Sunday Soupçons #39
soupçon/ˈsuːpsɒn,ˈsuːpsɒ̃/ noun
1. a very small quantity of something; a slight trace, as of a particular taste or flavor
Sunday Soupçons is where I scribble mini-reviews for books I don’t have the brainspace/eloquence/smarts to write about in depth – or if I just don’t have anything interesting to say beyond I LIKED IT AND YOU SHOULD READ IT TOO!
One book I started out loving, then hated; one I DNFed over and over, then really liked!
The Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois by Ryan Graudin Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: B0CLKVV8MB
Goodreads
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In this lush and lyrical fantasy, Ryan Graudin transports readers to the hidden magic pockets of early 1900s Paris, a place of enchanted salons, fortune tellers who can change your stars, and doorways that can take you to the most unexpected places—and introduces readers to the delightful Céleste Artois, a con artist who will make a deal with the devil in exchange for her life...and change the fate of the world.
Once, Céleste Artois had dreams of being an artist. But when the creative elite of Paris dashed those plans, she turned her talents to forgery and cons. She and the Enchantresses—her two fellow thieves and best friends—see Paris as a rich hunting ground for marks. Yet even though their hideout in Peré Lachaise cemetery is bursting with francs, Céleste cannot rest. There is always more to take. And the blood she has begun to cough into her handkerchief means her time is running out.
But everything changes when she encounters Rafe, a mysterious and beautiful stranger who leads her to an enchanted salon—a place where artists can bring wondrous imaginations to life. Céleste is captivated by this establishment, and learns of the existence of magical Paris, hidden in the pockets and alleys of the ordinary world, if one only knows where to look.
Rafe offers Céleste an irresistible the gift of time in exchange for lending him and his benefactor her forging talents. But one must be careful making deals with devils, and there's more to this hidden world than meets the eye. Shadows have begun to circle Paris. And soon, the Enchantresses will find that true magic is far more powerful, and deadly, than they ever imagined.
My journey with Enchanted Lies was extremely odd; I soft-DNFed it back in December, and at the time, I really liked it! (So why did I soft-DNF it? Because I got distracted by other books, in laughably stereotypical ADHD-fashion, and by the time I remembered I was meant to be reading Enchanted Lies, it had been so long that I wasn’t feeling it anymore.) I loved Graudin’s prose and properly magical, beautiful magic – it was giving me Laini Taylor vibes, albeit with less teeth.
So I came back to it – and wow, did I end up hating it!
Enchanted Lies has nothing to it except the pretty magic I mentioned. It’s three or four times longer than it needed to be – the paperback is only a bit under 600 pages, and for most of those, NOTHING WHATSOEVER IS HAPPENING. And I say this as someone who is usually quite happy to feast on nothing but pretty prose; if it’s pretty enough, I don’t need plot, honest, but this was beyond ridiculous! There was a whole plotline wherein Sylvie, the young girl Celeste and her friend Honoré take care of, made friends with Princess Anastasia of Russia that went nowhere and had no purpose whatsoever, culminating in a wishy-washy, pointless wrap-up that made me furious. And WW1 gets shoehorned in to the end of the book without warning, extremely clumsily, and that also goes nowhere. (Which is extra strange seeing as the author claims in the author’s note that the frontlines art of WW1 was what she wanted to write about in the first place, which??? I can’t even.)
Celeste and Honoré (and kid Sylvie) are thieves in Paris who discover the secret underworld of magic, taking very different paths within it. Honoré turns out to be sapphic, which would have been lovely if her romance hadn’t been written as weirdly sexless (wouldn’t have been a problem in and of itself, but Celeste’s romance with Rafe is intensely sexual, and the contrast is pretty crappy). It really bothered me, the way that romance was handled, and I still don’t know how to articulate why; the closest I can get is that it felt like the author was awkward with it, treated it differently to the f/m romance.
And like – Celeste, Honoré, and Sylvie are homeless. They live in a crypt in a graveyard. And that also felt like…like their situation was being romanticised? It never felt as desperate and awful as homelessness actually is, it was more like a strange, handwaved kind of fairytale – extra odd because they had countless bags of money buried all over the graveyard, but they did nothing with it? And I know poverty and homelessness can both make you not perfectly rational about money, but it didn’t seem to be that, either. In hindsight the whole thing is kinda ick – like the author just wanted them to live in a crypt Because Reasons, but didn’t want to reckon with the reality of that. Everything had to be pretty, even things that are awful.
The pages and pages of NOTHING were definitely the worst part; by the end, I was so ready to throw this book out the window. Pretty magic, and even pretty prose, does NOT justify 600 pages of nothingness, okay? Christ.
Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1) by Yoon Ha Lee Genres: Adult, Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi
Representation: East Asian coded cast, sapphic MC, major bisexual character, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: B01EBE05X2
Goodreads
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When Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for her unconventional tactics, Kel Command gives her a chance to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles from the heretics. Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake: if the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.
Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress. The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own.
As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao – because she might be his next victim.
Ninefox Gambit is another book that I had an odd history with: I’ve tried to read it at least three times before this, and always ended up DNFing it. But this month I am doing a Thing, so I was determined to give Ninefox another go – and it worked!
Though I think I appreciated this one more than I actually enjoyed it – mostly because it’s very much military sci fi: the entire book is the siege and infiltration of this fortress, and that’s really not my thing! Though there’s no military jargon or anything, and Yoon does an excellent job at conveying worldbuilding and making every character we encounter incredibly vivid; I liked the glimpses we got of random soldiers, and I was really impressed by how quickly Yoon was able to make each one feel incredibly real, just by giving us a few key details about them.
Cheris, our MC, is a loyal Kel (the Kel are soldiers) who seems to have no critiques of the dystopia she’s in. Her society is called the Hexarchate, made up of the six factions (the Kel are one) who oversee and manage the general civilian populace; the Hexarchate’s power depends on the calendar system, which depends on the people’s belief in it. How does the calendar stuff work? Wellllll, I think Yoon understands it (I think I read somewhere that he’s a mathematician himself?) but I don’t at all – you just need to roll with it. Somehow keeping different calendars allows people to use different impossible tech, that’s the main thing you need to understand. There’s also many references to equations and angles and what I’m willing to handwave as ‘math magic’, which can be very dense at points – but once you shift gears in your head, and stop trying to understand it, it becomes much less dense. There’s no actual math going on on the page, but Cheris is doing a lot of math a lot of the time, and it’s convincingly complicated even without us seeing the actual sums. But you just need to let it flow over you – like the calendar stuff, you’re not going to understand it, I suspect we’re not supposed to understand it, and once you stop trying it all becomes much easier!
That the Hexarchate is terrible is established very quickly; the Kel are treated as disposable and are programmed to be physically unable to disobey orders; ‘practising’ the calendar mandates ritual torture and execution; one of the ruling factions is responsible for ‘re-educating’ citizens; the list of awfulness goes on. What normal, everyday life looks like under the Hexarchate, we don’t really see in this book, as Cheris goes from a messy, pointless campaign in chapter one to being made a fake general so that the ghost only she can see can have his orders acted upon – I’m hoping that future books will give us a bit more of a look at what non-military life is like in this setting. But either way, it’s clear the Hexarchate is Extremely Bad, Actually.
So it’s interesting that Cheris isn’t any kind of rebel. In fact, she deliberately chose to become Kel even though she has the math genius required to join a much more prestigious faction; she wanted to fit in, and the ‘flock instinct’ Kel get programmed with, the thing that makes them super loyal and unable to disobey orders? That was appealing to her! There’s ‘drank the Kool-Aid’ and then there’s Cheris, is what I’m saying. It’s not even that she thinks the Hexarchate is actively good, so much as she just…takes it for granted that the way things are is Correct (not the same as Good) and does her best to be a good little cog in the system. (There’s a very funny moment where she’s introduced to the concept of democracy and just doesn’t get how a society could function that way.) It’s an interesting mindset to get from an outsider perspective.
Cheris gets sent to deal with a (space-)fortress that’s been taken over by heretics using their own, heretical calendar; to do this, she’s given permission to take a legendary general’s ghost with her. Jedao’s a military genius, but he was made into a ghost after massacring his own army, supposedly in a fit of inexplicable ‘madness’, so anyone making use of him has to be very careful not to be infected by his madness, and/or not to be manipulated by him into doing something terrible. As you’d expect, Jedao’s backstory and motivation is actually much more complicated than Cheris’ higher-ups have told her, and Jedao himself is…well, I absolutely bought that he was a genius not just at strategy, but at manipulating people! He’s a much more vibrant character than Cheris, but I think that’s very deliberate – Jedao is outside the Hexarchate, in a way, and Cheris is loyal to it, and part of the way that contrast manifests is Cheris feeling very…washed-out and grey at first. She’s not a person, she’s a Kel, which is exactly what her society wants her to be.
But through her relationship with Jedao, and over the course of the campaign against the fortress (which involves High Command screwing her over quite a bit) Cheris…becomes more and more of a person. It’s fascinating to watch.
I definitely want to read book two, although I’m really hoping for a bit less military stuff. (This doesn’t seem likely, given the plot that’s been set up by the end of Ninefox Gambit, but I’m hopeful anyway.) I’m really intrigued by what we’ve seen of this sci fi space empire, and I want plenty more; plus I have no idea how the plot that’s been set up is going to go, and I want to find out!
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