Now, this book goes into a lot of mental health issues I know nothing about, so mileage may vary here. I can’t speak to the representation there, and it’s a huge component of the story. But I think the conceit around it is interesting and makes for compelling reading, and feels well handled?

It is also bleak. Boy is it ever, sometimes. The mental health of the protagonist improves and degrades with her interactions with other people. A rich inner life is basically the only thing keeping her together as she suffers ostracizing and has much more responsibility placed on her by her family than most young adults her age. Talking about the central conceit of the book I would consider to be a spoiler. It’s also the most interesting aspect of the story; something I found very relatable at times. Suffice it to say the surrealistic aspects are not something I’ve come across quite like this.

It’s brutal and honest, very human in its depiction of humanity. Nuanced enough that characters all felt fleshed out. Heartbreakingly sad at times, coupled with mental health components and self-harm, I’d caution readers to consider their own headspace going into the story. If in the right place to contemplate the questions, and how they’re raised, I think this could range from very meaningful to at least fairly unique. In the wrong headspace, I expect this could feel crushing.

The audiobook, by the way, has multiple narrators and were all absolutely excellent. Great production values. Standout.

The concept of a group of refugees who lose parts of themselves when their sense of place and home are forcibly excised from their memory, is just a fantastic concept for a fantasy novel. And the worldbuilding mostly supports the concept and premise, which is, essentially, this group gets together and attempts to get revenge on the wizard that magically made it no longer possible for them to remember parts of themselves tied to Tigana.

I think of the characters in this book as being similarly initially very interesting. Trauma has effected them in various ways, and they are subsequently wound up like wind-up toys and set off. The problem is that on their path they became wildly less interesting than the initial anticipation of their path. They don’t really feel nuanced as they go on, and sometimes stray in the cliche. Very much feels like a fantasy book of the 90s.

On a prose level, it’s uneven. Above average, generally—flowery and descriptive to out-of-the-way, completely forgettable. With such a strong premise and concept I really wanted the character work to be better. There’s way too much plot device sex right away and throughout. And as soon as the characters “thing” is solidified, meaning their motivation or one sort of flourish, it’s generally over. They don’t feel nuanced and feel like they are an archetype set into a mold of a trauma response. They aren’t contradictory, they don’t really stand out stylistically in dialogue (though the dialogue is more than competent, generally). Like I said: wind-up toys set off. No more, no less.

This was pretty satisfying macro experience and a sometimes boring granular one. I know I will remember the ideas in this and not the characters. The craft doesn’t feel able and up to the very ambitious and fantastic concept, I think.

The thing I love about Rooney is she never fails to showcase every interaction in such a way that communicates the absolute tragedy of, often everyday exchanges. How most of us are socialized in such a way as to never acknowledge or notice the connective tissue of our lives dwelling there. If we approached these moments with more intention and focus, there’s a real beauty and affirmation waiting to be seized.

Instead we’re often trains on a collision course and we don’t know how to fix it. We usually just let it happen. Those moments haunt us. But we do nothing to make restitution or try to make sure those things don’t reoccur. Probably because acknowledging that inadequacy feels like it would be somehow worse than constant destruction. Undeniably, I think, Rooney paints those moments as very human and impartial. It feels like every story is a lamentation, to be honest. Nothing else to do but the characters to live with it.

I wonder if she’s so polarizing because people recognize themselves in interactions and either feel seen or hate that fact. With the people not connecting not noticing or not caring to see the primary preoccupying force in everything she writes.

Lion Zorn is an empathy tracker. Think Will Graham from Hannibal, only more focused on moods and macro, cultural patterns. We come off the last book, in which Zorn has leaked details of a drug that more-or-less unearths or allows for more people like him to bond with animals, heighten their empathy, generally. I didn’t actually expect the continuation of that book, because that’s quite an order.

