Tag: Ginn Hale

Ginn Hale

Did I buy the second book immediately after finishing the first, and read through the whole thing in the same day? Yes. Yes I did. I’m hoping that, by the time this gets posted, the third volume will be out, and seeing this scheduled post will remind me to go pick it up; as of this writing¹ there’s only the two available. Fortunately for me, Volume 2 ended at a stable point, instead of on an extreme cliffhanger.

I think reading both books in close sequence like that helped the effect; lots of Volume 1 was establishing the world, which allowed Volume 2 to pull at the relationships between the characters, and play around with that existing knowledge of the world. This feels like a good one to avoid any further spoilers, though, so I think I’m going to stop there, and just tell you to go read it.² Though, y’know, read the first book before you try this one; they’re so thoroughly interlinked that the chapter numbers in Volume 2 pick up where they left off at the end of Volume 1. This cannot be read on its own.

1. Which can be used as a hint for how far in advance I’m writing these. ↩
2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩

Ginn Hale

I had two clear thoughts in my mind, early on in this book: first, that for the setting, I was picturing Republic City from The Legend of Korra; and second, that the main character’s approach to life reminds me of Sokka from The Last Airbender. While the latter could, conceivably, have been an actual influence, the more I read, the more that I thought the former was just that both were based on the same sort of “1920s New York aesthetic in a heavily Chinese-inspired locale.”

The whole book, really, leans heavily into that Chinese folklore feeling, and it’s absolutely delightful. There’s a strong sense of a weighty, and long, past behind everything. This is a world that has a rich history. It’s also a world that had a People’s Revolution and is now in a very modern-feeling “we’re the People’s Secret Police” sort of place. A different kind of weighty, that.

The protagonist works well, here; he was raised in a temple as a sort of indentured servant of the state, and sets him up for a sort of simultaneous cynicism and naïveté; he’s cynical about his place in the world, about the role of class in his life, but also utterly naïve about the inherent corruption of a secret police. To spoil something from very early on, he saves the day from a bombing, and not once does he come to the (to me) obvious conclusion that it was a plot by the secret police.

The setting also has some interesting mechanics going on: a magic system that works well for big cinematic setpieces, and Avatar-style Doing Magic With Martial Arts, but also feels thoroughly influenced by electromagnetic physics. A delightfully chaotic reincarnation-ish system, which creates some hilarious interactions between characters who either have or haven’t yet figured out that’s what’s going on.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It ends on a vicious cliffhanger, but I at least managed to wait long enough to read this one that the sequel is now out, so hopefully I’ll be reading it soon. Check it out.¹

1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩

Ginn Hale

As promised, I went right into reading the second book.¹ And I quite enjoyed it, though admittedly not as much as I did the first. I think part of my issue was that this seems to be an advance reader copy or something — not the final edition, is all. There’s a few clear errors that a final editing pass should’ve caught.²

That said, I did enjoy the read. I was worried that it was going to do the Syfy thing, and try to continue escalating, but it didn’t — the scope stayed “well, we’re all gonna die, but the world will go on.” Nice to have a sort of series-scale denouement like that, after the first book featured “well, we’re all gonna die, and then also this thing might end the world after that.”

The other thing this reminded me of was Diana Wynne Jones. It had that same kind of “slow build right up until everything comes together at once” feeling; in the same way that I spend the first half of the book going “I dunno, I don’t think this is really capturing me as much as I’d like it to…” and then suddenly I’m forgetting to eat because I can’t put the book down that long. It wound up being fun, and tying up some of the remaining threads from the first book pretty well, so I appreciated that. A good read! Start with Book 1, but then give it a go.³

1. At some point in the book I thought “is there going to be a third?” and found out that this is, in fact, the fourth book in the series — evidently a great deal of the Mysterious Backstory I’d been piecing together as I read was just the events of the first two books. Whoops, guess I was reading on challenge mode. That said, I think it held up quite well as its own little duology! ↩
2. And I mean obvious stuff like a word that was meant to be replaced still being there. The subtler things, like a character’s name being spelled differently, are harder to notice if you haven’t just read the first one. And, presumably, particularly if you didn’t spend every appearance by that character in the first book thinking about “her name isn’t ‘Fleur’ like from Harry Potter, it’s ‘Fluer’” so that it suddenly becoming ‘Fleur’ really stands out. ↩
3. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩

Ginn Hale

I had so much more fun reading this than I expected to. A great deal of giving me exactly what I wanted in the most fun way possible. So much mysterious backstory to piece together! Two missing princes! Quests within quests. A character whose two intertwined emotional arcs are “working through internalized homophobia” and “dealing with PTSD that they’ve spent a lifetime ignoring.” And a truly wonderful “the audience knows but the character doesn’t” scene featuring a shapeshifter who’d been stuck in animal form, and a man in the midst of a severe fever waking up to a twink in his bed wearing nothing but the collar he’d hand-made for the dog he rescued a couple weeks ago. Exactly as hilarious a reveal as I wanted that to be. Absolutely perfect.

The magic system here feels cobbled together out of various other things—there’s hints of Tolkein-style “the magic is going out of the world,” but it feels more like a “… because we’ve deliberately forgotten how to do the really big stuff” in a way that makes the world feel like it has lots and lots of history to dig into. The magic users all at least a little bit know about the other types of magic, some kind of passing familiarity, but there are, indeed, at least three distinct styles that we see. And it feels like they all fit together, like they’re all expressions of the same fundamental thing—reminiscent of the Thirteenth Child series, in that way.¹

An absolute delight of a read; I’m about to dive into the second book, because things aren’t neatly tied up at all here at the end, and I’m excited to find out where it goes. Check it out!²

1. Having just gone to look for a link, it would seem that I’ve never written up a review of those books… so I suppose I now have an excuse to do a reread. ↩
2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