rocky41_7

Earlier this week I finished another commute audiobook, Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell. This is a crime thriller/murder mystery that takes place on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When a teenage girl is found strangled at the Indian Days summer powwow, four of her classmates become the prime suspects in her murder.

I would say this is a solid entry in the murder mystery genre. The book alternates perspectives between the four classmates, which allows the author to do some fun things keeping the reader on the hook. One character will make a big discovery only for the POV to pop over to another who doesn't have that information, so Cobell can keep information from the reader without it feeling too forced. The audiobook has a separate narrator for each POV, which was also fun (although I didn't care for Eli's reader) and if you're prone to picking up and putting down your audiobook in the middle of a chapter, this helps you keep track of whose POV you're in.

Cobell uses the format of the crime thriller, like Marcie Rendon in Where They Last Saw Her, to draw attention to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), but the book still feels like a novel its own right; it never feels like just a tool for explaining the MMIW issue. And it's an important issue that deserves a lot more attention. The statistics on violence against Native American women are shocking--even if you think they're bad, they're probably worse than you're imagining--and specific stats get highlighted in the text and in the author's note at the end. In this way, I think the book has enormous social value. Cobell uses her characters to personalize the problem and show the comorbid impacts of poverty and drug use on the reservation.

Outside of its interest in the MMIW crisis, I don't think the book does much that's particularly groundbreaking. The teens band together to try to solve the mystery and absolve themselves, as you'd expect. At various times they suspect each other, family members, law enforcement. Cobell keeps you on the hook while offering reasonable suspicion for a number of characters. She avoids my least favorite move in the murder mystery genre, which is pinning it on some rando at the last minute.

The ending is pretty explosive and I enjoy some of the things she does with perspective here as well. We the readers know what the killer thinks of their crimes because the text tells us. But the other characters never hear that explanation except third hand, and many of them simply don't believe it. And that feels real--they end the story with their own version of the truth and there's simply no space for that to be corrected (and why would they believe the word of a killer anyway?) The killer feels a little one-dimensional, but the motives make sense, if they're unsurprising. The motivations behind most violent crimes are pretty repetitive.

The prose is fine. We're reading from the perspective of teenagers, so expect a lot of melodramatic metaphors and jumping to conclusions based on minimal evidence.

Overall, this book tells an important story. It was entertaining as a narrative and sheds light on a community that deserves a lot more attention.

A Memory Called Empire left me in such a place that I of course had to rush after the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. In the second book of this duology, we're tackling the bomb dropped at the end of the last book: that a hostile alien force has been picking at the borders of Teixcalaanli space.

This became a first contact story, which delighted me, because I love first contact stories. The book posits another interesting philosophical question to the readers. Darj Tarats wants Teixcalaan to go to war with these new aliens, because it would likely drag on for quite some time, sucking up Teixcalaan's resources and keeping them focused on something other than colonizing Lsel Station, and might even destroy them in the end. Mahit does not want Teixcalaan to go to war with these new aliens because it would be an unnecessary and vast loss of life on both sides, and because in spite of its nature as an empire, there's so much Mahit likes about Teixcalaan, even though peace allows Teixcalaan much more time and resources to potentially conquer Mahit's home.

Book 2 breaks into a mulit-POV style, which works very well I think for giving us a 3D view of the situation when first contact is made and what happens after. Emotions, naturally, are running very high on all sides, so getting to see many characters' thoughts is helpful to understanding this house of cards.

Martine does a great job I think of presenting us with aliens that are alien, but still people. The question is whether they and the Teixcalaanli can work that out before someone does something fearful.

She also does well with layering Mahit and Yskander here. There are a few conversations Mahit has that hit so much harder now that we have a full picture of Yskander and how long the ambassador to Teixcalaan has been kicked around the Lsel council like a football as they all pursue their own best course for keeping away from Teixcalaan. Knowing that that fragment of Yskander is there, seeing the fallout of his own death and how it came about makes these conversations especially powerful.

The story is laid out gradually and builds to a believable conclusion. The ending is slightly abrupt--there's not really any denouement--but it didn't shortchange the story.

One of the perspectives we see in this book is imperial heir Eight Antidote, now 11. And he's either quite precocious, or Six Direction was a genius, which is possible. This kid's a regular Johnny-on-the-spot, but he is also a narrative tool representing a very different future for Teixcalaan than Emperor Nineteen Adze represents. He is Six Direction unencumbered by years of war and politicking; he is Six Direction without the grim, dog-eat-dog-world attitude of an adult raised by Empire. But he's also young and vulnerable; he represents a Teixcalaan that could be--but also one that could so easily be smothered in its crib, a fate Nineteen Adze is desperate to avoid.

Mahit and Three Seagrass continue to struggle, even more than in the last book, with the nature of their relationship. Three Seagrass is pure Teixcalaanli, and can frequently be insulting without meaning to, but Mahit is also primed by years of Teixcalaan's cultural chauvinism to see insult even where none was intended. I felt like they landed, by the end of the book, somewhere believable--although I would absolutely read more about them if Martine was offering!

I didn't notice this book having the issue with repetition that I found in book 1, so that was a nice improvement as well.

I was worried at the end of the last book how the story would handle this shocking, massive plot drop, but I think Martine did it very gracefully. It feels like a natural continuation of book 1 while still expanding the focus of the story. I would love to see more of this universe, but I'm also satisfied with where we've left things. There are no easy answers to what to do about Teixcalaan, but that doesn't feel unrealistic either. Well done all around!

I finished my second Sarah Waters book this week after devouring most of it on my flight to Texas and she has surely done it again! This book was Affinity, a much less-talked about one of her novels, which concerns Victorian lady Margaret Prior, who in an effort to overcome her grief for her recently deceased father and a mysterious illness that gripped her around that time, decides to become a "Lady Visitor" to a women's prison: someone who comes to talk with them from time-to-time. She almost immediately becomes enraptured with a young medium, Selina Dawes, doing time for murder and assault.

I don't usually like to do extensive summaries in these reviews, but I want to highlight what USA Today called "thinly veiled erotica" in this book. This book is best approached, I think, with a measure of dream logic (or porn logic, if you prefer), where things can be deeply erotic in concept that in real life would certainly not be. Nothing illustrates this better than the opening chapter of the book.

