LRRC Week 49
snow snoW snOW sNOW SNOW!!!!
Listen I love the holiday season, okay, and I am determined to wring every single piece of joy out of this year that I can.
#97: THE BURNING GOD by R.F. Kuang
I’m…honestly kind of at a loss of what to say for this book.
No direct spoilers, though this review may touch on things that you could use to make assumptions about spoilers.
More than anything else, I think, this book left me feeling kind of conflicted. On one hand, there were a lot of elements of this that I liked, on the other hand…part of me keeps going “what did I even just read?”
I really liked The Poppy War, and I LOVED The Dragon Republic, so I was going in to The Burning God with really high expectations. I can’t say that those expectations WEREN’T met - in many ways, this book covered the beats I expected it to cover and in general, yes, I am satisfied by where the story went and the direction Kuang took the characters.
I think perhaps where I’m getting tripped up is that there’s SO MUCH that happens in this book that 500 pages almost feels insufficient. This book could easily have been split into two or three - it feels like it reaches a climax at least two times before we hit the ACTUAL climax of the book.
TPW and TDR were both large, complex books too, but I felt there was a connective tissue running through them, a singularity of purpose, that perhaps didn’t quite work here, in my opinion. Events felt like they passed at the speed of light - I felt like I was constantly reeling from one extreme to the next, and not in a frantic-paced way.
And I think the effect of this was that story beats and character beats didn’t quite have time to land. There’s at least three major elements of this book that I felt got built up a lot and then just kind of petered out again, not living up to the build-up. Rin’s emotions and motivations changed quicker and quicker as the book moved on, to the point that I felt like we hadn’t earned certain emotional beats.
It’s strange to be sitting here writing this because I did mostly enjoy the experience of reading the book, yet in the aftermath I keep going back to “but what about —” “but how about —” and feeling increasingly dissatisfied. It doesn’t sit well with me because, as stated, I love so much about this series! And I’m not even unhappy with the ending!
Part of my dissatisfaction, too, comes from what I would consider to be a very abrupt ending. And in some respects, the abruptness makes a lot of sense. On the other side, though, we’ve spent several years invested in the politics and the people of Nikan, and I want to know what happens next for them. Also, I feel like I was denied a look at Fantasy Communism, which is very sad.
I’ll be rereading this sometime next year to cover it for my podcast (Brodacious Book Club on your favourite podcatcher), so it will be interesting to see if my opinion changes (and what the opinion of my wonderful cohost is), so stay tuned for that! (/shameless plug)
#98: THE SCIENCE OF ORPHAN BLACK by Casey Griffin & Nina Nesseth
I don’t typically review non-fiction books on here, but this WAS a CanCon 2019 book. Also, Nina’s great and you should definitely go follow her over on twitter @cestmabiologie.
I just rewatched Orphan Black, so everything this book talks about was really fresh in my mind, which helped me follow the references and the science really closely. Generally, I found the book to be really interesting, both for its look at the actual scientific basis for the various elements in Orphan Black, but also for the ethical implications of it all.
There’s a good mix of everything in this book, and it definitely helped me understand some of the complicated elements of the latter seasons of the show, which in my opinion became somewhat harder to follow as they went on. It’s also nice to see everything all linked together and laid out well.
The combination of hard science explanation (which I found easy to follow, though some I had prior understanding of) and insight into the show through some of the people involved in running it is really great. It made me want to rewatch the show again, which I don’t have time for but WISH I DID.
If you’re a fan of the show, I definitely recommend picking this one up!
NEXT WEEK’S AGENDA:
#99: Even If We Break by Marieke Nijkamp
#100: Nigh by Marie Bilodeau