Books!

Recent Reading: The Tainted Cup

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:44:05 GMT

Posted by: rocky41_7

On Sunday I finished The Tainted Cup, the first book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series by Robert Jackson Bennett. This is a fantasy murder mystery with an element of political thriller.

The main character is Ana Dolabra, an eccentric but brilliant investigator, and I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen a woman fill this role. The wacky but effective investigator is of course a very well-known stock character, but has always been, in my experience, a man. I found Ana delightful; strange but not off-putting, and without coming off like the author was working to hard to make her quirky.

However, our point-of-view protagonist is Din Kol, Ana’s put-upon assistant, on whose shoulders falls the managing of her many idiosyncrasies. They’re a fun team to watch work, and in this first book we get to see their working relationship unfold, as they’ve only recently teamed up at the start. Din is fine, but mostly I appreciated him as a lens for Ana.

Bennett’s fantasy world is characterized by fantastical use and manipulation of plants and the human body. Din, for instance, has been modified to be an “engraver”—someone with an eidetic memory. For obvious reasons, this serves him well as aid to an investigator.

I think Bennett does a good job of throwing you into the world and letting you use context to figure most of it out. I get bored with SFF novels that feel the need to hold your hand, as if you might be a first-time SFF reader who never encountered a magic system before, so I was relieved when Bennett just started telling the story and letting me figure the world out as it went along. I’d rather be a bit lost at times than be toddled along, but I never felt lost here.

The novel touches on some things that I feel are pretty keenly relevant, like the ability of the wealthy to avoid justice and their willingness to inflict suffering on the rest of society to better their own position (and then justify it to themselves).

I don’t read a ton of murder mysteries, so I may not be the best judge of this, but I also felt that Ana worked well. It’s a tough trick writing a character who’s meant to be much smarter than the rest of the cast (perhaps even than the author!), and it can fail a couple of ways: the supposed “brilliant” deductions are obvious to the average reader, making the rest of the cast look painfully dull for not seeing them; or the machinations are so obtuse with so little evidence the reader simply won’t believe the detective could have figured that out without an ass-pull from the author. I didn’t think Bennett fell into either of these traps and every detail Ana referred to in one of her deductions was something that had been mentioned before.

I enjoyed this book and I plan to read the next one. Very interested to see where Ana’s adventures take her next!

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The Great Panjandrum Himself

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:59:27 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

The Great Panjandrum Himself by Samuel Foote

In nonsense perhaps matched only by Lewis Carroll's The Mad Gardener's Song. An actor said he could memorize anything in one reading, and this was the attempt to defeat him.

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The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:15:13 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy by Ronald Hutton

A long topic

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Puritanism and the Wilderness

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:57:03 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Puritanism and the Wilderness: 1629-1700, The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier by Peter N. Carroll

What the Puritans thought about wilderness as they came to New England. . .

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The Apothecary Diaries 15

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:16:42 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

The Apothecary Diaries 15 by Nekokurage

Spoiler warnings ahead for the earlier books.

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Recent Reading: Glorious Exploits

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:55:26 GMT

Posted by: rocky41_7

Hello friends ヾ(•ω•`)o I feel like it's been a while! Today I finished Glorious Exploits by Irish author Ferdia Lennon. It turned out to be the perfect book to read after finishing my lectures on the Greek and Persian wars, because it takes place in Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War (I caught that reference to the Athenian silver mines!)

The book is written in a contemporary Irish dialect, which put a lot of reviewers off. However, I think it works well for making the language accessible and readable to a modern audience in the sense that reading it, we can immediately tell who is likely educated, who is not, who is being casual, who is being disingenuous, etc. As long as you're prepared for it, I don't think it causes much disruption.

The audiobook is narrated by the author himself, which was fun. It's always great to hear an author's own take on their work. For instance, the way Lampo says "good morning," both to the Spartan guards and the Athenian prisoners of war at the start of the book. This could have been a nothing exchange, but the obnoxious way Lennon says that "good morning" tells us almost right away that Lampo is a guy who delights in being a thorn in others' sides and a guy who thinks he's hilarious.

