At this point I think the formula is a bit stale for me. Win at a cost feels less organic, because you expect exactly that. Only the revelation to make that occur this time is a bit too contrived, making the entire ending feel contrived. Yeah, we get it everyone betrays everyone; no matter the locale, apparently, you’re going to get screwed over, when participating in skullduggery. And yet again we get a circuitous pointing right back to the characters already known at the end. It feels like it’s spinning its wheels in its attempts to screw over the characters juuuust enough. Just Move On from these damn villains!

Unfortunately, the bounce back to Locke as a kid and the romance angle felt really forecasted and the play itself just another thing the author is into, as with the sailing in the previous book, that becomes something that pads the book, making it the longest and self indulgent of the series so far. I think reading these years apart would be way better than back-to-back, but I don’t like to do that, so it/I suffers for it.

Fun to return to the characters but definitely doesn’t feel as unique as the first book in terms of plotting and tropes. It also heavily goes into nautical stuff, where the characters are being taught about the terms and this section was interminable to me, because I just did not care about all of that stuff. Reads like the author did a lot of research and didn’t want any of it to go to waste.

Happily, once that section is sorted it’s back to an unconventional pirate crew I really enjoyed. Though as mentioned, the numerous twists, especially the one started at the very start can be seen from a mile away, unlike the first, which obfuscates at least some of the twisty ways, somewhat. It’s a fun enough formula holdover but is a bit old back-to-back. I think it’d have been more enjoyable. I’m going straight to the next though, as I want to get through a bunch of series I’ve been putting off, like this one.

It’s fun to revisit stuff you enjoyed a lot in your teens/early twenties and they don’t disappoint. It’s still a breath of fresh air consuming a fantasy book that isn’t medieval Europe or similar. And then to have a pretty intricate setting put down in highly descriptive language, to the point of interludes codifying worldbuilding little short stories peppering the text. Plus, a gang of understandable but unlikable characters engaging in the fleecing of the rich in convoluted ways in tandem with Locke’s past essentially priming the skills and attributes of the gang members and pacing stuff out so that all the action doesn’t happen all at once.

It’s a good time if you’re into those highly specific things. Fantasy authors that love the world they make and want to tell you about can be exasperating, if you’re not also interested in the world. Thankfully, I am. Not the least of which because one of my favourite tabletop games Blades in the Dark, borrows heavily from how this story functions. I am predisposed to liking pretty much every aspect of it because I have consumed and played many hours of the game, which emulates this.

But even so I think it’s a pretty unique and interesting take on each genre, mashed up here. The beginning has a slower start only due to the orphan kids being written in a very adolescent way. Lots of boring cussing and talking about women and all that. But that’s a short phase. Once through things get immediately better, and it is sustained.

10-ish years in the future, young Flynne, poor and living in the America’s south, takes on a job her brother is meant for: Piloting a ‘copter as security through, what she believes to be a game. She becomes a witness to a crime that powers beyond her comprehension take an interest in, putting her in the middle of a titanic struggle. Bodies start dropping and what she thought was a game is actually something completely different.

Gibson is an aquifer taste. At least, for me he is. He has a predilection to overuse commas and insert a lot of verisimilitude in dialogue. The result can really bog down the momentum and create a methodical pace the reader has to abide by. He’s great at co-opting words in current use intuitively, for worldbuilding the ten-second future-scapes. And he does all this with purposeful information design that generally feels overwhelming for the protagonist, who is usually fish-out-of-water perspective for the reader. As a result, he always feels like a singular literary and genre mashup. There’s frenetic pacing and hardly any interiority, 80% dialogue and reiterative conversations. You learn about the characters purely as they do things and you project their interiority as a reader.

This can all really gel, or really grind. I’ve had to acclimate, and I’ve glad I have. The plot is always worth it; despite the omnipresence puppeteering things, I always like the reveals and the speculative ideas embedded in the fiction. They do feel like wheels spinning sometimes in the start, and I’d prefer a lot more interiority and painting of scenes, so they generally never quite hit 5 star reads for me. This, in particular, feels very prescient and the most interesting take on certain spoilery notions, only now becoming more predominate in scifi.

If you’re wondering about the adaptation on TV, I’ve also seen that. Apart from the characters been same or similar, and the concept of the technology and timeline, notion of the jackpot, etc.. it’s all fairly different in the show. It’s not as good in my opinion, but much of this book, frenetic as the pacing may suggest, doesn’t have That much plot. It’s more about placing all the pieces on the board and seeing short moves that result in a checkmate—rather than episodic content that has a very different information design, and wants showy technology and/or a fight sequence every couple episodes to keep people watching. The show has a different antagonist and is clearly on a far different plot sequence, judging from the beats. The relationships between characters are different and character arcs are pretty drastically altered.

Had I not read this with a friend I highly doubt I’d have ever picked it up. I’m glad I did, though I didn’t often agree with the conclusions the author had in her rumination predominately about her buying a hawk in a fit of processing the complex grief she is experiencing from her father passing. In a way it is a exorcism that takes place during the training and subsequent excursions. She goes back and forth on the ethics, antiquity of the practice, and various takeaways from her being pretty legitimately unhinged from the decision and it’s ramifications.