In the opening chapter, Margaret makes her first visit to Millbank prison. Waters does an excellent job of making the prison itself a terror; a winding maze of whitewashed, identical hallways inside a cocoon of pentagonal buildings set unsteadily into the marshy bank of the Thames within which Margaret immediately becomes turned around. She is passed from the gentleman family friend who first suggested she become a Lady Visitor to the matrons of the women's side of the prison, a realm populated entirely by women. As Margaret passes into this self-contained place which feels entirely removed from the rest of the world (the prisoners are allowed to send correspondence four times a year) she becomes keenly aware of the strange blurring and even erasure of the boundaries, rules, and customs of the outside world. Furthermore, Margaret is reassured over and over again that she is, effectively, in a position of power over all these vulnerable women, trapped in their cells and subject to the harsh rules of Millbank. The prison fully intends for Margaret to be someone for them to idolize and look up to, someone whose attention can make them strive to better themselves. Margaret, a repressed Victorian lesbian, is dropped into this strange realm of only women in which she operates above the rules that strictly govern the rest of them.

It is in this state, after this long journey through Millbank, that Margaret first catches sight of Selina Dawes, and is taken from the start.

The book is not heavy on plot, and some reviewers have called it dull, but I was riveted. The plot is the development of Margaret and Selina's relationship, and the progress of Margaret's mindset on the question of whether Selina's powers or real, or if she's just a very talented con artist. These are by nature things which progress gradually. Practically, it's true that not much happens: Margaret visits the prison. Margaret goes to the library. Margaret has a disagreement with her mother. But her mental and emotional changes across the book are significant.

There are also the vibes. Waters does such a good job of capturing a very gloomy, gothic atmosphere where Margaret (and the reader!) are constantly sort of questioning what's real and to what degree and there's a powerful sense of unease that permeates the entire story. It ties in so well with Selina's role as a spiritual medium and the Victorian obsession with such things; it creates a very holistic theme and feel to the book that I just sank into.

On the flip side of the erotic view of the prison we see early in the book, Waters also uses it to terrifying effect to simulate the paranoia of a closeted gay person at this time in England. As Margaret's feelings for Selina develop and become more explicit, she lives in terror that the matrons of the prison will realize that her interest in Selina is not the polite interest of a Lady Visitor in her charges. She is always analyzing what the matrons can see in her interactions with Selina and what might go under the radar; she is constantly wondering if rude comments or looks from this matron or that is simple rudeness, or a veiled accusation of impropriety. The panopticon pulses around Margaret more and more but she can't keep away from Selina even to protect herself from the danger of being caught.

On the whole, I thought this book was fantastic. I enjoyed it even more than Fingersmith. Waters was really cooking here and I've added several more of her books to my TBR, because she obviously knows what she's doing.

Homegoing is family epic by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi. It follows the descendants of two half-sisters in Ghana in the 18th century: One, Effia, marries a British governor there. The other, Esi, is captured in raids and sold into slavery in America by that same governor. Gyasi's novel traces the story of their family from there.

As I'm sure you can imagine just by the novel's description, Homegoing is a heavy book. It's not long--only 300 pages--but the subjects it deals with are dark. Homegoing shines a very personal, intimate light on historical atrocities and it is unflinching in the stark reality of those things. However, it is not sensationalist--the things that happen, particularly to Esi's family, are shocking, but not because Gyasi is playing a gotcha game with the reader, simply because we know these things really happened. This isn't a story about real people, but it is true, in that sense--these things did happen, to generations of people.

Each chapter is a generation of the family--chapter 1 is Effia's story about marrying the governor, chapter 2 is Esi's story about her capture and imprisonment, chapter 3 is the story of Effia's son Quey, etc.--which allows Gyasi to span centuries of history, shining a light both on the development of Ghana first as it is brought under the yoke of colonialism, through its fight for independence, to regaining its sovereignty; as well as the struggle of Black Americans first against slavery and then on the successive attempts to maintain racism in the state: Jim Crow, chain gangs, the war on drugs.

While there is great suffering in Homegoing, Gyasi also shows, I think, that joy exists even in the worst times. Even the hardest-suffering of Gyasi's characters still have hopes and dreams; they still fall in love; they still have inside jokes with friends; they still dance and sing and teach children to walk and try to preserve the memories of their loved ones. Homegoing documents an almost unfathomable amount of hardship, but it also knows that life will always try to find a way.

The novel is obviously very well-researched. Gyasi has put a lot of effort into a holistic understanding of both Ghanaian and American history and it shows.

Although we don't get long with most of the characters, each of them stands out as distinct from one another. Gyasi does a wonderful job of showing their own mindsets, opinions, virtues and vices, relationships with their family and their history, and how that intersects with that character's particular struggle.

Really a very well-done book. I know I'm going to be thinking about this one for a long time, and I think it has undoubtedly earned its place on the various recommendation lists where it sits. If you are squeamish about the subject material, or not someone who usually goes for books that deal with such heavy issues, I would strongly suggest giving this one a try anyway. It matters that we remember not only that these things were wrong, but why they were wrong, and Gyasi shows that here in vivid detail. It's really worth the read.

I realized as I was approaching the end of this book that it is the third unfinished series sapphic SFF centering the machinations of an empire that I've read lately (the others being The Locked Tomb and The Masquerade). A Memory Called Empire is the first book in the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine (narrated by Amy Landon in the audiobook) and tells the story of Mahit Dzmare, a diplomat from an as-yet-unconquered satellite state of the Teixcalaanli Empire entering her role as ambassador for the first time--after the previous ambassador went radio silent.

For fans of fantasy politics, I highly recommend this one. Mahit enters a political scene on the cusp of boiling over and is thrown not only into navigating a culture and society she's only ever read about, but having to piece together what her predecessor was doing, why he was doing it, and what happened to him. It's a whirlwind of not knowing who to trust, what to lean on, or where to go.

Martine creates such an interesting world here in Teixcalaan and the mindset of a people who pride themselves on being artists above all and yet exist as ruthless conquerors within their corner of space. Furthermore, Mahit herself is in a fascinating position as someone who's been half in love with this empire since childhood, and yet is all too keenly aware of the threat it poses to her and her home. Mahit does well in Teixcalaan--she loves the poetry and literature they so highly prize, she's able to navigate Teixcalaanli society and see the double meanings everywhere, and she's excited to try her hand at these things. And yet--if she plays her cards wrong, it will end with her home being gobbled up by Empire, and as Mahit herself says: Nothing touched by Empire remains unchanged.

