booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

RADIANCE is a feast of grief, a full spread of reactions, inactions, and mourning of a particular life and death, by those who knew Severin, loved her, or saw her movies and thought that was close enough to love and knowing. Told through various media such as scripts, interviews, journals, and editorials, RADIANCE is a lush portrait of an alternate early 1900’s cinematic solar system where the Edisons are a dynasty, supply chains stretch from Earth’s moon all the way to Pluto, with life sustained by the milk of callowhales on Venus, and imagination fed by silent films. 

I love old sci-fi's imagination of the wonders of the solar system, before we knew that Mars wasn't brimming with water. RADIANCE embraces that imagination and makes it true. The rules are different here, where movie stars live on the moon, production teams travel to Venus for better lighting, and Pluto is a colony for those who want to be absolutely free to live under a pretty stringent set of customs. The worldbuilding is lovingly detailed, with reasons (implied or explicit) for each oddity until they blur together into a wonderfully strange whole. 

My sense of what the story is wobbled and undulated as I was reading, as each new piece, every angle and new way of telling the story, they shifted my sense of the narrative. At the end I feel as though I understand Severin, at least a little, but also I have a deep sense of how foolish it is to think that I’d understand her through this biographical reimagining of her life and wishes, filtered through the gaze of someone who made her reenact important moments if the lighting was a bit off. 

Some sections are breezy and delightful, oozing the upbeat patter of a newsreel or advertisement, scattered with references to contemporary figures and their planetary exploits, matter-of-factly describing life on various planets and moons. It’s excellent worldbuilding, as descriptions slowly drift between what genuinely seems like fun and more disturbing descriptions of what’s necessary for survival or expected as the rules of that particular location. I like this blend of narrative styles, creating the feeling of a great big book of everything one might want to say about Severin, pouring at first in a raw scream of grief at her absence, moving into a celebration of what she did with her presence, then contemplating a long future without her. 

My favorite sections are the murder mystery theater portion and the last instance of The Ingenue's Handbook. The staged and surreal nature of the mystery theater felt like a perfect way to highlight the impossibility of reconciling Percival's need to know what happened to Severin, and his understanding of how impossible that would be. The Handbook, shortly thereafter, is by contrast acceptance and understanding of the writer's need to move on, but also great love for Severin that is undiminished even by her likely eternal absence.

The conclusion pulls everything together delicately and suddenly, like a magic trick, blink and you'll miss it. One instant I had a dozen questions and just a paragraphs or two later the whole story made sense in a way that I didn't expect but just feels wonderful. 

There’s a relentless sense of movement, as Isabel describes what’s she’s seeing, thinking, and doing in a constant stream. This creates a self-reinforcing interplay between Isabel's physical journey as she's exploring, and her ruminations on what's working, what's not working, what different ghosts are doing, and what any of it means. 

The worldbuilding is great, building on what was established in ARCHIVIST WASP but exploring a whole new setting that was inaccessible/unknown before. There’s a sense of what places mean to her and what they prompt her to think, mingled with more detailed descriptions of specific important features of the location. It gives the whole thing a hazy, dreamlike feeling, in the way that the dreamer wakes up knowing some weirdly important and oddly-specific detail, but everything else is a vague blur that quickly falls away. This is not unlike how the ghosts must feel, perhaps. There's a lot of focus on memory and identity, and it prompted me to think on how much the absence or presence of memories contributes to personality. For these ghosts, some of them have very strong personalities even when their memories are inaccessible, but they're distressed when they become aware of the fact that they're missing memories. This creates a feeling of seeking something they might not even be able to recognize when they find it, viewed through Isabel's distress since she's seen some of what they can't remember anymore.

Since (unlike FIREBREAK) this is a direct sequel to ARCHIVIST WASP, it’s time for the sequel check. This wraps up several things left hanging from the previous book. The main storyline starts here and wasn’t present previously. The main character changed her name-in-use but is still the same person with a consistent narrative style that’s recognizable from the first book. Several major things are introduced and resolved, it definitely has its own story. It’s the last book chronologically, for now, since FIREBREAK (published later) is more of a prequel that can be read on its own. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the ghost, a few of which are answered by the prequel, but none of which are essential for this particular story. I think it might make sense if someone started here and hadn’t read the other books, since the social shape of the world is much changed from ARCHIVIST WASP, and the way those changes are explained can easily serve as an introduction for anyone new. A lot of the emotional resolution will definitely matter more for anyone who read the first book, but the story is pretty self-contained and would likely make enough sense to be enjoyable on its own.

I love the ending, it’s bittersweet and hopeful, hinting just enough at catharsis that it’s satisfying as an ending while being open enough to possibly support more stories afterwards. I want more with these characters, so I hope that happens.

ASSASSIN’S APPRENTICE follows Fitz through his childhood and adolescence, as he learns to be an assassin for the king, and what he’s actually willing to kill for.

