LRRC Week 50

Wow, week 50. Only two more weeks to go. We’re chugging along, despite everything that has happened in 2020.

#99: EVEN IF WE BREAK by Marieke Nijkamp

Oh dear.

This book had such a good hook, such a good premise, and then just completely shat the bed with it.

You know the game Until Dawn? The game about a bunch of friends, who are all kind of terrible people, but who go to a cabin up in the woods for one last big celebration, at which creepy stuff starts happening?

You know how you spend the first half of it going through creepy stuff that is later revealed to just be the extremely implausible manipulations of one of the existing characters, pursuing a somewhat nonsensical revenge prank in the midst of a mental breakdown?

This is that, but worse.

Because at least the character’s motivations make SOME degree of sense in Until Dawn. At least the creepy factor is retroactively justified by the fact that there ARE ACTUALLY supernatural things going down on the mountain.

And I don’t think that Until Dawn is all that good of a game (to say nothing of the culturally appropriative elements of it), but it’s at least ENTERTAINING. And CREEPY. And, you know what, fairly narratively satisfying! None of which I can say for Even If We Break!

I think there are ways this story could have worked, but the pieces simply don’t come together. I neither liked nor cared about any of these characters, and I didn’t get the sense that they liked or cared about each other, either. Over and over I was asking myself “why are these people friends?” And when the narrative demands you care about the friendship in order for it to have any emotional weight, that’s a huge problem.

Also, the mystery is so obvious it’s almost painful. Like, yes, I’ve SEEN A MOVIE before, I know exactly where this is going, and I did not have time for it. I kept waiting for something actually clever to happen and it just never did.

The TTRPG angle is interesting in concept, but again, I don’t think it ever gets integrated in a meaningful way. The story is almost too short for that. I don’t know if any of it is even intelligible to someone who’s never played a TTRPG, but even as someone who has, I don’t think I got anything extra from familiarity.

The book does have trans and queer representation, as well as representation of disability and an autistic character. I cannot speak to how well any of them are represented, and I believe the author is autistic and non-binary, but CW for the fact that during the book they face transphobia and ableism.

I wish this book was better. That’s always the worst feeling to come out of a book with, in my opinion.

#100: NIGH by Marie Bilodeau

Woo, book 100!

I read all five instalments in this serialized book in one go, and so the following is a review for the story as a whole:

I quite liked Nigh! Definitely different from your usual fae stories in a lot of ways, and much darker than I was anticipating when I first picked up the book. Nigh follows Al, a mechanic, as she struggles to deal with the veil between the human and fae worlds falling.

The thing that stands out to me about this story, aside from the frequently vivd and lovely descriptions, is the unexpectedness of it. I was never quite sure where the story was going to go next, never certain where we were going to end up. This had a destabilizing effect that I think mostly worked - the characters, of course, were similarly destabilized throughout the story.

In the end, I was satisfied by both the journey and the resolution, and the way that the various threads were tied up, though I was definitely worried for a little bit there that I wouldn’t be! I could honestly have read much more of this - I’m fascinated by the combination of human/fae world, and would have loved to se a lot more of how that world functioned.

NEXT WEEK’S AGENDA:

#101: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

#102: Desdemona and the Deep by C.S.E. Cooney