Tag: reading

RIP My 69 Books GoodReads Goal – Newsletter #1

Beatrine ShahzadLeave a comment

Lowering one’s yearly reading goal is a common sentiment I’ve seen in bookish spaces, probably more than the layperson would expect. I suspect it’s some sort of backlash to “overconsumption” driven by comparison to others on social media and this need to keep up with the voracious reading habits of one’s peers. Some would argue you cannot “overconsume” when it comes to a work of art, but that is a different discussion for a different day. The bottom line is– the constant fluxing and quick trends of social media pressure people into feeling as if they must keep up. If you’re on bookish social media, that will apply to books.

I get this. I really do. But also, I’m above it. I’m simply #builtdifferent. I’ve never cared for the bandwagon which is why I’m always five years late to every relevant discussion and can never capitalize on discourse clout properly. I’m lowering my reading goal for other, more personal reasons. I will explain in a moment.

But first, we must dissect… why 69?

The first year I committed to a serious reading goal was 2021. Like most of the human population driven insane by the COVID-19 quarantine, I began reading again in 2020. But, instead of discovering a new part of me, I was rekindling something that had simply been latent for the duration of my college years. I had been a big reader my entire life, barring the four-year stretch I was in school, and coincidentally, I graduated into a bit of a global reading renaissance.

I never tracked my reading when I was in high school, but I knew I easily could read 50 books in one year. And I did. I met my 50 book reading goal for 2021 around midsummer and then instantly hit a wall. It was difficult for me to pick up another novel, and I meandered my way through the rest of the year, picking up traction at the end with exactly 69 books read. I snorted to myself. Heh. 69. And then I set it to my reading goal in 2022. And after closing 2022 out with 74 books, I said I’d do it again. But in 2023, I had a bit of an issue.

All in all, I got a lot done in 2023. I met my reading goal. I read 73 books. I watched 111 films. I usually average 70 of each. On the creative side of things, I continued uploading reviews to GoodReads (I know I neglected this blog). I covered TIFF as a film critic. Between the months of April to September, I outlined, drafted, edited, and began to query a novel. I participated in (and won) NaNoWriMo in November. I was pulling insane numbers. But I really wasn’t quite pleased with most of it. (I’m proud of that April to September novel I will not lie but everything else can maybe go in the trash.)

I flourish under structure. I get NaNoWriMo done because there’s a word count I have to hit every day, and I take it seriously. It’s how I draft all my novels now, by setting a minimum word count every day and sticking to it. It’s the same thing with my reading goals. I have to stay on top of it. If I don’t have that structure in place, and I don’t have respect for that structure, I will not get anything done. I will wallow and be depressed and not pick up a book. But that structure was beginning to be a little too much.

All was well until June of this year. I read Dark Age by Pierce Brown and Babel by RF Kuang back to back, honestly at the same time since the audiobooks came in so close together. If you’re a reader who knows anything about these novels, you’ve probably covered your mouth in horror. Because, yeah, it was bad.

Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series is famously anxiety inducing. When I read the original trilogy, I would have to take breaks between books by subsequently reading something lighthearted to prevent amplifying that anxiety. Dark Age is perhaps the most depressing of any book in that series. It’s a 833 page checklist of war crimes and emotional turmoil. And, for whatever reason, I followed it up with Babel which is allegedly about the power of unions but in reality it’s about the inescapable soul crushing effects of imperialism.

I’m going to go into the mental breakdown Babel inspired in a moment, and you might think, “wow if it inspired such a strong emotional reaction, it must be a good book.” And to that I say: lmao. There are so many criticisms I have of Babel from its existence to its execution. At the end of the day, RF Kuang agitated my worst anxieties about imperialism, but it was a quote from Blade Runner 2049 that I applied to the narrative that set me over the edge.

So, yeah. I had a mental breakdown (sort of). I cried so hard I threw up (likely place for me to be). I wrote a really long thread on Twitter about imperialism and my own personal relationship to it as a receptively bilingual biracial. Looking back, this was all very humiliating. Like girl, just get a grip. But the all-consuming dread of imperialism had its BOOT on my NECK and it was not letting up.

And after that disastrous double punch, it was difficult to pick up another book. I was in my reading dark night of the soul. The only books I got through were few netgalley ARCs requested, all of which were reviewed late. That is, until September when I realized I was 10 books behind my reading goal schedule.

