Week 14

It’s April!

Spring is usually my favourite season, but there is something deeply sad to me about going into a second spring wherein COVID cases look grim, and we can’t do much of anything. I haven’t seen most of my friends for over a year, now.

Hey, remember when some people thought lockdown would make us all more productive? Wild.

#18) RUIN AND RISING by Leigh Bardugo

Huh. Okay.

I actually liked this - more than I was expecting to?

Like, I’ve got my gripes with how it ends, and they are in line with what I expected they’d be (namely, that it revolves around a sacrifice that the main character doesn’t actually know she’s making). Really, I think the book raises interesting questions, I’m just not sure that it entirely answered them to my satisfaction.

Some aspects of this book felt like they moved very quickly, or were a little random. This may be partially due to the speed with which I ended up reading the book, but there were several details I found myself just kind of going “hmm, was this necessary?” for.

I continued to find it amusing to read this book as though I was younger, and given to the concept of traditional ship wars. Really, the Darkling as a character seems perfectly designed to elicit such things: irrefutably evil, yet tortured, and of course, therefore very sexy. I don’t know, there’s a purity to the fact that this character exists, and I’m terribly fond of that.

I do wish we were given more understanding of how the world worked earlier than we are, generally, in this series: many of the plot twists seem to depend at least partially on information that we weren’t given before. This is particularly clear whenever the Saints come up; I don’t know I ever got a good sense of how saints, as a group, function in this world.

All in all, though, I actually had a lot of fun with this series. I’m thinking I now need to reread Six of Crows, which I admittedly did not care for upon first reading, to see more of this world and remind myself of how it ties in.

#19) THE NINE by Tracy Townsend

I will be honest, I didn’t entirely know what to expect when I picked this book up!

I met Tracy last year at ConFusion, in January 2020, a time and a place which now feels so extremely far away. Also, serves to illustrate how bad I am at reading books that I actually own. Sorry, Tracy (and also, everyone else).

Anyway, I found the unexpectedness of this book really fresh. There was always something new happening, some new twist or turn being thrown at the reader, in a way that served to escalate the stakes and yet didn’t completely catch me off track.

The other thing that really stood out to me about THE NINE was the interesting world-building, and the way that it was developed. I love an alternate-history style book, and I really liked that this kind of danced between being vaguely steampunk and being fantasy, tied in with an interesting look at the role of religion.

The theology part I would happily have read much more about, both about the history and the ways in which different characters and cultures relate to it. I’m looking forward to picking up the next book, and hope that it will deliver in such a way!