Tag: bookses precious

Philip Ball, Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler. This was fairly short and contained entertaining/appalling anecdotes as well as a pretty comprehensive idea of which physicists went which ways under the Nazi regime and why. Ball walked a very fine line very, very well: he didn’t overstate Nazi sympathies based on continued residence in Germany (even talking about why it could be hard for Germans of any religious/ethnic background to find places elsewhere in the world), but at the same time he was not really up for overstated nonsense about who was in danger and why. Good stuff.

Ellen Datlow, ed., The Doll Collection. Discussed elsewhere.

Nina Kiriki Hoffman, A Red Heart of Memories. Structurally weird but doing fantasy things I don’t really see elsewhere. I find Hoffman’s prose very readable but somehow manage to forget to get more of her stuff for large swaths of time and then binge.

Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition. Despite the title, this will not be an erotic book for the vast majority of readers. (Some people would find the manual to their crockpot erotic. Never say never; the world is full of differences.) It’s a pictorial history of Chinese women’s foot-binding and the shoes that covered the bound feet. Jackson manages not to exoticize the historical binding of Chinese women’s feet while exoticizing literally everything else about the existence of Chinese people, which was quite, um, the accomplishment. (See what I didn’t do there?) The photos speak for themselves and are fascinating and horrifying. And splendid: the needlework put into these shoes is astonishing.

Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. What a strange book. It ends with 1920, and I get why: because Prohibition is such a huge topic. Still, in 1920 the Progressive Movement had not really fallen, and Prohibition is a huge relevant topic. Also it barely mentioned the Tafts and skated past the longer-term effects of Roosevelt and Wilson. I was glad to see some more obscure figures covered, but…this is not going to be enough if you’re looking for a history of the Progressive Movement. It has interesting tidbits but huge incomprehensible gaps.

Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization. The ancient Mediterranean is not one of my main things, but this seemed like a reasonably well-done history of a civilization not much covered except as The Opponent, so it was a good gap to fill in.

Andrew C. Nahm, Introduction to Korean History and Culture. It fascinates me how the various people I’ve read trying to write a history of Korea focus so differently. It’s fun to watch. Anyway, this one–like pretty much everything else I’ve read–spends half its time on the twentieth century, which is frustrating for someone whose main interest is three to five centuries earlier. Still good stuff, though; if you’re going to start reading about Korean history, this is as good a place as any and much better than some.

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Does what it says on the tin…if you assume that only white women worked in turn-of-the-century New York. Which: hahaha no. Or if you assume that non-white women had the same access and interest in leisure activities in that era, which, seriously, come on, can anybody say rise of jazz? But it was really solid on white ethnicity and religious variability, and there’s good detail here for those who want more texture in a heroine of this era (or even a hero). Just…the dimension that was missing was a bit glaring to me.

Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham, Veronica Mars: Mr. Kiss and Tell. So…back in the day my college friends and I discovered Connie Willis books. And we tore through them and raved over them and loved them. And then I picked up the collaborations between her and Cynthia Felice. And fie! no! how horrible they were! And we gnashed our teeth and muttered dire imprecations about Cynthia Felice for ruuuuuining our Connie Willis books. But then! I graduated, and I went to a convention where Connie Willis was the GoH, and she was on panels talking about how the collaboration had worked. And it turned out that every single thing that I liked in those books was Cynthia Felice, and every single thing that I thought was horrible was Connie Willis. So! While I know Jennifer Graham somewhat, I don’t know what balance of ideas in this book was hers and what was Rob Thomas’s. (For those of you who are not Marshmallows, Thomas is the original creator of the series.) But! Given the amount of control a co-writer of tie-in novels has compared to the creator of the series, I strongly suspect that the scenes with Veronica and Logan buying and training a puppy were Jen Graham’s and the…direction…that the overall plot arc regarding long-time beloved characters took…was Rob Thomas. The first of these tie-in novels was good fun, like a middle-of-the-road episode maybe. This one…I only recommend it to Marshmallows who will want to know in detail where the continuity is going. But if you do read it, email me and we can…discuss. Possibly with many ellipses.

Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700. Does what it says on the tin. If you don’t want to read about when they issued what coins and which counterfeiting techniques were prevalent, you will probably not be tempted anyway.

Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, The Last Changeling. Second in its series, very much a series book, but with new fun elements and clear and significant furtherance of the plot. And not in a way that made me want to punch anybody, either, so go people who are not Rob Thomas. Um. Wait. That was my outside voice. Anyway, this is Faerie fantasy with one of the main characters an apprentice midwife not just in name but in personality/practice, and I really enjoy that.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

You can tell from a quick glance at the cover that this is an anthology that will skew towards dark fantasy/horror. The cover does not mislead. So the first thing to know is that I am not the target audience for this book. While Ellen Datlow says in the introduction that she didn’t want any evil doll stories, I thought that at least one of the stories totally qualified as an evil doll story by my standards.

Still, even for someone who is not the target audience, there’s skillful, interesting writing in this volume. Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Doctor Faustus” drew heavily on Mary’s experience as a puppeteer–if you revel in telling detail and vivid accuracy, this is a standout story. I only wish it had had a longer/more complicated plot–I’d love to see more of this sort of thing from Mary. Pat Cadigan’s “In Case of Zebras” was a perfect example of how not every story has to be paced the same way: it unfolded in a way that was appropriate for both its teen narrator and her ER volunteer setting. The heroine was engaging and well-done. Finally, Seanan McGuire’s “There Is No Place for Sorrow in the Kingdom of the Cold” used the doll premise to do serious secret-world worldbuilding, drawing on multiple sources in a way that I found delightful. For someone who is more horror-inclined, I’m sure there will be more stand-outs. It’s still not my sort of thing, but it was in general a very readable anthology.

Please consider using our link to buy The Doll Collection at Amazon.

Eleanor Arnason, Hidden Folk. Icelandic mythology-inspired short stories. There were a few of these that fell oddly into the 1970s-esque trap of “the Irish are a special maaaaagical people,” but the language was right on in all of them for being saga inspired. Generally good fun.

Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis. So very good. Sanatoriums, interactions of TB with leprosy, general degenerative interesting stuff.

Octavia Cade, The Life in Papers of Sofie K. Kindle. A magical realist novella about a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician. If that doesn’t make you want to read it, I can’t help you; if it does, hey, did you know there was this book? There is this book! It is just the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing! (I do.)

Mike Carey, Lucifer Book Three. Giant graphic novel omnibus, and I think I am done with the Lucifer series on this one. The stories are not compelling enough to be worth the deliberately ugly art. I understand that it’s deliberately ugly for a reason, is making a statement, etc. But it is still a visual assault that I can opt out of, and will.

Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, Women in the Material World. A late twentieth century book of photographs and interviews with women in different countries worldwide, touching on their daily material lives in a very practical and specific way. I would have passed this by without a recommendation, because if it had been less concrete it would have been awful. As it was–fascinating.

Benedict Jacka, Chosen. These are short and zippy–this is the fourth in a series–and if you’re looking for Magical London Books, this is one. This one has had enough room to start ramifying interestingly. I don’t recommend starting here because of that, though–there’s no reason not to read the previous ones, and they’ll make the ramifications here work better.

Laurie R. King, Night Work. I may also be done with this series. There was a lot of exoticization of non-white characters, which was particularly bad as both the characters and the exoticization were central to the plot. I had sort of gotten along with the earlier volumes in this series on the theory that they were from an earlier time, but this is getting pretty contemporary and not acting like it. So–sigh. Onwards in the search for another long mystery series I like.

Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. This is a particularly interesting biography because so much of its process geeking is text rather than subtext: Milford will talk about interviewing Millay’s sister and then talk about what she thinks is not being said, what she has doubts about and why, what other sources she’s using. Quite good; I wish Milford had more work out there. (She wrote a bio of Zelda Fitzgerald, but I had enough of Zelda Fitzgerald in Flappers and don’t need an entire book of her, no matter how good the biographer.)

E. C. Myers, The Silence of Six. Myers is quite good at Average Teen Voice, whether or not the teen in question is entirely sympathetic. This is a teen hacker novel in the vein of Little Brother and Homeland. Lots of running around and skullduggery, good fun.