Oh yeah, I messed up.

So, I did what I did best. I made a schedule of books to read until the end of the year and stuck to it. Of course, I tried picking books I’d enjoy, but I was limited. I wanted to start the Liveship Traders Trilogy after finishing the Farseer Trilogy in 2022, but I could not get to it. Those books were too long. I wouldn’t be able to finish them and meet my goal. In fact, I couldn’t start any high fantasy, because they’re longer and slow to get into, and I wanted to focus on books I could get through very quickly.

And so, I was picking up a lot of breezy and short books. Some of them I really enjoyed, since I was healing from the Dark Age/Babel fiasco, but my diet felt incomplete and unbalanced. I was missing books I could really sink into and think about. I like books because I (allegedly) like thinking. And I was depriving myself of that just to get through to my goal.

I felt similarly about NaNoWriMo in 2023. I was making my word goal, but it felt like garbage. I’ve written enough to know when I do and do not feel confident in my drafting. With such a high word count, I was not ensuring that I got enough words on paper to finish a novel, but instead, I was producing such a copious amount of vapid ramblings that ensured I would never open the document to revise the novel. At a certain point, productivity can be counterproductive. Yes, I can write 50k words in one month, but it is certainly not a book and may never become one.

In 2023, I’m not going to work for the reading goal. The reading goal is going to work for me. 42 is the funny number from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It is so far below what I can expect to read in a year and I’ll have no trouble meeting and then surpassing it. This year, the vibes will dictate where I go. There will be structure, but just enough that I do not feel aimless. I will read the books I’ve been wanting to read for years now. I’ll read more diversely and plan out what I pick with more care.

On the writing side of things, I won’t let high word counts and expectations rule my life. I’ve been using writing as a mental health crutch, and it’s lead to a lot of sloppy work. If I’m not drafting, I start going a little stir-crazy. But, I need to be more intentional. I must begin to try new things. Screenwriting will certainly take a while to learn, but it’s a worthy sacrifice of time. If I want to write a more involved high fantasy or historical fiction, I must research instead of just sitting at the computer and word vomiting. The only reason I was able to write my April-September book so quickly is because I had been sitting on the idea and letting it marinate for 2 years, so when it was time to write, I didn’t have to discover the story or the characters through the act of writing. Normalize sitting with your thoughts, maybe?

Yes, I can read 69 books a year. I am capable of that and so much more. But, like, who am I trying to impress? Who cares? At the end of the day, the consumption of art is primarily an act of introspection. You read, you watch, you write for yourself. It’s an act of self-awareness and self-understanding. This past year, I’ve been using it as a means of escape, to drown out the voices of insecurity and anxiety in my head, but in 2024 we are embracing the voices. We are reading books and watching movies to connect to ourselves rather than chase some arbitrary goal. And hopefully, we pick a good mix so we don’t cry so hard we throw up.

Race Without Racism in Fantasy

Beatrine ShahzadLeave a comment

When I was in college, I took an anthropology class. Its first midterm asked, “Is race real? Is it important?” Maybe it was phrased a little differently, but that was the gist of it. Though I knew the answer, I pulled at my hair at the idea of condensing it onto the four lines provided. Because race is complicated.

Race is not “real”. It’s a social construct. It’s more modern than the average person probably thinks, coming about in the 1500s and subsequently becoming very closely tied to the Atlantic slave trade. It groups people together by phenotypical traits, things that are observable like skin color or facial features. It’s a classification based on others’ perception of you, how others find a place for you in the world, rather than any sort of personal self-identification reflective of cultural upbringing. Race isn’t real but it is important insofar as it allows us to understand racism.

Racism is a system of oppression built on race. It’s a list of stereotypes and beliefs of inferiority based on the way that someone looks. Over time, this definition has expanded somewhat to include more specific ethnic and cultural signifiers, but it was invented around the idea of observable traits. Much of the specifics about racism can become complicated and contradictory and cluttered, but I will not dedicate much time to the nuances. What is important to know is that most people’s understanding of race is not based on any cultural understanding of how people in that race act, it is, rather, an understanding of how an outside force views a group of people.

Asian-American is only a useful phrase insofar as it explains the shared experience and treatment of those who have been grouped together as Asians in America. It’s more of a description of shared oppression than anything else. Any discussion of culture is divided by country, a discussion of ethnic background. There are cultural similarities between China, Japan, Korea, etc, of course, but though they all eat noodles, the dishes themselves are unique to each culture. The languages are different. They practice religion differently.

