. Many believe that evolution and the Christian god co-exist, many believe that god isn't so much the god of the bible as a generous, loving entity, and some believe that god wishes for the genocide of the "transgenders". Most of the very intelligent people that Shaw named didn't have the evidence for evolution that we have today and many don't feel the need for proof of their religious belief. Some only believe in god because it's tradition, or it's the only way they can bear to exist. Many Christians value the mysticism of god as in they don't wanna think hard about it, they like how fantastical it is. Many Christians have removed the darker parts of Christianity from their personal belief systems, making god more encouraging than judgemental and generous than just, more open than legalistic (which is biblically inaccurate but the bible is contradictory). Many Christians believe multiple things at once, contradicting their own beliefs with other beliefs because they feel better about themselves with a god to defend them against whatever they fear. There is no logical reason to be a Christian just as there is no logical reason to believe in the ancient Greek gods. The Christians need their god to be real, so they make it make sense. There is nothing wrong with that as long as they mind their business. 

Third point: Christianity is about living life to the fullest. There are strict rules for most Christians against sex, mind-altering substances, queerness, and modesty. It depends purely on one's definition of "to the fullest." Many conservatives believe that just imagining having sex with someone is the same as doing it and consider it a sin. Shaw writes as if drinking a glass of wine, attending the opera, and going to the beach are life's main attractions while many Christians have rules against all of these activities. Other denominations don't believe in celibacy and encourage mind-altering substances. So Shaw lied.

Point Four: Christianity has a compelling assessment of what is wrong with the world. I mean... Yeah? It's just the guilt trip argument and there are a lot of studies that find that humanity is generally not harmful to itself and the world. And the only way that the assessment actually "proves true" is if you apply all the biblical and historical laws. Like never losing control of your temper and respecting your elders, never having sexual inclinations towards someone you're not married to, having high self-esteem, etc. What has proven to be true for thousands of years is that what is actually wrong with the world is rich people hoarding. Shaw tries to argue that the liberal ideas that would "fix" the world are unreasonable because the Nazis were well educated and socialists have been horrible people. I'd like to point out that many Nazis have been and are Christians and that the happiest countries in the world have the smallest wealth gaps and the lowest rates of crime. Shaw also infers that if everyone were Christian then the world wouldn't be so messed up and that's just not true because so many of the rich and powerful say they're Christians and they are the people allowing all the starvation and ozone layer destruction and pollution if not causing it. Besides, most Christian teaching doesn't actually make people take responsibility for their wrongdoings. They say god forgave them and cover it up. 

Point Five: Jesus is arguably the most influential person to have lived. Shaw completely ignored the fact that the reason that Christianity and thus Jesus is so influential is because England and France used Christian ministry as a way to colonize the whole fucking world.

Point Six: Jesus' death is good news. Only if you believe that Jesus' death legit made up for all your bad behavior. And they forget that many pedophiles, rapists, and murderers are excused from taking responsibility for their crimes because the church defends them by saying that they confessed their sins and asked for god's forgiveness.

Point Seven: If Jesus really did rise from the dead you'll miss out on Heaven. I don't know man, that's a big conclusion to leap to and the Christians have always been kind of sketchy. If they didn't huddle outside of society so much and insist on making everyone a Christian then it'd be less weird but... they do.

I have no problems with Jesus. He was awesome! It's the Christians who colonized the world, manipulate their followers, and force their ideals on us. I don't care if someone is a Christian, I mind when they use their religion to defend their discriminatory habits. I mind when they pretend that they are kind when they are actually shaming people for living their lives the way that works for them. I mind when they ruin peoples' lives and blame us for it. Some of my best friends are Christian and the only reason I don't mind that they're Christians is because they don't judge me for being myself.

Following Jesus' teachings is good. Jesus taught his followers to be courageous and kind. Christians teach their followers to hurt themselves and hurt others. I don't believe Jesus came back from the dead so I'm not a Christian. Even when I did believe and was too old for my parents to force me to attend I didn't associate with the Church. And I wouldn't encourage it. If Jesus truly did save he'd save us from the Christian Church.

