Intense, tightly structured and edited, a good and necessary addition to reading about BLM and inclusion. Especially with what’s going on right now and the misinformation surrounding the movement. It’s a heavy read, as you can imagine.

I was a bit reticent about this because most reviews I’ve seen have been polarizing, but I ended up really enjoying it. The structure, themes, and the through line of feminism strikes just the right note.

Each point is underlined with historical and personal experiences of the characters. It is also very clever at illustrating the things movements have to contend with and how general intellect functions, as well as how it disillusions the idea that you could effect change in the organizational structure we now have without force or violence, and everything could just be fine if we find the right way to do things “peacefully” enough. The journey of the characters is so effective at showing loss of agency and actual empowerment while remaining engaging with POV shifts and the structure.

This was a surprising book. Progressively gets more complex when you stick with it; a bit frustrating at the beginning because it appears basic, both in terms of dialogue and theme. Then things get wild and weird. I can’t say I enjoyed the characters all that much. They were fine but not noteworthy. The pleasure came from the setting and the overarching question.

This is my first Melville and maybe this is ‘normal’ and I’d never have known it. I just always read that Mieville books were extremely complex and Literary, or that they kitbashed genre in a way that upset purists. Possibly a bunch of this novel just sailed over my head, if that’s the case. Or maybe this was just so accessible and more straight forward so I misaligned my expectations based on reputation.

So, I guess you could say I was relieved? Because I was expecting to be consuming something with a super high cognitive load, but ended up something fairly straight forward with an interesting internal mystery and a cool world/aesthetic. It could have easily been a 5 star read had it been a bit more developed, tightened up, and more complex characterizations. It’s a weird book.

Hype. Hype hype hype.
I’m not even waiting until I buy the third book, just gonna get the audiobook while Dragon Republic is fresh.
Oh, and this was good short story to refresh before starting the last book.

Basically everything about the first book that gave me trepidation was expanded on to great effect in this one. The characters are messy as hell, and feel real. The focus on war that felt a bit gratuitous and not that thoughtful in the first book are the predominate point now. It’s more gritty than some dark fantasy stories I’ve read. This thing is for real.

DNF’d 10%. There were some red flags for self-help books pretty early on. When I googled it, turned out to be justified. Just go watch some YouTube videos on the subject, this guy is problematic and overtly so, considering many of his anecdotes are so eye brow raising it is very difficult to believe, putting the actual ‘wisdom’ that’s codified into question as well. On top of all that, there seems to be allegations of plagiarism and falsifications. Weirdly, i hadn’t heard of any of this. But as I say, even just 10% into the audiobook I was google to see how legit this was, so~