Happily, this book maintains the things that worked about the first book and adds a healthy dose of interesting speculative science into a fast-paced cyberpunk thriller model. It’s still fairly gonzo and steeped in pop culture references, and it’s again a mystery formulated in such a way as the reader would never figure it out on their own, I think. But I like those things about it. It’s chaotic, Zorn is masculine but not alpha male or archetypical. He makes mistakes. His core is literally about being empathic. He’s played more often than he’s the mover and shaker. He isn’t always trying to get laid. Conflicts are resolved usually in atypical ways. And there’s a diverse cast that’s pretty well fleshed out, fairly diverse in terms of representation, and often are at odds with Zorn. Sometimes for reasons he’s completely unaware of.

Really, I think the holdup readers will have is the core conceit around empathy and the play against type/trope this book does while being a cyberpunk book. Readers of the subgenre are, to my mind, notorious in their subjective definitions of what a CP story is and ought to be. Usually people like realism in their CP. So do I, and this still won me over; twice now.

The em-tracking is a novel concept and it’s not used as a magic marker that constantly works to his advantage. Most of the time it’s a disadvantage having empathy when others do not. Especially when they know how to use that knowledge like a weapon. As long as readers can roll with the quirky arrangement of cyberpunk, action thriller tropes and subversions, there’s plenty of love about this book.

Don’t @ me!


Bit of a trudge for me. Mostly owing to the strange narrative interjections with prescriptive historical context… about history. And then I just can’t stand military/war fiction in general, so I knew this wouldn’t be a favourite. I honestly think Anna Karenina is better constructed and a masterclass on introducing themes back-to-back, building a network of connective tissue with a lot of payoff without the prescriptive methods of narrative interjections. Fiction is self generated and when authors use that to tell readers what’s right—even when they’re certainly aligned with my own ideology re: politics and nationalism and history—it generates a cognitive dissonance that really bothers me.

On top of this, description was really centered on generalities and I prefer specificity. On one hand, there’s insights that bring you into a scene, such as noting a woman being beautiful for having disproportionate lips or friends that meet after a time taking a while to find their footing for a bit. On the other it dumbs things down fairly often, reducing people to bland generalities, always always, again, around attractiveness. Something that is so subjective and pointless.

When we get that Downton Abbey vibe and I start caring about these rich people, the voice is compelling. Anytime I care about rich people, the author is a wizard. But it became too infrequent and the interjections more intrusive.

It absolutely has some fantastic stuff to say on history and war and power and gender dynamics (from time to time)… but it also isn’t really anything new. If I hadn’t read about these subjects. Especially if I were in high school or early 20s, I think this could be a eye opening read. I love books that trick you into learning. But it became something of a dead horse being written. Points were being made after a scene that made the point already. It’s so explicit it is grating. Over time, it does feel like it’s beating a dead horse.

2021 reread (listen): Keeping in mind when this was published I am being generous and giving this a rating reflecting it does articulate what it sets out to do.

That being said it kind of embodies the critiques men often embody (ha, it’s a good quip, you’ll see why soon) in their philosophical and intellectual rigour. Men almost always completely discount principles of the body and tend to characterize their mind as being detached from their body. Or reflect only upon nourishment of the body in service to the mind.

A through line for women of thought, generally, is grounded in principles of embodiment. Lived experience being reflected in the body and the marriage of the sum total of experience with the memories flowing from the perception of the body. For instance, a woman who gives birth has a body that changes, reflecting that experience. It’s an unacknowledged privilege of men that they never usually have to think about their bodies in any real sense because they generally hold rights, power, wealth, and peace of mind. Their anxieties being focused on legacy.

The more marginalized a person is, the more grounded their thoughts tend to be on issues of embodiment. They don’t have the luxury to do otherwise.

For me, this is such a disconnect with life that most thoughts on the character of men and a various anxieties come off as bloviating and sometimes laughable. To say nothing of, as I noted in my 2019 reading of this, the realities of mental health as we know it today.

So, yes. This was _fine_, for what it is.

2019: Interesting, but seriously antiquated in terms of mental health realities.