The plot of the story is simple: Gelon, Lampo's childhood best friend, decides they're going to put on a Euripides play with the Athenian prisoners, because the Athenians are the only ones who know enough of the script to pull it off.

That's all. The story moves at a leisurely pace, with Lampo and Gelon working through various technical snags in this plan and trying to garner support in Syracuse for the idea (there's not much).

I think Lennon excels at showing characters who are sometimes disappointingly realistic. Gelon and Lampo are not heroes. They are not conscientious objectors to the war. They are not activists against the obvious abuse the Athenian prisoners of war are going through. They're just two poor dudes put out of work by the war, who sort of maybe kind of thing it's not the greatest thing in the world for the Athenians to be tortured or starved to death and possibly someone might want to do something about that, at some point.

Similarly, the Athenians were undoubtedly the aggressors in the war. They invaded Sicily, they burned other villages on the island to the ground, they fully intended to conquer Syracuse. They allegedly killed Syracusans who had already surrendered. But the book asks, when is enough enough? When have they been punished enough? When have the Syracusans gone from victims seeking justice to perpetrators seeking vengeance?

Lampo himself, the main protagonist, is a prime mixed bag. His humorous nature makes him come off a bit harmless, but he can be wildly insensitive, even mean, even to people he likes. He can swing rapidly from mood to mood. He's often focused on himself and his insecurities can make him lash out or give up too easily. And yet, it's Lampo, not Gelon, who has the first confrontation with Bitton, a man who roams the quarries beating Athenian prisoners of war to death at random to soothe his grief for his son who died in the war. It's Lampo who inserts himself between Bitton and some Athenian strangers to try to talk the man down. And it's Lampo who urges action at the secondary climax, Lampo who sets that entire plot point in motion when no one else in Syracuse seems to give a shit.

In a way that feels characteristic of Irish tales, Glorious Exploits does not shy away from the gross, unglamorous reality of its story and its characters. It doesn't try to dress anyone up in shining armor or sacrifice the dull reality for a romantic sheen. Yet in the muck and the mire, a shocking gleam of poetry emerges. The play starts off as a lark for Lampo, a silly, ridiculous thing he's doing to humor his melancholy friend, but gradually, it becomes important. And as it becomes important to him, it becomes important to the reader. The plot is slow, and a reader may find themselves wondering why they're bothering with all this--but for me, the later two climaxes of the book hit like gut punches.

I'm still chewing this one over, but I enjoyed it and I would read more from this author. It's not a story that will shock and wow you upfront, but the heart of it really hits if you stick with it.

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Assignment in Brittany

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 20:22:38 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes

A thriller about an British undercover agent in Brittany, in 1940. The work was published in 1942.

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Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 14

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:49:34 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 14 by Kamome Shirahama

The tale continues! Serious spoilers ahead for the earlier works.

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The Secrets of Story

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:27:40 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers by Matt Bird

A how-to-write book. Despite the title, mostly for TV and movie writers, down to and including explaining that a prose writer has it easier.

Nevertheless, some useful ideas, particularly about irony, such as the character's flaw should be a flip-side of a strength to add reason to not want to fix it. None of the jargon was impenetrable.

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The Snake Prince and Other Stories

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:54:02 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

The Snake Prince and Other Stories: Burmese Folk Tales by Edna Ledgard

A varied collection. I think a little overwritten, but the tales are a new slice, fitting a new culture. Fairy tales, including a kind and unkind girls featuring a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and a unique take on burning the skin of the shape-shifted: the Naga prince is not killed but he is rendered mortal to live and grow old and die with his bride.

Also tales of fools and clever men, and animal tales.

Most are recognizable types, but not close to other variants.

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Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:55:36 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt by Barbara Mertz

A light discussion of Egypt. Admittedly covering a long period of history and so necessarily cursory in place. Discusses what records we have and what archeological evidence we have found, and various Pharaohs and changes.

