booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

I don’t like the style of the opening narration, something about it doesn’t work for me. I think it’s that Koli is narrating from so far in the future, it makes it feel like being told a rambling story.

A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT follows a tea monk who, after several years of traveling between villages serving tea and providing people a calm place to talk and rest, travels into the wilderness and meet a wild-built robot.

The worldbuilding is specific enough to feel grounded, but doesn't get bogged down in small details. Most of the story is told through introspection and conversation. This is a thoughtful novella about purpose, peace, and personhood. Some parts are definitely stressful for the main character, so how stressful it is for the reader will depend on how much they resonate with the tea monk's existential angst. I enjoyed it immensely and intend to read the sequel.

The beginning infodumps and backstory were overwhelming, making me wish it either opened with the exciting escape that happened right before the book opens, or that it waited until later on to explain that backstory. 

RUNEBINDER is a struggle for survival in post-apocalyptic Chicago, full of blood, death, magic, temptation, and queer longing for safety that seems impossible. 

I like Tenn as a main character, he has a blend of hope and exhaustion which makes him really believable as a kid who's been fighting this magic war for several years by this point. Most of the main characters would feel overpowered for book one, but here they fit, as the enemies they fight are either so numerous or so individually powerful that only the twins' three-sphere competence and Tenn's mysteriously strong Water connection are able to withstand them. I like the twins, there's a blend between moments where they're treated as a unit and when they're treated as individuals. They're more experienced than Tenn, but he's differently powerful, so they play complementary roles in confrontations and battle scenes. The cadence of where their abilities were enough and where they were overwhelmed felt natural and worked with the plot to turn this incredibly bloody story into something that's soothing on a narrative level. 

The worldbuilding is a Rapture-as-zombies take on events from some parts of  Revelation in the Bible. If that sentence didn't mean anything to you that's fine, the worldbuilding is internally consistent even without being understood as a (thus far) secular reimagining of a Biblical apocalypse story. There are spirits, magic, and powers, but only the (briefly present and utterly irrelevant) homophobic street preachers tie the destruction of the world to any particular deity. 

There's a group of characters which seem like "what if the Roma (or another similar group) were magic". They're not named as being a particular real-world group, but they're an insular community who live in a magically-hidden trailer park in the woods, wear patchwork clothes, and play a "magic guide" role in the story. I don't have the background to state unequivocally that this particular characterization is offensive, but it fits neatly into the literary history of using the tropes associated with this real-world group and stripping them of their identity labels in order to fit the story while reinforcing existing stereotypes, usually negative ones. They're portrayed as having access to magic that the rest of the world doesn't, and they have an answer for why they didn't do more when things got bad, but Tenn gets frustrated by what feels like holding back information and resources that could have saved lives. It feels more egregious when the setting is real-world Chicago after a magical event, if I'm right about who they're meant to be then they could have been called Roma and the only disruption would be that it makes the possibly harmful characterization more obvious. If the story doesn't mean to imply they're Roma, then it shouldn't make them live in mobile dwellings and wear patchwork clothes while playing the role of magical/prophetic consultants.

I had fun reading this, it flowed well as an audiobook and I enjoyed the narrator. Unfortunately the issue with the not-technically-Roma and a few other minor things dampened my enjoyment somewhat, though I do plan to try to sequel. 

With a narrative that feels like it tossed aside an opportunity for a truly cool trans guy character in exchange for yet another "woman dresses as a man in order to fight" story, THE GUINEVERE DECEPTION presents (cis) female triumph as "doing things (cis) men can't do". It's a well-supported and cohesive story as long as you're fine with the story being that men are bad and women have to pick up all the messes because they're the only ones who can be competent without being evil.

Guinevere (not-Guinevere but there's nothing else to call her) is an artfully crafted protagonist, conscious of her lack of agency even as she makes what choices she can. The thing is that even when she makes decisions, she only makes whatever ones the men didn't take care of first. It's a narrative that tries to frame her as beginning with little agency, and then slowly claiming more. The thing is that her big triumphant moment at the end is doing what she was shaped (by men) to do. Maybe this will get developed later on in the series, but there are bigger issues for me.

