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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.
( Read more... )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.
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.
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.
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.
I first read The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison last year, but I never got around to reviewing it, in part because I didn't know what to say about it. My friends had loved it, and while I'd found it enjoyable, I was still percolating on what I liked (or didn't!) about it. Listening to The Witness for the Dead, a book in the same universe, got me thinking about TGE again, so this month I gave it a re-read. This time, it all clicked.
This book is truly such an enjoyable read. The basics of Maia's tale are not unfamiliar—a seeming nobody is thrust into a position of power no one ever expected them to have—but Addison puts her own fascinating spin on it. It has the same feeling I got from The Witness for the Dead, where the story prioritizes doing the right thing and many if not most of the characters in it are striving to be good people (whatever that means for them). It makes a nice contrast to the very selfish, dark fantasy where you know from the start every character is just in it for themselves (and I do enjoy those too, not to say one is better than other!) The protagonist Maia in particular is put in any number of positions where he could misuse his power for personal gratification—such as imprisoning or executing his abusive former guardian, Setheris—but he, with conscious effort, chooses differently. That is not the kind of person—not the kind of emperor—Maia wants to be. And honestly—there is very gratifying fantasy, particularly today, in the idea of someone obtaining power and being committed to some kind of principles of proper governance, of having some code of honor above their own personal enrichment.
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You know that feeling where you're enjoying inhabiting a book so much you don't want to reach the end? This week I finished The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison, and that's how I felt.
Witness is a companion novel to Addison's breakout novel, The Goblin Emperor (TGE), which I read for the first time last year and never got around to reviewing. You don't need to have read TGE to enjoy this one at all; Witness focuses on a minor character from TGE and his adventures after the events of that novel. Thara Celehar is a prelate of the god Ulis, and his role in elven society is something like a cross between a priest and a private detective. He has the ability to commune, in a limited fashion, with the dead, and he is employed by the city to provide this service to the people. This may involve reporting a deceased's last thoughts to a mourner, asking a deceased to clarify a point on their will, or seeking answers from a murder victim to bring their killer to justice.
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