The book is pretty well written regarding the words and storytelling. My problem with the story is that no one in the book is likable. Some blame for my dislike for the story should be allotted to the narrator as I was listening to the audiobook and they made everything the story did a little more extreme with their tone choices. For a while, I hoped that the Pied Piper would turn out interesting. But Kim failed me by making him more romantic than he would need to be to keep me interested. Lena (main character and narrator) is the worst, in my opinion. She is entitled, dramatic, self-centered, and always, always, always bitching about her woes. She just won't take a fucking break! To be fair, she is written to have had a traumatic life, I can understand that. However, not even people with all these struggles actually focus so intently on them all the time. We take breaks either because we get distracted by something else, like a book or project or just looking at our circumstances from a distance for sanity's sake. If we don't purposely look away from our problems we numb out or dissociate. Because pain, physical and emotional makes you literally stop functioning mentally in many capacities. But it is not as if the story needs to be realistic for it to be enjoyable. Lena's constant focus on her woes is exhausting. Again, it makes sense for her to be bitter and angry and vengeful, I love a violent, hurt femme character! But Lena doesn't let us get to know her beyond her rage.

Then there is the romance. I did not care for it. The only reason I shipped Lena and Rui at first was because I was interested in Rui's character. But then it makes no sense for him to like Lena at all, though the game they play is pretty cool. All of their interactions are exhausting, all of Rui's charm is ruined by Lena's obsession with her anger, and her attraction to him couldn't be less entertaining. But that could just be my own asexuality.

The world-building was pretty cool. I liked the words for the gods and realms and powers and the like. 

If you want to read an Asia-inspired book where a god falls in love with a mortal I'd recommend The Girl That Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh. If you want to read a book with an angry girl I'd recommend The Poppy War trilogy by R.F. Kwang, The Unbroken by C.L. Clark- If you want to read a book about an angry girl/woman who falls in love I'd recommend The Wrath and the Dawn by Rennee Ahdiah, the Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novil, Book of Night by Holly Black, Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi, The Last Namsara by Kristen Ciccarelli, and if you'd like a book with just a badass girl/woman I'd recommend The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick, The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, the Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri, Nevermoor: the Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend, Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge, The Bloodsworn Saga by John Gwynne, and Small Angels by Lauren Owen. And if you want a street child becoming important I'd recommend Master of One by Dani Bennett and Jaida Jones, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge, Edinburgh Nights by T.L. Huchu, FingerSmith by Sarah Waters, and Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans. 

Stopped caring

Bad, bad book.
Bad writing, bad characterization, stupid plot, deceitful with its a marketing. This book wants so badly to be progressive but is a slut for the status quo. It loves the flavor of boots so much, it’s practically begging to deep throat them. It’s behind in its understanding of liberation and even more behind in its knowledge of queerness. It should have pretended that queer people don’t exist in its neoliberal universe rather than mentioning us in passing every thirty pages only to give us the wet noodle that whatever that straight predator’s name is.


And don’t even get me STARTED on how women were called female all the fucking time! It’s not like there was even any good reason to call them that as nonbinary people don’t exist in this world and none of the main characters are biologist. I don’t think there doctor scenes and if there are I can’t remember them. Kennedy is referred to as a “black female” over and over and it’s so uncomfortable like Kennedy is suddenly this meaty creature instead of an independent woman. This on top of the assumption that all women want to get married and have kids someday, made the book’s lack of knowledge on women’s issues even more obvious. In the beginning the story mocks men who are ”traditional” to some degree but then turns around a repeatedly infers that all women naturally want to become mothers or wives. That even career driven women want some day to “settle down”. Every one was rated on a scale of attractiveness especially the “females” and everyone that Kennedy knew was gorgeous in some unique way and it takes up so much of the book and it’s not like this side chatter even matters, why do we know just how feminine and pretty she is? You can describe someone’s appearance without saying that they’re pretty or ugly. There’s one kind of fat women that Kennedy generously described as beautiful whether she’s thicker or thinner and okay??? No one asked for Kennedy’s opinion. It’s obvious that this book firmly believes that someone’s attractiveness directly relates to how important they are not just to the story but the world in which it takes place overall. And women especially but women don’t have inherent value if they’re pretty, no they must also copulate and reproduce. 

Everyone’s  goodness is decided by how willingly “kind” they are and how easy that kindness is generate. And yes, this is a romcom but it was a boring romcom because no one was interesting. Everyone was a cut out plastic doll being directed by an unsympathetic child trying their best to do life “right”. 

