books i read in may-jun 2024
Jul. 3rd, 2024 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositebeen doing a lot of staring blankly at walls to cope with the eofy work horrors lately which hasn't given me a lot of spare time or energy to do basically anything else let alone read but here's a couple of reviews from may I think. spoilers for the cruel prince and the wicked king – holly black; sound the gong – joan he:
the cruel prince / the wicked king – holly black
having decided that I'm in my cclare extended cinematic universe era, next up on my list was holly black. funnily enough I never got very far into the faerie side of ya supernatural romance, I was always a vampire main even though faeries have all the advantages of vampires (beautiful immortal inhuman killers with weird rules and hierarchies) and none of the disadvantages (I find the whole blood drinking thing kind of landminey which I know is the entire conceit of vampires in the first place but skirting landmines has always been my passion) but also after I read wicked lovely I simply did not believe any other faerie romances needed to exist. I still stand by this tbh and I plan to reread the series after I finish book3 but I did enjoy tcp (which I have been calling a court of poppy and war in my head) regardless!
tcp made me realise I do not care for bully romances but as soon as cardanjude moved out of the schoolyard bully stage and into their hateristic puppet king x puppeteer henchman power struggles dynamic everything clicked into place and I was giggling and twirling my hair at the beautiful haterom. you can imagine the oprah.gif I did when jude graduated from evil grand viziership to political marriage, I am always saying that political marriages are the funniest solution to pretty much every imaginable problem. she did almost instantly fall from grace to queen in exile which made me feel somewhat ill as guy who hates it when actions have consequences but I think it was narratively interesting to have her so brutally undercut at the moment she finally obtained power in her own right, so I'm very curious to see how she claws it back as she has been trying to do all series.
rather unusually I did not enjoy the semi military academy arc it just wasn't giving what I want military academy arcs to give. I've been comparing the school arc in tcp to sinegard arc in tpw to try and figure out why sinegard was so much more appealing to me even though both involved the protag going through heavy bullying/mistreatment/erasure and i think it's because rin had genuine camaraderie and first love to sustain her through the trials and tribulations and she also later looks back on her academy years with somewhat historically revisionist fondness whereas jude does not really gaf about school and didn't have any positive memories there and never thinks about it once she's out of it, and I think that twinned longing/resentment exhibited by rin and other military academy graduates is vital to my enjoyment of military academy arcs. like it's gruelling and terrible but in hindsight the best years of your life. obviously that is not the case for jude and this is one of the reasons why book2>>>>>>book1 to me. I loved seeing jude trying to play the game of thrones so much more than her underdog struggle upwards a position where she can be a player. the part where jude gets kidnapped by the undersea and starved and forced to drink saltwater and tortured while having to pretend that the brainwashing is working and she believes she's having a ball in that bitch did severely landmine me but then I meditated on it a bit more and decided that actually it was extremely sxc of jude to be suffering and consciously having to repress and pretend she's doped up on happiness.
now let's talk about girls girls girls ): the tragedy of the duarte sisters is so fucked up to me ): I love a good gift of the magi / grass is always greener in how vivi is a faerie who wishes she were human and jude (and taryn) are humans who wish they were fae. taryn makes me so unbearably sad they could never make me hate you taryn… the love is neverending but so is the grief. being twin sisters who are explicitly ideological mirrors of each other and can't stand the inverted reflection of themselves in the other even though they love each other is the most terrible thing in the universe!!!!! jude and taryn were by far the most compelling dynamic in book1 and taryn's betrayal of jude right at the end of book2 gutted me almost as much as it gutted jude, but I get it… you do what you have to so you can survive and protect the people you love and get the outcomes that you think will lead to your greatest desires. it's only another distorted reflection of jude's attitude. but my god I wish nothing more than for jude and taryn to properly reconcile and understand each other in the next book at least in some aspect I needddddd siblings to enemies to end in It's All Love Always Has Been.
