booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

THE FOREVER WAR is a story about a never-ending war against a barely-understood enemy, fought by soldiers who are removed from their own time and can never really come home again.

Mandella begins as just one of a hundred men and women (evenly distributed), tapped for an off-planet tour of duty. He’s casually intimate with the whole group, partly because of an assigned bedmate rotation, though he’s a bit closer with Marygay Potter by the time the story starts. The change in their level of emotional intimacy is apparent when he switches from calling her “Potter” (as he does in the beginning) to “Marygay” as he does starting from their brief return to Earth and lasting the rest of their time together. After their attempt to return to civilian life goes badly in the early 2020’s, they gradually become each other’s only connection to the 20th century, as everyone around them was born much later and in an increasingly unrecognizable society.

A large part of what makes all future iterations of human society so unrecognizable to Mandella is that, beginning in the early 21st century, a government program makes first most and then all people homosexual. As a queer person this felt unrealistic to me due to a complete lack of any idea of bisexuality or pansexuality, and the only reference to “asexuality” being in reference to a particular amputee’s physical inability rather than lack of desire (the only thing discussed is homosexuality, so I’ll refrain from attempting to list the full list of possibilities omitted). Both the overwhelming heterosexuality of his past and the mandatory homosexuality of the future are socially reinforced in a way that makes them both feel artificial. In this setting being one or the other is as simple as flipping some switch, and yet most people prefer to stay on their original setting. However, within the story the point isn’t whether it correctly projected the future direction of queerness. It is rather that when Mandella, a heterosexual protagonist, is already ripped away from his society through the dilated progression of relative time, the gradual switch to having him completely surrounded by gay people even when he’s deployed means that he went from the enforced intimacy of assigned bedmates to a frustrating lack of intimacy and connection. The only person capable of understanding him is his fellow 20th-century lover, Marygay. Mandella’s speech is antiquated, he has no common cultural touchstones, and even the intimacy of touch is unavailable because the women he’d possibly be interested in are all uninterested in him, and he is neither willing nor able to accept other avenues of connection. The past is a foreign country, but unfortunately it’s the only one he knows. 

THE DOOMSDAY BOOK OF FAIRY TALES weaves hope, heartbreak, and delusion into a compelling story of surviving past any chance of thriving. The world has ended but humanity hasn’t stopped, and Jesse will spin stories for as long as there’s anyone to hear them (perhaps even when there’s not).

Jesse is a skilled narrator, but an unreliable one. The fables woven into the descriptions of her life are excellent stories in their own right, and they are so numerous as to blur the line between whether this is a character telling stories or a short story collection with a very involved framing device. As her life becomes bleaker and more stressful the stories come faster, she’s spinning them for her dog, then someone she finds in her travels, and eventually to herself (even if she can’t admit it). 

Jesse needs Doggo desperately, he’s the one constant in her thoughts even when he’s not around. Jesse’s family also has a large impact on her, mostly through the shape of their absence. Her relationship with her sister wasn’t great as kids, and Jesse has a lot of tangled feelings about the slow dissolution of her family until she’s all by herself for decades.

The worldbuilding is bleak in the real world and fantastical in Jesse’s stories. They were very engaging, at one point I was so engrossed in the plot of one of the fairy tales that I swore aloud when a character made a foolish decision. Some of the stories were flimsier than others, but taken as a whole they’re great and they make the entire book stronger. Jesse is canonically making them up in the moment, so even the roughness of some of them is explained in the text.

The ending made me question everything I knew about the actual trajectory of the story, leaving open the possibility that events proceeded quite differently from what was directly said. It’s done in a way that strengthens the plot overall and it makes me want to read the whole thing again with this new theory.

I read this as an audiobook and it helped enhance the feeling of being read stories from a book of fairy tales. 

CIRQUE DU FREAK: A LIVING NIGHTMARE is the story of how Darren coveted a spider, met a vampire, and found himself in over his head.