Julie E. Neraas, Apprenticed to Hope: A Sourcebook for Difficult Times. Lent to me by someone with whom I was talking about chronic illness stuff. I’m sure it’s very helpful to some people, but I found a lot of it frustratingly basic.

Greg Rucka, Stumptown Vol. 2. Portland PI graphic novel, with rock musicians. Reasonably fun if you want a one of those, not one of Rucka’s best.

V. E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic. Discussed elsewhere.

Chris West, A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps. Every year I buy myself a book for my grandpa’s birthday. I pick something that I think we could have enjoyed together, because I’m not done sharing things with Grandpa even though he’s gone. This was this year’s purchase, and I’m confident that Grandpa would have found it interesting. A lot of the historical overview was stuff that someone who knows a reasonable amount about GB/the UK would already know, but some of the detail was more middlebrow/person-on-the-street than histories often focus on, and that made it feel more authentic to me: if you asked a bunch of Britons what happened in such-and-such a year, the World Cup is very likely to come up, for example. Also the postal-specific stuff was interesting and explained some institutions we don’t have here, like banking at the post office.

Review copy provided by Tor.

A Darker Shade of Magic is the story of four parallel worlds with very different outcomes. One of the protags is one of the very few people who can move between the worlds, and he has color-coded them to keep track of which one he’s referring to–Grey, Red, White, and Black. The divergence of the worlds is not random but refers to their relationship with magic.

That all sounds a bit technical and inside-baseball; the book is anything but. It was such a fast read that I was 2/3 of the way through before I even noticed I should probably do things like move around and stretch occasionally. I am not one of the genre readers who is a sucker for thief protags, but the thief Lila was brave and useful and entertaining. And the two princes were just what they ought to be (errm, sorry, child of the nineties)–that is, they were sympathetic and comprehensible in their relationship with each other, their parents, and the rest of the world. While not everyone has a fully filled-in backstory, ramification from background is the name of the game–each world shapes its denizens differently, for good or ill.

And there are music boxes and magical artifacts with minds–or at least wills–of their own. And burning ships.

Fun story, hurrah, would read author again.

One note: the city in which all this takes place is London, with the Thames as an important thing. If you pick this up hoping for another immersive London fantasy, it will not deliver. There is not a heck of a lot of our-London historical detail in this book. For me, this was not a disadvantage–I have plenty of Magic London Books and not a lot of good recent parallel worlds magic stories. But best to know what one is getting into in advance: set in London, yes, Magic London Book subgenre, not really, no.

Please consider using our link to buy A Darker Shade of Magic from Amazon.

Review copy provided by First Second.

The Sculptor seems aimed at young artists and wannabes: a sad-sack sculptor makes a deal with Death that he can sculpt whatever he wants, with his bare hands, in exchange for shortening his life to 200 days. Death’s motivations in this are pretty dodgy, and the text spends hundreds of pages crapping all over the main character (David) and then aims for cheap pathos in the ending.

Oh, sorry, do I sound unimpressed?

The thing is, there was enough good stuff about The Sculptor that I did want to keep reading. One of the things that favorably impressed me is that for all the rest of the times he falls for young-artist-narrative cliches, McCloud is clear that having your work turn out exactly as you intended doesn’t solve everything. Or sometimes anything. That’s pretty important–it’s a mistake I see a lot of young writers making, thinking that the only problem is that it’s not like it is in their heads. Stuff is like it is in David’s head, and nobody cares. He sometimes has bad ideas, he sometimes has obscure ideas, he’s terrible at promoting himself…and superpowers don’t change that.

Some of the sculptures are cool to look at on the page, and it’s an idea that’s fun to think about: if you could sculpt any material with your bare hands, including granite, concrete, etc. at very large scale, what would you come up with? How would you present it to the world? But the idea is better than the execution. The rule isn’t actually “do the worst possible thing to your characters,” it’s “do the worst possible thing that’s interesting.”

Ah well. Even at several hundred pages, it’s a quick read. And it’s not terrible. It’s just…well, it’s just like its protagonist: you start to think its lack of success is because it’s ultimately pretty shallow.

