Solid book; solid series. I’ve said this in my last review already but it’s such a pleasure to read a police procedural that’s inclusive and aware of the climate we’re in, here in Canada. Not to mention all the while being subversive of tropes in this genre. Both Esa and Rachel are well realized, they’re relationship doesn’t feed off of negative and zany sexual dynamics that too often mire series and plots like this. They themselves are against type and their lenses are both incredible useful for the full context of the plot every time.

This in particular is probably the one that hits hardest for me, as it’s based on real white supremacy flourishing in the country, particularly this brand in Quebec. And just this year the leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh was subjected to blatant racism from caucus members from Quebec! And then asked to apologize for calling them racist, which he did not, only to be chastised for it. I sometimes wonder if he was at all inspiration for the character of Esa, as Jagmeet’s public face is very much in character to Esa, in my mind.

But I digress. You can expect a highly nuanced portrayal of interactions between PoC and white people, code-switching and micro aggressions, to just out right racism. All of it with the overarching relevant themes, right up to political levels that are sometimes hard to parse. It’s really fantastic.

Really my only issue, we with others, is that the clarity is to overt that the prose are expository and nothing is left for the reader to infer. You want this for something like this, but it effected overall enjoyment. Also the scene with the killer was far too melodramatic for me, which solidified the 4 stars for me.

I highly recommend this series. It’s so good and pertinent and worthy of readers’ time. As usual there is the authors note explaining the real life events on which this is based and a suggested readers list, followed by the authors over qualifications for writing nuanced fiction like this.

Fantastic authorial voice. The cadence of the narrator is fantastic. Some images seem like the author was really attached to and were included just for that sake; a bit extraneous at points. Very enjoyable to read. Miscommunication as a theme could have been more present, but the main points get across well and it clips along like hell, especially for a short story.

He’s good and distilling more complex ideas into digestible and easy to understand bits. I think with anything with claims like this, that aren’t academic and rigorously defended and cited, the idea is to spark different notions in the reader and hopefully they roll with it and research it more to see what it is they themselves believe; so I’m not bothered by the cherry picking.

What’s compelling is that Gladwell is communicating what he thinks and why, and like learning what people think and why. It’s something to talk about and what not.

It’s clearly an exercise in confirmation bias though, which is why with anything that’s popular, a reader has a responsibility to do critical thinking. Otherwise we end up with people who think that every master level is achieved in 10k hours, across all fields. Or people who believe the Da Vinci Code is not fiction.

And as we have seen, Gladwell’s notions are taken as fact, when they’re meant to be accessible ideas and really nothing more. You’re meant to then interrogate what you believe and think and why. At least, that’s what I would think.

This book is wild. It’s hit and miss, as most all comedy is; certainly satire. But everything about it is novel and somehow works.

I don’t know what else to say. I too think western culture le sucks.

Great concept, i for the most part, really liked the prose and style. I’m not a big horror reader but I identified strongly with the theme and what the loss of agency was about, specifically.

Strangely, even though it was first person I felt detached from the characters and didn’t get invested but I tend to be more interested in theme, symbolism, structure, etc., anyway.

It’s short and punchy and, from what I know, original. I was full of trepidation because I don’t like horror usually but it, as you can see, exceeded my expectations. I came to the author by way of her cyberpunk duology, which are both great too. If you dig this, I recommend diving into those for more of her writing~~

And oh snap! This turns out to be the very first book I added to my TBR on goodreads! Oddly satisfying crushing this one, despite the fact that it’s just 1 down out of 500+, but it’s neat?

This is an interesting YA novel to me because the synopsis set expectations that wasn’t really what the book was really about. It’s a lot of family drama and interpersonal/communication problems,,, but with the spectre of this really scary event where the protagonist can’t remember an evening. This event unfolding is paced alongside an outbreak and the relationship drama(s) unfolding, and so a lot of it feels like a bunch of B plots unfolding instead of an A plot with B plots.

Once I recalibrated that expectation I was drawn in again and ended up enjoying it. The author is great at characterization and inclusive elements, and those things are mostly subversive to the genre still, so I end up gaining a lot of satisfaction from that.

I do think this book lost a bunch of readers in the first third of the book though, simply because of marketing and setup. I grabbed this because I read The Summer Prince, a fantastic YA biopunk-romance intersectional and similarly inclusive book. I love that book. This book has some of those components I love but if the framing doesn’t work for you this, try out The Summer Prince - it is fantastic!

Reading this while a pandemic is going on is interesting. If you have the bandwidth I recommend reading fiction like this (I’ve read 4-5?) because the speculative components and how they interact with reality is pretty fascinating to me.

Pretty much everyone assumes that governments will use it as an opportunity and/or over correct for populations who don’t quarantine and what not. At least so far as in North America, we have seen citizens not being wrangled at all. Rough.

This is a weird book. Maybe a case of the marketing being super incongruous with the actual book? It is far off from what I expected, in any case.

The setting and concept are interest. The communication of worldbuilding and the characterization of the Anthropomorphized creatures didn’t make sense to me, or else, they felt like it almost always does when people use animals-as-people: They want to make the perception of the animal and it’s nature the personality of someone. But people should be more complex then that and I think it almost always strays into weird/problematic areas… as it does here. There’s erroneous details that you wouldn’t expect as well. If the character is an animal the sensory information should be different than a person. Basically the characters just didn’t feel believable or even understandable. And then there was weird fuckin’ between “animals” that also added nothing.

