Week 16

I feel a little as though I am spinning my wheels, running in place. I suspect this is due to the length and tenacity of the pandemic, though that doesn’t make me any happier about it.

In any case, books continue to happen, and I continue to read them.

Maybe one day I’ll stop waiting for my to-read list to clear out.

#22) THE BONE SHARD DAUGHTER by Andrea Stewart

Wow, you all weren’t kidding about how great this book is, huh!

The book follows a number of different plot points, which manage to weave together and end up influencing each other in really fun, fascinating ways. Probably my favourite part of the book was trying to figure out how the pieces fit together, trying to unravel the mysteries at the heart of the novel.

The characters, too, are interesting and kept me invested in the story. They’re separated by distance and position, and do not immediately seem like they have anything to do with each other. Lin, the Emperor’s daughter, trying to regain her memory, Jovis, a smuggler with a heart of gold, trying to find his wife, and Phalue and Ranami, a couple trying to make it despite differences in class and understanding of the world.

All of these stories really worked for me, and I was held tight to the book, wanting to see where they all went. There’s some really fascinating discussions within about power and oppression and exploitation, made concrete by the Emperor’s use of citizens’ bone shards to power his mad science creations. You know me, I love a concrete analogy for a theme, and I was really into this.

The bone shard magic itself is really interestingly developed, and I was very invested in Lin’s journey to try and learn it, to try and take over her father’s constructs. Furthermore, all the relationships in the story are well-developed, and I cared about all of the characters, enough to be deeply bummed when bad things happened.

Now I just need to anxiously wait until the release of THE BONE SHARD EMPEROR.

#23) UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED by Sarah Gailey

“Queer librarians distributing anti-fascist materials” was never NOT going to be a winner, right?

The story follows Esther, a queer woman who’s grown up in a very restricted, normative town. After her lover is executed for deviance, she runs away to join the librarians, a travelling group who, it turns out, are secretly working against the restrictive society in which they live by smuggling people and materials.

All in all, really, I liked this book a lot. It’s hopeful and radical and I really resonated with its depiction of queerness and queer community as freeing and improving everything around it. Esther’s journey to self-acceptance, and towards actively wanting to work for change, made sense to me.

If I had one complaint, it’s that, at novella-length, it feels a little short. I would really have enjoyed spending more time with these characters, both to sink more fully into character development and to see their relationships. There’s two characters who are around for most of the novella who get very little characterization and seem almost entirely superfluous; perhaps if the book was longer, we could have gotten to know them and the world better.

Still, I really liked this, and I would be extremely open to a sequel or something else set in this world!