stuckinpermafrost's Reviews (146)

What I liked about this book: I read a solid chunk of it at a Baltimore Orioles game, and my friends and I have decided that it was a good luck charm. The moment I started to complaining to them about it, we started to come back from losing 0-3. We won 5-3, let’s go O’s

That’s about it! Oh boy, where to even start with what I didn’t like.

The best word I can use to describe the writing style is amateur. Simple prose, very little imagery, I guess it got the job done but that’s about it. It feels like a teenager’s first attempt at writing a book, and I’m honestly shocked this wasn’t the author’s first publication.

Yeeran and Lettle were both completely lacking in sense. So many times they’d internally question something that happened, and I wanted to just yell at the book because the explanation was so obvious. Standing in front of a giant magic tree, someone mentions the “Tree of Souls,” and Lettle asks what the Tree of Souls is. Girl, what do you think? The number of times they failed to understand something that had already been hammered into us as the reader was just infuriating. Every single plot point was extremely predictable, and yet the characters always failed to understand a single thing that was going on. No common sense at all. The characters were extremely one-dimensional, too. I truly didn’t care what happened to any of them.

The two romances were way too similar to be interesting. Characters meet, dislike each other, start to become attracted each other but can’t be together for Reasons. Please, I beg of you, pick another arc. I’m so tired. I only finished this book because I need my baseball team to win, and apparently the more I complain about it, the better we do.

Not sure if it’s just the translation, but the writing didn’t feel all that well done. Lots of shifting POVs within scenes, not in an omniscient third person way but in a way that just felt messy. I may try to come back to this later.

This was my second read by Simon Jimenez (and only his second book... so I've now read all of his works!). I think I ever so slightly preferred The Vanished Birds, but not by much. They're both absolutely gorgeous books.

I think a third-person omniscient POV can be hard to do well. Sometimes switching between characters' perspectives just feels sloppy -- I tried a book recently that didn't really keep the POVs straight, and I DNFed it for that. This book really shows how incredible it can be when it's done with intent. I don't think I've ever read a book with such a creative structure (although I am aware of other books that play around with the writing style like this... just haven't read them yet lol). The second-person "present" narrative, the third-person historical parts with Jun and Keema, the section in the middle told in first-person and the italicized parts throughout, they were all just so beautifully written.

I rewatched Princess Mononoke recently, and afterwards I wondered if I could find any books that had a similar vibe. I feel like The Spear Cuts Through Water may be as close as I've gotten with regards to the plot, although it really goes beyond it with everything past just Jun and Keema's story. Not to put down Princess Mononoke (it's one of my all time favorite films!), it's just told in a much more straightforward way.

r/Fantasy Bingo 2025 squares: A Book in Parts (HM), Down With the System, Impossible Places, Gods & Pantheons, Author of Color. Arguably High Fashion too, but I probably wouldn't count it. (

Fabric does come up a decent amount with Induun, but I feel like the merchant aspect is more important than fabric. You could swap it for other types of industry and not much would be changed.

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It was so fun to read a book where the main character is a short, fat, female scientist who’s bad with emotions. She’s just like me fr 🥹 

Loved T. Kingfisher’s writing as always! I found all of the characters to be very interesting, and I liked seeing the mystery of what was going on with Edie (or Gran Mae) unwind as the book went on.  I always like a story where a Bad Character is defeated, but that actually causes something even worse to happen. I never get tired of that kind of twist!

I find it a bit hard to rate books like this. I didn’t find it to be very interesting compared to more modern sci-fi, but it’s kind of unfair to make that comparison too. We hadn’t even been to space yet when this was published!

That being said, I just wasn’t super into this. I found the post-script to be the most interesting part to be honest — I like seeing how the book differed from the “real” story!

I feel like the pacing of all three of these books is a bit odd in a way The Goblin Emperor wasn’t, but it’s by design, not because of bad writing. Thara chases different plot threads which may or may not be related in the end, and some of them are definitely less adventurous than others — how much of the book was centered around cleaning a room?

I ESPECIALLY loved seeing Maia/Edrehasivar again, plus Csevet and some of the others! I’ve loved seeing what the empire is like outside Cetho, but it was nice to briefly see the capital again too.

I have somewhat mixed feelings on the ending, particularly regarding Thara’s relationship with Iäna.

I’m not mad about it, exactly — it’s good to have very close platonic friendships in fiction! Iäna can care deeply for Thara without being attracted to him (and vice versa)! Also, in modern terms it kind of sounded like he’s aromantic too, which is quite nice as someone who’s probably aromantic myself. But it really, really felt like the previous books were setting up a relationship between the two, and I’m kind of bewildered that it didn’t happen. I was honestly quite disappointed at first by that reveal, but after finishing the book I’m more okay with it.

As far as I know, The Cemeteries of Amalo is over — it says it’s a trilogy on the back cover of my copy — but it really did seem to leave things open for future entries. Not so much setting up future plots as leaving the possibility open. I’d be very happy to see more Chronicles of Osreth books, especially ones that show us other parts of this world!

Thara you poor sad wet cat of a man. I found this one slightly easier to follow than The Witness for the Dead, perhaps because I was just more used to the language of this series again, but I think the plot was a bit more solid too. I actually like how the plot winds around a bit, covering different mysteries that may end up being connected in the end, but I was still happy to find this one to be a bit tighter.