I really enjoyed her characters too--3-Seagrass stole the show for me--and they all have believably varied and grounded views and opinions, with the sorts of blind spots and biases you would expect from people in their respective positions. There's character growth and change too, which is always fun to see, and I'm excited to see how that progresses in the next book.

If I had a complaint, and it's a minor one, it's that the prose is sometimes overly repetitive and explanatory, as if Martine doesn't quite trust her audience to remember things from earlier in the book, or understand what's being implied, which occasionally has the effect of making Mahit look less intelligent than her role would demand. However, it didn't happen often enough that I was truly annoyed, and I think the book gets better about it as it goes on.

On the whole, a fun, exciting read (although it takes its time to set up--expect a slow start!) that left me actually looking forward to my commute for a chance to listen to more. Already checking to see if my library has the next book available.

Mae's Top Reads of 2025!

I wanted to put together a little highlight reel of the year's reads, so here it is!

The Masquerade series by Seth Dickinson: This series is is all fantasy politics. There's no magic or fairies or prophecies, just Seth Dickinson's invented world and the titanic machinations of Empire. And it is electric...Baru herself is the epitome of ruthlessness. Her goals are noble—her desire to free her home, to end the tyranny of the Masquerade—but she will do anything to achieve those goals. She is a truly fascinating character, calculating, controlled, brilliant—and constantly tormented by the need to weigh her choices and the potential futures ahead.

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin: Le Guin captures truly great sci-fi because this work is so imbued with curiosity. Le Guin is asking questions at the heart of any great sci-fi work: What defines humanity? What can we achieve, and how is it done, and what does that mean for society? What is society? What does it mean to be alone? What does it mean to be part of a whole? To me, sci-fi can't be truly sci-fi without a measure of philosophy, and The Dispossessed has this in droves.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield: Armfield's writing beautifully illustrates this journey, and she does a particularly good job of doling out information a little at a time, so that the reader often share's in Miri's confusion and muddled state of mind.

The Originalism Trap by Madiba K. Dennie: Dennie does a great job making this book accessible to everyone...She doesn't stop at "here's what's wrong" either--she has proposal and suggestions for how to counter the outsized influence of this once-disfavored theory and what we as citizens can do to push back against it.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter: The book is obviously well-researched, and Hofstadter does a thorough job of documenting his sources and influences, as well as recommending additional reading on a broad range of topics touched on in his own book. So much of what he establishes here makes perfect sense when looking at modern American society. He so neatly threads the needle between where we started and where we are now that at some moments, it felt like the fog was lifting on something I should have seen ages ago.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez: Jimenez's writing is beautiful and vivid—for good or for ill, as there are some gruesome events that take place—and really sweeps you up in the events of the story. He also does a wonderful job capturing the emotional mindsets of the characters. In particular, I thought the way he handled the relationship of the two main protagonists, Jun and Keema, was very realistic given who they are, and the emotional payoff of his taking the time to work through that was so worth it.

And for the haters among us, below the cut are my most disappointing reads of 2025.

( Booooo )

I collect false treasures in empty wardrobes.

This quote by Paul Eluard opens book #14 from the "Women in Translation" rec list, which continues to fatten up my TBR list. This is Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. This novella, originally published in the 1960s, is about the ways in which women are subsumed by the men in their lives, or otherwise are buffeted about with less control over their lives than they ought to have.

The forward by Kate Zambreno is a wonderfully complementary piece. She talks about the anger she feels going to a woman's funeral and hearing the dead woman sanctified by men in her life who did nothing but take from her, who can speak of her only to praise what she did for others, and can say nothing about what the woman herself was.

Sometimes you can read a book and just know the author was angry when she wrote it. This is one of those. The book uses the phrase "discreet rage" about one of its characters, and I think that sentiment succinctly describes the whole book. The protagonist, Dora Rosario, is ten years into widowhood, and she has devoted her entire life to mourning her unremarkable husband as much as she had previous devoted her life to supporting his every opinion regardless of whether or not she agreed with it. Now, a decade on, her mother-in-law reveals something about Dora's late husband that changes her entire perspective.

I would like to believe we are moving away from the world portrayed in Empty Wardrobes (though not with as much success as I'd like), but this is a stark reminder of how even a few generations ago, in the Sixties, a woman's identity was so controlled by her husband's. There are only two men in this book--Duarte, Dora's dead husband, and Ernesto, the longtime partner of a side character--and they both, through social structures, exercise incredible control over the lives of the women around them without any respect or even knowledge of their impact.

The three main women in this book--Dora, her daughter Lisa, and the narrator--each take a different approach to the male romantic partners in their lives, and none of them comes out the better for it (well, perhaps for Lisa, but I personally doubt it will last), because the ultimate problem is societal attitudes about the way men and women are meant to relate to each other.

It's not a long book, and I can't say much more without spoiling things, but I also think it does some fabulous things with its narration and perspective, and the way it doles out information. Really an excellent framing that allows for a lot of fluidity and filling in gaps with your own visions while remaining clear in the nature of the story it's telling.

This book was only translated into English in 2021, which is a shame, because I think it would have struck a nerve much earlier, but we have it now! Costa does an excellent job with the work too; the writing is full of punchy phrases like the above, and she captures some realistic dialogue--characters repeating themselves, responding in ways that don't quite match up with what was asked, etc.--while keeping it natural-sounding.

First book of 2026! This was The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente with illustrations by Michael Kaluta. I have no recollection of how this ended up on my TBR and I was a little skeptical checking it out in the library, but I'm glad I stuck with it because it ended up being a lot of fun and I will definitely check out the second volume.

You might be a little confused in the beginning, as In the Night Garden is a series of nested stories within stories and the style takes a minute to get used to, but it's worth it. Valente unfolds a veritable matryoshka of tales into neat blooms whose petals all fit together. Retroactive reveals and recontextualiations are delightful here.

Valente's vivid prose brings together her fantastical tales with such clarity; she attends frequently to all five senses, so that the reader knows what the characters are not only seeing, but hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling as well. There's obviously a lot of fairy tale inspiration here, but Valente definitely brings her own flavor. Women are almost always the hero of Valente's tales (though they play the villains too!) and there are such a great variety of them. Monsters abound too, but they get their chance to tell a tale too. (There's also some gentle ribbing at the Arthurian legends, with one witch lamenting about "all that questing" princes get up to.)

