Hugo reading.
I always wonder if I'm stricter with Hugo books than others in terms of rating. Or does the fact that I'm only choosing to read them insofar as I'm choosing to read all the nominees mean that I'm less inclined towards them from the get-go?
I mean, this book is definitely within the genre of things that are my thing. (Ugh, English.) It reminds me of Cat Valente, except Valente has an exuberance and ornateness where even (especially?) when she's being overwrought, she's wonderful. Harrow doesn't precisely walk the line between too much and not enough so much as wobble back and forth across it. I like what she does here and I also wanted more from this book than I got.
There are also aspects of this book that feel like Harrow engaged with superficially and that could have used...something. Like, yes, people in our world are racist, I'm pleased she doesn't gloss over that. And at the same time, in the naming of it, Harrow does skate lightly over it because she's rather too invested in her villains being villainous to have other people show the level of evil.

All the evil seems to come from outside our own world and, while the evil inside it gets name-checked, it doesn't land with the same power. This appears also in Harrow's use of "sane girl in a madhouse" as a trope, which I admit is one I find DEEPLY troubling because authors so rarely make the obvious jump that this isn't wrong because we're treating those without mental illness like they have a mental illness or even, as Harrow does, that the madhouse can drive one mad, but that institutionalization is fundamentally abuse even when a person is "mad", suffering from mental illness, utterly unable to communicate with the world, or a danger to themselves and others. And it's still something that happens and seeing it used as a historical nightmare...and specifically that it's bad because "sane women" were silenced through it bothers me.

It was a definitely a good debut, for all that I have some bones - large and small - to pick with it. And I appreciate what Harrow is doing with both the idea of story and the portal fantasy. It's interesting that we're at a point where this feels like it's part of an extremely large conversation BOTH about the nature of portal fantasy and about the nature of narrative.