Collin > Recent Status Updates

"Spiky, unruly hair lay greased flat against its back in a tangled mess" is it spiky or is it greasy and flat oh my god. is the editor in the room with us

“So far, logic pointed to someone who knew enough Hawaiian to work its magic.” oh good I’m glad we’re almost halfway through a book about solving a murder committed via Hawaiian spell and gathered enough evidence to narrow down the possible culprits to anyone who speaks an indeterminate amount of Hawaiian

this gala scene is giving 2000s Not Like Other Girls nonsense

this romance is so stupiddddd it's starting to pmo. this concept is so good and interesting and relatively fresh but we're going to ruin it with thee stalest and most unimaginative of romance/romantasy cliches?? okay whatever it's your book to ruin

pg. 65: “She blinked and looked at me in the face for the first time,….”
pg. 67: “She met my eyes for the first time, her voice thin but clear.”

is it too much to ask that editors do their dadgum jobs once in a while

“Before modern medicine began to develop in the eighteenth century, death was mysterious, ordained by the gods, a force that resided outside the human body. In those times, you felt pain, and it got worse and worse until you died, never knowing the cause. With modern medicine, death relocated to inside our bodies.” seems like a massive over-generalization but what do i know

Afsoneh: hey, Ruz
Firuz: Parviz used to call me that...
Afsoneh: because it's your f'ing name

this is all pretty half-baked worldbuilding so far but I still like the concept a lot, so... crossed fingers some of these threads come together soon.

“Although I don't consider my pain sacred, the stillness it engenders may be. Pain made me realize I was less a creature with a reliable inner identity than a penetrable ecosystem.”

ough

anyway there's not a lot of horror to be had in a story where it feels like you can still see the author's notes on the margins reading THE REAL HORROR IS CAPITALISM AND MISOGYNY !!!!!! which, yeah, in real life, no arguments there, but it really sucks the life out of any actual supernatural horror element when not done with a deft hand, and the hand is not deft here.

it's petty and a matter of taste but the omniscient third POV is grating, too. it's not a matter of multiple POVs, it's that the narration draws attention to its own omniscience ("While Ana was wondering why the past couldn't rest, her former landlord also tossed and turned...."), in a way that feels too twee and quirky for what is ostensibly a horror novel.

I continue to be amazed at the times when authors choose to use overview/summary mode during moments when they should be fully dialed into a close POV. a character starting to tell a dramatic story and the narrative cutting to a wordless, distant-POV flashback can work in movies/TV but it so rarely works in books; the two media speak different languages of sense impressions.

this is very much a The Author Is Very Invested In The Characters' Status As New Yorkers kind of book so far and it's grating me . i don't care about New Yorkers' Main Character Syndrome oh my goddd.

I looooove when a book’s method of communicating romantic chemistry between characters is just one of those characters saying that there was romantic chemistry. Love that. Who needs actual chemistry when you can just read that it’s there. That’s efficient writing.

me, barely halfway through a very short book on ferns: if i don't build a fern garden somewhere right this exact second i'm going to scream and explode and die

"[The safe room]'s a damn Waffle House from Alabama." EYYYYYYY this is the first time I've felt the thrill of victory from this book. I want the Waffle House from Alabama to win this dungeon crawl.

the fact that I don't like this book at all is the greatest reading disappointment of this year so far.

the head archivist's name is APOLLONIUS ROLAND??

idk, man, I just agree with Artur here. toxic gothic eternal sisterly love WOULD be great but I don’t feel compelled to want Lucy and Sarah to be together forever, because (Not) Sarah sucks in an incredibly mundane, manipulative way. She acts like a whiny hangry toddler.

It’s a shame that this is a “all men bad” kind of a book because if Lucy has to be attracted to men, there could be a really compelling, complicated, messy dynamic between her and Artur. Because he’s not wrong, Sarah IS using and manipulating Lucy, and probably always has. Lucy IS overly obsessed with Sarah. But Lucy loves her sister so of course this feels like an attack.

The classism against Marta is nottttt doing it for me. It’s not even serving a purpose, besides making me dislike Lucy and especially Sarah even more than I already did.

I'm more baffled, intrigued, and distracted by the presence of casu marzu, a traditional Sardinian ewe's milk cheese made with live fly maggots, at this no-name roadside inn in an extremely insular fantasy version of England, than I have been by any of the plot/relationship stuff so far. I don't care about tales or incarnates or soulmates. what's up with this inn's Sardinian cheese situation. let's dig in here.

time to pick it up again this morning and I'm brokenhearted to report that I Don't Want To.

It Doesn't Matter but this setting isn't A Totally Fantasy Island From My Imagination, Wink-Wink, it's just. England. Simran is from India. and now I'm thinking about the Implications, and all this destined soulmate reincarnation cycle is the actual least interesting thing in the world to me. do tales work this way elsewhere? if not, why? how does this affect ALL OF HISTORY in such a way that leads to England?

it does not matter but I always get so Pixar Cars Has A Car Pope about stories like this where the alternate-universe setting is Actual England with London and the White Cliffs of Dover and immigrants from Literal India and such. London is named that because of the Romans. all of this knight stuff draws heavily on French tales of chivalry. what's the religious history of this version of England, of this world?

also potentially very petty of me but the idea of all this extreme state control over tales and the incarnates within them in order to keep England literally afloat and existent -- tales which seem to be very white and heteronormative, all blond-haired blue-eyed knights and pale-faced queens and such -- BUT ! the world is queernorm. is very funny to me.

this book: here is a tavern and a witch with a fairy ring trap and knights on destriers and magic barges and magic archivists and magic leatherbound books
me: okay, cool, magic medieval/early modern England setting, got it
this book: simran's got a pistol
me: okay, weird, but pistols were around earlier than a lot of people expect, i can roll
this book: we use the words 'queer' and 'trans'
me: the lord is testing me

I'm not going to hold this against the actual story because it's not Tasha Suri's fault, it's Orbit's, but oh my giddyyyyyyy aunt.