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Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits, Vol. 11

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 03:57:27 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits, Vol. 11 by Waco Ioka

And so we begin in medias res -- spoilers ahead for the earlier volumes

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The Way to a Beautiful World

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 05:03:22 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

The Way to a Beautiful World by James Norbury

Another collection of cartoons, loosely woven into a tale. A little more loosely than in Journey, which benefitted it. Most could work as stand-alones, and are the strongest.

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Kill the Villainess, Vol. 5

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 05:16:07 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Kill the Villainess, Vol. 5 by Haegi

Spoilers ahead for the earlier ones.

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Recent Reading: Earthlings

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 05:40:49 GMT

Posted by: rocky41_7

The second book I finished this weekend was Earthlings by Sakyaka Murata, translated from Japanese by Ginny Takemori. This book is about Natsuki, a girl who's always felt she doesn't quite belong with humans. This has been book #16 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

I've struggled a lot with what to say about this book, or whether to say anything at all. First, as many other reviews note, the book description does not in any way prepare you for the trigger warnings that may apply, so if you have no-gos for reading, do have a look around for a list before you crack this one open.

There are a lot of things you could take away from this book. The lifelong impact of childhood sexual abuse. The damage of a child having no safe adult to confide in. The pain of feeling alienated from society. The pain caused by strict social expectations that leave no room for individuals to pursue other modes of living. The danger that refusing to allow deviations from the "norm" will lead individuals incapable of conforming to that norm to reject society altogether. The idea that rejecting smaller social rules eventually leads to complete anarchy and amorality. The suffocating impact of the absence of privacy and the extremes to which it may drive people.

It is an exploration of the harm done, intentionally and unintentionally, to those who don't "fit" into the mold of society. How much of it is reality and how much of it is Natsuki's imagination is also up to the reader.

It's also a book about interrogating taboos, which leads to the trigger warning above. Natsuki's choice not to marry or have children is in and of itself, violating a taboo of her culture. Her feeling that violating this taboo does no harm to her or anyone else naturally leads to questioning other taboos, and you can't write a book about questioning taboos and then say "but not that taboo, that's too taboo!" so the book does go some dark places as Natsuki and her companions ask themselves if there's anything rational in refraining from theft, murder, and assault.

The translation is well done, particularly in dealing with a number of sensitive subjects.

I'm not sure what I ultimately take away from Earthlings. Perhaps how much damage societal rejection has on a person's psyche and the harms that can spawn from that. We are, in the end, social creatures. Feeling from a young age that you don't belong is bound to have detrimental developmental impacts.

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Recent Reading: The Seep

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 05:39:06 GMT

Posted by: rocky41_7

This weekend I finished two books, the first of which was The Seep by Chana Porter, which has been on my TBR for years. In this book, Earth has been peacefully invaded by a parasitic alien which goes about solving all of Earth's problems in exchange for insight on what being human is like.

If you're looking for a SFF book with heavy world-building, this is not it. Very little explanation is ever given about the Seep (the alien, not the book), how it works, how it got here, what its initial invasion was like. The practicalities of the Seep are not what this book is about; this book is about its protagonist, Trina, learning to live in a world where the Seep dominates everything, for better or worse.

The Seep itself could be an allegory for any number of things, but to me, it correlated strongly with modern technology, especially since the advent of AI, although the book was published in 2020, before AI hit the public market. The way Trina's misgivings about the Seep are brushed off as a sort of Ludditism, an old fogey being old (Trina is 50 for the better part of the book), the way even Trina acknowledges a lot of the good the Seep does but no one is willing to seriously discuss what's being lost, the way it has so quickly and totally seeped into every aspect of life on Earth so that those who choose to live without it are relegated to an isolated, ostracized community roundly mocked by everyone else.