I was so engrossed in the work I didn't realize until quite late in the book how little romance factors into it. In a fairy tale inspired book like this, I would have expected a great many characters motivated by romance, but I can only think of two here who are primarily motivated by a love interest, and this delights me too. I'm arospec myself and while I enjoy a good tale of romance, I also weary of how frequently and totally it is centered in stories, so I was really enthused by how little that's the case here.

Friendship and family relationships do make frequent appearances though, and the friendship between the orphan teller of tales and the young boy hanging onto her words is the framing story. Love between mother and daughter, between brother and sister, even between strangers is a common thread.

She also avoids a pitfall I see in various modern fantasy stories which are so keen to explain the magic of their world they strip it of all mystery. Valente's world remains largely unexplained and asks the reader to simply take it as it is, which I found fun and appropriately mysterious.

The style of the book allows Valente to pull in a great many diverse characters and voices, which she does it well. Most impressive though is her ability to pull a cohesive tapestry out of all the various threads she's juggling.

A really fun and unusual story which I enjoyed a lot--a great start to a new year of reading!

Total Words Published at end of year: 19,763, which is a massive drop from last year's roughly 103k, which was already a drop from 2023's 162k. Normally I don't even include unpublished work, but the Ancient Arlathan Double Agent AU, which I started publishing and then withdrew, is more than double the word count of everything else I wrote this year combined, so it seemed silly not to include it.

Fandoms: DA mostly--which flickered and died as the disappointment from Veilguard really set in. I published or finished up a few Tolkien fics which had already been in the works and dropped a second chapter of a five year old Mass Effect fic. In spite of my ongoing love affair with Baldur's Gate, I simply haven't felt the urge to write anything for it.

Highest Everything (raw kudos, hits, comments):

Hits: One Morning (of Several) on the Citadel (914)
Kudos: One Morning (of Several) on the Citadel (84)
Comments: By Invitation Only (4)

New Things I Tried: N/A

Fic I Spent the Most Time On: Undoubtedly the Double Agent AU, which I still never got to a place I was satisfied with. It just became unwieldy and I realized it was going to take a lot more time to get it to a place I was happy with than I was willing to invest, so I shelved it.

Fic I Spent the Least Time On: Bonafide which was just some silly pseudo-political Elronduil make-out banter,

Favorite Thing I Wrote: I don't really feel strongly about any of this year's product, but the second chapter of One Morning probably is my favorite.

Favorite Thing(s) I Read:

Pray for Rain by mafalda_157 - Back in ancient Arlathan, when Elgar’nan is on the precipice of declaring himself god, he and Solas clash over what constitutes good leadership.
The Wolf, Bruised by bitterling - The Dread Wolf expected this. But he had hoped to be summoned, or to be found in private… yet it seems that the All-Father relishes these public displays.
A flash to the sun, the golden close of love by @adler-obsessed - “Darling Cassandra, do sit down before your legs give out. I do not want my rooms to become the site of a holy pilgrimage, where devotees pray at the resting place of Divine Victoria.”
Last Exit by macbethisms - The funeral of Esen-Temur, with live commentary.
As Little Might be Thought by our_ourobos - Given his first taste of freedom, Elros pushes the limits.
Queen of Peace by astardanced - Csethiro broke abruptly free of the pack and came sweeping towards him with hands outstretched, probably hoping to do damage control. “Serenity,” she said, ignoring her father, who seemed to be wanting to prompt her like a conductor. “We are honoured to have you here.”
All Your Sisters Wanna Fly by astardanced - an heir for the ceredada, at long last.
Unembittered by Arveldis - Findis makes a last entreaty.

Writing Goals for 2026: Find some inspiration...it is clearly lacking.

This year I read 63 books, which will sound like a lot to some people, and not very much to others, but it's a lot for me at this point in my life. I was a huge reader growing up. Like, regularly getting called to the front of the classroom to fork over the book I'd been reading under my desk during the lesson. But in high school I got into internet and fanfiction and then I was moving around so much that books were never a priority item to haul along with me and I just sort of...stopped reading.

But I've gotten back into it--I've had an active library card again since 2023, which I initially got solely to check out Nona the Ninth XD--and it's been such a joy. I've never been an audiobook person, and I still prefer physical books, but having Libby and audiobooks in my car has made my work commute SO much less unpleasant.

I wanted to reflect on what I've read this year, so I compiled this list of titles and ratings. Asterisks by books I did not finish, generally because I disliked them too much (that's another thing--I've been trying to accept giving up on books I'm really not enjoying more), with the exception of Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger, which wasn't bad, just for too young an audience for me to enjoy. Unrated books I either found too hard to pin a rating to or just didn't get around to rating.

I feel like I got a great spread of books this year, though I've failed to whittle down my TBR list at all thanks to very compelling recommendations. I'm really looking forward to another year of stories!

The actual written reviews can be found on my Dreamwidth or Storygraph.

The most frustrating thing about The Tomb of Dragons is not even the romance bait-and-switch but the feeling that core themes of the trilogy were just completely dropped and even reversed in the final half of the third book.

We start book one with Thara still grieving the death of his lover Evru and only recently returned to his calling after that tragedy, starting his life anew in the city of Amalo. Throughout the trilogy, he is aloof, reserved, and unwilling to rely on others or accept companionship or camaraderie from anyone. Despite this, his earnest nature and devotion to using his role as a prelate to help others wins him the affection of many in his new home.

Yet he is, as Anora says in the third book, a hard man to be friends with. Although many around Thara genuinely like him and wish him well, he continues to hold himself at arms' length, in part by nature, in part due to past tragedy, and in part due to complex feelings around being gay in a homophobic society (and perhaps a feeling that he must hold himself apart, to be able to keep that part of himself private). He is repeatedly shocked when others express affection or well-wishes to him beyond simply politesse. Anora has to tell him that Azanharad feels warmly to him, as it simply never occurred to Thara.

In his relationship with Iana, he starts to come around to the idea of romance again, but in his relationships with many more, he starts to come around to the idea of community. In his dinners with Anora, in his training and partnership with Tomasaran, in his working relationship with Prince Orchenis, Thara begins to develop this community, a home in Amalo.

