booksthatburn's reviews
1463 reviews

ANCILLARY SWORD follows Breq to the station where the sister of the lieutenant she murdered lives. The lieutenant served her when she was a ship, but now Breq has only one body. Knowing that the lieutenant's sister would not welcome her, she nevertheless makes an offer intended to provide material support and to assuage whatever level of guilt she quite understandably feels, even after all this time. As a sequel, this means that the stated point of the book (at the outset) is to wrap up this obligation which was left hanging from ANCILLARY JUSTICE. Once Breq arrives on the station, a new storyline unfolds relating to abuse of some of the colonized people. She pursues and obtains a small but very important piece of justice. Along the way the narrative spends a lot of time showing the way that the Radch Empire's ideals of fairness and justice can still allow for quite a bit of unfairness and injustice when people play fast and loose with precisely whom is a real citizen, and therefore whom is due basic protections and rights. 

I love the way this series approaches identity, holding space for individuality and autonomy even though Breq is the last body of a collective identity which cycled through hundreds or thousands of bodies over her long existence. It seems as though this is part of why she cares about individual's rights to their own bodies so much, she had a duty of care and a sense of well-being tied up in her many bodies when she had them. In her strange existence as the last of her own ancillaries she is turning that care outward even more than when she just had charge of her ancillaries and crew.

Very importantly for the middle book of a trilogy, this has a complete storyline that could stand alone and be very comprehensible to someone who hadn't read the first book. Enough is explained about how the ancillaries work that even though Breq's backstory was told in the ANCILLARY JUSTICE, there's enough here for ANICLLARY SWORD to make sense without those specifics. Because of the way key details are explained towards the end of the book, to a new reader this could easily feel like the solution to a mystery, just as it does to most of the people around Breq. 

The worldbuilding once again is complex and robust, but it's focused on people in a way that feels very accessible. I prefer soft sci-fi, and while I don't know if this technically counts, I do know that I've made it through two books so far without being forced to learn the technobabble for how the space travel gates work, so I'm happy with it.

I have some guesses as to what the third book could focus on, the only thing I know for sure is that breck leaves the station in the end, something I don't consider to really be a spoiler as her one constant is travel. Wherever she goes now and what happens because of the people she got to know in ancillary sword the third book is likely to deal with the Emperor's crisis of identity that is brewing in the background (and occasionally the foreground) of this book

I want to know how the Emperor's identity crisis will resolve (or not), really I want to know what Breq will do next. 

PALADIN'S FAITH follows Marguerite and Shane. Marguerite was last seen in PALADIN'S GRACE, where she vanished quite suddenly in the middle of some stressful events and it was discovered that, while other characters knew she was a spy, "Marguerite" was in fact the name of a different spy who had died years earlier. As we never get another name for this character, both the book and this review will continue to refer to her by her chosen name of Marguerite. What happened to her after this point was a great mystery, especially to her friend Grace, the perfumer who got together with Stephen in that book. Now, in PALADIN'S FAITH, Marguerite has returned to ask Bishop Beartongue for the loan of some paladins so that she can find an artificer with an economy-changing invention that has the possibility of fixing a great many of the White Rat's current problems. Shane has been around in the previous books, present, but not generally playing a major role. Wren, the other paladin who travels with them, has hitherto been mentioned only incidentally as part of the group of the late Saint of Steel's paladins. 

I like Wren, I'd been waiting for any of the female paladins to get as much attention as their brother paladins and I'm quite pleased with the result. I enjoy Marguerite and Shane, both separately and together. Shane is consistent with his brief appearances in earlier books, and to whatever extent there’s more variation from Marguerite's early appearance, much of that is due to finally knowing more about her. I love how T. Kingfisher keeps finding new permutations of the kind of person who would become a paladin and end up looking like guilt-ridden walls of muscle from the outside, but turn out to be kind, strong, very capable, guilt-ridden walls of muscle from the inside. 

The Saint of Steel series has hit its stride, with a level of obvious consistency in quality where I'm super happy with this book, it's everything I wanted but couldn't anticipate, and I'm very excited for the next one. This also is a point where it gets harder for me to have non-spoiler specifics for a review. I had a great time, and if you are this far in the series, you, too, probably like fluffy paladin romances with some death and relative gore (but remarkably fewer severed heads than the first three books).

 PALADIN'S FAITH. is definitely not the last book in the series, it appears that there are supposed to be seven in total, one for each of the paladins. Regardless of the eventual tally, this is not the last book and there is a hell of a teaser at the end for something that will be very relevant in future books. Even without that teaser, this book is not devoted to solving the mystery of the Saint's death and so that plotline is ready to receive more attention later. Shane does get a few insights from an unlikely source, and I'm interested in how that will all pan out. 