This is all important because many people in America have been conditioned to think of both cultural and physical otherness through the lens of race first. And race is understood through the symbiotic relationship with racism. So, what happens when you try to yank racism out of the equation but view society through a racial lens?

It gets kind of weird.

I am all for not depicting racism in fantasy when you’re not planning to make any sort of commentary on it. That’s great. But. You still, then have to put thought into how you depict people of color. Your first instinct to that news is “of course I’m careful not to have my BIPOC characters fall into harmful stereotypes”. And to that, I say that you’re still thinking of these characters through a racial lens, in which the way they’re depicted has more to do with others perceive them than how their culture has shaped their identity.

The default fantasy setting is European inspired. The cultural norms that writers don’t think twice about putting into their books are based on European, or modern western, sensibilities. It is not a blank slate. It is defined by a real world culture. And so, when you take a character of color and cram them into the world without any discussion of cultural differences, you’re having them conform to a culture that isn’t theirs. Their only claim to diverse representation is the color of their skin and their physical features. Which, you can argue that in your world, people who look different all have the same cultural background and your world doesn’t abide by the same regional distinctions that inform physical differences that this world does, but you are being lazy. Also, you’re full of shit.

Because there is a real-world counterpart to the idea of a racist-free utopia in which white people and people of color all share the same cultural sensibilities and coexist, and it’s the casual racist’s hope for a post-racial America. The really hardcore racists, the fascists, want to send all the people of color back to their countries or force them from white spaces. But the casual racists, they don’t mind people of color– as long as they act like white people. As long as they share Christian sensibilities and conform to what’s “normal”. Those are the good people of color, and if we ever want to be free of racism, people of color should all strive to be good and stop highlighting differences and shaking the table.

So, I guess this is a plea for authors, especially white authors, to think about how they depict people of color in their books. Think about their ethnic or cultural background. Think of the way that ethnicity operates in your world, the different regions and people who operate it and how they interact. If you want to do the post-racial American utopia because you’re lazy, whatever, but at least acknowledge that’s what you’re doing. Allow room for nuance. Your choice comes with consequences. This is a common critique of contemporary books, white authors writing characters of color without any understanding of how they differ from white people, but it’s still a criticism worth exploring in Fantasy. Because if the author does not take the time to world build every detail, people will fill in the blanks with their understanding of our world, so writers must be conscientious of what doors they’re leaving open.

It is possible to not have racism in your books and still depict characters of color, but it is important to still acknowledge the differences between them. People of color have different cultural backgrounds than white people and that’s fine to depict. In fact, it’s good. Difference should be celebrated and explored. Do not depict to claim ownership of cultural elements, but introduce and acknowledge. In fact, without racism, the cultural interaction could take a very different shape. They could meld and share more than they do now, and that’s an interesting way to world-build. Creating different cultures and reflecting on how they interact and grow together is a better sandbox to play in than a blanket culture that probably is western inspired. It’s just important to consider how they society got there.

I can imagine that there are a few white authors feeling very frustrated right now. A “damned if I do want to include diversity, damned if I don’t” kind of attitude. Which, I gotta say. If being told to think about depicting characters of color further than skin deep makes you feel overwhelmed or upset, then I think you should… rethink your worldview. Rethink how you interact with your marginalized friends. Writers are meant to be curious, and if you don’t think different cultures are worth learning about and depicting, then you’re not very curious, and also probably not a very good writer.

I received an arc of Lightlark by Alex Aster and read it before the average person did. It was marketed as a diverse Hunger Games, which didn’t turn out to be true. Of the main cast of six rulers, only one seemed to be a person of color, a Black man named Azul. After the book was published, I was shocked to learn that, apparently, according to the author, our main character was also supposed to be “Latinx/indigenous”. Which, like, What does that even mean?

The only descriptions of the main character’s physical appearance are green eyes, thick lashes, and skin that is “naturally tan”. Not only could this describe a white person, but these features can be found in West Asia and other regions as well. There is no Latin America in the Lightlark universe. And when she says indigenous, indigenous to where. The regional groups of Lightlark are divided by magical ability rather than skin color. Azul is the ruler of the Skylings, but there are pale Skylings. So, geographical indicators shouldn’t be indicative of physical feature, but indigenous implies that they are. Or rather, the author wants us to impose a modern understanding of race onto her fantasy world, which just does not work.

