booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

The ableist language from THE SECRET HOUR has continued and actually doubled down. I understand that it's accurate to the early 2000's when this was written but it's consistent enough that it damaged my enjoyment of the story. The final straw was when part of the town's backstory involves Native Americans being characterized as having come in with the oil boom and ruined the secrecy the town had going. My dim recollection from reading this as a teen is that maybe this story is not accurate, but whether or not it turns out to be false in the narrative it was one thing too many and I'm not going to finish the book. This was a re-read to see if a series I loved as a teen held up now that I'm an adult, and for me, it didn't.

THE PAST IS RED follows Tetley, first a child then an adult in Garbagetown, the floating raft of trash from the long-deceased Fuckwits who wrecked the planet and died long ago when the waters rose. 

It's made of repurposed jargon, vibes, and fridge horror, which makes it hard to describe but excellent to read. Tetley is hated by everyone she knows at home because of something she does partway through the book. This greatly reduces the number of relationships to keep track of, but also turns every interaction into a chance for someone to hurt her and to feel justified according to the rules. Her main relationships are with Big Red and Goodnight Moon. The narrative is told out of order, which means that the effects of that one action play out through the entire story, first as foreshadowing of the event and then reflecting on it.

The worldbuilding is conveyed through a mix of direct explanations from Tetley and the strange gaps between what those things are now in reality versus what they are to her in Garbagetown. Every time she explains something there’s a dissonance between my understanding of the objects or concepts involved and what she says about them, and that dissonance fleshes out the world. 

The plot was a bit hard to follow, as it bounces around between Tetley thinking to herself, actually doing things, or talking to someone about what happened. There’s a small moment towards the end which changed my understanding of a lot of sections from earlier, and another which implied the origin of a strange but important phrase. I think this will make a lot more sense when I re-read it, but I’m fine being confused for a while if the payoff is worth it. This time, it definitely is. The ending is my favorite part, with a twist in understanding that is beautiful handled. 

Cora can't stop hearing the Drowned Gods and wants to escape their oil-slick rainbows on her skin. She transfers to Whitethorn Academy in the hopes that it'll be better to forget, but it turns out conversion therapy for kids returned from portals doesn't work any better than the other kind.

Cora is a mermaid even if her scales aren't on the outside right now, but because of some previous events she's currently a mermaid who is having trouble being in the water. The stress of this drives her to think that being severed from both the Drowned Gods and from her Trenches-derived mermaid nature altogether might be better than having both and being haunted by nightmares. She's fat and comfortable in her own skin, the descriptions of fatphobia in the narrative are about how other people are seeing her and assuming things, and she's rejecting those assertions. Fatphobia is just one facet of the food control at Whitethorn, but it's the one she feels most keenly.

Cora doesn’t get to know the other girls very well and that feels purposeful in the narrative. No one at the school is there to bond, they’re there to forget and break in a way that fits the Academy’s version of the world. This gradually changes, especially once a new student appears and they both run into Regan (the protagonist of ACROSS THE GREEN GRASS FIELDS).

The world of Whitethorn Academy is at least partly modeled after “conversion therapy”, which is a euphemist term for the practice of emotionally and physically torturing people (usually children) until they stop exhibiting some “undesirable” behavior (specifically that of being queer). At Whitethorn, the undesirable behavior is anything having to do with the doors. There are a lot of little subtle things that I appreciate about this manner of worldbuilding, but due to what it’s copying a detailed description would likely be very triggering. The big one I will comment on is that Cora notices that almost all the faculty were former Whitethorn students, because the way in which the school breaks them makes them detached from their doors but also ill-suited for the normal world outside. There’s a lot of little things like that which make for a chilling read, forming a complete vision of a place which takes pleasure in breaking children, but told in a way that makes it clear at every moment that this is a horrible thing. 

This continues Cora’s story from her appearances in previous books, as well as showing Regan who was introduced in ACROSS THE GREEN GRASS FIELDS. There's a new storyline which revolves around the continuing effects on Cora from her time spent with the Drowned Gods, and her attempt to break their hold by going to Whitethorn. A big thing is introduced and resolved, but this was just the introduction for Whitethorn Academy and I’m sure we’ll get more in the future. It set up a lot of fascinating things about that school and the contrast between their mission and Eleanor’s. Cora is a new narrator in the series and her voice is distinct from the previous ones. This book is a turning point in the series and might be a bit much for someone to try and start here. It relies in a basic understanding of the doors and why someone might want to either return or forget, so it’s definitely better to start with the first book instead. The ending is well done, with a bittersweet mix of triumph and terror. I'm very excited for whatever's next, this introduced several new characters and I'd love to see their doors.