I thought at first that maybe Guinevere could be asexual, based on how she and Arthur spoke about their relationship early on. The problem is that since she's young enough that she has her first period during the story and seems to have little to no understanding of what sex is other than that there's some thing more Arthur might want to do with her. Merlin (in Guinevere's backstory) controlled what information she has and gave he what he thought she needed to know, sending her to be a bride without any understanding of what is euphemistically encompassed by a "wedding night". This makes the moments that could be read as ace characterization feel like exploitation of a child instead. Unless I missed something her exact age isn't given, though Arthur is implied to be youthful while also old enough to have a sexual past of his own. This fits the historical context, but I'm more unnerved by it being shown through implications, like I had to piece together just how young and exploited she is.

I mostly enjoyed the story, until I realized it was so committed to the idea that "men are bad, actually", that it does a disservice to one of its characters in a way that was frustrating and makes for a worse story. There's a masked character (knight who always has the helmet on) who is assumed to be male and is treated as such, but as soon as Guinevere finds out this character is female under the helmet, she begins treating the character accordingly. There's even a moment where, when disguised as a woman, this character says they've never felt right in clothes like this. Every bit of characterization screams some variation of trans-masc (I won't fuss over labels but they're definitely not a cis woman), except for how Guinevere thinks about them. It felt like the protagonist was persistently misgendering a character she likes very much, even though the text didn't seem like it was doing it on purpose. The narrative also focuses on how the parts of Arthur that make him a good king make him a bad husband (one cannot be loyal above all else to both a kingdom and a spouse). That, to me, was a very cool and insightful blend of characterization and storytelling, but formed part of this broader picture where by the time I got three-quarters of the way through, Mordred looked like the only good and effective male character (and if you know anything about Arthurian stories, you know it's trouble when Mordred looks like the only good one). It then further conflates "man" (i.e. male people) with "Man" (i.e. humankind) in the bad guy speech about humanity as a curse. By conflating maleness with humanity, and humanity with malice, then having a cis woman save the day in spite of both, it implicitly places womanhood outside of the corruption of humanity in a way that unsettles me.

THE DARKNESS OUTSIDE US features two older teens on a space mission to rescue Ambrose's sister. When little things stop adding up, the more Ambrose and Kodiak try to find out what's happening, the more the A.I. gets in their way.

The plot takes a while to get going, the beginning is a lot of worldbuilding which is usually smoothly conveyed, but occasionally veers into thinly veiled infodumps. Once things get going (somewhere between a third and halfway in) they pick up quickly and the story becomes very engaging. It has much of what I love most about time loop stories without technically being one. I was initially hesitant about the relationship between Ambrose and Kodiak, their chemistry grew slowly and I'm a bit too demi to buy into a romance driven by being the only two people they can interact with, but once I accepted that they clearly like each other I was able to settle in and enjoy the story. 

They're from two different countries (apparently the only two countries on Earth at the time of their ship's launch), which are implied to be Russia and an Anglophone country (I'm pretty sure this is supported by the actual text, the audiobook narrator used a Russian accent for Kodiak and a British one for Ambrose which may have affected how I interpreted the story. They make reference to a cold war, so I'm pretty sure that's what was happening. This felt a bit off to me from a worldbuilding angle because there are other large countries who could just as easily have been used as the starting point for the two remaining world powers, but I think the choice ends up working. With that small caveat, I love the second half of the book, I had an excellent time and didn't want it to end. 

I would highly recommend this, except for my uneasiness about the country choices and the fact that in the first quarter I almost didn't finish it because of the slow pacing and how I wasn't getting into the romance at first. If you want a groundhog day story about gay love in space, with a possibly hostile A.I., try this.

Given that this is pulling from the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, I like how this blends between having those stories be events that already happened, things happening now, and stories the characters are telling. I generally dislike stories where characters spend a lot of time lying to each other, especially when coupled with disguises, so I wasn't sure if I'd like this one. Unfortunately I was right and I'm not enjoying it, so I'm stopping.

I find myself feeling neutral about this book, and I'm not precisely sure why. The worldbuilding was interesting, the characters worked well, and I liked where it ended up. The audiobook narrator is excellent, they're definitely why I kept reading even though I was feeling meh about the book itself. My hesitance may be because the entire plot relies on a miscommunication early on in a way that made the rest of the story, while frequently engaging, feel a bit pointless. The conversation was artfully arranged to allow for the precise misunderstanding necessary to kick off everything else, and then the characters' stubbornness fuels the rest of the story. It's a well-constructed instance of a trope I dislike, and as much as I can tell it's done well, I still didn't like it. Since this trope is unlikely to fuel the plot twice in the series, I'll probably check out the sequel. I love Leto's story, he's definitely my favorite character, if I read more it'll be to find out what happens with him.