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In a world rendered post-apocalyptic by thousands of years worth of warring Dark Lords, a group of adult students attend magic school to learn how to do civil engineering with magic. They spend the first quarter of the book using magic to build a house they can live in for the rest of their time at school. Later, they build bridges and canals.
This isn't quite as relaxing as it sounds, because if they don't master their innate power, it will fry their brains. The only way to avoid getting their brains fried is to transform themselves into a "metaphysical form," which is a sort of magical expression of their inner selves and/or the form they want to be. They can still keep a normal-looking form for social occasions, but their real self is now a coil of flame, a sunless sea, etc, immortal unless something kills them. Also, in order to get formally licensed as an independent sorcerer, they need to do a senior project which is a work of original magic.
In between, they drink a lot of tea (some of it lethal), cook and eat (some of their food is created from memories), fall in love, practice making magical explosives, and help out the community by doing stuff like creating hot tubs out of pure sapphire, fixing a dam, and making innovative anti-mosquito spells.
Either this premise appeals to you or it doesn't. It greatly appeals to me. I love books based on process (doing a thing) rather than conflict. Of course process-based books often include conflict, just as conflict-based books often include process, but typically one dominates, and in western books, it's nearly always conflict. (If it's 50-50, you get Dick Francis.)
I LOVED this book. It's very weird and also somewhat difficult, but I found it extremely worthwhile. It's cozy but also appealingly strange, it has a very cool magic system which involves a lot of science, the ensemble cast is very likable, the worldbuilding is incredible, there's a pleasant amount of dry humor, there's a lot of beautiful and/or cozy elements but also some excellent understated horror, and it's centrally about people trying to do the right thing and maintain a just community against extreme odds. It has a very uplifting feeling overall. Enormous amounts of competence porn if you like that.
It's the sort of book bound to attract a following whose numbers are inversely proportional to their enthusiasm. If you like John M. Ford, Pamela Dean, C. J. Cherryh, and/or Gene Wolfe, this might be very much up your alley.
In this world, lots of people have a little bit of magical power, and a very few people have immense amounts of it. Power tends to corrupt, corrupt people tend to murder potential rivals, and so anyone powerful who might have not been a tyrant tends to die before they grow up. The result is a quarter of a million years of immensely powerful sorcerers casually mutating and enslaving the population, and fighting incredibly destructive battles with each other. The world is now overrun with horrifying magically created plants and animals called weeds; people spend a lot of time weeding.
But the book's setting is the Commonweal, a small and beleaguered island of non-horribleness in a world otherwise consisting of assorted Dark Lords and their horrible kingdoms. (They're not actually called Dark Lords in the book, but that's basically what they are.) The Commonweal has used some elaborate magic and the offer of a life that's not fucking awful to lure in several former Dark Lords to play well with others, and established an equality-based society. However, due to all the fallout of the rest of history, famine and invasion are ever-present threats.
To be more specific, the setting is the second Commonweal, which has been isolated from the first as the result of an invasion in the previous book. (Yes, there's a previous book; I'll get to that shortly). The majority culture here are the Creeks, who are not exactly human. In fact I'm pretty sure none of the characters are exactly human. Among other interesting cultural differences, the use of gendered pronouns indicates a sexual or romantic relationship with the person you're calling "she" or "he," so we don't always know what gender characters are.
A Succession of Bad Days is narrated by Edgar, who just had a magical parasite removed. It turns out that the parasite has been feeding on their power and also their ability to learn. With it gone, Edgar has quite a lot of power - enough that Edgar needs to start learning to control it, or it will destroy them.
Edgar joins a class consisting of Dove (an ex-sergeant who was deeply traumatized in a recent battle; iron-willed and possessed of absurd amounts of magical potential), Chloris (prim and proper by Creek cultural standards, which are not ours; not happy to be there), Zora (a teenager who likes to create illusory wings; the least powerful of them and an absolute sweetheart), and Kynefrid (who has already studied magic a bit; this is not an advantage.) Edgar is sweet, earnest, and generally a cinnamon roll. Edgar is also deeply, deeply strange.
Their teachers are Wake, a necromancer and ancient eldritch horror in a human suit; Blossom, who likes to blow shit up, looks like a cute teenager, and is actually a coil of flame in human form; and Halt, an unfathomably ancient former Dark Lord who typically appears as a sweet grandma who knits, drinks tea, and rides a giant fire-breathing battle sheep named Eustace. If you have enough magical power, you can perceive her as a giant spider. If you have an absolutely absurd amount of magic power, you can just barely glimpse the unfathomable horror behind the spider...