locke can die though. i think it's pretty explicit in the text that taryn picked a faerie to be in love with because she wanted to be in love with a faerie to legitimise her standing and then sunk cost fallacy'd herself into going through with everything that entailed. and while I support self-delusion and women's wrongs I really wish she'd picked another guy. also dare I say repressed lesbian trait. maybe I should open nicaisia/taryn? crown princess of the undersea would be a pretty good target for taryn's social climbing ambitions. anyway I hope taryn kills that man 🙏
I like jude, I love schemers and ambitious women generally and I'm always extremely partial to volatile female protags… her real not fake henchman era as dain's agent was pretty funny also. cardan took a while to grow on me to the point where I was tinhetting dainjude in book1 because what am I gonna do, say no to girl desperate to be a weapon x her direct military superior who gives her purpose but is also pretty awful to her and forces her to choose to stab her own hand to prove her loyalty? wait this is making me realise that jude being in situations where she has to ""willingly"" allow herself to be physically and psychologically harmed because the plausible deniability of supernatural compulsion has been withheld from her and she needs to grit her teeth and persevere for the sake of a greater goal is a Two Nickels thing and I am eating it up every time I do love whump and I do love jude going through trials.
anyway turns out literally all that needed to happen for me to be sold on cardanjude was the bullying part to end and the crazy power dynamics enemycoworkers with benefits without benefits to begin. it's very good that even when their physical chemistry boiled over and they couldn't not hook up they still hated each other, that's exactly what enemies to lovers where the sexual tension resolves before the emotional tension does should be giving. this is REAL kismesissitude. jude is so caught up in her machinations she doesn't really reflect on her feelings and that's what I loooove in a heroine every time there's nothing I like more than a lack of emotional self-awareness. also I can't even express how much I was crying and screaming and throwing up over everything going to shit at the end of book2 because cardan did what taryn-as-jude told him to do even without compulsion because he wanted her to know that he trusted her to lead him true. my man kevin on the ledge… god!!!
as stated i have been too scared of Actions Having Consequences to start book3 (I KNOW THAT FUCKASS SMITH IS GOING TO BETRAY JUDE!) but I will do that eventually I want to see both the cardanjude / judetaryn and the political endgames. you know the series got me when I care about the plot lmao. jude may be at her lowest rn but I believe in jude's counterattack… let's get that black<->red quadrant vacillation going properly girls! 6/10 for tcp and 8/10 for twk.
favourite lines:
"What did he give you?" I ask Taryn, finally tiring of the silence. "Madoc gave me the sword Dad made. That's the one we were fighting with. He said he had something for you, too."
She's quiet long enough that I don't think she's going to answer. "A set of knives, for a table. Supposedly, they cut right through bone. The sword is better. It has a name."
sound the gong – joan he
this was my tds3 plane trip read and it was… fine. i didn't like it as much as strike the zither but I didn't hate it as much as the inheritance games book2 whose title I can't even remember so like, as far as sequels to books I liked go it could be worse. I was definitely disappointed because book1 was one of my top reads of 2023 but if I hadn't had such high expectations going in I probably would have had a better time. I feel like every aspect (other than the rivalmance) that I liked in book1 was absent from book2. most annoyingly there was a lot less girls the world and zephyr spent too much time away from xin ren. the ghost protag who bodyhops concept was interesting in theory but came at the heavy cost of dynamix because zephyr was hardly ever interacting with other people as her actual self… I think I do need protags to have corporeal form or at least a permanent host, I think it works in yugioh style situations but not so much in evernight style situations.
obviously I took the rivals to enemies who talk about their enemyship in words that connote romance bait, and what could be more romantic than both of them successfully killing each other several times and zephyr vengefully stealing crow's body after murdering him to evict his soul and then gifting him immortality as her last act before she gets obliterated from existence for real. it was frustrating that they spent most of the book with one or both in ghost form, but I get that it was necessary for the story to progress. ultimately I think I still preferred their alive corporeal rivalry and ambiguous feelings in book1 though. like they were fine in this book but the zither newtype flash duel-conversations meant soooo much to me. and so many missed opportunities for the incredible romance of recognising zephyr's soul in another body ):
my favourite part was when xin ren and cicada both went against zephyr's careful plans and came back to rescue zephyr and november because they loved their strategists more than they cared about victory. i really like those chokepoints where zephyr forgets that normal people aren't perfectly rational beings like she plans them to be and gets surprised by the capacity of the human heart. my girl needs to take a behavioural finance class. it's not fully clear to me whether the assumption that everyone acts as rational players is part of zephyr's personality or if it's linked to her divinity as the flipside of zephyr developing normal people feelings because humanity is contagious to the point where she gains enough of a human soul to reincarnate by the end of the story. probably both? I definitely think this should have been more of a focus of the story and most of all zephyr's blindness to her own emotional vulnerabilities, which is always my favourite trait in a goal-driven heroine.
