porge_grewe's reviews
164 reviews

This book is Pratchett and Gaiman at their best... Or maybe, each just below their best? Both of them writing at their best for where they were in 1990? Or maybe each helping the other to make something they couldn't have otherwise, regardless of their best. Whatever, if you like Pratchett or Gaiman, you are very probably going to like this book!

The book is intensely English - *Intensely* English - I was actually surprised as I read it as to how much it felt like a companion piece to American Gods: just as American Gods feels like Gaiman's statement on the US, this is the same for the UK, and his affection for both clearly shines through. And who better to choose as the god of English fiction than William Brown? The book is at its best when it revels in the Just William parody (reference? Homage?) and it feels like the writers know it. The middle of the book is a really tight showcase of the excellent premise (William the Antichrist), and it builds to an ending I found deeply touching.

So why only 4 stars? Because I find it unfortunately difficult to recommend this book personally. This book has the difficulty I have with a lot of Pratchett and Gaiman in the 90s - An unfortunate mean streak to their otherwise light hearted sense of humour: Pratchett's treatment of fat people throughout much of early Discworld, Gaiman's... Well, the first hundred pages or so of American Gods. Here it manifests mostly as the kind of jovial xenophobia which abounds in a lot of twentieth century English humour, shown particularly in the couple of scenes featuring Japanese characters, all of whom are named after Japanese food in an 'Allo 'Allo level of cheap joke, before one character stereotypically contemplates seppuku in response to a minor failure culminating, if I'm remembering correctly,

in the crew of the whaling ship being the only characters to die permanently in the entire book?

It's a shame that when the writing is so tight and insightful everywhere else, the writers jump gleefully into that nasty old well.

This is a really beautiful book. Rawson manages multiple disparate points of view skilfully, marrying intensely human, adult perspectives with childhood optimism, disappointment, and frustration, with the best inhuman perspective writing I have ever read. This book perfectly captures the cold of the deep, the cold of the land, the people who help us through, and the people we become to help us through.

Absolutely fantastic!

The second of Brandon Sanderson's secret projects written over the course of the Covid pandemic, and with this one it really comes through that these are passion projects - HIs enthusiasm for this story clearly shine through. Unfortunately, the other side of this is that both Tress and, to a greater extent, this story feel significantly less polished than his usual work. Sanderson's normal foibles are clearly present here, but without the polish which usually glosses over them: characters having a single expression which they constantly pull (eyes are rolling all over the place in this book), the prevalence of simple folk amazed by simple knowledge, and of course Sanderson's abiding love of capitalism as the fix to most of anyone's problems.

Sanderson spins a good story, as always - I don't know if he's capable of bad plotting - But nothing around the plot really worked for me. Granted, this story had an uphill struggle as it was dealing with my two least-favourite sci fi tropes: sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic (boring), and uniform cultural evolution (a dangerously simplistic way of seeing the world), but even from that starting point the story really did nothing to redeem itself for me. The writing is good enough and the characters are likeable enough that it would make a good children's book, but again I really can't recommend anything based on as dangerous a worldview as cultural evolution to children.