We know that he has no love for his previous city of office, Aveio, where Evru was executed, and that he never felt at home in the imperial court with his cousin Csoru, but in Amalo, he begins to feel comfortable. He feeds the local strays on his porch, he regularly attends the theater, he regularly dines with Anora and later with Tomasaran.

After great loss, both personal and directional, forced to start his life over essentially from scratch, Thara is beginning to resettle.

And The Tomb of Dragons just tosses all that and decides that actually what Thara wants is a life on the road with some guy he met a few months ago and barely knows. All of those relationships he spent nearly three full books painstakingly building are relegated to pen pals and that's meant to be an optimistic ending. Those friendships that were sold as so important turn out to mean less than this rando love interest introduced in the final third of the last book.

Thara is not a character who ever gave off the air of being an adventurer. He is not someone who has been looking for thrills or a life living out of a suitcase; he's always seemed far more domestic and practical. Few characters in the Chronicles of Osreth seem less suited to a life of constant travel and peril. All of the dangers Thara takes on in Amalo are only in pursuit of his calling, and he does not take any pleasure in it beyond being able to assist those who rely on him.

For two and a half books it felt like Thara was building a new home in Amalo, a place where he felt safe, and cared for, and known, and for that to all be chucked at the last minute for the life of a traveling prelate feels like a second tragedy in his life. It doesn't come off like a hopeful new start, it comes off like Thara having another home snatched away from him, like his once more being forced out of a place he had, with great difficulty, made connections.

And it's so disappointing to me.

Last night I wrapped up Solo Dance by Kotomi Li, translated from Japanese by Arthur Morris. This short book is about a young gay Taiwanese woman who struggles with both internal and external homophobia, and eventually moves to Japan looking for understanding.

Queer stories from other countries are always interesting to me and it’s a good reminder that progress has not been even all over the world. Much of the book is pretty depressing, because the protagonist struggled with fitting in even before she realized she was gay, and she has some real struggles. She is battling severe depression for much of the book and at several points, suicidality.

The book is touching in that the protagonist’s struggles feel real and she’s someone who is so close to having positive experience that could change her life for the better, but her luck keeps dropping on the other side each time.

I don’t want to spoil too much about the end, but while I was grateful for the overall tone of the it, it is contrived and not very believable. But I did enjoy the protagonist’s travels leading up to that point. It’s not at all subtle, and it packs a lot more plot into the final handful of chapters than the rest of the book, but it was still sweet to see the protagonist’s perspective shift a little through her engagements with other people.

I’m not sure if it’s the translation or the original prose, but the language is stilted and very emotionally distant. The reader is kept at arm’s length from the protagonist virtually the whole novel, and while we’re often told she’s feeling these intense feelings, I never felt it. It was like reading a clinical report of her feelings, which was disappointing.

This is Li’s first novel, and it reads that way. There’s a lot of heart in it, and I appreciate it for that, but it lacks a lot in technical skill. I would be interested to see more of Li’s future work, when she’s had more time to polish her ability, but I don’t regret taking the time with this one.

Time and circumstance conspired to keep me from reviewing the second book in the Cemeteries of Amalo book, The Grief of Stones, but today I finished the third book, Tomb of the Dragons and I do have time to review this third and final book in the trilogy.

This is NOT a spoiler-free review.

Tomb of the Dragons retains much of what I loved about the first two books, including Thara’s character and his investigations into the underbelly of Amalo, with a healthy helping of Ethuveraz politics.

Thara is having to adjust to the events at the end of the last book, and here, I feel, is where we truly see how important his calling is to him—how he handles losing it. It gives some good perspective to why he is so dogged in pursuing his work goals—his calling really is his sense of purpose, his life. Watching Thara grapple with this change and its indefinite consequences was fascinating.

However, it also retains in greater measure some of the things that I didn’t love about the earlier books, including Addison’s obsession with minutiae. I can only read about the characters traveling on this or that tram line so many times before my eyes start skipping lines to the things that really matter. This would bother me less if it didn’t feel like it came at the expense of more important things.

For one, at the close of the trilogy, we still know virtually nothing about Evru, arguably the most important person in Thara’s past. We know nothing about their relationship except how it ended, about why Thara was drawn to Evru or what he got out of the relationship. We know very little about Thara’s own past, and only here do we finally get even crumbs of detail about his training as a prelate, one of the other most important events of his life. Yet we get the full name of every paper boy Thara encounters.

Furthermore, Addison makes plot decisions which are frankly baffling in their logic. To any reader with eyes, Iana was set up as Thara’s love interest, the most likely future candidate for his “moving on from Evru’s tragedy” romance. Three and a half books lead us to believe this.Then we get a bait-and-switch where Iana abruptly declares himself heterosexual and aromantic, and some rando we only get introduced to properly in the final third of the book is shoehorned in as Thara’s new crush.

To be clear, I’m not mad that Iana and Thara didn’t end as a couple—I was never deeply invested in their romance and would have been just as happy for there to be no romance at all in this story—I’m just a loss to understand this switch. It makes Thara and Olgarezh feel painfully lacking in chemistry, as we’ve had a fraction of the time to get to know them together as we have with Iana. We know almost nothing about Olgarezh as we have only a third of a book to get to know him, and the nature of his role and his character keeps him buttoned up for most of it, so I found it hard to care about him.

It would have been far less annoying and unsatisfying to just have Thara end the book single, but looking forward to a future romance. Instead, what we get feels rushed and narratively nonsensical. It also makes the ending of the book feel inorganic and unnecessary, a tool to force bonding between Thara and Olgarezh, rather than a rewarding conclusion to Thara’s adventures in Amalo.

The second thing that surprised me in an unsatisfying way was Thara ending the series essentially exiled from Amalo. A huge thread of this series has been Thara learning to accept love from others and find a way to set down roots again, and he was doing that in Amalo! He had friends, he had peers, he had connections, he had a home! And yet at the end of the book, that’s all taken away, and he’s kicked onto a life on the road with Olgarezh, who he barely knows, and all of his Amalo connections are relegated to pen pals. It was shocking and very disappointing. Again—if Addison had never planned for Thara to stay in Amalo, why wasn’t there more groundwork laid for his being unsatisfied having to stay in one place, why so much time spent showing him settling in to Amalo? It felt like giving him a home only to once again take it away.

