Kaa’s Reviews > Too Like the Lightning > Status Update

Mycroft is supposed to be more messed up than just an unreliable narrator. It should become clearer if you keep reading.

Thanks, I appreciate that. I definitely plan to continue the book. I read some of what the author has said about the book, which let me understand Mycroft as a pretty terrible person in a quite conservative society masquerading as progressive. I don't know if I'll like it yet, but seeing it that way helps me get it a bit better.

I did not finish this book and gave it the worst Goodreads review I’ve ever written. I saw zero useful thought-provocation in creating a POV that parrots bog-standard shitty thinking. It doesn’t even make any sense why even a shitty biological essentialist would, raised in this supposedly “gender neutral” society, have totally ordinary 20th century ideas of femininity, manhood, etc.

What made me certain there would be no payoff is that the entire world (the author’s creation, not Mycroft’s) is incredibly, blindly Eurocentric, a nonsense creation of Enlightenment and neoliberal thought that does not allow any other ways of living. Check out the scene of the world culture’s statuary: every single actual historical figure named is part of the ordinary Western canon; the only non-Western names are sci fi inventions from our future, white neoliberals at heart disguised as racially and culturally diverse support for the world culture’s ideals.

I appreciate that perspective too. I was warned that the gender stuff would be rough, which it is, but I can at least see sort of what the author thought she was doing, even if it may not be done well. I have seen much less discussion of racism and Eurocentrism in the book, which is striking because to me that seems like a bigger problem of the writing with less justification. I either don't remember or haven't gotten to that scene, but that doesn't sound promising for the rest of the book, although at the moment I still have the goal of finishing it.

Yeah, completely agree—maybe I would have struggled through to see where the gender thing ended up, but everything else about this world is just the weird daydreams of Enlightenment Europe. Those thinkers had no idea how society and culture worked, especially non-European ones. It makes me viscerally angry to see a modern author *and historian* write a setting built on Rousseau’s unfounded musings. We already know what that setting looks like when you actually try to build it in the real world: the Enlightenment philosophies won, and the centuries of colonialism are just as much their legacy as the creation of the liberated democratic (white) individual.

I really struggle to contain myself on this book, the old political rage seethes back up my throat.