If you’ve read very many of my reviews, you probably know that I love retellings. Part of what I enjoy about retellings is getting to have the shape of something familiar, but presented in a totally new way. REEVE OF VEILS covers the events of KNIGHT OF FLAMES, this time from the perspective of a new romantic pairing. It gave me the wonderful gift of the feeling of a retelling, but within the same series as the original story. I love it, I love everything about how that’s handled. It even addresses several coincidences or oddly convenient things that happened to the characters from the time Freddy appeared (such as Laurence being unable to find his drug dealer in LORD OF RAVENS). It turns out that while helping Laurence and Quentin deal with Kane Wilson in KNIGHT OF FLAMES, Frederick, Quentin's twin brother, was actually doing a great deal of manipulation and organizing things behind the scenes. This includes but is not limited to reading a lot of people's minds, hiding his telepathic ability, trying to stymy his father's goals as much as possible, and removing Laurence's long-time drug dealer as a potential danger. 

The most convenient way for Freddy to remove this drug dealer from the danger zone is to make him no longer a drug dealer. To mold him into a new person, to help him become a better version of himself who is no longer slowly destroying other people's lives through addiction. A more confident, calmer, sexy version of... hey guess what he's the love interest. 

Mikey is a very smart, deeply wounded, and understandably nervous person who ended up dealing drugs and getting fucked in most of the deeply unpleasant ways that the life of a small-time drug dealer has to offer. He's willing to be turned into whomever Frederick wants (and finds the manipulation pretty hot, especially when he knows it's happening), resulting in a dynamic where Freddy's telepathy is comforting, just as permeating but not invasive because Michael had time to decide at the start, as fully informed as possible, whether to stay with Freddy or get the hell away. Frederick and Michael have a very well written relationship that I’m extremely glad I’m not in, but it seems like it is good for them in a bunch of really cool ways. Freddy needs someone who isn’t afraid of the power imbalance he brings to almost every relationship, and Michael is not only unafraid of it, but aroused by it, which is very good for their sex life. Michael needs someone who will not only promise to keep him safe, but has the power and resources to make good on that promise. While I can anticipate other powers in play threatening this is the series goes on, for the foundation of a mutually beneficial and overall positive relationship, it’s a very good start. 

Theirs is a very particular dynamic, one where both parties recognize the coercive power structures in play, and, rather than trying to remove them, accept the benefits and challenges of the arrangement. It's an opportunity to play with power dynamics in a sexual context, something that can be very erotic but hasn't been part of this series much until now. Many stories with telepaths have to deal with the practical ethics of being able to read someone's mind (narratively that's often the point of having telepaths involved to begin with). I love telepath stories, and I especially love how this one says "yes, and" to the potential difficulties with ethics and intimacy that are inherent in telepath/non-telepath relationships. Giving Frederick a love interest who is not only fine with having his mind read, but often gets turned on by it, that's a lot of fun for me as a reader and so far seems to be good for the two of them. When combined with this series' care and attention to the deleterious effects of cycles of abuse and exertion of power, this is probably my favorite book in the series so far. 

As a sequel, this doesn’t specifically wrap up any plot points that were left hanging in a direct way. Rather, it weaves in and around LORD OF FLAMES to show Frederick's side of a great many scenes between him and Laurence, either specifically or more generally, with Frederick summing up his own thoughts as various points of the narrative are reached. These retreads of previously-shown scenes fit around an entirely new storyline which takes place with Mikey and Freddy. Michael and Frederick are very different as narrators than Laurence and Quentin. Part, but not all of this is due to the fantastic voice work in the audiobook. As for the actual text, how they speak and what they think about are so different from each other. Structurally, one of the very cool things about this book's place within the larger story is that in LORD OF FLAMES there’s a long period of time where Quentin is recovering from a likely concussion, and that tedious process is largely skipped over because he was in bed, getting brain rest, recovering from the head trauma. That leaves a lot of room to play with in this book, seeing some of that recovery from Frederick's perspective, when the end-state is not in doubt, but we hadn’t already seen the details. Incidentally, ever since my own concussion several years ago, many depictions of concussions in fiction are stressful to read because they either gloss over them as no big deal, just shake it off and keep moving, or they linger on the slow recovery process and a bunch of ancillary ableism from other people. This does neither of those things. I hadn't discussed the concussion in my review of LORD OF FLAMES because most of the recovery time is skipped over, Quentin just spends a month or so recovering and then the story picks back up. Here, some of that time is shown from Freddy's perspective, as he was busy with his own machinations and with helping Michael get his life together, as well as checking in on Quentin so Laurence could get some time to himself and decompress. 

Weirdly, because of the way this retreads ground from the second book, this wouldn’t be the worst place for someone to start if they hadn’t read the other books and wanted to jump into the series partway through. I definitely don’t recommend that method, as I suspect that the immediate sequels will be much more closely intertwined with the first three books, possibly more fully integrating the four established narrators going forward. That being said, the fact that Frederick starts out genuinely not knowing a lot of things about Laurence means that his perspective can serve pretty well as a third person introduction to him as a character. But then, due to his familiarity with his own twin, this would make a pretty terrible introduction to Quentin. Since much of the narrative takes place during his convalescence, or while he’s running around away from Freddy, doing all the stuff he did in LORD OF FLAMES. These were perfectly suitable moments of characterization when they happen from the perspective of Quentin, or from Laurence, his boyfriend, but are much less helpful so as told by a brother who doesn’t feel the need to puzzle him out, and often isn’t in the same room. Any long-running series needs periodic landing points which can work to pull in new readers who might want to read the story going forward but aren't ready to go all the way back to the beginning, but I'm torn on whether this is the book I'd recommend for that. I'll have a better sense after I read the next one.