Together, they build a house, borrow an ancient forest, build a canal, navigate some interesting local politics, and grapple with the implications of becoming sorcerers in a community which both needs them and was specifically created to limit their political power.
I should note that this is actually the second book in the series. The first is The March North, and is the reason why it took me so long to get to this one. I made a number of very determined attempts to read The March North and could not make heads or tails of it. I think I understood about one sentence out of every three. Luckily, it turns out that you do not actually have to have read The March North to read A Succession of Bad Days.
The March North is the story of an attempted invasion of the Commonweal, resulting in the second Commonweal splitting off from it. Dove, Halt, and Blossom are in it. I may take another whack at it after I read more books in the series and hopefully have more context.
The prose style of A Succession of Bad Days is uhhh unique. Many commas are involved, nesting like birds at spring. It's very clearly a deliberate choice, is often quite beautiful, and sometimes understatedly funny. But. It reads like it was originally written in a different language, then translated into English by someone determined to preserve as much of the original syntax as possible. Add to that a tendency to imply rather than state, show events that only make sense in light of information learned 100 pages later, and an enormous amount of technical vocabulary, and you can see why I'm calling it difficult.
All this is also true of The March North, except that the style tends more toward the terse, the narrator explains absolutely nothing because they already know what's going on, and they culturally and personally minimize emotional expression which makes it additionally hard to know what's important and what isn't. Edgar wakes up with no idea what's going on and is very curious, and has lots and lots of feelings, so despite their tendency to use commas as all-purpose punctuation, they're a much easier narrator to follow.
A Succession of Bad Days is the first part of the students' story, which concludes in Safely You Deliver. I loved that too. I'll review it separately because I have a LOT of questions specific to it.
If you've read A Succession of Bad Days, let's talk here! Spoilers for this book (but not the later ones) are fine in comments. No need to use rot13. If you read the book later and want to discuss, please start commenting whenever, and I'll come talk with you.
You can buy this book, along with the rest of the series to date, on Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and probably other places. You cannot buy it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. There is no print edition.
Spoilers! Questions! Hopefully the author will appear and shed some (possibly gnomic) light!
( Read more... )
This isn't quite as relaxing as it sounds, because if they don't master their innate power, it will fry their brains. The only way to avoid getting their brains fried is to transform themselves into a "metaphysical form," which is a sort of magical expression of their inner selves and/or the form they want to be. They can still keep a normal-looking form for social occasions, but their real self is now a coil of flame, a sunless sea, etc, immortal unless something kills them. Also, in order to get formally licensed as an independent sorcerer, they need to do a senior project which is a work of original magic.
In between, they drink a lot of tea (some of it lethal), cook and eat (some of their food is created from memories), fall in love, practice making magical explosives, and help out the community by doing stuff like creating hot tubs out of pure sapphire, fixing a dam, and making innovative anti-mosquito spells.
Either this premise appeals to you or it doesn't. It greatly appeals to me. I love books based on process (doing a thing) rather than conflict. Of course process-based books often include conflict, just as conflict-based books often include process, but typically one dominates, and in western books, it's nearly always conflict. (If it's 50-50, you get Dick Francis.)
I LOVED this book. It's very weird and also somewhat difficult, but I found it extremely worthwhile. It's cozy but also appealingly strange, it has a very cool magic system which involves a lot of science, the ensemble cast is very likable, the worldbuilding is incredible, there's a pleasant amount of dry humor, there's a lot of beautiful and/or cozy elements but also some excellent understated horror, and it's centrally about people trying to do the right thing and maintain a just community against extreme odds. It has a very uplifting feeling overall. Enormous amounts of competence porn if you like that.
It's the sort of book bound to attract a following whose numbers are inversely proportional to their enthusiasm. If you like John M. Ford, Pamela Dean, C. J. Cherryh, and/or Gene Wolfe, this might be very much up your alley.
In this world, lots of people have a little bit of magical power, and a very few people have immense amounts of it. Power tends to corrupt, corrupt people tend to murder potential rivals, and so anyone powerful who might have not been a tyrant tends to die before they grow up. The result is a quarter of a million years of immensely powerful sorcerers casually mutating and enslaving the population, and fighting incredibly destructive battles with each other. The world is now overrun with horrifying magically created plants and animals called weeds; people spend a lot of time weeding.