in general zephyr's godhood really felt like such a pointless aspect of the story. her relationship with her divine sisters was so underdeveloped it didn't feel like any kind of sacrifice for her to choose mortality over them. it's an unfortunate corollary of them having been introduced so late in book1 but then they didn't get any real character or relationship focus after that anyway. I liked the reveal of zephyr's divinity after her unexpected death in book1 and the genre pivot into fantasy but book2 constantly felt like it was floundering through narratives, unable to decide what exactly it was trying to do and doing nothing as a result. it was a little bit romance, a little bit fantasy, a little bit politics, a little bit historical, a little bit feudal lord x handmaiden (handstrategist?) but too dilettanteish to commit to any of those aspects so it just ended up being unsatisfying on every front. and this is coming from #1 superpowers fan in the world but in particular I think zephyr became overreliant on her superpowers and it took away from her strategic prowess and 4d chess manoeuvring. even though she literally expressly realises this in her narration which is one of the reasons she picks crow's body to possess so she can be a strategist again the issue is not ever really fixed. reading this book after tcp/twk which went all out on both the romance and the war politics really made stg feel so much midder in comparison.
also the coda had some of the worst writing in the whole duology i was a little shocked. something weird going on with the grammar but also one of the weakest immortal character timeskip epilogue life recaps I've ever read ngl, although crow and sikou hai half-developing into strategist4strategist 2.0 Zephyr Widowers Club Edition was pretty funny in theory. if only crow didn't randomly have a moral boundary about replacement goldfishing zephyr with her protégé ):
overall maybe a 4/10 I think the ending was so lacklustre it pulled down my enjoyment level of the entire book. it's a shame since there were some really fun and flirty lines in here but they weren’t enough to save the muddled narrative.
favourite lines:
"Then don't watch," I say, but the stone grows when I find the scar behind my shoulder, where Crow took that arrow for me, and even though I know he saved me just so that I could burn Miasma's navy, my next words are choked. "Go haunt someone else."
"I'd never be disloyal to you."
the cruel prince / the wicked king – holly black
having decided that I'm in my cclare extended cinematic universe era, next up on my list was holly black. funnily enough I never got very far into the faerie side of ya supernatural romance, I was always a vampire main even though faeries have all the advantages of vampires (beautiful immortal inhuman killers with weird rules and hierarchies) and none of the disadvantages (I find the whole blood drinking thing kind of landminey which I know is the entire conceit of vampires in the first place but skirting landmines has always been my passion) but also after I read wicked lovely I simply did not believe any other faerie romances needed to exist. I still stand by this tbh and I plan to reread the series after I finish book3 but I did enjoy tcp (which I have been calling a court of poppy and war in my head) regardless!
tcp made me realise I do not care for bully romances but as soon as cardanjude moved out of the schoolyard bully stage and into their hateristic puppet king x puppeteer henchman power struggles dynamic everything clicked into place and I was giggling and twirling my hair at the beautiful haterom. you can imagine the oprah.gif I did when jude graduated from evil grand viziership to political marriage, I am always saying that political marriages are the funniest solution to pretty much every imaginable problem. she did almost instantly fall from grace to queen in exile which made me feel somewhat ill as guy who hates it when actions have consequences but I think it was narratively interesting to have her so brutally undercut at the moment she finally obtained power in her own right, so I'm very curious to see how she claws it back as she has been trying to do all series.
rather unusually I did not enjoy the semi military academy arc it just wasn't giving what I want military academy arcs to give. I've been comparing the school arc in tcp to sinegard arc in tpw to try and figure out why sinegard was so much more appealing to me even though both involved the protag going through heavy bullying/mistreatment/erasure and i think it's because rin had genuine camaraderie and first love to sustain her through the trials and tribulations and she also later looks back on her academy years with somewhat historically revisionist fondness whereas jude does not really gaf about school and didn't have any positive memories there and never thinks about it once she's out of it, and I think that twinned longing/resentment exhibited by rin and other military academy graduates is vital to my enjoyment of military academy arcs. like it's gruelling and terrible but in hindsight the best years of your life. obviously that is not the case for jude and this is one of the reasons why book2>>>>>>book1 to me. I loved seeing jude trying to play the game of thrones so much more than her underdog struggle upwards a position where she can be a player. the part where jude gets kidnapped by the undersea and starved and forced to drink saltwater and tortured while having to pretend that the brainwashing is working and she believes she's having a ball in that bitch did severely landmine me but then I meditated on it a bit more and decided that actually it was extremely sxc of jude to be suffering and consciously having to repress and pretend she's doped up on happiness.