Lightlark exemplifies the issue of relying on representation that is only skin deep, even in Fantasy. If there was some sort of cultural distinction implying her background, something that resonated to Latinx/indigenous readers, then this confusion could have been avoided. The representation the author claimed would have been obvious to see, and easy to empathize with. This is the difference between thoughtless and thoughtful representation.

Also, there is the issue of fantasy depictions like Robert Jordan’s Aiel in Wheel of Time. They’re desert gingers. Tall, pale skinned, red haired, and home to a cruel and unforgiving desert. The desert had not always been a desert, which explains how gingers got there, but the optics are still weird. The way that the Aiel must veil themselves to protect from the sun, the steps they take to survive in the desert is reminiscent of how many desert-faring real world cultures did so, such as Arabs. This is just how humans survive in the desert, but these practices and beliefs around the desert have been folded into the cultural dress and belief in the real world, belonging to peoples who, for the most part, don’t really much resemble the Aiel. The ethnic groups of the desert are very diverse, but it was clear he was emulating whiteness specifically. The desert has shaped the people who have lived there for generations, shaped their culture. Learning from their practices and depicting their land yet refusing to represent them is strange, and although it is a made up world, it resembles erasure.

I am not going to pretend to offer some sort of catch all solution to this issue. Race is complicated. For example, Black Americans have been forced to adopt a shared culture through a racial lens because their ethnic histories were lost in the slave trade. It isn’t my place to dictate how Black people should be represented, only to encourage authors to consider this history when they depict this racial group.

The point of this article is to bring light to an issue, to challenge how you have been thinking about representation in SFF novels. It’s also worth noting that I’m writing from a western, American perspective. It’s meant to start a discussion, rather than end one. I’m tired of reading Fantasy books in which brown faces are just that- brown faces. Because truly, I believe that if we begin to consider the cultures from which we borrow the features we want to represent, it can only lead to a richer novel. Many authors already grab cultural inspiration from around the globe, but now it’s a matter of depicting and crediting them in a careful and thoughtful way alongside thoughtful characters. And as always, do not tell stories that are not yours to tell.

‘Seven Faceless Saints’ Review – Una Delusione

Beatrine ShahzadLeave a comment

Before we get into this review of Seven Faceless Saints by M.K. Lobb, let us take a moment to thank netgalley and Little, Brown for the arc. All quotes have been taken from the advanced reader copy, check with the final published copy.

In war-torn Ombrazia, it’s a death sentence if you’re born without magic. Well, practically speaking. Based off of medieval Italy, the country is carved into guilds and each of the seven crafts has a patron saint. Those descendant from such a saint could be born with some of their ancestor’s magic and are called disciples. Disciples’ ability to craft is highly valued by the economy, so they are favored by society. Everyone else goes off to die in a war fought over trade routes against heretics who seceded for following the disgraced and fallen seventh saint.

Prickily and determined, Roz is a disciple, though she isn’t proud of the role. Righteous in her anger, she does not believe in the saints nor does she the society their worship has constructed. Damian is head of security (a cop), a descendant without a gift, and guilt-ridden after his stint as a soldier at the frontlines. They were in love before he was shipped off, but everything had changed between them by the time he returned. Now, they’re just strangers with history and strangers who have to team up together to solve a series of mysterious murders targeting both the unfavored and the disciples.

I want to make it very clear from the beginning that this is a secular review. I’m not religious. I’m not Christian. I was raised Muslim. The most I know about Christianity is the one week of Vacation Bible Study I led when I was in high school because I needed volunteering credit, the Book of Job analysis I had to do in my high school AP Lit class, and just talking to my Christian friends about their faith. So really, I don’t have a horse in this race.

First and foremost, I had a little bit of fun with the Italian setting. I make fun of Italians mercilessly (mamma mia), but the Italian words thrown in here and there were fun. Developing a guild system as a political basis was also a good idea, but I wish the execution had been better.

The prose is very passive. It almost comes across as detached, which is a hurdle to overcome when connecting to characters. Many actions are overly wordy and simply described. For example, there are a lot of “the blank was a blank thing” (the glow was a somber thing, the sound was a deafening thing) which is cute once or twice but with the frequency I noticed it only aided in the detached style of writing. Also, it’s a personal ick. The only time the writing feels alive and you actually feel connected to the characters is when the main couple is attracted (see: horny) to each other, which means that was the best part of the book, but it also means that literally everything else falls flat.