Darren pays a lot of attention to people and what’s happening with them. He seems to have a great relationship with his sister, a pretty good (if not always honest) one with his parents, and he has a close-knit group of friends his age. His closest friend is Steve, but it seems like he puts a lot of energy into managing their interactions so Steve won’t get upset and yell at him. Because of the framing of the story we don’t see a lot of Steve’s temper, but given what he threatens and how he follows it up, I’m willing to believe this isn’t the first time he’s drastically overreacted to a slight, whether real or merely perceived. It’s a neat bit of characterization and it works very well.

Given that the entire premise revolves around a kid going to a freak show and finding out that monsters are real, I appreciated that one of the first events in the book is a teacher seeing the flyer for the show and explaining the bigoted and ableist history of them. It allows for the rest of the book to use that as a cover for what’s actually happening with the show, and lets anyone who’d rather not read a fictional version of this know up front what they’re getting into.

There’s a lot of little worldbuilding touches I love, like the descriptions of the freak show souvenirs and concessions. It completely makes sense that a kid would be fascinated by them, and it’s fun to get those descriptions as a more lighthearted moment after some of the tension immediately previous.

The plot is very much the introduction to a much bigger story. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, with a bunch of bad things happening and a clear next step that can’t be resolved until later. It introduced a bunch of the major players and made it mandatory/possible for Darren to leave his family so the rest of the series can happen, but if someone stopped after this book it would probably be unsatisfactory. As someone who’s read the series before, it prompts me to keep going, since I like what this previews and I’m ready for more.

I tried to get into this, but it just didn’t happen. I liked the first one, but something about this just didn’t work for me.

A big part of the issue is that I can’t form mental images of things I haven’t seen, and as the locations and action became more strange and more focused on technically-not-magic space power battles and pocket universe stuff it creates long stretches when the only thing I could focus on is Caiden’s thoughts about things. I didn’t really like Caiden in the last book, and I didn’t like him any better here.

BENEATH THE RISING features the unhealthy friendship of two teens in a bizarrely stable equilibrium which is maintained by neither of them thinking about it too hard and rarely having actual conversations about the way their edges cut. Johnny needs Nicky’s help to stop the tentacle monsters/gods from breaking into this dimensions and rending the world, but as they race across the globe Nicky finds himself less and less sure that she actually needs his help, and increasingly convinced that he’s just there as her porter. It doesn’t help that the monsters keep crashing into his dreams to try and make a deal.

I liked the second half much more than the first, but if you find yourself disliking Nick as a narrator you should know it only intensifies. I read the entire thing despite not liking either of them as characters, since it felt like more was going on than was immediately obvious.

The opening paragraph establishes the timeframe and the split from real-world history with a brevity and deftness which is, quite frankly, stunning. The prose is fluid, conveying Nicky’s understanding of the world and the beings in it in a way that gives his perspective without getting in the way. Terror lies in the gaps when words fail him, as the monsters rise and the world grows ever stranger. It’s fast-paced and driven by the urgency of fear, with just enough answers available at each stage to temporarily hold back Nicky’s confusion in the face of Johnny’s need to hoard information. Some later sections started to feel like they were trying to be both a brief  tour of various MENA and Middle Eastern locations as well as focusing on the dynamic between Nicky and Johnny. As you may gather from the rest of this review, there wasn’t really room to accomplish both, and so I was left with a blurry impression of Nick’s surprise as a first-time traveler.

The story revolves around the relationship between Nicky and Johnny. The specific plot events of monsters appearing, endless travel, occasional difficulties with authorities, and uneasy alliances with prior acquaintances of Johnny’s all serve to intensify and flavor Nicky’s endless thoughts of his past, how he and Johnny are in relation to each other, and whether he feels useful or just used.

Nicky seems unable to understand that Johnny will never be interested, he’s holding on to just enough hope that he torments himself with little thoughts of how some small casual or platonically intimate word or action has a romantic parallel. It’s just enough to read like a character trait without rising to the level of being grating, since he doesn’t use these hopes against Johnny. They’re little things, like thinking how them using the same chapstick one after another is “the closest we’d ever come to a kiss.” To whatever degree he understands his position of “needed but not romantically loved” by Johnny, he’s unwilling or unable to have that change how he feels about her. He has stuck around for years even though he wants something she will not or cannot reciprocate, and she has a privileged life that means their every moment of existence widens the gulf between their experiences. There's a very specific reason for this with a pretty good payoff, but it was a bit grating before it was explained.

