Me, rollerblading into my therapist’s office with heart-shaped sunglasses and a piña colada and dropping this book on the desk with a loud thud: Boy dMe, rollerblading into my therapist’s office with heart-shaped sunglasses and a piña colada and dropping this book on the desk with a loud thud: Boy do we have much to talk about today!
Why read Verity when you can just pull out an Ouija board and summon a demon from hell? I'm sure it’ll have the same effect. I finished this book feeling completely sapped of life, as if I've been bleeding freely for the past few hours instead of simply reading. That ending. What the hell. If I could just shake my head to dissolve the memory of it, to disarrange it somehow, I would. Because of all the things I’d braced myself for, that was not it.
Right. Let's talk plot.
Lowen Ashleigh is set free from the long tedium of her daily life when she’s employed by Jeremy Crawford to ghostwrite the remaining books in a popular series his wife, Verity, is unable to finish due to an unfortunate accident. Lowe acquiesces in the spirit of hope: that this opportunity would help her acquire some small measure of celebrity and that celebrity would be oxygen to the fire of her career. But nothing prepares Lowe for Verity’s autobiography, which she accidentally stumbles upon one day. For the horror of it. Verity’s secrets paint a different picture of what Lowen thought she knew of Verity, Jeremy, and their lives together. But sooner or later, as these things often go, the whole truth will spill, and the fraught waiting in-between would come to an end, with havoc and screaming and loss.
“After all, this is a house full of Chronics. The next tragedy is already long overdue.”
I love books that make me backtrack my own declarations of preference. The books that catch me completely off-guard, astonish me, keep me on my toes. Verity is not at all what I expected, and I think it is all the better for it. I picked it up with a great deal of skepticism. I did not enjoy any of Hoover's previous work, and didn't think Verity would tip the scales. I’ve never been happier to be so wrong because this book absolutely lives up to the buzz.
Verity is a huge departure from Hoover's catalogue. It's a fiendishly clever, mind-bending whirligig of a book. The plot is a hall of mirrors where everything is a vacant reflection, including the people who live there. Hoover draws you into a world where illusion informs reality, and time enfolds hauntingly. She lures and tricks and wrong-foots. Always, she wields her unreliable characters to stunning effect: confounding, disturbing and delighting in turn. Not only is nothing what it seems, it’s not even what it seems after it’s been revealed to be not what it seems. And I was entrapped in this story long before I even realized the net was already cast.
The book's biggest triumph to me was the sheer energy threaded the pages, how it feels uncontrollable, yet it is perfectly under control by the author. I like the way Hoover makes you feel Lowe’s deep-skin unease and confusion as if it's your own. You can sense the danger pulsing all around, and while you can scarcely see the freshly hideous future taking shape ahead, you can feel it all the same. In short, if I were Lowe, I’d have gotten the hell out of there. I’d have been impressed by her courage if I weren’t too preoccupied repeating a litany of “GET OUT OF THERE, YOU IDIOT” in my head.
And, oh my God, the ending. That shit struck me backhanded. I'm still reverberating from it. Because here's the thing: Verity offers its reader no solidity of truth that they could hold in their hands. Even as I was reading and rereading the last chapter I was mining it for clues, trying to make sense of something that felt so utterly senseless. Everything I’ve read up until that point felt like a false memory and I was left shaking my fist at the whole book for leaving me on such a hideous note as it did. Because, what.
So, yeah. I'm going to let this story haunt me for a long time. ...more
Ah yes, the place I truly dwell, a damp and cold eternity of endless disappointment.
Fine. I’m just being dramatic (again). But seriously—being this seAh yes, the place I truly dwell, a damp and cold eternity of endless disappointment.
Fine. I’m just being dramatic (again). But seriously—being this sensitive is really inconvenient. Your most anticipated book of the year doesn’t live up to your expectations and you have to cancel your plans for the day to be angry about it.
**
For a century, Kalyazin and Tranavia bled great gouts of men into a holy war that served no greater cause than one country’s fear, and one empire’s hubris.
Nadya, a Kalyazi cleric who can commune with an entire pantheon of gods, is training in secrecy in the holy mountains by priests who sought to wield the power that sheltered inside her into the one thing that could save Kalyazin from sinking to its knees. But a sudden Tranavian attack on the monastery sends Nadya’s destiny spilling out into the air. All this mayhem is like blood in the water, and Nadya isn’t the only one swimming in it: Serefin, the High prince of Tranavia and a powerful blood mage, has scant interest in anything unless it involves alcohol but now finds himself forced to constantly look about him in trepidation for those who might be in a position to oppose his succession, including his father, the king. And there’s Malachiasz, a Tranavian defector whose real intentions are shrouded in secrecy and with whom Nadya forms a reluctant alliance while they’re both on the run from the Tranavian soldiers.
