altlovesbooks

Poaching is terrible, full stop. It’s one of those things you know (or, should know) instinctively is bad, but apparently we still need books and novellas like these to keep on telling people it’s bad, because it’s still happening. Humans keep being humans.

Mammoths have been brought back, but have forgotten how to be mammoths. There’s no other mammoths to teach them how to mammoth, and so their efforts up to this point have ended in failure. Now they’ve taken the mind/thoughts/personality of a human, the late Dr. Damira, expert in elephants, and implanted it into the mind of a mammoth. The idea is that she, with her inborn knowledge of elephants, will be able to guide mammoths accordingly, being similar animals and all. Instead of this intriguing premise, we follow along as a band of poachers targeting mammoths for their incredibly valuable ivory and the inevitable conflict between them and the mammoths.

I thought this was a really good story with flaws. I far and away loved Damira’s viewpoint the best, and would have appreciated a much longer book that took its time with a lot of the ideas and technologies introduced. As a novella you have to go into it expecting that a lot of what’s discussed and posed won’t be answered by the author in a satisfying way, leaving the reader to mull over the words themselves. I do like this aspect, but part of me also wonders if the book would have had more impact if given the space to expand a bit more. The poachers viewpoint was okay, but ultimately not compelling to me, despite the author’s attempts at characterizing and humanizing at least one of them. They’re still poachers at the end of the day, after all.

I also listened to the audiobook of this, and while the person doing Damira’s voice was fantastic, her male counterpart doing the poachers was kind of bad. Flat delivery of lines, delivered in a very low tone of voice that had me cranking my volume up for his portions every time. It doesn’t impact my rating of the actual book at all, but I’m noting it here in case anyone else is looking at the audiobook.

A valuable, worthwhile read, regardless.

So, of the mixed bag that is the mythology retelling genre, I think this was actually a pretty decent read.

I didn't know much about Atalanta going into this, aside from her golden apple experience, but from a cursory glance after finishing this book, it does a good job of retelling her experiences up to the infamous golden apple run. She's strong, she's fast, she's a crack shot with a bow, and she's out to prove that she has what it takes to hang with the men in Grecian legend. We start with her upbringing under Athena in the woods with the other nymphs, we then progress onto her stint aboard the Argo chasing the Golden Fleece with the rest, and then end the book with her trying to find her place as an ex-Argonaut.

The problem I have with this book is that the beginning and the ending are kind of weak points of the book. I think we spend overlong in the woods with her growing up under Athena, and then the last part of the book is her being all feminist-but-not-really about what to do now, and the dithering kind of grated on my nerves. Even the middle part, the quest for the Golden Fleece itself, was kind of boring, because we experience it as a ride-along character. Jason and the other Argonauts actually do everything, she experiences the quest watching what they do and talking about it. I also have a minor quibble about how Jason was portrayed in the book, but I get that the author was going for a feminist take on the whole thing, and so had to portray him as being more inept than I feel like he was.

But the writing was phenomenal, and there's definitely something here if you're still into the Greek mythology retelling genre after all this time.

This had all the markings of a book I'd really enjoy, but the end product came off kind of aggressively bland. I can't even really point to why, just that by the end I was actually kind of bored with the whole thing.

There was a war of conquest between the Vaalbaran Empire and the Ominirish Republic that ended in failure. The Vaalbaran Empire surrendered, but the societal divides between the two still exist. Enitan of the Ominirish Republic is just a scribe and lover of tea, fairly far removed from all the political machinations moving above her, but she gets unwillingly dragged into being a spy, a double agent, and political prisoner when her sibling is abducted by the Vaalbarans.

This book hits the imperialism/colonialism tropes hard, as one might expect from a story in the aftermath of a war of conquest. I struggled to really get into this great world the author built, because once Enitan ends up in Vaalbara, it feels like she entirely forgets her mission to save her sibling for a large chunk of the middle book while she hosts tea ceremonies as a cover for spying for the Ominirish Republic. Every tea ceremony had an incident involving in-world racism, classism, colonialism, cultural appropriation, or some other tangentially related social issue worked in somehow, which made it feel a bit heavy-handed and same-y after a while. I have no problems with social issues being worked into the books I read, but I also hate feeling like I'm being beat over the head with the same message over and over again. I got it the first couple times, I promise.

Even after the plot starts moving again, I felt like it was too little, too late. Enitan, despite being the main character, didn't really have a lot fleshing her out. She makes good tea, she's devoted to her sibling, and she wants respect for her people. That's essentially the extent of her character as shown in the book. Her supporting characters get even less treatment, which is a shame considering I thought Menkhet had the most potential to be a great character.

It's fine as a book, but kind of a letdown from the premise.