The main pair’s relationship is extremely emotionally jarring to get through. And not in the good way. There are moments where the characters will switch from anger to humor to regret to horniness within one page with practically no sinew connecting the thoughts. Complexity of emotion is expected, but there has to be some continuous layering or transitions between them, or I’m just going to get whiplash. There are chapters of emotional buildup and when the characters finally standoff, there is an uncalled for casual air to the entire conversation. There are chapters ended on extremely emotionally intense dialogue, and when the POV switches into the same scene, the same character will deliver another line of dialogue on the complete opposite side of the emotional spectrum and I don’t know how they traversed that entire gap. The emotions of the chapters contrasted, but the author refused to elaborate on how the character could say something so charged before changing her tune, only why she changed her tune.

So, we have a roller coaster of unconnected emotions making it difficult to connect to the characters. Especially Roz. I do enjoy the hardened female character, but she came off as entirely one note to me. Personally, I think it’s because the author did not allow her to be wrong about anything. She let her desire for revenge and anger get the better of her from time to time, but it was clear throughout every discussion in the book that we were meant to side with Roz. She had very little to learn or understand about other characters, practically nothing outside of a romantic context. It was a boring viewpoint to be in, and it sapped the intrigue out of what could otherwise be compelling dialogues.

I liked Damian but that’s just because the pathetically obsessed man is one of the archetypes I am most fond of. Call it the Raoul de Chagny print. Men who are complete losers >>>. But the way this man was written frustrated me to no end, because MK Lobb could’ve made his arc great but then just… didn’t.

Disinterested prose and disjointed writing aside, the biggest problem with this book is how the author approaches religion. Seven Faceless Saints desperately wanted to be a commentary on religion, or at least religious systems. It wanted to have Damian have a fall from faith arc. But it could do neither of those things, because the book did not care to introspect on what could inspire people to religion or give them comfort. It did not develop a political system built around the ideals of a religion, even though it said it did. And no dialogue on religion was a true dialogue, because it was always, always cut short. Three times the dialogue is interrupted or written off because… the author did not want to write the other side? I’m at a loss.

If Lobb had chosen to take the saints out of the equation entirely, the worldbuilding would be the same. People with more magic are more useful, so they are favored by society. The disgraced society is fighting its war over trade routes. Lobb calls them heretics, but they’re not fighting for a holy cause, they’re fighting because their kingdom is dying. Why is it called a Second War of Saints? When Roz and Damian initially learn that they do not have powers, their first thought is toward Damian’s inevitable enlistment. It’s extremely pragmatic, extremely practical, and does not revolve around the ideas of any sort of higher power.

Damian’s grappling with his faith is embarrassing to read. One of the first times Roz calls his faith lazy, his internal monologue basically throws in the towel, saying, “He couldn’t do this with her. The saints were his understanding of the world, and he wasn’t interested in hearing anyone tell him otherwise. It was how he’d been raised.” It was such a cartoonish depiction of what an atheist would think a religious person believes, I couldn’t believe it. He might have well looked into the camera and said “I’m brainwashed.” And as he begins to doubt his faith, he does it on the basis that “not all the stories are true” or “if the saints aren’t alive and aren’t hearing my prayers then I’ll look stupid for believing them”. Which… is a choice.

This is all exasperated by the fact that you only ever hear 1.5 religious stories and none of their specific beliefs, so instead of having an actual religion to critique, we’re left with the vague shadow of Christianity or Catholicism since that’s the clear inspiration (see: Italian Saints). One of the stories shared is this world’s version of Genesis. Roz flippantly comments that she does not believe that it is real, that the saints existed but did not carve out the world, and Damian has to antagonize with that possibility. Once again, it is embarrassingly flat. Like a child learning that Santa isn’t real. But while adults know that Santa isn’t real, they still in believe the spirit of Santa, the joy he inspires, and the importance of keeping that alive. Belief and faith, and all these things are not dipoles, they’re a complicated gradient.