Please consider using our link to buy The Sculptor at Amazon.

Ben Aaronovitch, Foxglove Summer. It seems that Aaronovitch is alternating arc plot books with monster of the week books. This is one of the latter, and it’s a fun monster of the week sort of thing, Peter out of his usual setting, but if you were looking for an immediate follow-up to the ending of the last volume, this is not it. There’s just enough to let the reader know that he hasn’t forgotten, isn’t neglecting it, and otherwise this is pretty locally focused. I would still recommend starting at the beginning of the series, but you might be able to make this work as an entry point that’s atypical in some key ways.

Samit Basu, Resistance. This is another “start with the first one” book that’s still a pretty worthy sequel. The suddenly superheroic universe of the last book has evolved by a bit, and this book is fairly strong on following up/piling on consequences. If you wanted a book wherein mechas fight kaiju in a superhero universe, that happens here, but a lot of other stuff happens too.

Elizabeth Bear, Karen Memory. Discussed elsewhere.

Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, Stranger. Post-apocalyptic mutant adventures! I think my favorite part of this book was the variety of imagined fauna and flora. The human parts were well-handled also, but I found myself hoping that the characters would leave their town (as they sometimes did) so that they could find out about more strange plants and critters. I’m looking forward to finding out what else that world contains in the sequel.

Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory. I didn’t mean to have an incredibly morbid nonfiction week, but sometimes that’s what hold requests at the library do to you. This is short, a very easy read, and yet provides a lot of detail about modern cremation and the modern funeral industry in general. Some of this may be difficult for some people to read–I particularly want to flag that Doughty is detailed about how they handle infant corpses as opposed to adult corpses–but it’s very interesting stuff.

Amal El-Mohtar, The Honey Month. A synesthetic exploration inspired by twenty-eight types of honey–some poems and some short fiction, hard to genre-typify. The sort of strange intense project I wish we had more of.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. This was the second unintentionally morbid book in the week that Mark’s Grandpa Gritter died, and it had a lot more intellectual/emotional depth than the Doughty. Gawande is a doctor who has written extensively about process in some very usefully nerdy ways, and he looks at some process questions here. Much of it is stuff we’ve already handled or are aware of others handling, in my family, but there was still interesting detail that was new to me, and I think it’s a worthwhile book for many/most people. Recommended.

Robert Hughes, Goya. This was physically heavy enough to be a problem to read sometimes, so I’m afraid I had a more fragmented experience than I would otherwise have had. The progression from young artist attempting to make his mark with court to satirist and on to darkly humorous old man pleasing mostly himself was fascinating, though, and I enjoyed having a closer look at a painter I didn’t know much about.

Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter. Most of the Moomins hybernate, so this is a limited-cast Moomin book. Still fun, interesting, so very Finnish, but again probably not my first choice for where to start. (There’s no Thingummy and Bob, so there you have that.)

David Liss, The Day of Atonement. The story of a Portuguese Jewish man in the 18th century returning to Lisbon after having lived safely in England, seeking revenge on those who wronged his family and finding it harder than he expected to determine where and how that revenge should be dealt out. It’s the sort of thing Liss does very well, and I liked this latest volume of it a lot.

Karen Lord, The Galaxy Game. I would have liked more elephants, but it was still another worthy book in the universe of her previous. I also would have liked slightly more perspective balance among the young characters, but that isn’t really very important; it was still a space SF book of the sort that I loved when I was 12 and miss very much right now: different types of human with different abilities, navigating galactic politics and local variations as best they can.

Allan H. Ropper, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease. I do love neurology when the topic of it isn’t a family member. This contains bunches of weird stories of what the brain does and what people do around their own and others’ brain glitches. If you like that aspect of Oliver Sacks, Ropper is not quite as engaging but still a quite reasonable example of the genre. He also handles being Michael J. Fox’s neurologist quite well in the text, walking the line between name-dropping and minimizing with ease.