now let's talk about girls girls girls ): the tragedy of the duarte sisters is so fucked up to me ): I love a good gift of the magi / grass is always greener in how vivi is a faerie who wishes she were human and jude (and taryn) are humans who wish they were fae. taryn makes me so unbearably sad they could never make me hate you taryn… the love is neverending but so is the grief. being twin sisters who are explicitly ideological mirrors of each other and can't stand the inverted reflection of themselves in the other even though they love each other is the most terrible thing in the universe!!!!! jude and taryn were by far the most compelling dynamic in book1 and taryn's betrayal of jude right at the end of book2 gutted me almost as much as it gutted jude, but I get it… you do what you have to so you can survive and protect the people you love and get the outcomes that you think will lead to your greatest desires. it's only another distorted reflection of jude's attitude. but my god I wish nothing more than for jude and taryn to properly reconcile and understand each other in the next book at least in some aspect I needddddd siblings to enemies to end in It's All Love Always Has Been.
locke can die though. i think it's pretty explicit in the text that taryn picked a faerie to be in love with because she wanted to be in love with a faerie to legitimise her standing and then sunk cost fallacy'd herself into going through with everything that entailed. and while I support self-delusion and women's wrongs I really wish she'd picked another guy. also dare I say repressed lesbian trait. maybe I should open nicaisia/taryn? crown princess of the undersea would be a pretty good target for taryn's social climbing ambitions. anyway I hope taryn kills that man 🙏
I like jude, I love schemers and ambitious women generally and I'm always extremely partial to volatile female protags… her real not fake henchman era as dain's agent was pretty funny also. cardan took a while to grow on me to the point where I was tinhetting dainjude in book1 because what am I gonna do, say no to girl desperate to be a weapon x her direct military superior who gives her purpose but is also pretty awful to her and forces her to choose to stab her own hand to prove her loyalty? wait this is making me realise that jude being in situations where she has to ""willingly"" allow herself to be physically and psychologically harmed because the plausible deniability of supernatural compulsion has been withheld from her and she needs to grit her teeth and persevere for the sake of a greater goal is a Two Nickels thing and I am eating it up every time I do love whump and I do love jude going through trials.
anyway turns out literally all that needed to happen for me to be sold on cardanjude was the bullying part to end and the crazy power dynamics enemycoworkers with benefits without benefits to begin. it's very good that even when their physical chemistry boiled over and they couldn't not hook up they still hated each other, that's exactly what enemies to lovers where the sexual tension resolves before the emotional tension does should be giving. this is REAL kismesissitude. jude is so caught up in her machinations she doesn't really reflect on her feelings and that's what I loooove in a heroine every time there's nothing I like more than a lack of emotional self-awareness. also I can't even express how much I was crying and screaming and throwing up over everything going to shit at the end of book2 because cardan did what taryn-as-jude told him to do even without compulsion because he wanted her to know that he trusted her to lead him true. my man kevin on the ledge… god!!!
as stated i have been too scared of Actions Having Consequences to start book3 (I KNOW THAT FUCKASS SMITH IS GOING TO BETRAY JUDE!) but I will do that eventually I want to see both the cardanjude / judetaryn and the political endgames. you know the series got me when I care about the plot lmao. jude may be at her lowest rn but I believe in jude's counterattack… let's get that black<->red quadrant vacillation going properly girls! 6/10 for tcp and 8/10 for twk.
favourite lines:
"What did he give you?" I ask Taryn, finally tiring of the silence. "Madoc gave me the sword Dad made. That's the one we were fighting with. He said he had something for you, too."
She's quiet long enough that I don't think she's going to answer. "A set of knives, for a table. Supposedly, they cut right through bone. The sword is better. It has a name."