THE SECRET HOUR is a tightly wound story about teens who can access the 25th hour of the day and must fend off the monsters which live there. The plot is engaging, the characters are a complicated mix of likable and morally grey, and the narration perfectly captures the tone and language of teens in the early 2000’s. Unfortunately for my enjoyment of it, the slang in that decade was very ableist, and that language is woven throughout the text at a level too frequent to be an accident, and too frustrating for me to even consider recommending it now.

The perspective switches between the characters who can see the secret hour, but Jessica Day is definitely the main character. Her arrival is what sets off the plot and escalates the creatures’ plans. I like how well thought-out the web of relationships is. The feeling of their interactions fits the history of when the characters met each other, draped with the baggage of their specific circumstances.

There’s a lot of infodumping but it’s justified by having a character who’s the self-appointed master of lore and is eager to share what he knows. The text also knows it’s a lot of info, and even though Jessica, the new girl, got a six-hour cram session, we as the readers get a much more succinct version at points where it was relevant to the plot. I love the thirteen-letter words and all the numerical weapons, ever since I first read this as a teen I've had some of the phrases memorized.

The main plot is pretty simple: new girl moves to town, meets the usual crew, finds out about the outsider, tries not to die, has some fun, then there’s a big dramatic showdown against the creatures. The showdown is genuinely cool, but not very many things actually happened.

I have a lot of fond memories of reading this series as a teen myself, but ultimately it’s too riddled with ableism, both in derogatory slang and its numerous jokes about the idea of mental illness without engaging with the reality of it. I no longer recommend it.

THE MARROW THIEVES speculates that, given the opportunity and incentive, settlers would do what they’ve always done and steal the very dreams from the bones of Indigenous people in a last, desperate attempt to save themselves. And it won’t work. It’s not dystopian, nor apocalyptic, but five-minutes-in-the-future speculative  fiction because the necessary backstory is the real history that’s already happened. The “generic dystopia” version would include a factory tour and a lot more gore, rather than this (much better) story of a community trying to stay together. It’s wholly uninterested in gazing at the machinery of pain, but is focused on community, memory, and surviving long enough to have a chance at thriving.

The term "found family" is both accurate and inadequate for the character relationships. They're the remnants of a much larger and more complex community which was hunted, shattered, and even now is pursued. They were part of a community generally even before they found each other specifically, and now they're all they have left. Frenchie lost his parents before the novel opens, and loses his brother in the opening chapter. He finds a group of traveling Indigenous people, on the move in order to stay alive. I like Miig as a leader, he's doing his best and focusing on teaching the younger ones what they'll need to know. He and Minerva are working to pass on their culture, balancing the need to understand with the maturity of the individual children. 

A lot of the worldbuilding is conveyed though stories, either “Story” told nightly by Miig, or the characters’ “creation stories”, each person’s own history of how they came to be with the group. It lends a ponderous air to these details, where the reader’s desire to know more synchronizes with Frenchie’s hunger for any scrap of connection he can get. From the premise, I anticipated a scene in the factories, detailing the dystopia through voyeuristic gaze into the mechanisms used to cause their suffering. It doesn’t do that, thankfully, it stays focused on the characters, their journey, and their community. The physical bits of worldbuilding are in the places they pass through, the abandoned structures, and the garbage on the ground, the detritus that marks the wreckage of the world that was and the dangerous other people who also inhabit it.

I love the way the plot is unhurried. The endless travel is devoid of meaningful landmarks except for detritus. The pivotal scenes mostly hinge either on encounters with others or from stories. This changes toward the end after an encounter irrevocably changes the status quo and prompts them to change how they're running. I love the ending, it would be the best part if not for how great the rest of the book is.

UNSOULED is where the many plot threads of the first two books run as quickly as they can for one last tangle before what promises to be a pretty climactic final story. It moved too strangely for me to like it overall but I am pleased with the narrative turn it makes and I will be finishing the series after this. 

The thing that kept me reading was Starkey as an antagonist and Connor as a well-meaning but deeply flawed protagonist. Connor's continued journey to make peace with having Roland's arm and eye are both their own struggle and a catalyst for him to understand and externalize other issues.

