Mastodawn

Three fantasy books I've read & enjoyed lately:

Katherine Addison's THE WITNESS FOR THE DEAD is set in the same fantasy kingdom as THE GOBLIN EMPEROR, but you don't need to have read the latter. Thara Celehar is a Witness for the Dead, able to access the memory of the recently deceased to resolve disputes and solve mysteries, and he has a number of such mysteries to solve. The foremost is the murder of a singer at one of the city's opera houses, found floating in a canal. There's also an inheritance case to untangle, and a forest town has a ghoul that needs to be handled.

I enjoyed this a lot. Celehar is a likeable character, duty-bound to fulfill his role but with regrets about his past and a possible new love interest. The setting is evocatively drawn: a sprawling and mazy city with dozens of religions, a Gothic environment where maintaining cemeteries is very important because the occupants of unmaintained graves can rise as ghouls.

(1/3)

#books #bookstodon #fantasy

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Andrew Kuchling Apr 11

HE WHO DROWNED THE WORLD, by Shelley Parker-Chan, is book 2 of a duology about a rebellion against the Mongol rulers of ancient China, and this book follows the course of battles between Zhu Yuanzhang, "The Radiant King", the eunuch general Ouyang, and the rich salt-merchant family the Zhangs. Meanwhile, at the Great Khan's court at Dadu, Lord Wang Baoxiang takes a position as the assistant Minister of Finance and has complex plans of his own.

The storyline is just as elaborate and unrelenting as Martin's Game of Thrones series, but it's complete in two books that amount to slightly under a thousand pages. You'll definitely want to begin with the first book.

Gender threads through the book, as several characters have ambiguous or disguised genders and orientations. Zhu is the most sympathetic character, but he takes his own dark and cruel actions, and as the book continued I began to wonder if he was going to lose himself entirely to ambition. As in the first book, there are some sequences and twists that were wonderfully exciting. I'm going to read whatever Parker-Chan publishes next.

(2/3)

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Andrew Kuchling

In R.F. Kuang's KATABASIS, Two graduate students in magick at Cambridge, Alice and Peter, set out to travel into Hell to find their recently-dead graduate advisor Professor Jacob Grimes, with undefined plans to bring him back for the sake of their academic careers. Hell resembles Dante's, with nested circles of increasingly worse sins: Pride, Desire, Greed, rising to Cruelty and Tyranny. But because they're graduate students, Hell is patterned on a university: Pride is a campus library, Desire is a student center of small rooms in which people enact their desires, and so on.

I enjoyed the book overall: Hell is a distressing landscape that becomes increasingly brutal and disorienting. But I was expecting it to be *deeper*, too: the book presents various satires and critiques of academia, but they all felt like familiar, kind of first-order stuff to me, even though I'm only sort of academic-adjacent.

(3/3)