Nadya soon discovers that unknown forces are scheming to carve a new avenue to power and fulfilling her destiny of helping the gods reclaim their hold on the world might prove harder than she'd thought.
“We’re all monsters, Nadya,” Malachiasz said, his voice gaining a few tangled chords of chaos. “Some of us just hide it better than others.”
Reading the first couple of chapters, I was intrigued by Wicked Saints’ twining of religion, politics and magic, and the questions it hints at, but, sadly, what tatters remained of that interest quickly deserted me as the story progressed.
I expected more from this book than a few sequences of faintly interesting situations and a setting that is built more from analogues than any real sense of originality, a little more than a scaffolding made of concepts. The political exposition and the magic system also reads so messily, especially towards the end when suddenly what little logic used to belong to the story seems to have remained behind, like luggage on a dock. (Edit: Jewish reviewers have also pointed out the extremely troubling instances of egregious antisemitism in this book, and considering the author’s recently reported history of antisemitism, we should all have cause to worry. I cannot speak personally to these problematic elements since I am not Jewish, but I highly recommend you read a review by a Jewish reader.)
I was also—and I cannot overstate the extent to which this is true—explosively bored. Yes. Tensions steadily rise up. Portents stir. Dark, deathlike magic threatens to devour everything it touches. But nothing much comes of any of it until the final page when the narrative bends towards a massively anticlimactic showdown that left me wishing I had spent my time doing literally anything else.
I saw a lot of people evoke how similar this book was to The Grisha Trilogy, and I have to agree. Quite frankly, it felt like an uninspired rip-off. At least the plot turnings in Shadow and Bone are compelling because Bardugo spends so much time keeping us pressed close to the minds and hearts of her characters, ensuring that we care about them long before whatever peril comes for them. That isn't the case with this book at all. I couldn't connect with any of the characters. There were some minor characters and relationships I wish had been focused on instead of others: Rashid and Parijahan—Malachiasz's companions and the only POC in the story as far as we know—make brief appearances but they never truly step wholly into the page and we never really get much chance for them to settle into being multi-dimensional, or find out what their revenge agenda is. You know, another day, another breathtaking case of a white author tokenizing characters of color.
But this is not the only way that Wicked Saints doesn't commit to its potential. The premise of the story led me to believe it wouldn't adhere to genre conventions, clichés and staples, which meant I was really dispirited when it did. Wicked Saints plays the enemies-to-lovers romance without any attempt at subversion. In short, I couldn’t give a tuppenny damn about Nadya and Malachiasz‘s relationship. For many reasons, but chief of which is this: the fact that this book adheres to the old hoary trope of “reducing its female character to her love interest”.
This felt like Malachiasz’s story with Nadya merely a minor player in the drama of her own life. I was startled by how, sometimes, she wasn’t even the focus of the story within her own POVs. In the beginning, we learn that Nadya had grown up in a monastery, trained in the hope that she’d prove to be a weapon against Kalyazin’s enemies. The face of the world was long kept veiled from her and I was really excited to see her take possession of her destiny and determine the path of her own life, but, in the end, it seemed she had not learned how to hold another shape other than what others dictated for her. Then Malachiasz drops out of nowhere, like an impossible vision, and makes Nadya immediately buckle under his—broodingly attractive—stare, prompting her apparently to immediately take leave of all her senses as well as any depth to her character. (The appropriate response is usually an eye roll.)
I've read a staggering number of excellent fantasy books recently with lady leads that had their own agency on full display—from Arden's Winternight Trilogy to Novak's Spinning Silver to Kuang's The Poppy War—and I think it's done things to my head because I now can't settle for anything less extraordinary. I certainly don't deny the allure of stories where a shadowy figure is devoted, unrepentantly and without respite, to the female protagonist and her innocent mystique—but here’s the thing: female characters can have strong, compelling narratives without preventing them from experiencing love. It's maddening when books imply, unconsciously or otherwise, that women can either have a romantic interest or a personality, while ignoring the fact women are perfectly capable of possessing both, thank you very much. I kept waiting and waiting for the author to twist the trope into something original or at least productive, but the unexpected never once arrives.