Janni Lee Simner, Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer. Kindle. Tiernay hunts for very personal treasure. This is a middle-grade novel, but I think it’s almost better suited for adults, because the perspective on Tiernay’s awesomeness and juvenile limitations is very adult. I’m always on the lookout for good adventure fiction for the MG audience, so I was glad to get this one.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them. Every time I read Sylvia Townsend Warner, I say, “What a strange book,” and this was too. It was the story of a bunch of nuns over several decades of the 14th century. For the first half or so, it’s extremely fragmented, with through narratives not always easy to discern, but they do come together eventually.

Review copy provided by Tor. Also, full disclosure, the author is a personal friend.

Remember when I read Emma Bull’s Territory and said I don’t like Westerns, but I like this book?

Yeah. About that.

I also don’t like books set in whorehouses because they are a minefield of bad tropes.

Huh. So. Funny thing.

Karen Memory is a masterpiece of voice. If you read the first chapter and aren’t hooked by the titular character’s voice, I can’t really help you; and it’s achieved almost exclusively by word choice rather than phoneticization. Karen is a logging camp girl, the daughter of a horse trainer, in the process of being educated in the whorehouse in which she works. She is acutely observant but still thinks of some of her vocabulary as belonging to someone else. She is wholeheartedly accepting of her co-workers, except for the places where she doesn’t notice her own biases until they trip her up. There is every reason for this book to be titled with its protagonist’s name, because while there is plenty (plenty upon plenty!) of action plot here, it is really Karen’s story.

(The Memory part…if you are a neurology nerd hoping for a speculative novel whose premise rests strongly on the processing of memories, this is not that book. Her last name is Memery. This is the one with steampunk battle machines made out of the least likely possible domestic implements and a diverse group of people fighting to be treated as people. We can do neurology geeking somewhere else.)

The alternate history-steampunk elements are subtle in some chapters but present from the beginning, and crucial from the beginning. They are not gears glued on after for fashion. There is, for example, a medical machine that is far better with some cures than others, and the machines are sometimes loud and smell funny, and they need people to actually fix them or, better, soup them up. But there’s also a wealth of setting detail grounding the narrative beyond the machines: the smell and behavior of horses, for example, and more kinds of processed carbohydrates than you can shake a stick at. Dear heaven the carbohydrates. If you have celiac and read this book, I sincerely hope you have good substitute recipes, because I defy you to read this book and not long for biscuits and cornbread and flapjacks. There is buttermilk on my grocery list right now because of this book. This is entirely period-appropriate; there are also beans and bacon and molasses and suchlike. But when I finished reading I wanted to a) make a list of people to give this to and b) eat biscuits. Not in that order.

I am finding myself dancing around some of the coolest steampunky/speculative elements because I think the book will be more fun if the reader discovers them at the pace the book reveals them. So “Karen and her friends/co-workers fight a nefarious local would-be politician who has…” um. “Who can…” right. Yes. Well. There is fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, true love. Okay, not so much the fencing. But biscuits and giant crazy machinery are a pretty good substitute.

Please consider using our link to buy Karen Memory from Amazon.

Max Adams, The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria. Seventh century Northumbria is not something I’ve gotten a lot of outside of Hild (which is fiction), so it was a lovely gap to have filled in. I really like the interesting interplay between various ethnicities and religions/religious subtypes. Fascinating stuff, lots of maps, lots of discussions of how we know various things about this period.

Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust. I squeed when I saw this existed. It’s the seventh Flavia de Luce mystery, and the sixth put a pretty firm period to the series, [redacting] Flavia off to [redacted]. Well, it turns out that [redacted] has murders and opportunities for intrepid girl chemist-detectives to poke their noses into things, too! So Bradley is ending plot arcs, not the series, HURRAH MORE FLAVIA HURRAH HURRAH.

Nancy Marie Brown, Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths. Interesting take on the saga writer, effects on his life and his effects on further sagas. Sometimes good to argue with.

Greer Gilman, Exit, Pursued by a Bear. Kindle. One of Greer’s Jacobean noir novellas. Language just a perfect romp. Not long enough to get tired of any particular playwrights, fey, etc. even if you have low tolerance for any particular among them.