Connor, Lev, and Risa are still the core of the series. I appreciate some of the more complicated perspectives like the parts pirate, Starkey, and Archie. I like Gracie and I’m mostly happy she’s a character but I’m not sure I like how she’s portrayed. She's repeatedly referred to with ableist language about assumed cognitive deficiencies, but she turns out to be very good at games and strategy. It comes off overall as a well-meaning but indelicate portrayal of an "idiot savant" character, specifically one that fits a stereotypical but positive depiction of an autistic person, and I can't decide whether that's a good thing. She seems unintelligent at first but actually is good at... whatever kind of interpersonal or strategic thing she needs to be able to do in order to keep the plot moving. I like her as a character, but at times her insights take the place of actually developing the clues in the narrative. Rather than have the dialogue where the characters work through something, she cuts right through it with insight that might as well be laser-guided to make sure the reader learns something the text might not quite have given the clues for yet.

I don't like Cam. I feel comfortable with this because I think it's hard to like Cam, Connor, and Risa all at the same time and I only have room for Connor and Risa. Cam is as much of a victim as any of the kids, but I found myself irritated by the way that he kept conveniently having as part of himself practically any suddenly important minor character that was relevant to the story.
character relationships - I wish I had more of a handle on what’s going on with Risa. She hasn't seen Connor in a while and was unwillingly paired with Cam, but now is mostly on her own. The main thing that characterizes the relationships in this series generally and the series in particular is that they're complicated webs where through searching and coincidence characters know each other or know someone who knows the person they just met. It makes the world feel small in a way, that is just loose enough for coincidence to feel plausible, but dense enough that at this point when they meet someone new they're not actually new. That made Archie and Gracie good additions as genuinely new characters who aren't like the established ones.

The worldbuilding style definitely assumes the reader has already read the first two books and doesn’t need most of the specific terms explained. They’re pretty easily picked up from context, but I definitely recommend reading the series from the start and not trying to jump im here. There’s a section where Risa thinks about her past in a way that helps fill in some major plot events, and there are so many point-of-view characters that when new combinations of them interact their discussions can serve as mini recaps of prior events. The propagandist advertisements interwoven with the chapters help to establish what is changing politically around the main characters as they navigate their own pieces of this fraught existence. They combine to build the horrifying picture of a society which has decided that since Unwinding worked so well for one collection of problems that it might work for some more, in what becomes an ever more complex tangle of ways to murder the undesirable or inconvenient and claim they’re not actually dead. Alongside this “when you have a hammer, everything is a nail” approach are a plethora of groups who have fundamentally transformed their lives in some way in relation to unwinding. The previous books looked at Tithing and Clappers, and this one gives a better look at Rewinders (recipients of a Unwound’s parts who decide to live together in a community). 

This wraps up some things left hanging, including a detail back from the first book for which I hadn’t expected closure. As book three of four, this attempted a new storyline but it does it in a way that acts like it had deeper roots than it did. This introduced a bunch of things and resolves several others, but the Arápache storyline comes the closest to being introduced and resolved. Because of its pause point, though, I'm pretty sure it's not actually closed. It left a pretty big thing for later, wrapped in ribbon and draped in a neon sign shrieking "this will show up in the final book!" There's a very large cast and their voices are generally distinct, though it definitely helps that the chapters are named for the current narrator. I think the returning narrators are consistent with their previous incarnations, but honestly there are so many narrators that I'm not sure. If somehow you're reading this and trying to decide whether this is a good starting point for the series... it's definitely not. Not only is it better to start with the first book, but this one will be pretty confusing if it's your introduction to the world of Unwind.

It introduces and partially resolves the Arápache storyline, but while normally I'd like that I'm frustrated by how it was carried out. I’m a bit torn over what to think about it.. Including deliberate reference to and then a long sequence involving Native Americans works well overall, and it shows how the United States' decision to enact unwinding would affect other groups within its borders. For that, I like it. Where it was confusing is that in order to get the kids into the Rez, they add a previous stay there into Lev’s backstory. Since what he did in between being separated from Connor and Risa and arriving at the Graveyard in the first book isn’t fully explored, this attempts to fill in some of that blank space with a stay and some pretty dramatic backstory that makes their current visit both possible and tense. It didn’t work for me, and prompted me to check that I was reading the right book and hadn’t accidentally skipped one, since it seems bizarre that such a transformative event wouldn’t have been mentioned earlier. It makes it feel like a thing set up only once this turned into a series, and the overall effect is awkward. It then uses it to secure a pivotal plot point and that goes okay, but overall I'm dissatisfied. 

This is the penultimate book in the main series, and it shows, for good or ill. It dragged in the middle and I almost didn't finish the book. The ending was better, enough for me to actually finish it, but it was overly complicated. I liked a lot of moments, and I appreciate the dastardly characters and the morally complex world, but I think overall I didn't like this particular book in the series.