Seven Surrenders

I gulped this book down after finishing Too Like The Lightning. It honestly stood up to binge reading. I thought I had Palmer's number this time through – and in some ways I did in that twists were less shocking than they'd been in the first book – but this still managed to be a genuinely thrilling book with a lot to think about.

Here's my final warning: I was the first person in my group to finish Seven Surrenders. Friends don't let friends read Ada Palmer alone. This is the sort of book that you need a buddy to digest with.

The first book took a while to sell me. It's hard to look past the obscure philisophy and history lessons. It's difficult to keep straight all the gender fluidity, which makes it hard to imagine in your head what people look like and what the scene looks like. All that said, once you get into it the story takes off and it is a lot of fun to try and figure out whats going on.

Multi-layered, frustrating, annoying, intelligent - brilliant!

Would you destroy the world to create a better one? This book was great, with all of it's twists and turns, even though the wonderful world-building of the Utopia in the first book gets undone, and by the end of it, my sincere hope is that the third book will actually build something better.

Will Ada Palmer become the next Gene Wolfe?

Pros: brilliantly plotted, amazing world-building, excellent pacing, thought provoking

Cons: fundamentally disagreed with some of the philosophy, ending left me disappointed

Picking up immediately where Too Like the Lightning left off, Seven Surrenders details more of the actions of the heads of the seven hives, reveals the thief behind the seven-ten list, deals with the fall-out of the revelations that ended the first book, and paves the way for potential war.

I loved all of the politics, manipulation, and unclear morality of this book. This book has a LOT of political maneuvering and backroom dealings. It made me think about a lot of issues, even if my conclusions were different from those the book came to.

Mycroft remains an unreliable narrator at times, not always telling the truth and keeping certain things hidden until later. this helps with the pacing of the book, which I thought was great. The revelations come fast and hard, but enough is saved for the end to keep the reader guessing and turning pages quickly.

If the mix of sensual language and politics from the first book disturbed you, there are a few uncomfortable scenes in this book as well, mostly at the beginning.

One character is gendered as ‘it', which may upset readers. We are told the character chose that pronoun, but in addition to being a gender neutral term, it's also a term that reduces the person's humanity. Given the nature of the character, both of those may have been intentional repercussions of that choice.

There's a speech towards the end of the novel about gender that kind of irritated me. While I agreed with the ultimate point (or, at least understood where the character was going with the discussion), I'd understood this future to have done away with gendered pronouns as well as gendered clothing and expectations. And yet, this speech implied that children were still raised with the ideas that boys were more aggressive and girls more caring, etc, something I didn't get from the books themselves. But what annoyed me was the assertion that some traits code ‘female' and others ‘male' and if you get rid of those terms, it just makes everyone more ‘masculine' as if men aren't inherently capable of being kind or considerate despite the book's clear proof to the contrary (Carlyle, Bridger, etc. are men who obviously care about humanity, notwithstanding their being male).

The ending left me feeling unsatisfied. Yes, there are more books in the series which may overturn this, but with so many revelations I was expecting more resolution.

I finished this almost two weeks ago and I'm still thinking about it so that's good. It also hurt my feelings.

I want to return to this series and finish it because I am SO intrigued by the politics and the worldbuilding and the characters but I'm taking a break because of said hurt feelings hahaha. It's great writing and plotting. I just have an ache.