The other major problem I had was sentence structure. The overall piece felt very bogged down because the writer was attached to run on sentences. Lots of commas and a shit ton of “and”s in the same way really monotonous first person writing can have. And then character dialogue was the main way you learned about worldbuilding, which seemed forced because there was no balance between that and “telling” techniques.

The dialogue was pretty good otherwise, though. Pretty weird.

I thought the mythology and fantastical elements were genuinely interesting. For those reasons, despite the fact I did DNF this halfway though, which would usually make me give something 1 star only—I’m giving it two stars. It has stuff going for it and maybe other people would be down with what it’s doing if they like the authorial voice.

This series is always super solid for me. Khan has the knowledge and the craft to put very complex relationship and cultural frameworks into an enjoyable and well paced thriller. What’s more is that they are also very accessible to the average reader too.

If you aren’t familiar with the series, this is based in Canada, centered on a fictional division of the Toronto police department (I believe? It might be a provincial thing) that is called Community Policing. Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak head this division. They’re partners and they plot always centres on them, though there are returning side characters with plot interactions and complex, overarching B plots that are in there and handled well. Particularly in this book, a few of those really come to a head and it’s really satisfying to see those threads in play.

Esa is a Muslim man who is in a leadership position and has the credentials to pioneer this pilot program. Which, just in of itself is interesting, a subversion of genre elements, and a good idea that police might want to actually damn well do. He knows how to interact with immigrants and people of different backgrounds and has the necessary life experience to communicate effectively. Another groundbreaking subversion of Esa is that he is flawed but not in the traditional Muslim portrayal. He is kind, generous, easily taken advantage sometimes; just soft and considerate and not in the least a stereotype. Also he is always portrayed as a viable and desirable person in general. He is a extremely good looking person and that doesn’t happen much in our media. It’s also subversive. He is great! He still makes mistakes and his past causes him to react in ways he doesn’t fully understand, he’s got complex dynamics with every relationship established.

Rachel is similarly dogged with a traumatic past and is sort of the training wheels officer attached to Esa. She is somewhat subversive herself. She’s athletic and behaves like an athlete in all scenes. She eats a lot and often. She is also thoughtful and considerate and a bit of a doormat, so her and Esa have a similar blind spot, which I just like a lot because generally writers go for very different flaws; partners are polarizing individuals most of the time. Fire and water, oil and water, shit like that. Not so here, and again, it’s refreshing.

They’re fallible and interesting. And then the actual plot is well constructed and compelling in of itself. But there is always an additional layer of different political and cultural things going on. In this one, it’s the Syrian refugee crisis. Throughout the story you also learn about what that is through numerous POVs and dispels common misconceptions about it that Canadians have. It humanizes foreign elements to most people. It is so smart and well done.

Then, at the end of it, there is always the authors notes on the particular thing she talked about in that book AND suggested reading!

The only reason this isn’t a 5 star for me is that in her quest to be accessible, her first person narration, and dialogue in particular, tends to be natural—but overwritten. It can be a bit hold your hand in a expository way with the relationships in a way it doesn’t need to be. She both shows and tells quite often. It does hamper enjoyment and drags scenes sometimes.

And I feel a bit bad about it hurting my enjoyment somewhat even because I can see what she is doing: Some people probably will need the extra help in the character interactions and Khan likes to make every nuance of what’s happened between characters extremely clear. I feel like she infers it strongly enough that it’s not needed. But I could see her publisher even maybe insisting on this kind of overwriting to be honest, if only because there is such heavy subject matter and the handling of immigrant stories and, essentially putting a human interest piece in with the plot. I don’t know; that’s just my guess.

Anyway. You should be reading this series. We don’t often get A) Canadian police procedural thrillers from the lens of someone so (over) qualified to write them, and B) they’re subversive, well constructed, and legitimately informative reads.

3.5 rounded up

The communication of worldbuilding feels a bit expository sometimes but that’s science fiction, especially when it’s so radically different than today, as this is. The setting is absolutely the star of the show for me with this. Queer normalization, cli-fi /solarpunk underpinnings - it’s feels very innovative and fresh/ different.

I liked the characters and the plot, though the pacing felt a bit uneven, because the author really knows how to paint a scene. I didn’t really pay attention to the pacing much, which is when you know the things the author decides to be specific about were interesting to you.

The only thing consistently annoying is weird to talk about because it’s also fascinating. Social media becomes sort-of social capital, so how people communicate and how the slang/jargon isn’t serious, like in most SF with those elements. It feels childish and weird, yet is clearly present for a reason. There’s So many hashtag whatevers that I rolled my eyes, but yet currency is social capital and evolved from social media, so it IS how people would actually talk, I just don’t like it, and I’m not sure how fair that is? It bugged me a fair amount though, can’t disregard it. It’s a part of the prose and it’s prevalent, so keep that in mind. Maybe it’s your thing, maybe it’s not.

Otherwise I found this to be smart, interesting, inclusive, and fun. Plenty of subversions and, as I said, feels like it’s helping to pioneer a different kind of cli-fi, which I’m all for. I do not like the term Hopepunk, because it doesn’t mean anything substantial in the mission statement imo, but cli-fi should be more than one-note dystopias, and this feels like a direct response to that.