slauderdale’s Reviews > The Book of Night with Moon > Status Update

It fixes the bits that annoy me as it goes along. But I still find this book to feel very protracted.

A little too long, a little too abstract, a little too much wandering around.

"This book is so ultimately and charmingly a product of its time." RE: the science of the dinosaurs as well, who by current thinking didn't just All Die Off but in some instances survived to evolve into birds, implying a Choice (in the philosophical terms of Duane's cosmos) paralleling that of the cats, with the Hungry and the Mindful. But I'm still rereading, with vague memories of an intelligent dino coming up.

Pavarotti gets eaten by a T-Rex. Pavarotti. Gets. Eaten by a. T-REX. This book is so ultimately and charmingly a product of its time.

Cat culture is interesting but a bit assholish, IMO. There's a constant miasma of feline superiority, even on the part of wizardly protagonist Rhiow, but I have a hard time seeing what's so much better about cats (as written here, obviously.) Feels like, if they were the dominant culture, they'd have it in them to do quite as much damage as human beings to other species and to the world generally.

Sort of a slow beginning, but I think I'm enjoying this more the second time around. "...of course it was always dangerous to felidomorphize."

p. 56 “To her, rats were a symbol of the entropy that wizards spent their lives slowing…” We need to get some rat wizards in here.