I defended my thesis and passed! I am now officially a master of science. I didn’t have much time to read fun things while working on my thesis, but I did read some books over the past couple months.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant – Seth Dickinson
I had been avoiding reading this book since it came out because I heard it was very sad and brutal. However, my friend who has good taste in books read it and loved it so I finally gave in and read it. I was not impacted emotionally at all by The Traitor Baru Cormorant even though is a very tough book that deals with hard topics. I cried when reading Unkindness of Ghosts so I thought Traitor would get me. The parts of Traitor I enjoyed the most was the political and economic maneuvering that Baru does when she is first assigned to her position. The power struggle between Baru and Xate Yawa and the Governor was the most interesting to me since they revealed more about the characters than the battles did in my opinion. But I don’t really enjoy reading battle planning and fighting since it can be pretty transparent as to what is going to happen. I knew how the battle would go before the twists came which made me kinda bummed. I really tried to like the middle of the Traitor, but I almost dnf’d the book even though I liked the first part. I read the last couple chapters and then decided to go on reading it. I would recommend this book with lots of content warnings.
Content Warnings: homophobia, transphobia, racism, eugenics, depiction and discussion of genital mutilation, conversion therapy, and lgbt character death
The Monster Baru Cormorant – Seth Dickinson
Boy, this was a really 180 from Traitor. Baru goes from being hella repressed to hella horny. I liked Monster way more than Traitor since it focused more on the characters and their interactions. The world that Baru lives in gets heavily expanded by the addition of Tau-Indi who is from the main opposing nation to Falcrest. I really love Tau-Indi, partly since they are a nonbinary character and I go wild for representation but also because they are tragic in a completely different way than Baru. Baru and Tau-Indi in many ways are foils of each other since they are self-destructive people. The one plot twist I completely did not pick up until someone in one of the book servers I am in wrote a very long post about Monster. Either I was consumed by thesis or it just wasn’t super clear? I had to go back to read the part and then saw it.
There were also so many good lines of prose that I kept sticky noting for reference later. I felt that Dickinson’s prose improved in Monster. The first few chapters are full of beautiful descriptions of a horrible event. Dickinson also wrote Baru’s trauma and depression so well. The plot twist came out of left field and I am still screaming about it because it just was very bizarre compared to the rest of the novel and Traitor. I really am interested in the direction that the direction The Tyrant Baru Cormorant will take. I know that Dickinson had to split the draft of Monster into two since it was so long. There were so many threads that got introduced with the worldbuilding that makes me want to ask so many questions.
The thing that bothered me the most was the way cancer was handled in the book. It was really hard for me to suspend my disbelief because cancer doesn’t work that way. I understand what Dickinson was doing but it also drove me crazy. The one thing that I am so glad that Dickinson did in the author notes was mention Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells. That is a thing that many biologist students don’t learn about until genetics or advanced cell biology classes and often it is mentioned in passing. If you would like to know more about this, I highly recommend The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. However, Dickinson called the HeLa cell line a superorganism, which the cell line is not.
Even with these things, I still super enjoyed The Monster Baru Cormorant and cannot wait to read The Tyrant Baru Cormorant.
Content Warnings: homophobia,transphobia, racism, eugenics, genocide, torture, discussion of genital mutilation, depiction of suicidal ideation, body gore
Gideon the Ninth – Tasmyn Muir
I straight up loved this book. It was very fun and I loved the writing style. The writing style is very much influenced by Homestuck and memes. My friend had a hard time with it since they are not used to books being written like a memelord’s tumblr posts. Furthermore, I loved that the front cover has a blurb that includes “lesbians”. Gideon the Ninth did live up to the hype that was running through Twitter via Tor’s marketing campaign. It also is a good gateway book to queer SFF for people are unfamiliar with queer SFF. I have met several people over the discord server for this book’s fandom who have never read an openly queer SFF book before and wanted to find more.
Gideon the Ninth had so much of the tropes that I find completely satisfying including “I hate you, but I don’t really hate you”, “lesbians in pools”, and dad jokes. I really liked Gideon as a pov character because she is such an unreliable narrator since she is constantly getting distracted by pretty girls, swords, and fighting with her frenemy. She may not be the brightest bulb in the bunch but boy is her narration entertaining. Despite the plot shift from magic contest to murder mystery party, the tone remains essentially memelord. I feel that Muir really managed to capture how young adults can be so smart and yet so stupid (I was in an honors program in university so I know that all too well). The setting was really cool too, mashing catholicism aesthetic, gothic architecture, victorian elements with science fiction elements of advanced technology but also post apocalyptic vibes. I also like how the magic functions in the universe as well. It has that math magic element that I liked in Machineries of the Empire mashed with skeletons. What is there not to love?
CW: gore, lgbt character death, child death, and infanticide
Insectoid Reviews 