handove's reviews
140 reviews

i knew this was ya going in but the writing still felt a bit juvenile at times? anyway a lovely read i would've liked more of the black water sister and what she's been doing since she died but oh well

?

last 30% really sharpened up. leah pov > miri pov until then. gutting and beautiful but definitely more on the literary side of horror

fumiko was the most interesting character by far and even then i just wanted them to fucking do something & the plot to move on the entire time

becky chambers you're kind of a fucking genius

that was...bad. can't really articulate exactly why but i kept feeling like i was missing something, and the povs felt too similar, and so much felt illogical. the writing style at times was also a bit insufferable.

harry potter mention count: 3

rec swap w/ platy

racial generational trauma and sapphics and coming of age...yep yep yep

Nothing touched by empire stays clean.

19-02-25: the first thing i must say is thank you to the british empire. now i can monologue on twitter or storygraph about colonialism and not a single soul can contradict me.

this was excellent. it delved most into the cultural imperialism side of things, because lsel station (where our main character, mahit, comes from) isn't really a colony of teixcalaan (the empire), but she's grown up under its influence and spent her childhood absorbing that culture, a culture that will never truly see her as a person the same way. mahit you deserved better everything.

even apart from that this is a book about a lesbian (lesbians!!) in space. there's some fuckass communication system centered around bad poetry and there's a character called two cartography, nicknamed map. the side characters, i have conflicted feelings about three seagrass (especially later her role as a romantic interest) but nineteen adze? she and i, we could do lesbianisms together iykwim

i fucking love this book so much. it's excellent. it's brilliant. not to imply that the world revolves around me but in this case it does and this series was made for me in a lab. thank you for your service arkady martine

existential dread is so my thing

my stomach hurts

// coming back to this. honestly not much happened and i'm familiar enough w/ the fact that when you read a work in translation it often does not retain its original charm and unfortunately i saw that a little with solo dance. it didn't really leave a hole in me like i wanted it to.