The worldbuilding is layered, with things explained as Fitz is told them, supplemented by insights from his older self. This leads to a gradually filled-in impression of a complex setting where details are conveyed as they are necessary, and even more is implied through the narrative. This style lends clarity. He discusses both how he felt at the time, as a child and then a teenager, and what he thinks about those events now that he’s an adult. This becomes especially important during sections such as his time under Galen, as the dissonance intensifies between events as they happened and how he was being conditioned to perceive them. There are several moments where something he does as he’s telling the story is juxtaposed with some assertion made by his younger self, showing how something must have changed in the meantime (presumably to be covered somewhere in the trilogy). 

One of my favorite things is his complex relationship with Burrich. How they are to and with each other changes throughout the story. Even when it's changing for the worse, it makes sense, and it's nice to see Fitz's growing understanding of Burrich as a person with his own internal world separate from Fitz. How Fitz views Burrich is often a great proxy for how Fitz is growing and changing, flavored by the dissonance between how Fitz is and how Burrich wants him to be.

There’s a lot of care in the narration, partly due to the balance between Fitz’s memories and his older self’s reactions to and commentaries on the memories, and partly due to what I can best describe as a lack of voyeuristic interest. One of the background plots involves raiders pillaging the coast, and, other than a few scenes where Fitz has to directly fight someone as a result of the raids, there are few descriptions of the kind of violence which accompanies such raids. Said violence is canonically happening, and Fitz frequently discusses the effects he’s observing on the people and the Kingdom which stem from the raids, but in a way that makes sense for his character. This is just one example of how the narration gives the impression of the complexity (and sometimes violence) of Fitz’s world, but does not unnaturally bend his character to direct the story towards it, nor does it shy away when appropriate. 

A great start to the series, I'm ready to read the next one.

I don’t like the narrator and can tell the trajectory of the plot will stress me out.

THE LAST SUN was all wrong for me. I like witty banter and political machinations, but it felt like the interactions were constantly being explained. I made it halfway through and never felt like the protagonists were actually in any danger. There’s a tragic backstory that’s just hinted at so far, and a bodyguarding mission where they’ve just left their charge at home while they take care of other plot stuff. For all Rune talks about his lack of power, it hasn’t actually inconvenienced him or kept him from getting something done. When the seer told him to take a set of actions, he followed the advice and then everything was fine.

The tension doesn’t feel tense and I don’t like the characters enough to care whether they succeed. It’s a shame because I loved the initial problem that Mathias presents, I just wish the story was doing more with him.

It definitely doesn’t help that a bunch of the worldbuilding is themed around the Tarot, a topic with which I’m only passably familiar. If you’d like a fast-paced fantasy story with magic and guns in New Atlantis that’s themed around Tarot, give this a try. It’s just not my thing.

Just not a great fit for me.

As a queer person this was hard to read at times, and I appreciate that this a thriller set at a conversion therapy camp over a few days rather than being a longer saga set at the camp. I like the narrative balance between events at the camp and the summer leading up to it. As a thriller it’s pretty effective, I was genuinely surprised by some of the reveals at the end. When everyone running the camp is terrible by virtue of being someone who would run a conversion therapy camp… that makes for a believably large suspect pool and a compelling mystery for the protagonist to solve.

One thing which bothers me about the plot is that the central mystery is what happened years before to a character who is disabled in the present and dies shortly after the story begins. It's a mystery that could have been solved by the disabled person communicating at all with Connor earlier than when he did... instead of the actual method which relied on him dying in order for the information to be passed. It used the disabled character, Ricky, as a catalyst for how the reader enters Connor's story, and as part of the motivation for Connor's actions, and once it does begin focusing on him it's by necessity through other people's perspectives, or through things he left behind. On the other hand, part of the point is that Ricky's autonomy was impeded and his disability was caused by something related to the camp that Connor is now trying to escape, so it's just as possible that this dismissal of Ricky is on purpose, as part of the evil stuff that's happening. I'm not sure what to think about it.

This is great. Clih was the only returning character, and they had a more active role this time, both telling and receiving the story in a high-stakes cultural exchange/hostage scenario as they and they companions try to please three tigers until help can arrive. 

The tigers’ version of events was interjected at moments where it complemented (or occasionally contradicted) the version Clih knew. These moments are well-chosen, and serve to tell much about the tigers conveying them. The actual story is exciting, romantic, and poignant by turns, the pacing works well (even when interrupted by the tigers).

It as much to say about stories, who tells them, and whether telling them imperfectly is a price worth paying to preserve them. Clih begins with a story recorded, but recorded imperfectly, set against the tigers’ corrections and their demand for a perfectly told tale that will be Clih’s last. 

This is technically a sequel but can function as a stand-alone book. The main difference for anyone who reads them in order is that they'd already be familiar with the main character and their vocation, but these details are briefly conveyed early on without needing to reference any other text.