tsunni's reviews
303 reviews

I read in an interview somewhere that Fonda Lee intended the setting and characters to be non specific but familiarly East Asian, and she did it perfectly. The characters in Jade City and their interactions with each other have direct analogues to my own experiences with growing up around immigrants from East Asia, with their attitudes, how they talk, and how they treat each other. Shae and Anden, the ones who don't fit in, who are exploring their identities outside of tradition. Hilo and Lan, direct successors to traditions, Hilo especially with his undercurrent attitude that things would just work out if people fell into their intended roles and would question it less. The grandfather slapping you with words that are both brutally direct and backhanded at the same time that you've been unknowingly trained your entire life to not react to. Hilo, Lan, and Shae's (and Anden to some extent) back and forth pushing on old versus new ways, on Eastern ideals versus Western ones (with a very thinly veiled Espenia standing in for the US). Jade City keeps bringing up old memories and feelings that make reading this book have a bitter aftertaste, but I think that's a testament to how well Fonda Lee captured the feel of the setting and the people the book is portraying. 

The people and their relationships with each other and with East versus West thinking are the core strength of the book. The plot and events read like a gripping triad movie with superpowers, written in straightforward prose with great pacing and decent insight into character motivations; but where the overarching superpowered plot is concerned, events can fall a little flat, feel a bit forgivably contrived sometimes. The end especially felt a little anticlimatic, but only to a minor degree; I still really enjoyed it, but compared to the superb character work it was a bit overshadowed. The book ends decently well, but with plenty of plot hooks and a stinger to lead into book 2, which I'm excited for!

It was ok, but I regret spending the time on it. I’m not continuing with the next book. 

This feels very much like a western light novel. There’s fun ideas and action moments but not much else. The characters don't ring true to me, their motivations and emotions seemingly driven by plot convenience more than anything else. This was way less apparent in the first book but seeing the core party interact in this one made them feel very flimsy. Big character moments that should be impactful in the long term are brushed aside for plot within the next chapter. It all feels like a railroaded dnd campaign between all the fights and long winded lore speeches and not much else. 

I think I’m disappointed mainly in that the characters on the surface level are very appealing and what kept me reading, but the story just doesn’t deliver on the substance beneath.

It also ends in another very abrupt cliffhanger. Ugh.

Described as a lighthearted adult cozy fantasy about magical zookeeping with a queer romance, this is actually a not very lighthearted, anxiety inducing story about an extremely anxiety ridden woman who's supposed to be 28, but reads more like a teenaged social pariah, complete with perfect mean girl nemesis coworker (absolutely spilling over with enemy to lover flags) and hot male zookeeper (absolutely spilling over with not-gonna-happen flags) crush she can't help get tongue tied around.  Early on in the story she spends an entire week having a mental breakdown after reading a news article and being held together by her saint of a best friend/therapist stand-in (we find out shortly after that she has an actual real therapist whom she didn't contact on her own volition), having panic attacks around crowds, accidentally implying her crush smelled like fish among other stumbles, and being brow beaten by her nemesis at every turn.

There's nothing wrong with any of these things, if this was what the book was sold as and I was in the mood to read that. It was not, and I am not; I don't have it in me to deal with an MC like this right now. This has a lot going for it if you're looking for a more YA high schoolish vibe and like the magical animal theme. There's great lgbt rep (Tanya is the best character and it's not even close), there's a enemies to lovers romance plot that's SO loudly telegraphed from early on, there's a lot of animal conservation focus, and the Illumicrate version is really pretty and filled with animal sketches; not sure if the regular editions have that. If I had finished this and things continued as they were, I would probably have been somewhere in the 3/5 range.

I'm absolutely not dismissing social anxiety as I'm very personally familiar with it, but I'm dropping this out of pure exasperation for mismatched expectations between the book and how it was sold.

This book has the dubious honor of getting me to cancel my Illumicrate sub.

This is a really tricky book for me to score or review. The characters are mostly great; Jun, Chono, secondary characters like Liis, Masar, all get varying degrees of  characterization and bounce off each other in enjoyable ways. The world building is excellent and interesting enough, although mostly there for sake of plot rather than delivering any uniquely intriguing ideas, which is totally fine. I loved how the book had its own system for gender and self-identification, and how queer it was

although a sex scene came across a little gratuitous

. I felt kinda satisfied by the end and the book wraps up alright for being book one of a trilogy, but I mostly felt disgruntled by my overall experience.

The book does not hold back with throwing you into the deep end from the very beginning. There's a lot of great world building to wade through, but I was in over my head. I struggled through the first 25% playing with DNFing before the setting, factions, and the vast amount of terminology started to come together. It took pushing through another quarter of the book before I really started to engage comfortably with the writing and the story. There was a ton to like, but between everything mentioned, the slow pacing, trying to following chapter time jumps, and trying to understand and connect with the characters, it was not an easy book to read.

A big reason for me: the core character Esek was both very well characterized and very not characterized at the same time. She swoops in strong from early on as the morally ambiguous snarky sociopath, and we get to see a lot of her throwing her title, heritage, and ego around; but for being the main character the entire plot revolves around, we don't get to see very much behind the curtain.