However, while the book starts off with something to say about Trina feeling lost, about being unwilling to give everything up to the Seep, it peters out at the end without anything really to say about Trina's society (and by extension, our own). It floats around the idea that friction in our lives is good--various characters admit, under pressure, that they miss some of the more difficult aspects of life before the Seep, perhaps the sense that accomplishments meant more when you really had to work for them. Now everyone does whatever they want and it's easy, everything's easy. It hints that Trina, who is trans, has some resentment about how easily people are able to modify their bodies now with the Seep--friends walk around with angel wings, cat ears, change gender by day of the week--while Trina had to fight so hard to become who she is and feels that struggle is part of what made her who she is. It makes salient points that part of freedom is the freedom to chose wrong (the Seep is fixated on keeping humans from any unhealthy behaviors, and Trina longs for the days when she could have a drink without the overwhelming sense of alien disapproval, or the chance to grieve as she wishes to without someone trying to fix it for her). It implies that immortality takes some of the meaning out of life, because part of what makes our experiences meaningful is knowing that we only have so much time for them.

Yet the climax lacks a follow-through to these premises, in my view. When a book starts off with such strong opinions, I expect it to conclude with a solution, a criticism, a proposal...something. But here, Trina makes her speech to the Seep about why each person's individual experience shapes them and why we're all unique, but she also returns to the fold of the same community she left before, which, I think, substantially failed her in her grief for her lost wife, and partakes in the social rituals they had been demanding of her. Her end feelings on the Seep aren't even clear. She just sort of...goes on with life as she was doing before her wife's departure. Which would be perfectly fine if the story was only about grief, but this one felt like it was about a lot more than that.

I still think The Seep raises interesting, and very relevant in today's world, points, but I wish it did more with them in the end. However, the book is quite short, so I do still think it's worth the read.

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Peter Plymley's Letters And Selected Essays

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 03:48:24 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Peter Plymley's Letters And Selected Essays by Sydney Smith

Primary source. And polemic. Smith writing on the treatment of Ireland and the laws against Catholics, and reviews of books on Ireland. Sometimes very skillfully:

"When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool."

It is useful as a view of the issues -- one notes he heartily assures everyone he shares their views of the terribleness of the Catholic Church -- and of the era in general. He quotes one author, who discusses how one explanation of Ireland's backwardness was its elective kings, but points out that Poland also suffered horribly from the kingship being elective but wasn't so backward. Ah, the views one wants to research, sometimes.

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Hunting the Falcon

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:17:48 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox

A history/biography.

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Review: "The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook"

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 04:42:06 GMT

Posted by: ysabetwordsmith

The George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Cookbook
Paperback – January 1, 2000
by george-foreman-connie-merydith (Author)

Today we finished reading our second cookbook of the year. The front matter includes Acknowledgements, Preface, Introduction, and Smart Eating for Healthier Living. The recipe chapters are Bring Out the Best of Grilling -- Marinades, Sauces, and Rubs; A Cut Above -- Beef and Lamb; Smoky Sensations -- Pork Chops, Ribs, and Ham; Tender Choices from the Sea -- Fish and Shellfish; Savory Grilled Poultry -- Chicken and Turkey; Quick and Easy Favorites -- Burgers, Sandwiches, and Snacks; Tempting Companion Dishes -- Vegetables, Fruit, Salads, and Desserts. Then in the back are a basic cooking guide, glossary, and index. The index lists both recipe titles and ingredients.

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Forewords and Afterwords

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:04:30 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Forewords and Afterwords by W.H. Auden

A collection of essays, including reviews, all written on occasion, for a particular book.

It produces a great variety of subjects.

Some are of period interest, of various kinds. The appropriate treatment for migraines being psychoanalysis? On the other hand, this is where I read his observation about how going over to Rome was a shocking scandal in the upper classes -- like the birth of an illegitimate baby -- but something that did happen, whereas becoming a Baptist was inconceivable.

Much about poets and other writers, some interesting observations on heroes, and more.

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Recent Reading: Our Share of Night

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 02:16:52 GMT

Posted by: rocky41_7

If Mexican Gothic left you craving more South American fantasy horror, Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez of Argentina (translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell) has you covered. This is a family epic intertwined with the dark machinations of a macabre cult and its impact. It's also a splendid allegory for the evils of colonialism and generational trauma. This book was #15 from the "Women in Translation" rec list.