- weibocrylaugh SERIOUSLY THERE IS NO APP FOR THIS… you can always get me with warrior/lady two sides of the same coin sisters.
sound the gong – joan he
this was my tds3 plane trip read and it was… fine. i didn't like it as much as strike the zither but I didn't hate it as much as the inheritance games book2 whose title I can't even remember so like, as far as sequels to books I liked go it could be worse. I was definitely disappointed because book1 was one of my top reads of 2023 but if I hadn't had such high expectations going in I probably would have had a better time. I feel like every aspect (other than the rivalmance) that I liked in book1 was absent from book2. most annoyingly there was a lot less girls the world and zephyr spent too much time away from xin ren. the ghost protag who bodyhops concept was interesting in theory but came at the heavy cost of dynamix because zephyr was hardly ever interacting with other people as her actual self… I think I do need protags to have corporeal form or at least a permanent host, I think it works in yugioh style situations but not so much in evernight style situations.
obviously I took the rivals to enemies who talk about their enemyship in words that connote romance bait, and what could be more romantic than both of them successfully killing each other several times and zephyr vengefully stealing crow's body after murdering him to evict his soul and then gifting him immortality as her last act before she gets obliterated from existence for real. it was frustrating that they spent most of the book with one or both in ghost form, but I get that it was necessary for the story to progress. ultimately I think I still preferred their alive corporeal rivalry and ambiguous feelings in book1 though. like they were fine in this book but the zither newtype flash duel-conversations meant soooo much to me. and so many missed opportunities for the incredible romance of recognising zephyr's soul in another body ):
my favourite part was when xin ren and cicada both went against zephyr's careful plans and came back to rescue zephyr and november because they loved their strategists more than they cared about victory. i really like those chokepoints where zephyr forgets that normal people aren't perfectly rational beings like she plans them to be and gets surprised by the capacity of the human heart. my girl needs to take a behavioural finance class. it's not fully clear to me whether the assumption that everyone acts as rational players is part of zephyr's personality or if it's linked to her divinity as the flipside of zephyr developing normal people feelings because humanity is contagious to the point where she gains enough of a human soul to reincarnate by the end of the story. probably both? I definitely think this should have been more of a focus of the story and most of all zephyr's blindness to her own emotional vulnerabilities, which is always my favourite trait in a goal-driven heroine.
in general zephyr's godhood really felt like such a pointless aspect of the story. her relationship with her divine sisters was so underdeveloped it didn't feel like any kind of sacrifice for her to choose mortality over them. it's an unfortunate corollary of them having been introduced so late in book1 but then they didn't get any real character or relationship focus after that anyway. I liked the reveal of zephyr's divinity after her unexpected death in book1 and the genre pivot into fantasy but book2 constantly felt like it was floundering through narratives, unable to decide what exactly it was trying to do and doing nothing as a result. it was a little bit romance, a little bit fantasy, a little bit politics, a little bit historical, a little bit feudal lord x handmaiden (handstrategist?) but too dilettanteish to commit to any of those aspects so it just ended up being unsatisfying on every front. and this is coming from #1 superpowers fan in the world but in particular I think zephyr became overreliant on her superpowers and it took away from her strategic prowess and 4d chess manoeuvring. even though she literally expressly realises this in her narration which is one of the reasons she picks crow's body to possess so she can be a strategist again the issue is not ever really fixed. reading this book after tcp/twk which went all out on both the romance and the war politics really made stg feel so much midder in comparison.
also the coda had some of the worst writing in the whole duology i was a little shocked. something weird going on with the grammar but also one of the weakest immortal character timeskip epilogue life recaps I've ever read ngl, although crow and sikou hai half-developing into strategist4strategist 2.0 Zephyr Widowers Club Edition was pretty funny in theory. if only crow didn't randomly have a moral boundary about replacement goldfishing zephyr with her protégé ):
overall maybe a 4/10 I think the ending was so lacklustre it pulled down my enjoyment level of the entire book. it's a shame since there were some really fun and flirty lines in here but they weren’t enough to save the muddled narrative.
favourite lines:
"Then don't watch," I say, but the stone grows when I find the scar behind my shoulder, where Crow took that arrow for me, and even though I know he saved me just so that I could burn Miasma's navy, my next words are choked. "Go haunt someone else."
"I'd never be disloyal to you."
- zephyr stealing crow's body and feeling the scar that is the physical proof of crow almost dying to save her life when she had her own body is crazyyy
