More enjoyable than the first one! This time we follow the then apprentice, now full Chant, as he chronicles a new story (his own), on paper, the text we are actually reading. Only there is also a reader within the fiction who is annotating this text as part of a kind of mystery (and injects a fair bit of humour, too).

The meta addition is really fun, both because I wanted to know who was making these footnotes and crossing out the text and what not, but also because their personality really came through as a secondary character.

The actual plot is semi interesting. It’s nice to have queer rep, especially neat when he would Recontextualizing stories of straight characters with a queer lens. But there wasn’t as many stories as the first because the main tension is that he just is not about that chant life right now. The process of storytelling is something he’s disenchanted with, and he’s in a sort of mid life crisis situation. The stakes are pretty low, especially compared to the first. It’s a much more quiet story, and that makes the fairly large page count seem a bit overindulgent. But I did like the conclusion and the structure and format with the meta component and conversation were absolutely engaging. Never was it in danger of being put down by me.