The book begins with Juan, a powerful but ill man who acts as a "medium" for the cult to commune with its dark god. Juan, struggling with the health of his defective heart, the wear-and-tear of years as the medium, and the grief and rage of his wife's recent death (he suspects, at the orders of the cult he serves) is desperate to keep his son Gaspar from stepping into his shoes, as the cult wants. Juan's opening segment of the book is about his efforts to protect Gaspar.

From there, the book branches off into other perspectives which give background to both the cult and the family. This is a great way of giving us a holistic and generational view of the cult, but it does drag occasionally. Gaspar's sections--in his childhood and then later in his teens/young adulthood--together make up the majority of the book, and while enjoyable, do amble off into great detail about his and his friends' day-to-day lives, such that I did wonder sometimes when we were getting back to the plot. I don't like to cite pacing issues, because I think that gets thrown around a lot whenever someone didn't vibe with a book, but the drawn-out length of these quotidian sections doesn't fit well with how quickly the climax of the book passes and is wrapped up. I would have liked to have spent less time with Gaspar at soccer games and more on his plans for addressing the cult.

However, on the whole, the book is a fun, if very dark read. It also serves well as a critique of Argentina's moneyed class and of colonialism in general, and how money sticks with money even across borders. Here, Argentina's wealthy have more in common with English money than with the Argentine lower classes (and that's how they want it). The cult, populated at its upper echelons by the privileged, is an almost literal blight on the land, willing to sacrifice an endless amount of blood, local and otherwise, to beg power off a hungry and unknown supernatural entity.

It brutalizes its mediums, which it often plucks from poverty to wring for power and then discard. Juan was adopted away from his own poor family at six, under the insistence his parents would not be able to pay for the medical care he needed, and he is the least-abused of the cult's line of mediums. As soon as the cult sets their eye on his son, Juan must begin scheming how to keep Gaspar away from them.

Although he acts out of love of his son, Juan is also a deeply flawed person. He is secretive, moody, lies constantly (there is actual gaslighting here) and doesn't hesitate to knock Gaspar around to make him obey. The more he deteriorates--a common problem with all cult mediums--the less human he becomes. Part of this is his work, but much of it is also attributable to years of being used by the cult for its ends and the accumulated emotional trauma. This, of course, is then inflicted on Gaspar through his father's tempers and secrets.

Similarly flawed are the other members of the immediate family. Juan's wife Rosario, despite a better nature than her parents, still supports this cult and is eager for Gaspar to follow in his father's footsteps as a cult medium, in part for the prestige it will bring her as his mother. Gaspar, although far more empathetic and gentle than either of his parents, eventually grows up with his father's temper. Watching him grow from a sweet-natured little boy into the troubled young adult he becomes after years of his father's abuse and neglect is painful, but realistic.

The book is also unexpectedly queer. It's not often a book surprises me with its queerness, because that's usually what landed it on my radar in the first place, but this one did. Juan and Rosario are both bisexual and later in the book we spend some active time in Argentina's queer scene, including during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

The translation was great! It read very naturally, even the dialogue, and it never felt stilted or awkward in its phrasing.

An ambitious novel that for the most part, pulls off what it's trying to do. As mentioned, I wish the ending had gotten more room to breathe, and I would not have minded this coming at the cost of some of the middle bits of navel-gazing, but I still felt the story was satisfying.

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Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 14

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 04:07:01 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 14 by Kanehito Yamada

Spoilers ahead for the earlier ones.

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Recent Reading: Looking for Smoke

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:44:30 GMT

Posted by: 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.

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The Silver Bullet

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:56:45 GMT

Posted by: marycatelli

The Silver Bullet, and Other American Witch Stories by Hubert J. Davis

A selection of folktales gathered in the 1930s. A number of people claimed to have been the actual victims, others to know the people involved. A number are just told without a connection. Two are recognizable fairy tales.

It has sections about how to become a witch, how they worked, how to counter them, and tales of their witchery for money or mischief. Many references to witch doctors (or white witches).

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Recent Reading: A Desolation Called Peace

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:21:32 GMT

Posted by: rocky41_7

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!

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