I hope the events of the sequel will smooth out this rough patch, but I honestly don’t care enough to find out.
If you aren’t someone an evil capitalistic corporation wants dead for being the on-the-run refugee who ignited a galactic revolution with the help of If you aren’t someone an evil capitalistic corporation wants dead for being the on-the-run refugee who ignited a galactic revolution with the help of a cranky wizard, a mythical sword and a group of knights.... are you really living?
So, what’s this book about?
When Ari, a refugee from an Arab-settled planet, draws Excalibur from a tree on Old Earth and an ancient cycle shudders to life, that was only the tinder. The spark comes when Ari is dubbed the 42nd incarnation of king Arthur by Merlin, the backwards-aging wizard whom the doom of endlessly reliving Arthur’s tragic story hung on like a shawl for centuries. Determination, like an electric shock, sears through Ari’s whole body and whatever hesitancy might have been in her is parched away when Ari is given hope of saving her mothers and overthrowing Mercer company, a tyrannical corporation with a checkered history of suppressing their crimes like an unpleasant rumor before it had a chance to be heard.
But Ari doesn’t stand a chance alone. She needs the collective strength of people who, like her, have borne too much and would risk no more, forget nothing and show no mercy. The cry of this revolution fits into the hollows of the dreams of her knights, and, together they embark on a whirlwind mission to bring peace to humankind…even if it came with danger and ended in doom.
Once & Future is a queer and inclusive adaptation of the Arthurian legend that turns over ideas about oppression, about classism and capitalism, and, most of all, about how none can hold a candle to the most infinitesimal spark of hope, all while on a high-stakes rollercoaster quest to save humanity…and that’s no mean feat. While the story of King Arthur is used as a basic premise, the authors craftily unweave the original tale, using threads of it to inspire different characters, only to subvert the whole with lost desert civilizations, spaceships and interdimensional travel. Once & Future also introduces a diverse mix of characters from different backgrounds and with differing sexual orientations, all frankly discussing their identities and futures (Ari is pansexual, is from an Arab-settled country and has two moms, Lamarack is black, disabled and identifies as gender-fluid, Merlin is basically a gay disaster, and there's also a sapphic romance between Ari and her Gweneviere).
I liked how this book doesn’t shy away from the harsh economic realities of everyone’s lives. It doesn’t gloss over the fact that bad things happen and that it’s awfully hard work to fix them. Evil regimes come. People are held captive. Good people do nothing. Bad people demand everything and are given even more. However, I think by choosing to personify Mercer with an evil CEO, Once & Future misses a crucial point: You're not fighting one person, you're fighting an entire system. And it felt like a missed opportunity when we could have had a clearer look into the corruption of the institutions trying to smother Ari and her people.
But I think the core thread of my dissatisfaction with this book is that I'd been braced for a surge of wonder, and expecting it to be wrenching, but it just...wasn’t. There were an awful lot of other bits to quibble over, and my enjoyment of the story kept bobbing under their weight. For instance, there’s a sort of dichotomy in terms of pacing, one that I’m still uncertain how to feel about. On the one hand, things happen in flurries of action, which is very exciting and engaging in a soapy sort of way, but, on the other hand, revelations occur haphazardly, awkwardly delayed and then in a rush, in such a way that a number of high-stakes turns seem trite and arbitrary and characters are reduced to a single trait, their motivations wavering and switching in accordance with plot contrivance more than their own development.
I really expected more from this book than a sequence of interesting, but overtly dramatic, situations. The price the book pays for this is a loss of emotional engagement on the reader’s part—I felt set apart from the characters’ emotions and that made it very difficult to care. Furthermore, I'm usually perfectly content with the easily-accessible writing some YA authors settle for but this one just didn't work for me at all.
In the end, I just don’t have any strong feelings about this book, and, as a reader, that’s what I fear the most: the middle ground, the lukewarm, and reading while constantly having to chase off the loose-limbed lassitude that threatens to rise and overwhelm.
Overall, while Once & Future triumphs in term of inclusiveness and introduces a subversive and original premise, it just didn't quite commit to its potential.
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Reading this novella is all fun and games until it makes you devastatingly aware of the pathetic lack of romancing you're experiencing in your life.
SoReading this novella is all fun and games until it makes you devastatingly aware of the pathetic lack of romancing you're experiencing in your life.