But the book's setting is the Commonweal, a small and beleaguered island of non-horribleness in a world otherwise consisting of assorted Dark Lords and their horrible kingdoms. (They're not actually called Dark Lords in the book, but that's basically what they are.) The Commonweal has used some elaborate magic and the offer of a life that's not fucking awful to lure in several former Dark Lords to play well with others, and established an equality-based society. However, due to all the fallout of the rest of history, famine and invasion are ever-present threats.
To be more specific, the setting is the second Commonweal, which has been isolated from the first as the result of an invasion in the previous book. (Yes, there's a previous book; I'll get to that shortly). The majority culture here are the Creeks, who are not exactly human. In fact I'm pretty sure none of the characters are exactly human. Among other interesting cultural differences, the use of gendered pronouns indicates a sexual or romantic relationship with the person you're calling "she" or "he," so we don't always know what gender characters are.
A Succession of Bad Days is narrated by Edgar, who just had a magical parasite removed. It turns out that the parasite has been feeding on their power and also their ability to learn. With it gone, Edgar has quite a lot of power - enough that Edgar needs to start learning to control it, or it will destroy them.
Edgar joins a class consisting of Dove (an ex-sergeant who was deeply traumatized in a recent battle; iron-willed and possessed of absurd amounts of magical potential), Chloris (prim and proper by Creek cultural standards, which are not ours; not happy to be there), Zora (a teenager who likes to create illusory wings; the least powerful of them and an absolute sweetheart), and Kynefrid (who has already studied magic a bit; this is not an advantage.) Edgar is sweet, earnest, and generally a cinnamon roll. Edgar is also deeply, deeply strange.
Their teachers are Wake, a necromancer and ancient eldritch horror in a human suit; Blossom, who likes to blow shit up, looks like a cute teenager, and is actually a coil of flame in human form; and Halt, an unfathomably ancient former Dark Lord who typically appears as a sweet grandma who knits, drinks tea, and rides a giant fire-breathing battle sheep named Eustace. If you have enough magical power, you can perceive her as a giant spider. If you have an absolutely absurd amount of magic power, you can just barely glimpse the unfathomable horror behind the spider...
Together, they build a house, borrow an ancient forest, build a canal, navigate some interesting local politics, and grapple with the implications of becoming sorcerers in a community which both needs them and was specifically created to limit their political power.
I should note that this is actually the second book in the series. The first is The March North, and is the reason why it took me so long to get to this one. I made a number of very determined attempts to read The March North and could not make heads or tails of it. I think I understood about one sentence out of every three. Luckily, it turns out that you do not actually have to have read The March North to read A Succession of Bad Days.
The March North is the story of an attempted invasion of the Commonweal, resulting in the second Commonweal splitting off from it. Dove, Halt, and Blossom are in it. I may take another whack at it after I read more books in the series and hopefully have more context.
The prose style of A Succession of Bad Days is uhhh unique. Many commas are involved, nesting like birds at spring. It's very clearly a deliberate choice, is often quite beautiful, and sometimes understatedly funny. But. It reads like it was originally written in a different language, then translated into English by someone determined to preserve as much of the original syntax as possible. Add to that a tendency to imply rather than state, show events that only make sense in light of information learned 100 pages later, and an enormous amount of technical vocabulary, and you can see why I'm calling it difficult.
All this is also true of The March North, except that the style tends more toward the terse, the narrator explains absolutely nothing because they already know what's going on, and they culturally and personally minimize emotional expression which makes it additionally hard to know what's important and what isn't. Edgar wakes up with no idea what's going on and is very curious, and has lots and lots of feelings, so despite their tendency to use commas as all-purpose punctuation, they're a much easier narrator to follow.
A Succession of Bad Days is the first part of the students' story, which concludes in Safely You Deliver. I loved that too. I'll review it separately because I have a LOT of questions specific to it.
If you've read A Succession of Bad Days, let's talk here! Spoilers for this book (but not the later ones) are fine in comments. No need to use rot13. If you read the book later and want to discuss, please start commenting whenever, and I'll come talk with you.
You can buy this book, along with the rest of the series to date, on Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and probably other places. You cannot buy it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. There is no print edition.
Spoilers! Questions! Hopefully the author will appear and shed some (possibly gnomic) light!
( Read more... )