Unfortunately, it straddles her experiences with that of White, the author of The Once and Future King—a book I did not remotely enjoy, nor want to know more about. Boy, she is enamoured with the authors life experience and how it relates to what he wrote, and, of course, his own granular, inexperienced journey in getting and “training” a hawk, too. I can see why it’s there… but I just was not interested in it; certainly not in that granular a detail.

As mentioned, I also found myself shaking my head at her conclusions. She gets close to the idea of maybe it being archaic and foolish and kind of shitty to own a hawk. The damn things get “lost” all the time, aka, they don’t want to be controlled by a human because they’re animals? I don’t think what she does is particular ethical. As mentioned, for much of this, she is not in her right mind, though. Im not sure that excuses her behaviour, since I don’t know much about what would happen to these hawks people attempt to obtain. Would it never have been caught? Or would someone else just have the Hawk she got from the guy?

Regardless, I thought she had a fascinating mind and enjoyed her kind of writing. What she was interested in, when not intersecting with White, I found fairly captivating. She is quite the character, probably in part because her experience was so far removed and she was a wild thing. And her revelation about why the hawk was an imperative was well done, so I found this far better than it had any right to be. I see a few people disliked it because of the conceit of her subjugating an animal and I understand that, but I thought about all the fiction and nonfiction I’ve enjoyed before: None of them had characters doing things I would do or agreed with. In part, I think that is the point of this story.

This was a 2.5 rounded up for me, because I did like the last 60 pages quite a bit. I hadn’t realized I was quite attached to the original cast and the conceit of that story. I really liked the framing and those characters. These ones are less interesting to me, to be honest. But the ethos carries over, and kind of carries the book. It’s inclusive and has lots of representation. It’s empathic and sentimental and goes against typical sci-fi fare. There’s even less of a plot (by far) than the first one: Pepper and Sidra, the A.I from the first book, acclimate to living together and off chapters are Pepper’s past as a clone in an indentured m, horrible factory place.

Where things get better is when the past events actually reach a point with actual stakes, because most of it is perfunctory. We know she escapes we are in her future now. It’s vaguely interesting how she manages to do so, but really, until that storyline ramps up I just didn’t care all that much, even though it’s pertinent as to why she cared so much about helping Sidra with this illegal transition.

It was completely fine but I really was looking forward to more of the original concept, and I think just wasn’t as in the mood for something else as I was when I picked up the first.

I think this would be especially good if you haven’t read anything like it. It’s very endearing at times, specifically when it’s more personal experience memoir than with macro description of the perception of natural environment and the reiteration of core concepts. Already knowing them and then having them returned to many, many times in the organizational structure got pretty old—I assume, like a few other memoirs by indigenous people, to demonstrate an oral storytelling technique. To be honest, i think that particular structure fits myths and stories; I do not think it’s ideal as a structure for something with information design as a core conceit, like this (and other memoirs, biographies).

So, if all of this is new to a reader I could see why it would resonate so much. Thankfully, as it went on, there was some here for me, too.

This book was very engrossing. The voice finely crafted. And it had to be so because the plot is not anything all that much. Mostly, it’s about the reflections of the narrator from some time in the future, at the time of cross-current shaping those moments, and how he feels about that, what he thought about.

Not all that much happens and it ends up being about a great many things. One of those types of novels.

Everything about this was better than I expected, though some of the humor elements got old over time and the cross-current with war times is just not my cup of tea. It is really good at framing ordinary scenes with empathy and personalities that really pop off the page. Top-of-the-line character work made this breezy.

Also, the audiobook is exceptionally narrated. Very much recommend consuming it that way. Who knew someone could articulate that many different voices? Always astounded when you come by a talented narrator like that.

The comparison to Mantel is an apt one, I think. There are some who pick up historical fiction looking for something purporting to be narrative nonfiction, and then knock down a book for that want. But all history is an interpretation, as are the sources people want cited. What we have now is the ability to make further conjectures on the observation of society and the biases from which history was formulated. And so, I really don’t mind at all fiction that “reimagines”—rather pays attention to things obfuscated previously. In this case, rather than Joan being a divine being, she was blessed with good genetics and the way the world treated her, molded her into the person that could perform those deeds. Raw talent and materials were hers and she used them to great effect.

But even she, at seventeen, understand that her story means something greater because she can see many people have lived a life like her, and so are an untapped resource to make a nation and community and home well defended and protected. Joan continually reiterates this throughout and this reframing makes it very convincing (along with the idea that perhaps she wasn’t untouchable by God until favour left her). Which means that the country suffered because it didn’t know its people, most especially its women, as we do now. Which extrapolates the messaging into current times far more squarely than other inspirational stories, imo.

Much of this resonated with me because it’s down-to-earth. Coupled with the organic dialogue and great descriptions and scene framing, fluidity with time - honing in on only what is interesting with the young years of Joan’s rearing, and you’ve got an exceptional text. Obviously, if I want a text with citations I’ll go pick up a nonfiction account. Though, who knows if it would account for some of the biases as this does, ironically.