There was a Maia cameo, which I loved, and it was really fun to revisit the Untheliniese court from the perspective of someone other than Maia, and to see Maia from an outside perspective. It was fun to see Csevet from another angle too! Really loved getting to see Maia in action as Edrahasivar too.

On the whole, this was a disappointing end to the trilogy. I still love the first two books, and there is still much I like about this one, but Addison makes too many jarring narrative shifts that make no sense and don’t add up in the face of the earlier parts of the story for it to be satisfying.

It took over a month for my hold on this book to come up, but Friday night I finished Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. If you look into online book recommendations like on New York Times or NPR, you've probably seen this title come up. This book is about a young poet who sobers up after years of severe addiction and is now looking for meaning and purpose.

Martyr! is a beautiful book about the very human search for meaning in our lives, but it also is not afraid to shy away from the ugliness of that search. It juxtaposes eloquently-worded paragraphs of generational grief with Cyrus waking up having pissed the bed because he went to sleep so drunk the night before. Neither of these things cancels the other out.

Everyone in Martyr! is flawed, often deeply, but they're all also very real, and they're trying their best; they aren't trying to hurt anyone, but they cause hurt anyway, and then they and those around them just have to deal with that. Martyr! weighs the search for personal meaning against the duty owed to others and doesn't come up with a clean answer. What responsibility did Orkideh have to her family as opposed to herself? What responsibility did Ali have to Cyrus as opposed to himself? What responsibility does Cyrus have to Zee, as opposed to his search for a meaningful death?

Cyrus' story is mainly the post-sobriety story: He's doing what he's supposed to, he's not drinking or doing drugs, he's going to his AA meetings, he's working (after a fashion)...and what's the reward? He still can't sleep at night and he feels directionless and alone and now he doesn't even have the ecstasy of a good high to look forward to. This is the "so what now?" part of the sobriety journey.

It's also in many ways a family story. Cyrus lost his mother when he was young and his father shortly after he left for college, and he spends the book trying to reckon with these things and with the people his parents were. Roya is the mother Cyrus never knew, whose shape he could only vaguely sketch out from his father's grief and his unstable uncle's recollections. Ali is the father who supported Cyrus in all practical ways, and sacrificed mightily to do it, but did not really have the emotional bandwidth to be there for his son. And there are parallels between Cyrus and Roya arising later in the book that tugged quite hard on my heartstrings, but I won't spoil anything here.

Cyrus wants to find meaning, but seems only able to grasp it in the idea of a meaningful death--hence his obsession with martyrs. The idea of a life with meaning seems beyond him. He struggles throughout the book with this and with the people trying to suggest that dying is not the only way to have lived.

I really enjoyed this book and I think it deserves the praise it's gotten. I've tried to sum up here what the book is "about," but it's a story driven by emotion more than plot. It's Cyrus' journey and his steps and stumbles along the way, and I think Akbar did a wonderful job with it.

Brahma's Dream by Shree Ghatage was a book I snatched out of a pile of stuff my sister was giving away last year, but she'd never gotten around to reading it herself, so she couldn't give me a preview. Brahma's Dream is set in India just before it gains self-rule, and concerns the family of Mohini, a child whose serious illness dominates her life.

This is one of those middle-of-the-road books that was neither amazingly good nor offensively bad, and therefore I struggle to come up with much to say about it. That makes it sound bad, but it isn't--I enjoyed my time with it. I thought Ghatage did a good job with exploring life on the precipice of great political change, although the history and politics of 1940s India is more backdrop to the family drama than central to the story. I liked Mohini and her family; because the nature of her illness necessitates a lot of rest and down time, Mohini is naturally a thoughtful child, as her thoughts are sometimes all she has to amuse herself. However, she never crosses the line into being precocious, which was a relief.

Neither did I feel like the book leaned too hard on Mohini's illness to elicit sentimentality from the reader. Obviously, an illness like hers is the biggest influence on her life, and on the lives of her immediate family, and there are many moments you sympathize with her because she can't just be a child the way she wants to be, but I didn't feel like Ghatage was plucking heartstrings just for the sake of it.

Reading the relationships between Mohini and her family was heartwarming, especially with her grandfather, who takes great joy in Mohini's intellect and is often there to discuss the import of various societal events with her.

Ghatage's descriptive writing really brings to life the India of the time, with the colors, smells, sounds, and sights that are a part of Mohini's every day.

It reminded me of another book I read about a significant event in Indian history (the separation of India and Pakistan) told through the perspective of a young ill girl, Cracking India.

On the whole, this was a sweet, heartfelt book. It's not heavy on plot, but if you enjoy watching the story of a family unfold and the little dramas that play out, it's enjoyable.

Book # (checks notes) 13! From the "Women in Translation" rec list has been The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann, translated from German by Amy Bojang. This book concerns a house full of elderly retirees who end up investigating a series of murders in their sleepy English town.

This book was truly a delight from start to finish. I loved Swann's quirky senior cast; they were both entertaining and raised valid and very human questions about what aging with dignity means. It did a fabulous job scratching my itch for an exciting novel with no twenty-somethings to be seen. Now Agnes, the protagonist, and her friends are quite old, which impacts their lives in significant ways. However, I felt Swann did a good job of showing the limitations of an aging body--unless she's really in a hurry, Agnes will usually opt to take the stair lift down from the second floor, for instance--without sacrificing the depth and complexity of her characters, or relegating such things merely to the youth of their pasts.

The premise of this book caught my attention immediately, but after a lifetime of books with riveting premises that dismally fail to deliver, I was still wary. I'm happy to report that The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp fully delivers on its promise! Swann makes ample and engaging use of her premise.

The story itself is not especially surprising; if you're looking for a real brain-bender of a mystery or a book of shocking plot twists, this is not it. But I enjoyed it, and I thought Swann walked an enjoyable line between laying down enough clues that I could see the writing on the wall at some point, without giving the game away too quickly. There are no last-minute ass-pulls of heretofore unmentioned characters suddenly confessing to the crime here! The main red herring that gets tossed in the reader is likely to see for what it is very quickly, but for plot-relevant reasons I won't mention here, it's very believable that Agnes does not see that.

Agnes herself was a wonderful protagonist; I really enjoyed getting to go along on this adventure with her. She had a hard enough time wrangling her household of easily-distracted seniors even before the murders started! But the whole cast was endearing, if also all obnoxious in their own way after decades of settling on their own way of getting through life.