I like the ending, I’m glad that the last moments were new text, and not only the epilogue from LORD OF FLAMES, repurposed. Instead, that is present with new context around it, bookending the moment and showing some other things that happened. The epilogue briefly catches up through the end of LORD OF RAVENS, as those events for an outsider like Freddy happen so quickly that all he really needs is a quick update to understand what happened. This is definitely not the last book in this series, and the epilogue in particular provides an indication for what might be coming next. 

This feels absolutely mid-tier. Nothing specifically bad to say about it, but it fell out of my brain as soon as I finished it.

*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

THOSE BEYOND THE WALL is a stunning follow-up to THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS, building on many of the same themes of classism, racism, xenophobia, protection, abuse, and exploitation from a very different angle. It tells the story of an Ashtown runner trying to stop an existential threat from another world without being trampled by the city of Wiley in the process. 

This focuses on Ashtown and its power structures through the perspective of Mr. Scales, a runner who is close friends with Mr. Cheeks and can’t stand former Ruralite, Mr. Cross. Scales is an engaging and somewhat unreliable narrator, using the idea of truth and stories in a metatexual way to complicate her tale, while engaging with the essence of what happened. 

The main storyline is new, set up by events in the previous book, but at a distance of years, and with a different main character, which makes a huge difference to the tone and feel of the book. THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS established the idea that in order to travel between worlds, you can only go to a place where your doppelgänger is dead. This means that many white, rich (or even just middle-class) people in Wiley were likely to be alive on too many worlds to make good travelers. This meant that poor, brown, Ashtowners who had been exploited for generations were recruited to be travelers. In THOSE BEYOND THE WALL, Scales is differently concerned with power. She's not asking Wiley city for legitimacy or recognition. Her understanding of the give-and-take of power in relationships doesn’t shy away from the pervasive nature of power dynamics, and she's willing to manipulate the flow of that power as much as she's aware of it. Scales is a fascinating and mostly (but not completely) trustworthy narrator. She seems to be telling the story from the perspective of being at its end and relaying what happened, something not uncommon for first person narratives, though the way she omits, elides, or shifts around information means there's room for some future narrator to disagree with her telling.

I like how deliberately sex work positive this book is. It goes beyond the presence of the House, and the importance of Exlee, deliberately pushing back against the bigoted attitudes of the ruralites, and a former ruralite in particular. 

THOSE BEYOND THE WALL can probably be read on its own, with the relevant backstory explained succinctly enough to make sense to anyone who hasn't read THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS, or serving as a welcome refresher to anyone for whom it's been a while. As a sort-of sequel, this gives updates and closure for many of the significant characters from the first book. For some, those answers are found in their deaths, but for many of them, this is the story of what happens when Ashtown has to protect themselves from other worlds, and from the classist xenophobes in the city who have benefited from and upheld an apartheid regime. The specific plot would make sense to someone who hadn’t read the first one, partly because it’s a completely different narrator with a completely different perspective on those events, which allows Scales to be an entry point for someone who knows nothing about the first book. However, the ending of THOSE BEYOND THE WALL provides closure to several things that are emotionally left open at the end of THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS. Getting those answers without having asked a question is much less satisfying than it would be for someone who has reason to care about those details. Also, now that I’ve read this, I need to go do a reread of both books in order, because characters who are very important here had different levels of importance in that first book, but I’m pretty sure several of them were present there, beyond the obvious ones like Nik Nik and Cara. Scales has a completely different relationship to Nik Nik than Cara did, in a way that’s fascinating but never let me forget that even the less abusive version of Nik Nik is soaked in death and violence. When looking at sequels, tracking changes in narrative voice has felt more and more perfunctory as I’ve read books that keep the same narrator across the series or have broadly similar ideological goals, such that they’re working in similar directions. This was not the case for THOSE BEYOND THE WALL. Mr. Scales is not the same person as Cara from the first book. They have such fundamentally disparate perspectives that they may as well have grown up in different worlds, even if they technically are from the same one. I’m pretty certain that this particular world is the same one where Cara and Dell made their stand against Adam, but even if I'm wrong about that it doesn't matter much for the experience of reading THOSE BEYOND THE WALL. By closely interacting with an all-consuming and abusive person at different stages of his life, both Cara and Scales were shaped by their relationships to Nik Nik in ways that left indelible marks, but he is so different with each of them that they're unable to relate to each other's experiences as if they were with the same person. Given all the parallel worlds, it probably isn't even technically the same man, but I'd need to do a much closer read (and maybe make a chart or spreadsheet) in order to be certain.

I don’t know if this will be the last book, it feels like it could be, and I hope, for the characters' sakes, that what happens next isn’t exciting enough to require someone to be a main character ever again. That being said, I will happily devoured any and all books set in this world, as they are truly stunning.