Collin > Recent Status Updates

“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.

this book is almost 500 pages long but I promise you that if the book's font was a normal size, it would be like. 350. 400 tops. and then you could make the margins bigger, maybe widen the line spacing, and I wouldn't feel like I was looking into the magical thicket around Sleeping Beauty's castle.

petty petty petty but I would like to burn at the stake whoever designed the interior of this book. giant-ass font and half-inch margins is a DERANGED way to set up a book for adults. this is what children's Christian adventure books published by a church in the 90s looked like. no shade, those books raised me, but holy batman.

it's so sad to me that the author made Jonathan Harker the dead captain. I know I'm well past that but I keep thinking about it. you give me Captain Nonbinary Jonathan Harker except they're dead from the beginning? but maybe they'll come back... maybe...

this is literally a locked-room murder mystery but they have their tepid little "the killer could be any of us!!! (or one of the 15 riverboat crewmembers)" round table and then... go about their business. no "go in pairs or sets of three"? no "set plenty of ward spells"? just "well the killer didn't get what they probably wanted out of the murder so they'll probably stop and we're probably safe now"? okay

"More importantly, she would have to think like a folklorist. This group was nothing more than a collection of folktales she had to catalogue and dissect. She would pry them open slowly -- and she would do it with them being none the wiser." girl what are you talking about.

"After all these years, after every insult they'd traded, how dare Sylvia pretend to care about her?" Lorelei dude I fear that you're the only one who's been insulting anyone. like I'm not complaining that Lorelei is a mean antisocial pride monster, I love that in a fictional woman, but it's not at all satisfying to behave that way towards the love interest is the love interest isn't actually dishing it out, too.

she's an academic in a world where fairytale magic is real. but her perspective on fairytales is exactly the same as that of someone in, idk, Grimrose Girls? she's treating fairytales with the same level of academic rigor as Once Upon A Time?

it feels a little lazy that this world literally has magic and fairytale creatures like nixies and lindworms but they still treat fairytales in exactly the same way as we do, as "pretty girls always get their happy endings <3" kind of morality tales. and also that Lorelei would feel that way about her not being the kind of girl to get a fairytale happy ending.