Barbara Hambly, Crimson Angel. Latest in the Benjamin January series. I think it would work all right as an entry point, although I recommend reading the whole series. This dovetailed nicely with my reading the last few months, because it’s partially set in the Caribbean and deals with the effects of the Haitian Revolution, among other things. Slavery, family, and more. I probably shouldn’t have read the latest installations of two of my favorite mystery series in one fortnight, but I am weak.

Florian Illies, 1913: The Year Before the Storm. What a strange little book. It’s a very narrative style, telling the story of that year in retrospect–the things that we think of as important harbingers of future things now rather than what the people of 1913 would have thought of as important. It’s translated from the German, and that’s remarkably clear: the focus is Germanophone (? is this the equivalent of Anglophone or Francophone? what I mean is not just citizens of Germany but also throughout the Habsburg lands of the time), and the focus is very much avant garde, to the point where someone who has not thought much about the continental avant garde of the early 20th century would end up saying, “Who?” repeatedly. There is nothing of Asia, Africa, or South America in this book, and apparently the main notable thing that happened in 1913 in North America was that Louis Armstrong first picked up the trumpet. (Which, hey: notable. I just think that once you’re reporting on when in 1913 Picasso had a cold, you might notice a few other things in the world.) Funny in spots, interesting in spots. Very weird.

Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland. Reread, but not since approximately grade school. This says “1” on the spine, but I don’t recommend starting here. Jansson is clearly still getting her feet under her. It has some funny bits (OH THE HEMULEN), and I think it’s worth reading, but you’ll get the wrong impression of how good the series is if you start here, and there’s no reason to read them in publication order, really none–on the first page there’s mention of the flood that’s in a later book, so. May as well start later, with something where she’s got it on all cylinders.

Matsu Kannari, Kutune Shirka, the Ainu Epic. This is very short but filled with otters. It is not a complete epic, it’s a fragment of an epic. Still, there’s not that much in English about the Ainu–Japan is mostly presented as a monolith, culturally/mythically–so this is a good thing to have.

Frank L. Klemen, Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War. (US Civil War, just for the record.) This was not what I hoped it would be. It’s not really the book’s fault: it did a perfectly cromulent job of covering mostly pro-Confederate conspiracies and secret societies in the North during the US Civil War itself. But I was hoping for a broader scope than that–leading up to the war and after the war would have been nice, and more of the pro-Union secret societies as well. (MORE WIDE AWAKES.) So I will have to find another source for that stuff.

Pascu Stefan, A History of Transylvania. This is an old book, from the Soviet era, so there are weird things about it. Particularly there is a firm and abiding hatred for Pan-Slavism that takes its form in insisting that Romanians are true Dacian Romans dammit. And you can see why, living under the Soviet influence, that might be a direction of subtle rebellion–Russia has often used Pan-Slavism to mean Russian domination. But Pascu didn’t really seem to see how similar the situation he was describing was to, say, Gaul. Ah well. Still some interesting gaps filled in, mostly in the “kings and crowns” direction.

Abra Staffin-Wiebe, A Circus of Brass and Bone. Kindle. Discussed elsewhere.

Brian Staveley, The Providence of Fire. Discussed elsewhere.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the second book in a series. The first one, some of you will recall, was a bit disappointing in that it focused on the two brothers who were fairly standard fantasy novel archetypes and gave very little space to their sister who was a princess who was also Minister of Finance.

Well! You will be pleased to know that Adare, the princess in question, appears a great deal more in this book.

She is no longer Minister of Finance. She acts very little like a former Minister of Finance. I don’t really understand why Brian Staveley came up with a POV character who was Minister of Finance if he didn’t want to write about one.

Also in increased content over the previous book: torture. Lots and lots more torture. General misery, despair, and definitely torture.

Oh, and also phoneticized “peasant” dialect. You know, for the scum common people.

Whee.

And yet I read this volume all the way through, so there have to be some good things about it. I was mostly invested in a handful of secondary characters, honestly, and the prose style is readable (when not doing phoneticized dialect), and I was hoping that the spoilerific means of getting from place to place would have some interesting stuff attached to it.

I’m not sure this is grimdark proper, but I suspect that people with a higher tolerance for grimdark than I have would enjoy it more.

Please consider using our link to buy Providence of Fire at Amazon.