Bojang does a flawless job with the translation; she really captures various English voices both in the dialogue and in Agnes' narration. The writing flows naturally without ever coming off stilted or awkward.

I really had fun with this one, and I'm delighted to here there's apparently a sequel--Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime--which I will definitely be checking out.

Last night I finished The Once and Future King by T.H. White, because I felt like it was time I made a real foray into the Arthurian legends. The actual first Arthurian book I read was The Mists of Avalon, but that was years ago and before I had heard the full story about Marion Zimmer Bradley. This book takes a decidedly different tone. I’m sticking to the most common name spellings for all of the characters here, because spellings do vary across all versions of these legends.

The first thing that surprised me about The Once and Future King is that it’s funny, and frequently in an absurd, dorky kind of way. Knights failing tilts because their visors fell over their eyes wrong, Merlin accidentally zapping himself away in the middle of a lesson because he was in a temper, the Questing Beast “falling in love” with two men dressed in a beast costume, that sort of thing. This silliness is largely concentrated in the first quarter of the book, which is about Arthur’s childhood, but it’s never fully lost.

The second surprise was how long the book focuses on Arthur’s childhood, but then again, it is setting the scene for Arthur’s worldview and the lessons he internalized as a child which shape his approach to being king.

( Read more... )

It’s been a bit! Timing conspired to prevent me from reviewing my last audiobook (Katherine Addison’s The Grief of Stones), but I’m here with the conclusion of the Magebike Courier duology by Hana Lee, Flight of the Fallen.

On the whole, I think if you liked the first book, you’ll like the second. It’s more of the same, which is no complaint from me. Lee digs only slightly more into the worldbuilding of the Wastes, but as with the first book, it’s clear that’s not where Lee’s strengths or interests lie, and so she doesn’t overreach herself there, which I think is best.

The main trio—Jin, Yi-Nereen, and Kadrin—continue to be fun and engaging characters, although Jin’s self-pitying act that began at the end of book 1 grows a little tiresome, even if it is understandable. (Fortunately, she gets over it and her best traits--her courage, her determination to keep trying, her capacity to love--win resoundingly in the end.) Making a surprisingly delightful reappearance is Sou-zelle, who actually threatens to usurp our lovers as the most interesting protagonist for the first third of the book. Book 1 did a good job of making Sou-zelle a more dynamic character than merely Yi-Nereen’s jilted fiancé, and book 2 continues to give him more depth.

Yi-Nereen is a very fun character to read; I enjoyed both her power and her continual debate over her own morality. Despite being a princess and Jin a hardscrabble commoner, it's Yi-Nereen who often feels like the edgier character and I think that makes for a fun dynamic. Between her and Jin, it’s fortunate they have Kadrin around to be the heart of the trio and keep them both above water. And support is his main role. Not that he doesn’t do anything, but narratively he very much acts to back up the women in his life, and he also gets to play the dude in distress. Personally, I enjoyed this—fighting and power are simply not Kadrin’s strengths and the story never reneges on this to preserve his masculinity. His value is elsewhere, and it is cherished by those close to him.

I whined a little bit that the lack of resolution to the main trio’s relationship at the end of the last book felt a little contrived, and it feels similarly just slightly contrived here how they manage to go most of the book without discussing their relationship or acknowledging that they’re all very down to make this a menage a trois situation. I would have also liked a bit more down time between them, especially during the denouement, but slice of life this series is not and never has been.

There’s perhaps slightly less combat in this book, but there’s still plenty of dashing across the hazardous Mana Wastes and action and protagonists experiencing injuries and needing to be cared for. I was a little worried this book would feel it needed to up the scale of violence as a sequel, so the final confrontations were actually quite satisfying in that they remained personal to the protagonists and not so excessive as to wear me out.

There's more engagement with the politics of the Wastes, which I always enjoy in a fantasy story. Watching Yi-Nereen try to navigate life in her new home city was both exciting and had me watching from between my fingers at moments. This woman is either zero or a hundred MPH; no in-between.

Once again though, I find myself wanting more from the ending. Despite all the drama over the main trio’s relationship, Jin’s final scenes are not with Yi-Nereen and Kadrin, but with others. Which wouldn’t bother me if we’d gotten to see more of the trio being together. It would have just been rewarding to see more of what an active romance looks like between them, although I am grateful the book continues to value their platonic relationships as well.

Overall, the book continued to be fun. Is it the next great fantasy novel? Certainly not. Did I enjoy my time with it? I sure did. Will I read something else by this author? Possibly, depends on the book. I enjoyed my time with the Magebike Courier series and would definitely be open to more projects by this author.

Turning over in my mind how Astarion and Cazador are mirrors of each other and it's sooo interesting. Like, Astarion when the PC meets him is on a kind of precipice. The PC can either encourage him to continue on the path he's on, resentful that other people might get help when he didn't and willing to do anything to make himself feel safe (might makes right, etc.), or can push him back in the direction of being "good," caring about others and keeping his worse instincts under control.

Astarion spends large chunks of the game castigating Cazador for his senseless cruelty, for his selfishness, for his derangement. Astarion also frets about being or becoming a monster. If the PC tells him during their first meeting that the parasites will turn them into mindflayers, his response is a dejected "Of course it'll turn me into a monster."

And yet, the moment Astarion grasps that he might seize control of Cazador's ritual of ascension, that he might sacrifice his vampiric "siblings" to obtain the power Cazador sought, he is immediately sorely tempted, even eager. When it becomes clear the ritual necessitates the sacrifice not only of Astarion's six spawn siblings, but also the seven thousand victims Cazador has been collecting in the basement for centuries, many of whom Astarion himself delivered unknowingly to their fate, Astarion hesitates only slightly in his desire to complete the ritual himself.

If Astarion is ascended via Cazador's ritual, he almost immediately follows in his master's footsteps. Some of his first dialogue after ascending is about feeling that every other living thing wants to serve and be controlled by him, the vampire ascendant. If he follows Cazador's path, he becomes Cazador.

