I thought I’d like this more! I love Grease Bats and the premise of this one is very appealing so I was surprised to find this comic felt… rushed & underdeveloped? 

some things I liked: 

some things I didn’t: 

things this comic is about & really gets: being extremely 19 years old, outgrowing childhood friends, still loving childhood friends, the allure of intimidating femmes and cool girls, being annoying in a hostel

fsr I thought this was a horror novel before starting it. it was not! whoops!

slow, thoughtful meditation on place/faith/love/nature. made me actually feel nostalgia, fondness and love for southern Ontario! a difficult feat!!! but slow, thoughtful meditations are not really my thing… alas………….

started while on vacation & then lost the thread & it’s months later & it’s my roommate’s book anyways. art writing a little too technical for my brain but interesting where I could fully follow. 

what a genuinely weird book. 

if you have the patience and the time, finish the whole thing. but I wouldn’t blame you for stopping halfway through. I think saying anything more if you haven’t read it is saying too much!

I knew exactly what my review was going to be through the first 80%. and then this book became something else, and something else again. 

I spent most of the book enjoying it, but asking what the point of a gothic novel was at this point in time. like, gothic novels themselves are weird and sexy and salacious and tense and scary and fundamentally about the ☠️female condition👻 — like if you’re reading this giant fucking CanLit tome you’ve probably taken an english lit course and you probably Know About Feminism already. so you don’t need Ann-Marie MacDonald to tell you that women had it bad at the turn of the 20th century. and yet so much of this book is detailed suffering - Mae’s story is just awful, paced very slowly, just awful lies and torture and misery at a snail’s pace. as the reader you’re cursed with dramatic irony and you know that none of this will turn out well; it becomes excruciating in the third or fourth act when you realize Mae’s child is almost definitely going to the same fate unless things REALLY turn around. at this point I was like, why are you torturing me and these characters? why don’t you think your reader is already on the same page about this stuff? like what in the second wave feminism makes you think I want to read 700 pages of the saddest most devastating shit in intricate detail, when the historical genre you are writing in already does this, but faster and way horny-er? so that was my review: “intriguing, but thinks it’s elevating gothic when gothic is already about women going debatably insane because their husbands are evil.” 

but then it kind of transforms at the 11th hour? and suddenly the book is full of happiness and justice and good people? there are suddenly queers everywhere, and proto-feminists, and Good Men? (also sorry, an aside, this book has a great description of the way in which gay middle aged dudes are sometimes just SO endearing for no reason, you’re just like, ugh I love this gay guy… his gay little Comportment….) and all is made right. the villains meet bad ends. it’s like, gothic fix-it fic! suddenly! what is happening! 

and many things happen. and it becomes more magical than it has been, mostly, but in a way I found enjoyable and satisfying. and it gets quite weird at the end, and becomes an eco-novel-thing. but I won’t begrudge it that. I think most novels could probably become climate fiction very suddenly these days and I’d be like, oh, for sure. 

anyways I liked this much more the weirder it got and it made me cry a lot in the last 150 pages (lol!) which were worth the other 600 or so. even the sluggish first 600 pages were very solid and good. what a book!!!

Hmm I love… Maybe not strong if you haven’t read the Ancillary books but I have read them so I don’t really care! Lots of interesting world bits in this one - interesting to learn a bit about the Presger translators and satisfyingly clears up some very confusing aspects of translator characters in past books without giving so much detail that the Presger lose all mystery and creepiness. Does its sentimental bits very effectively. Love all these characters and ngl the fact that multiple characters use the same set of neopronouns (in fact multiple characters use the same TWO different sets of pronouns!!) DID make me cry. I don’t think I’ve read many things at all where multiple characters even use they/them pronouns and I’m not a ✨representation✨ Guy but this did actually feel meaningful to me!! Also love human characters attempting to explain gender (& basically going “uhh. I don’t know. Sorry”) and also characters trying a new gender on simply because they saw a cool TV character and thought that it would be awesome to be like em. that is actually exactly how gender works. The distinction between cultures with a third gender and cultures with no genders… yes… and the way everyone’s cultural norms and language intersect and overlap and people attempt to gender/misgender each other culturally, rather than maliciously? (But then it becomes sort of neglectful malice when characters don’t bother to figure it out properly - so good lol!) It’s all a vessel for compelling world building that visibly affects the characters’ lives and outlooks!!! Wow!!! idk this space opera world continues to really do it for me. 👨🏻‍🍳👌 a more successful step outside of the Ancillary books than Provenance was, too, imo. Seems to be setting the stage for a return to Breq & co. in the nearish future (or at least a story in which they are present as characters, if not the focus?) which is very exciting to me. I love… sciance fiction……..