Nick is a poor brown boy and Johnny is a rich white girl, they’re bonded together now through years of time spent as friends, but it originally started when they were present as children for a violent event which Nicky now only dimly remembers. Nicky is the point-of-view character, on the outside looking in as Johnny is a super-genius who never says she thinks of him as lesser but he keeps feeling the gulfs between their experiences of the world. They’re both deeply flawed, with separate competencies and gaps in their knowledge, complementing each other in a way that means they’re both constantly a bit frustrated once the fate of the world hangs on Nicky helping Johnny be a genius one more time. It’s a blend which was at times frustrating to read but mostly feels like an endless dance, a catch-and-release as Nicky slowly starts to realize that his genius friend isn’t perfect, and the lens of his regard of her and the new places she drags him into shows the gaps in his own understanding. It’s entertaining to read, shot through with moments of fear and dread as the consequences of years of Johnny’s actions start to have costs in the present. As the stakes get higher and they both begin panicking (for very excellent plot reasons), their rapport cracks more and more and they stop consistently covering for each other’s frailties, sometimes digging in on what they know for sure and what the other person couldn’t possibly understand.

THE WALL OF STORMS cements The Dandelion Dynasty as an epic saga which will outlast any one character, no matter how pivotal or beloved they may be. This is one segment in a generation-spanning saga of doorstoppers, where the fall of a person is transformative, but ultimately a blip in the crushing wave of a (very fascinating) history. 

Zomi is a great addition to the series, she brings out something in wonderful in Luan Zya as he mentors her and it was nice to finally learn where he kept vanishing to. Kuni (now Emperor Ragin) takes a bit of a backseat in favor of Empress Jia and Queen Gin.

The worldbuilding is full of explanations of history, language, ecology, and inventions. Several of the characters love to explain things (Luan Zya is a major one, but not the only such scholar), and it feels natural each time because the information is said when it’s needed by some other character. In addition to exploring new parts of Dara, it introduces the windswept and harsh land of the Lyucu and the history of them as a people.

Empress Jia is a fascinating character and I hope her machinations go well because otherwise things might take some very bad turns going forward. Queen Gin is smart but prone to being politically outmaneuvered. Consort Risana seems like she got the memo way too late about her role having a political angle. Kuni is more in the background, playing a long game but not seeming to realize that by keeping his plan a secret he may be leaving fallow a field where others are sowing destructive seeds. Princess Thera grows up a lot and I quite like her by the end. I could sing Zomi’s praises for ages, she felt like the main character to me, but I recognize that other characters nay have had nearly as much time in the spotlight throughout the narrative.

This wrapped up several things which were left hanging, and includes several wholly new storylines which are introduced and resolved. It leaves some big things for later, they are mostly in the vein of "what happens next" since this series is an epic following a dynasty moreso than any one individual. The start of that was present in the first book, but things like spending so much of the book on Zomi and another major portion following the Lyucu help to drive home the scale of this series in a way that was glimpsed but not fully realized in THE GRACE OF KINGS. Because of how complete this volume is, and the kind of episodic focus each book brings to a grand history, it would actually completely make sense if someone started here and hadn't read the first book. The experience would be more meaningful if the reader knows the history of these characters, but the aforementioned pivot away from Kuni helps to make this accessible if someone started here instead of the first book. The previous events are treated much like the history of Mata Zyndu's court is treated in THE GRACE OF KINGS: they're referenced when needed, and some characters have very intense opinions on that history (especially if they were dramatically shaped by it), but a series has to start somewhere and this is what was chosen. 

Zomi’s story is interwoven with the larger plot in a way that, while one clearly is earlier than the other, makes it feel wrong to think of the invasion storyline as the main plot. Zomi’s past is foundational to the empire’s future, and her travels with Luan Zya are informative and fascinating. The Lyucu invasion is handled really well, with perspective characters and occasionally nested stories are chosen to cover a breadth and depth of narrative that wouldn’t be easy otherwise.