While it is certainly true that some Christians believe in Genesis verbatim, many understand that many bible stories exist to be metaphor. If religious stories weren’t open to interpretation, then there wouldn’t be a billion denominations. The bible has been studied and questioned for thousands of years, with scholars dedicating their lives to questioning what it means. Regularly, Roz comments on how people who are religious simply accept things without question and how much it annoys her. It’s incredibly close-minded and ignorant, and I’d almost think that she was set up to be wrong except for the fact that the narrative backs her up. When Damian starts to question his faith (oh no the stories aren’t 100% factually correct), it crumbles near instantly.

There are no central religious morals the citizens seem to follow. There are seven guilds, do any of their interpretation of the stories differ? Are there cultural differences between the guilds due to their different beliefs? If there are differences between the guilds, are some looked down upon by others? Do the different saints stress different morals that people who follow them feel compelled to? The unfavored citizens seem not to follow a guild, but do they still worship the saints? These may seem like extraneous questions, but they’re questions you need to answer if you want to make a commentary on religion. It’s hard to critique how a set of ideals can be corrupted and enforced on people when you don’t have a set of ideals. You can’t have saints without sinners, and Lobb never bothered to write sin. There’s a source of evil, in a classical fantasy sort of way, but there is no belief of mortal sin. And it could’ve made the book so much better.

Damian is defined by his guilt. There is a lot he regrets. Yet, he never prays for forgiveness. There’s a big difference between “if the saints don’t exist, I’ll have dedicated my life to nothing” and “if the saints don’t exist, then who can forgive me for what I’ve done?”. The possible drama. The angst. The yearning. The lack of it drove me insane. It could’ve been so good.

Instead, we just got empty appeals to his patron saint, asking him for guidance and asking what he did wrong to not be blessed with a gift. A plea that rings hollow because we don’t know what his saint’s morals are. How did Damian dedicate his entire life to a code of conduct that his saint set up? Is he mad at himself for being imperfect, for breaking it, or is he mad that he forwent his own sense of right and wrong to follow it and it still resulted in nothing?

Damian’s saint is Strength, but the narrative regularly brings up how he’s too soft, a sense of disappointment from his father. Which, wasn’t lost on me, but we could’ve turned up the volume. Just imagine the drama if his father was a stoic follower of Strength, and believing in following the callous will of Strength before any other saint. Damian, on the other hand, could believe in the important of balance, and feels that all saints have important teachings that they must consider. Or even, maybe Damian’s fall from faith would be the fact that he couldn’t dedicate his life to a cruel saint that made his father cruel. There would be an ideological rift between them, one that we never get to know because we don’t even know what Strength’s code of conduct is. We don’t know what descendants of Strength are supposed to believe. If it was mentioned in the book, it must’ve been a throwaway line. But, I must’ve been sleepwalking through this book then, because shouldn’t the religious beliefs of these people be baked into every other line?

Near the end, the narrative does dip its toes within the actual dangers of belief and religion, but it’s more of a commentary on extremism than it is on any sort of organized system. I’m just… very disappointed. I watched Midnight Mass two weeks before reading this book, and maybe if I hadn’t watched that near-flawless, gripping, commentary on religion, then maybe I’d be kinder. But no, I’ve seen how it’s possible to show the dangers of religion while showing empathy to the people who believe. It also just makes for a better story. Dressing your book in religious imagery does little to actual imbue it with the inherent drama and stakes that actual religious belief bestows. Hell, even Book of Mormon, as flawed and blasphemous and problematic as it is, is a more nuanced take on belief than this is.

The commentary on cops is a little sus in places, but I ultimately think it checks out. I think. There’s so much telling in this novel, I don’t know why the author would feel the need to tell us that there are good people in the police force and that Damian tried to get rid of the bad apples (as if this is something to be applauded), but leave the bits about the system getting rid of good, merciful people (because it’s inconducive to their goals) up to critical interpretation. The worldbuilding as a whole needed to be bolstered to make these kinds of commentaries.

I don’t think I’ll be picking up the sequel. Frankly, I can’t see any continuation of the story that would interest me based on where the characters left off. There is more teased, but I just don’t care about this world and I certainly don’t care about the characters that much. I did quite enjoy the climax of the novel, and found myself gripped by the scene. It is emotionally satisfying, but beyond it could not make me care. The plot itself is whatever, I didn’t find it clever, but it wasn’t a bad mystery. Perfectly serviceable. The pacing didn’t drag, though I did find myself growing annoyed with the mismatch of emotions and lack of worldbuilding after the 40% mark. Before that point, I had high hopes for this book. It had slayage potential. Unfortunately, it did not slay.