I will acknowledge that I am white and thus my experience where is comes to racial issues is void and all I know I learn from POC. I care a lot about racial issues and put a lot of effort into learning how to be helpful in their liberation. This book goes against nearly everything I’ve learned about good representation. That one time that James Baldwin books were mentioned . . . If Kendall has even read James Baldwin she did not take his teachings to heart.

Characters aren’t likable. They grow in the story but they grow from one 2D figures to a slightly more dense 2D figures. They’re like lacroix, hinting at a flavor (personality) but never arriving. Like bad acting. On top of that, they’re annoying. It’s as if they’re staring you in the eyes, begging to be loved but as soon as you reach for them they becoming limp and slippery. They are eels with big, wet eyes.

3/5

I dislike this story

The writing and the topic do not match up. The characters are annoying. The love story is out of place. The inclusion is awkward. The tone is off. The representation is conflicting.

The story is set in this alternate universe where people are generally kind to each other, flowers and cozy spaces are common, magic is used for the good of the people, and being queer is normalized... but then there's income inequality, poverty, mental illnesses are ignored, and crime is common. But the story is set up like the society is ideal for the most part?

Queerness is not shied from in the story. Almost everyone is queer and it's noted as this lovely and normal thing which is great. Except for some reason is doesn't feel queer? Maybe that's just because the story is written like it's for ten-year-olds. It's noted that Clara is bi, that she's had physical relationships with boys and girls, and it's written like that, boys and girls, while the story also acknowledges that nonbinary people exist so it kind of sounds like she's not into nonbinary people? This is weird because one doesn't have to be interested in nonbinary people but it's a weird thing to just gloss over. Robin can shapeshift apparently, and is nonbinary, that feels weird. Clara's favorite teacher is trans and that part was actually handled well. Same-gender couples are noted several times and that's fun except it felt pretty mechanical instead of something that society actually accepted.

And the reason for this, I think, is because of money. The story setting has classism, and wage inequality which go hand in hand with homophobia and racism. Clara signs her magic away to Xavier because she doesn't have money to pay for him to train her in her magic. She and her father live in poverty while Xavier's family is wealthy. This is never acknowledged as problematic. It's normal for them. Yet trans and homophobia still exist. "Just because gay people are normal doesn't mean the economy is healed," you may say. Not with the way that our society is set up. This story is unreliable because in our society capitalism and homophobia are linked. The homos are villainized because capitalism depends on gender roles to keep wage inequality and racism in check. We cannot liberate ourselves of racism, homophobia, and ablism without also liberating ourselves of capitalism which then trickles down into monetary systems in general. The queer people in this society feel fake because they are not actually free to express their queerness because that would mean being their true selves which is impossible under wage slavery. In a capitalistic society, all our actions are filtered through "can I afford this" and I mean literally all our actions. If we act too weird we risk losing our jobs or paying a fine or losing relationships. Since queerness is interlocked with free expression, our true selves, and our true selves are kept in check by our dependence on money, thus capitalism, queerness is inauthentic until it confronts systems (plural) of oppression. This story lives in a setting where money and the "worthy" mindset still oppress society. There is no personal freedom when these systems plague us.  The status quo and this story are married and it ruins everything.

3/5 stars, fake, I did not like it.

4/5

This is a good book, unfortunately.

I say it this way because a lot of the time it felt like the author was being pretentious in her flowery style and drama. The POV switches were painful and Isaac is my least favorite type of character and Bellatine is so fucking annoying! And her statue love interest is worse! Baba Yaga herself was very interesting but her great, great, great, great grandkids are the worst! In fact, it's as if Nethercotte took my least favorite types of characters, added some quirks, and dumped them into a story.

But the story is good! The grief is real, the magic is weird, the contradictions are mysterious, the walking house is fantastic! The angst, my friends! It's such good angst! Not the relationship angst, that shit was boring as hell and annoying, but the life angst, the way the characters felt about themselves, that was the true sauce.

It also felt so fucking weird that Nethercotte constantly acknowledged the atrocities of the land. Maybe that's just my privilege talking but it felt so out of place and character for the Yaga siblings. Like, this book isn't addressing those topics so why is it bringing them up. I care very much about those issues but it felt like the story was only bringing them up out of obligation and personal responsibility rather than because it was important to the story. It was awkward for me.

4/5 I would not recommend unless the situation truly called on THIS particular book