I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, so this book was not easy to wrap my head around. As can happen with a lot of SFF books, I didn’t always fully grasp the world building or how exactly certain tech or magic worked. I took some long-ish breaks from this book and that might be a part of why I struggled to understand the different political/religious factions and how they worked together or against each other. I know it’s not the elegant way to do it, but sometimes I just want a breakdown at the beginning of what we’re walking into.

I enjoyed the shifts in Misery’s perspective, and how they were never really a reliable narrator.

Her quick jump from lying about being a Messiah to fully believing it was a little too fast for me. But I guess that’s how it goes. It reminded me of Paul’s transformation in at the end of the second Dune film.

Looking at the book as a whole, it definitely seems like a critique of the uber religious. It displays how people can be misguided by their religious zeal so that they are unable to empathize with others or be able to fully observe situations.

This book is truly exemplary in its use of personal pronouns. We are viewing the world through Misery’s perspective, and so the narration uses the neutral xie/hir for any character we meet until hir pronouns are revealed to Misery/us. A great example of how we can avoid gendering folks until they identify themselves to us. The last book of Yang’s I read had very interesting gender lore (people using magic to suspend the development of external sex characteristics until they decide for themself how they would like to identify - but a stigma exists in this world against non-binary people who are seen as not being able to “choose”) and it was nice to read another book of theirs, this one where there seems to be no prejudice against any particular gender (and many more than two exist).