Most of who she is through a good 75%+ of the story is being the big sneering anti-something (-hero/-villian/-???) that blitzes through all the other things I'm trying to absorb from the plot without a lot of explanation for why she is who she is.

We finally get some explanation

near the end of the book

, but for me that was a too little too late situation. I love morally grey characters but looking deeper at their internal struggle is for me a requirement for what makes them interesting, which we do get for some of the other characters; but in Esek's case their internal struggle is obfuscated

in service of a major plot device near the end.

That simply didn't work for me, but that's a personal preference; I found what happened interesting in the moment but it didn't make up for the frustration I felt with the rest of the book. I could see why it had to be setup this way, but I think it simply did it a bit too much (I had read another book with a similar pattern of confusing majority -> !recontextualizing later plot turn and loved it, so it's not the approach itself that I dislike; we do bones mfer).

I'll have to think hard about continuing with book 2 when it comes out. For now I'm not sure I want to.

The tone and voice of Buehlman's The Blacktongue Thief had a certain stumbling rhythmic cadence that took me a while to get used to, but that I grew to love and found beautiful. It was a fantastic reflection of the humor and viewpoint of the protagonist of that book, and The Blacktongue Thief as a whole was a much more humorous and fun book to read.

Buehlman's writing here for The Daughters' War is dramatically different but no less amazing, and I'm in awe of Buehlman's ability to write different voices so well. Galva's dry, traumatized tone is a reflection of the story itself, which is much less offbeat and humorous than The Blacktongue Thief. This is grim dark to its fullest, focused on a brutal, terrible war against the most horrific depiction of goblins I've ever seen in any media; but unlike a lot of other grim dark I've read, Buehlman's characters have this level of deep emotional complexity both within themselves and in relation with each other, that never fails to feel honest and realistic. Galva's relationship with her birds Dalgatha and Bella, her relationship with the other raven soldiers, her deeply complex relationships with her brothers, are all written with consideration and care that I always felt was missing from other books of the same genre. Galva as a character never once loses focus as the story progresses, even as the plot moves on to depict the war against the goblins at a steady comfortable pace.

This was not an easy book to read, and it took me a lot longer to get through than usual. Part of it was the subject matter, which was about as gory, tragic, and depressing as any famous war movie depiction would get; there's certain dark imagery from the book that will stick with me for a while, I think. Part of it was Buehlman's writing, which managed to be so good that I wanted to slow down and savor every bit of it. I loved every single moment and as depressed as the book made me, I miss reading it and look forward to rereading this and The Blacktongue Thief again one day.

This is for me the perfect fantasy novel. It has a middle aged, appropriately emotionally complex protagonist with an interesting past, one with a young daughter that she shares an emotionally healthy and heartwarming relationship with. It has an accompanying cast of former comrades who are also middle aged, who all share realistically straightforward honest love and warmth for each other. It has an adventure plot that's exciting and fantastical and builds in all the right ways, that never compromises that emotional core. It's so accepting of people, of religion, and gender, and aging, and all the different aspects of people being people. And it's so incredibly well written, from the prose to the character voices; to the descriptions, the magic and cultures, the pacing and tension building and everything else. I finished reading this smiling. I hope there's more coming.

Chandrasekera seems like a really interesting writer with a lot to offer, and The Saint of Bright Doors feels like it has a lot of potential. I think he’s one of those authors I’m just not compatible with. I don’t have the Buddhism knowledge to fully appreciate this book to begin with, and the literary train of thought meandering prose style isn’t my thing. I still think it may be worth a try if those are your genres

I was so confused I opened up Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, wondering if maybe this word spaghetti was stylized or just how the author writes. Their prose is definitely on the long rambly side, but Bright Doors is readable and a more normal novel; Rakesfall is confusion turned up to 11 and incomprehensible to me. I love This Is How You Lose the Time War and was looking forward to something similar, but Rakesfall is too different from the synopsis and goes too far out of normal structure for me.

I’m not familiar with the Mahabharata outside of a few famous names that I recognized, but I loved this retelling of Ganga and Bhishma’s stories. I had little to compare this to except maybe Norse myths, and I appreciated how flawed, hypocritical, and human the gods and demigods in this story were, as full of pettiness and bickering as any of the Norse stories. 

Unlike the Norse myths, there was a strong focus in examining morality and the paradoxical nature of doing the right thing, coached in a more feminist interpretation of an epic that, if I’m reading things correctly under the surface, was anything but in the original. I really appreciated all the different layers that were being examined, and this has made me more interested in reading the Mahabharata one day. 

I thought this book was written really well and I had an easy time reading it; besides dealing with some of the names, which is largely my own issue except when someone has like 4 different names, looking at you Bhishma. The viewpoints and timeframes do jump around quite a bit, but in the way epic myths tend to do, so I wasn’t too bothered by it. The overall story arc does manage to begin and end in a satisfying way. Overall a book I’d definitely recommend.