So without further ado, here's a list of iconic and memorable moments in this book:
• First of all, nothing will ever come close to touching the humour and perfect execution of the question “do you mean to tell me that you have not actually fornicated yet?” being promptly met with the incredulous and indignant response “dear God, Felicity” • I love Felicity she radiates such Mom Energy I want her to embarrass me in front of strangers and also make sure I drink water and make sound decisions throughout the day • “I stepped on a cockroach this morning when I got out of bed; did I tell you that?” “I know, I heard you scream” • To be fair to Monty, anyone who says they’re not even moderately afraid of cockroaches is either lying or a psychopath • Speaking of which, let’s have a discussion about Monty • I love him. That’s it. That’s the discussion. • Look, I didn’t ask to be a fan of Monty. I didn’t ask to have my life disrupted by a tiny meatball of a man who is quite literally the 18th-century-version of a himbo frat boy. Why this? Why me? I didn’t ask for this • Monty telling Felicity Jesus would be mad at her for stealing his day when her birthday fell on Easter one year • Percy: *mentions how tiny Monty is* Monty: (ง •̀_•́)ง • Monty solemnly stating that the only reason Odysseus resisted the sirens was because none of them had a dump truck as fantastic as Percy’s • Monty: *takes a deep breath* Monty: Percy— Anyone who has spent five seconds around Monty: yes, Percy has a nice ass, we know, you love Percy’s ass. You could write a goddamn opera in honour of his ass WE KNOW WE GET IT YOU LOVE PERCY’S ASS • Monty, lamenting the lack of, in Felicity's words, fornicating in his life: “I’m a bit concerned my virginity is starting to grow back.” • [puts both hands on Monty’s shoulders and gazes intently into his eyes] Monty, you fucking idiot, that’s not how it works • Monty unsubtly flexing while cuddling with Percy to impress him with his Big Meaty Man Arms • Monty factually maintaining that he would be “sporting a semi” if Percy so much as sneezes…. or breathes…or generally exists • in Monty’s defense, no man will ever be as attractive as Percy emerging from the ocean shirtless, water dripping on his chest and a wide grin on his face, inviting Monty for a swim. That’s just a fact • So I'm sure you've caught on that this novella is pretty much just about Monty making commendable (if doomed) efforts to get laid • I wish I put as much effort into my college assignments as Monty did for such a noble cause • Also, I can’t overstate my appreciation for how committed Felicity was to helping Monty finally smash Percy • Not only did she come up with an ingenuously elaborate plan to get rid of the sailors aboard the ship, she also tidied up the room and lit candles and arranged for food on the table • Are there……. are there real siblings like Felicity Montague…….? do they…..exist? • What I should have been worried about: how I am going to pay for college What I'd been worried about: how Monty & Percy will get it on without ruining their relationship • Seriously. This novella should just be called “Two times Monty didn’t get laid and the one time he di—what’s that? That didn’t work either? Well…” • I'm actually slightly concerned about Monty, he was literally half-dead of blue balls by the end • “In my defense, we were left unsupervised” • I mean, look, that’s relatable • Plus being the gay human disaster of the family is hard work but someone (Monty) has to do it • Also apparently, Percy Newton, the human manifestation of a condensed sunshine, reads erotic leaflets in his past-time • I don’t know what to do with this piece of information. Percy’s my son. I’ve never thought about him like that and I never will. In fact, I already forgot about it. goodbye • Jokes aside, I binge read this book and it was the best therapy session I’ve ever had • Percy and Monty love each other so much which prompted a very awkward moment in which I realized the actual physical ache in my chest is because of the romance between two fictional characters • I love them so much I don’t really want to use words, just flail my arms and shriek in different pitches to express my feelings • and I'm warm with the satisfaction of knowing that Monty and Percy will forever be okay because they’ve learned the most indispensable Relationship 101 lesson: • you know what’s so hot? like sooo fucking attractive? an open and healthy communication!! feeling validated and understood and appreciated by your partner!!! now THAT's a turn-on!!!! • also, not gonna lie, I almost cried at Scipio fiercely apologizing to Monty for ever feeling like he had to hide his queerness from Scipio and apologizing that the world makes him feel as though he has to • a fictional pirate is literally a better father figure than most dads in the world
“I wish I could travel backward in time and tell Monty of two years ago, lying on the lawn of his father’s house with a bruised rib cage, realizing he was falling in love with the only person who gave him a reason to live, that he'd be here someday.”
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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