booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

THE QUEUE is a slow-burn bureaucratic dystopia following the increasingly complicated web of regulations, restrictions, and inconveniences imposed by a society 1) requiring everyone to get documents and permissions from a particular building to get anything done and then after a failed revolution 2) “temporarily” closing the building. 

The narration is matter-of-fact, dispassionately relaying the increasingly convoluted circumstances as every character figures out their own way to adapt to life in the queue. It gives the whole thing a bleak air, punctuated by brief happiness and grounded by dashed hopes. The underlying elements are quite simple, but the characters' woes are deaths of a thousand cuts as the fact that they need something from this building and cannot (currently) get into the building combine over and over to create problems for everyone, which are sometimes temporarily solved by workarounds, and those workarounds fail to address the underlying constraints. The audiobook narrator’s voice suffuses the story with a wry wit, understanding that it’s an incredibly bleak story but able to make the happy moments bright along the way (for as long as they last). 

The main characters are a doctor in a government building who is tracking down a discrepancy in some patient files, and then a bunch of people waiting in the Queue. Gradually they do more things away from the Gate, but every action, no matter its location, has something to do with the Queue and with the Gate, even if incidentally. 

The plot meanders as every bit of progress made is either stymied by eventually requiring paperwork only obtainable by waiting in the queue, or made by ignoring the Gate entirely and existing wholly in the Queue. The most urgent needs revolve around attempts to get medical care for oneself or others, including one man who is trying to get a bullet removed from his torso, the difficulties begin when the Gate refuses to acknowledge that any guns were fired in the event where he was shot. Things slowly deteriorate from there, mentally, physically, and bureaucratically, as the whole city is being gaslit and many of them start to believe the lies despite the evidence in their own memories.

Dry and bleak in all the best ways, read THE QUEUE for a dystopia borne of bureaucratic demands, futile paperwork, and bullets fading beyond memory even as every breath draws blood.

Very visually intense, full of color, too detailed for me.

It has some self mutilation and body horror in a way that's triggering for me.

Starts out with fatphobic comments about a pregnant character before we even learn the main character's name.

Starts with a "describe every swordstroke" kind of action scene, has someone pretending to be someone else (not a trope I like) while doing a romance (lying in relationships stresses me out), then lets me know what color the wallpaper and flowers are. Great for someone, but not me.

ALLIES OF THE NIGHT sees Darren and Mr. Crepsley's hunt for the Vampaneze Lord call them back to Mr. Crepsley's original city where once again a Vampaneze is killing humans.

The tone of the book is still kind of upbeat even when things are going badly. Because of the narrative structure, Darren is narrating the events from some point after they happened, which means that sometimes he dramatically foreshadows how bad things are going to get later. Earlier in the series this helped establish the overall tone, but now Darren doesn't do it quite as often (though still sometimes) and it feels like a change in him as he's slowly growing up. 

This doesn't do much original worldbuilding, except when Darren ends up back inside a school for the first time since he became a half-vampire. Since it's the second book in a trilogy subsumed within a longer series, it also doesn't need to build much new. 

I wish Harkat had a bigger role, he's mostly a sounding board whose advice Darren doesn't end up following, though the fact that all this happens when he was ignoring advice seems important.

Darren runs into someone he hasn't seen in a long time, and he tries to excuse his childlike appearance by kind of pretending to have a condition that means he looks like a kid even as an adult. Since (other than the blood drinking) it does explain the outward (lack of) changes caused by vampirism it does make sense, and it works as an excuse partly because conditions which cause someone to appear very young even into adulthood do exist. 

This continues the quest begun in the last book by heading to Mr. Crepsley's original city. This means that it's returning both to something left hanging rather recently (the ongoing hunt for the Vampaneze Lord) and also circling back to a place and at least one character not seen in a long time. This is a continuing storyline, but this phase of the quest features a place not mentioned recently, which makes it feel like its own thing. It leaves something for later, but I won't spoil what. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I'm hoping it wraps up some things in the next book. 

Darren is older than he was when the series began, but the way he's slowly aging (and the fact that he's been spending all his time around vampires) means that he's not where a human of his apparent age should be in modern society, a disconnect which this book is meant to point out. Part of the arc of the series is the way that his new life has changed him into someone that his earlier self might not recognize, and there's a human character in this one whose presence helps to point out those disconnects in the moment.

I don't think this one would make sense if someone started here and hadn't read the rest of the series. It requires you to know too much in order for any of it to have emotional weight, and the last good entry point for all of this was VAMPIRE MOUNTAIN. This is midway through a quest which is only important because of stuff that went down at the mountain and during Darren's trials, so if you don't know what either of those are but you're intrigued by this review I definitely recommend going back to the start of the series.

This is a nostalgia tour mixed with a quest and a life-or-death expedition, which is perfect for where this fits into the series. I like this one a lot!

The worldbuilding is wonderful, explaining a lot of things without feeling like it’s infodumping. Oli has a lot of fascinating anecdotes and animal facts, while Nina tends to provide more of the details about environmental concerns on Earth, though that rough division blurs later on. It did throw me a little that Oli’s sections are narrated in first person and Nina’s are narrated in third, since they’re both crucial for the story.

I like the audiobook narrators, they did a good job overall. The story starts slowly, spending a long time with both main characters before they meet late in the book. Oli leaves home and meets the people who become his friends, then goes through a lot to help them. Nina is worried about her home on both a local and global level, and is growing in her awareness of how she can take action to protect it in big and small ways. The pacing feels deliberate, treating their meeting as an important thing that happens, but not a goal. They have lives before and after their brief intersection.