I am always a bit hesitant to read short story collections because how can you rate something that is, almost ubiquitously, uneven? Different genres; different voices crafted for each narration; different perspectives; different points of interest for each conceit and premise. Terrifying.

I think this might be the third collection I’ve read that’s pulled it off though. Mostly by being exceptional with prose and diction work, making every story, if not a thing of personal interest, a pleasure to consume and feel on the proverbial tongue. And also with one story in particular that managed to form a dialogue with me regarding something I’ve never once fully articulated nor certainly verbalized. A story called A Briefing on Time’s History. I am a twin myself and make sense of my world primarily through narrative (Malka Older would probably call it a narrative disorder, actually), so that story was really striking and thought provoking to me. Not to mention moving.

There are other stand outs though. A story about a woman negotiating life with the ostensible memory of her father forcing food down her throat as a child when obstinate as an extrapolation of men in the future perceiving her body in a similar way. There are lots of things in here like that. I like to call these kinds of things prismatic. You shift something just a small degree and look at it from a different angle and it’s entirely something else.

Or a whole new view of the same thing, anyway. Excellent stuff. Rumination and stray thoughts that run rampant into stories regarding rearing and socialization and the good and damage we do to those we love, regardless of intent. You’ll laugh and you’ll be horrified. It goes places, from time to time.

A memoir from an early thirties black, queer man that highlights explicitly the many ways socialization and education in schools fails queer people. An explicitly for queer people, as the author chronicles how representation has affected them directly, as well as how the inability to find a book exactly like this one would have helped his development a great deal.

This was certainly competent and novel in concept—at least, to me—it’s even got a knack for prose i jibe with. It is, however, wildly uneven for me. I think this could have made a really powerful essay with laser focus, rather than an overview that stretches into tangential matters of life that vary in importance, privilege, and hyper fixations that may-or-may-not be shared. I find myself tuning out of some of the things that felt meandering and coming back for the overall summation of the point she was trying to hone in on for each section, rather than be gripped throughout.

Similarly to Ordinary Grace, this is a story that takes a close-to-archetypical story most people probably have read, and tilts it a bit. At times, it feels a bit like Big Fish. Not just because there’s a witch. It’s reiterated that not quite all of it is completely true.

It’s kids-in-the-forest reminiscent of Stand By Me at times, hitting a nostalgic note, as a gaggle of kids run away from a residential school (which the witch runs) and collide with random and odd people and situations. Narrated by one of two brothers in the future, there’s a strong sense of the author being present, beyond his being the protagonist, as you’re aware he’s also colouring outside the lines of the story.

Through the interrogation of faith and belief in religion and people, in general—especially after seeing some of the worst from people early on in their lives—characters encountered on their odyssey (literally dubbed so, called out in a chapter header) take on a symbolic, mythological quality which work to convey the thing out young narrator internalized at the time, as well as furthering the plot.

Sometimes this really worked for me. Other times, the… tinge or ‘quality’ this has, the author with his thumb on the scales, was something I butted heads with. You know fiction is a series of choices. You know it’s not the actual story of the brother. And yet, it did bug me not knowing what was ‘real’ or not.

There are a number of larger-than-life, melodramatic elements that present themselves. In a ‘pay attention to the strangeness of the dream’ way… I always wonder when an author does this to assuage the reader’s potential spotting of a contrivance. With me, though, it always underscores, highlights, and strikes the very thing they are trying to hand wave with a lightning bolt. It’s something like when people say they are doing a segue. You don’t draw attention to a segue: you just _do_ it.

As such, I liked this book quite a book. It has something good to say. Draws attention to residential schools. Twists a tropey story into something else. Is competently, sometimes exceptionally written; especially with dialogue with some characters. But every time I settled into the fiction, invariably the narrator would point to the strangeness of the dream and I would be out of the fiction and pretty annoyed. Otherwise I bet this would have been a 5 star read. Closer to it, anyway.