to preface the rating: you know how sometimes a 7/10 video game is like, the most interesting, strange, imaginative game you’ve played in years?? this is like… deadly premonition or something, not in the sense that these 2 pieces of fiction have anything in common stylistically/thematically/etc but that both are very much *the thing that they are* and that thing is very fun and compelling and also executed imperfectly/a little messily, in a way that doesn’t actually detract much at all. this is an unpolished story but that’s ok. It’s so bonkers overall anyways that you can hardly fault it. 

I liked the characters a lot & found myself thinking about them; I felt very immersed in the world (

or at least the first world we’re introduced to, that’s functioning more or less the same way as ours

) and wanted to sit and think about the implications of the rules and science it established. I also kind of had no idea what was going on at points but it’s kind of one of those things where you have to trust that either the explanation will work itself out down the line OR it won’t/there is no explanation and you have to be down to just come along for the ride. to be clear: I think this story is largely the former. but I was often just like : ok!! sure!! I have no idea why

this kid who was kind of being set up as the Shinji to this story’s NERV is just dead now

or

what “shift radix” means, in a literal sense

and like, some of those things don’t matter (like not every sci fi term needs to be fully defined imo) and some things that aren’t fully explained have very interesting implications??

like wait, in writing this I’m now wondering why Kyle had such a powerful pneuma & was it branch shifting shenanigans??? Or have I missed something else?

either way it’s straight up fun to think about & be confounded by so I don’t mind. 

I would love to see this again one day with a gentle handed but substantial edit and author’s notes. like overall the writing is quite strong but you see sections where it breaks down a bit and loses fidelity on details it’s previously shown you & I think and editor/beta would help with consistency on that front. 

anyways I love that this ends like

eva but with a gay orgy where everyone melts at the end

honestly I was very lukewarm on this book until the absolute last second but

almost dying and then stowing away on a cruise ship because you fucked things up too bad and you’re a complete anxious lonely manipulative mess

and then leaving things wide open for the reader brought it back around for me. like the implications are so dark??? I think it makes the rest of the book work — you spend the whole story waiting for Amy to change, or have a revelation about how to be in the world, and she doesn’t. she’s not actually naïve in the way you think she is at first. instead she runs away instead of dealing with her problems, or realizing that other people like her until she does something unhinged that pushes them away, or extending grace and understanding to people she’s judged or decided have it out for her. she *is* like her mother and she doesn’t really have the introspective ability to see that or get a handle on her emotions and actions. I think what made the book not work for me for the first, idk, 3/4 was the slow pace, & this lack of backstory; like you get very quickly that Amy has Problems, something happened at school, her mother was difficult and sick, but you don’t see much of it or get details, really. it’s just a lot of Amy’s stream of consciousness/mental state. so the primary experience of reading, until the ending, is frustration at where the narration isn’t going and with the minutia of fairly uninteresting detail. and then you realize Amy’s not going there because she isn’t able to. she doesn’t really know how analyze her life like that and she can’t really take responsibility for her shit except in these fleeting moments. and what preoccupies her is overanalyzing a million perceived slights and thinking about her virtuousness and being deeply, deeply lonely and regretful. so 3 stars because I didn’t actually enjoy reading this BUT I think this story & character are kind of secretly compelling. 

i feel like someone just fired a shotgun into my chest. brutal & sad. brings really interesting new depth to the first book. amazing narrator, deeply unlikeable in Black Leopard, Red Wolf and made human, understandable if hugely flawed here. Tracker is a villain in Sogolon’s story as she’s a villain in his. they both have their own motives & perspectives in telling their stories. they’re so similar in so many ways. extremely tragic characters, fuck!!!

one of the best representations of fandom culture i’ve read. totally believable characters. deeply effective and scary cosmic horror. I keep thinking about this, it’s so good.