Astarion was tortured for centuries into the person he is in the game. He admits to the PC that he barely remembers his life before being a vampire. The person he was before Cazador entered his life is almost entirely lost to him. After centuries of being on Cazador's leash, Astarion barely has a thought that doesn't revolve around Cazador. Minthara correctly points out that as long as Cazador lives, Astarion will never truly be free, because so much of his mindset continues to center his old master. Whomever Astarion might have been if Cazador had never touched him is a mystery, even to Astarion himself. He is now what Cazador made him, but the PC can encourage him to grow beyond that.

By choosing to ascend, by following in Cazador's wake, Astarion essentially rejects the chance to become something else--he accepts that he is what Cazador created and he will become what Cazador wanted to be. If an ascended Astarion is permitted to leave the Szarr mansion alive (ie. the PC doesn't turn on him with the Gur), he revels in his power and in the Reunion Party scene brags about being the "puppet master" of Baldur's Gate. If the PC is in a romance with him, he may agree to turn them into a vampire spawn, but refuses to make them a full vampire, for vague reasons that almost certainly amount to not wanting to have someone around who might even possibly compete with his power.

Astarion thus shows that he has the capacity to be just like Cazador.

By extrapolation, then, Cazador may have once been like Astarion.

The team learns by exploring the Szarr mansion that Cazador was turned by a vampire named Vellioth, who treated him horrifically. Simply by interrogating Vellioth's skull--which Cazador keeps in his bedroom as a gruesome memento--you can hear about how Vellioth murdered Cazador's friends in front of him when he reached out to them, made him spend eleven years impaled as punishment for a failed attempt to kill Vellioth, and how they both laughed when Cazador finally succeeded in killing his master. Clearly, Cazador is what Vellioth made him, down to the scroll of rules he recieved and then imposed on Astarion and the others, and compared to his old master, he may even view himself as lenient with his own spawn. (Astarion can remark that "even his precious rules" weren't something of Cazador's own invention, which shows how much of Cazador and particularly of his presentation as a vampire is made up of Vellioth. And yet--if romancing an ascended Astarion, he almost inarguably delivers the same set of rules, albeit phrased a little gentler, to the PC. Thank you to corgiteatime for the link!)

Who was Cazador before Vellioth? We don't know, and Astarion doesn't either, but the hints we gather in the Szarr mansion suggest Cazador's journey to his present monstrous state was not very different from Astarion's own path to the climax of his personal quest.

(Pure speculation, but Astarion suggests Cazador took special pleasure in tormenting him among the other spawn, and if Cazador saw something of his own pre-vampiric self in Astarion, I think it tracks that he might then in turn feel particularly hostile towards Astarion, perhaps resenting this reminder that he used to be something else, before Vellioth.)

Astarion lives in perpetual fear. Fear of Cazador, fear of being controlled, fear of being hated and despised by those around him, fear of having to face up to his own actions. His desire to seize on the ritual of ascesion is out of a desire for safety--one of his lines about wanting it is about how no one will ever control him again. Is Cazador's desire for it dissimilar? Rifling through his corresondence in the Szarr mansion shows he is eager to control Baldur's Gate and grow his own power, but of course he wouldn't admit to rival vampires that there is buried in there any desire for his own safety. It is not unbelievable that even centuries after Vellioth's death, even as a true vampire now himself, Cazador is still chasing some sense of safety. It is also a preview, I think, of an ascended Astarion's life: the fear that will never leave him as long as he continues to walk in his master's shadow. Astarion believes that ascending will excise that fear--but I'm sure Cazador believed that becoming a full-fledged vampire would make him feel secure, and here he is chasing the ritual of ascension.

Astarion and Cazador are two sides of the same coin, two stones in the same path begun by Vellioth (although, truthfully, probably even before him, by Vellioth's master and that vampire's master, and so on). Astarion can continue down that same road, chaneling the abuse he recieved from Cazador into his own cruelties, or he can end that terrible lineage by refusing the ritual, by refusing to become what Cazador wanted to be. Cazador represents the monster Astarion can truly become, the worst of Astarion's impulses and instincts, but when the PC meets him, Astarion is not yet too far gone--he can be turned away from this. For Cazador, it's much too late.

Last night I wrapped up another Julia Armfield novel, Private Rites. This novel is about three estranged sisters who are pushed back together when their father dies.

Very sorry I can't give this one a higher rating (I gave it a 3.25 on StoryGraph), because I loved the last Armfield novel I read, Our Wives Under the Sea, and this book shares a lot of similarities with that one. Our Wives Under the Sea was a meditative, slow-paced exploration of an evolving grief which hit me quite hard, but Private Rites comes off, if I can be excused for phrasing it this way, like it's trying too hard. Private Rites obviously really wants the reader to think it's Deep and Thoughtful and Literary, and it shows this desire too clearly for it to work, for me.

What does succeed in Private Rites is the frustrating and heart-breaking portrayal of three estranged sisters struggling with the legacy of a complicated and toxic father. Isla, Irene, and Agnes are not particularly likeable people, and even they muse over whether this can be tied to their strange and un-childlike childhood, or if it's just natural to them. Armfield so captures the feeling of being trapped at a certain age around family, the notion that they are locked into their view of you at ten or thirteen or seventeen and never update that view to reflect who you are as an adult and how you may subconciously regress to fit that view around them. She also catches the frustrating feeling of knowing you are reacting irrationally to a sibling and not being able to stop yourself and how much emotional history undergirds these seemingly outsized responses.

The slow apocalypse happening in the background of the story feels like it ties in well with the emotional state of the three protagonists; a drowning of the world that takes place a little at a time over many years until things become unlivable.

However, as mentioned above, the book ultimately does not succeed to me at being engaging. It is incredibly introspective in a way that comes off as navel-gazing. The "City" portions of the chapters felt especially like Armfield begging us to find the novel artistic and creative, which was unnecessary, because there's plenty here to stand on its own.

The ending also felt like a complete non-sequitur. The seeds for it were sown throughout the book, but not prominently enough that I cared when it came about. Instead, I felt cheated out of an emotional denouement among the three sisters, which is cast off in a coup by this last-minute, poorly-explained plot point.

I also felt like Isla gets an unfair share of grief, and it wasn't clear why she among the three of them was singled out to be exclusively miserable.

Do love the queer representation here; Armfield continues to excel in that.

On the whole, there is a lot of good meat here and it approaches grief from a completely different angle from Our Wives Under the Sea so that it doesn't feel at all repetitive if you've read that one, but it also drags more and I found the ending unsatisfying.

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