trying to figure out faces for these gay people in witchmark by cl polk hehehe... had a lot of fun giving tristan the most Jaw ever
[id: two bust illustrations of miles singer, followed by two bust illustrations of tristan hunter. miles is wearing a black waistcoat and green tie in one drawing, seen in profile, wearing small round glasses. in the other, he is facing the viewer, wearing a brown coat. his "little doctor glasses" are labelled, as are his sack jacket, his tired face, and his unbrushed hair. he has an olive complexion and dark brown hair, with honey brown eyes.
the first drawing of tristan has him facing the viewer, wearing a grey waistcoat with a silver ascot. his wavy blond hair is braided over one shoulder and artfully swept back. he has arched brows, narrow blue eyes, a prominent jaw, full lips, and slightly tan skin. he has one dimple. in the other drawing he is seen in profile, wearing a red robe embroidered with gold, using one hand to brush loose hair off his forehead. his thick eyebrows, "silly monogrammed robe", and blond hair are labelled. end id.]
I haven’t done a review for a while, but I felt I should for this book, as I didn't like it and wanted to explore why. The book’s about a necromantic witch called Robin, who is fighting to make the country of Aeland a better place. At first she tries to do this by working with the new king, who appears to be quite progressive, but as time goes on, it becomes clear he’s not the person she thought he was and she needs to take a different route. She takes over as the head of the Free Democracy party when the previous leader Jacob is assassinated and ends up bringing about a revolution. The blurb for the book describes it as A WHIRLWIND OF MAGIC, POLITICS, ROMANCE, AND INTRIGUE, which sounded right up my street, but it totally didn't live up to my expectations and here are some of the reasons…
One of the villains (a terminally ill old man) is tried near the end and sentenced to hang. I find the idea of capital punishment deeply troubling, so this was never going to sit well with me. I think it’s inhumane, and when mistakes happen (which they totally do), there’s nothing you can do about it. The trial also left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s what I believe is commonly referred to as a kangaroo court, when the accused isn’t given a chance to defend himself and the verdict’s pretty much decided before anyone says a word. To make matters worse, Robin traps the man’s soul in a tree for a thousand years after he’s been hanged. This isn’t part of the court’s decision and there’s no consultation. She just does it. For me this little display suggests that power has totally gone to her head and Aeland has simply traded one arrogant despot for another, which I’m sure wasn’t what the author had in mind.
The pacing feels off. Parts of the book seemed rushed (e.g. the revolution and a lot of the magic stuff), while other parts felt bloated and unnecessarily drawn out. The author seemed unable to tell what to focus on to best serve the story, and if there was any editorial guidance, it must have been pretty poor judging by how it turned out.
Complex issues are dealt with in what for me seems like a totally simplistic way. The revolutionaries are holier than thou and the people they’re fighting against are like pantomime villains, when in the real world, almost everyone is somewhere in the middle. You only really hear one viewpoint about stuff and the whole mess gets cleared up in a ridiculously short amount of time.
The character of Zelind. Zelind is non-binary, which on the face of it sounds great, but the sense I got was that khe was a token character. I had no clue about kher appearance or what kher life as non-binary was like (e.g. the specific challenges khe faced). I noticed that the author used the wrong pronouns for kher a few times (usually SHE/HER, but also at least one THEY), which made me wonder if KHE was once a SHE and the non-binary element was added quite late in the writing process to be on trend or something. It certainly doesn’t add to the plot in any way. If it wasn't a late change, then it's another example of sloppy editing. You expect that kind of slip in self-published books, but not when they're from a big company like Tor and not when its something people might be sensitive about. I also wondered how everyone the character meets seems to immediately know which pronouns to use for kher. I don’t have any direct experience of this myself, but I’m guessing it doesn’t always work that way for real non-binary people, so it doesn’t ring true. Another thing that didn’t seem realistic was the way the character rustled up a machine to generate electricity at the drop of a hat, when others have been trying for years and utterly failing. It’s not properly explained how khe is able to do it and it all happens off camera so to speak, so you don’t get to see what it actually involves. This character could have been so much more and for me was a big disappointment.
The plot feels contrived. I knew all along where the book was headed, so getting through it felt like a chore. There were also quite a few times when seemingly hopeless situations were quickly resolved by unlikely events, e.g. Robin happening to know there would be a hidden door which would allow her and Grace to escape from a burning room, or footsteps lying undisturbed on a snowy rooftop for days, so Robin can solve the mystery of Jacob’s assassination (luckily there hasn’t been any snow in the meantime and it hasn't melted either). Magic also felt a bit convenient at times and the rules around it seemed to shift to fit the plot.
So those are my biggest gripes. I won’t tell anyone they shouldn’t read the book, because I’ve seen a lot of glowing reviews and I’m sure a lot of people will 💜 it, but for me it just didn’t work. I haven’t read the other books in the Kingston cycle and I won’t be doing now. This one was more than enough. 2/5
New book: Witchmark by CL Polk, and wow, it really starts going right away, eh? Initial thoughts from the first four chapters:
This magic system and the way society is organized around it is baffling, but I’m happy not to get an infodump and just to try to understand it over time.
I don’t love the audiobook narrator — I’m finding their voice a little monotone? I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it’s a shame because I think I really like the writing style. I’m now kinda glad that the other two books are narrated by other people.
I’m guessing that romance is gonna be fairly central to the story but honestly I can already tell the relationship between Miles and Grace is probably going to be the most interesting part to me, cause I’m a sucker for complicated and difficult sibling relationships in fiction.
okay so: I was reading your old guard academia au (I'm a sucker for these, I quit academia years ago but it 1000% checks out) but then I started reading your DW book reviews and got so EXCITED. Why has like no one on tumblr read Witchmark, esp considering it won the World Fantasy Award??? [i'm obsessed and also agree Stormsong wasn't **quite** as good as the first but still good wlw content] Also Aliette de Bodard? Fonda Lee? DEALING WITH DRAGONS, aka my perfect covid comfort read?? yes!!
I suspect people on Tumblr HAVE read Witchmark, it’s been fairly successful, but stand-alone books rarely get fannish attention in the same way as even stand-alone movies do. Especially on such a visual-media-oriented site as Tumblr is.
Re: Fonda Lee - Jade City is on the way to getting a TV series!
“You were at Bywell on the first of Frostmonth. The day the lights went out all over Aeland. The day the Great Haunting started. The day when our soldiers were cured of a madness that tormented them. The day the Amaranthines came to Bywell. I know you know what happened that day. You were a witness. Or maybe you were a participant.” - from the ARC of Stormsong
I seem to be reviewing naught but sequels lately, so, as you might be aware, when reviewing a sequel, there will inevitably be spoilers for the first book. So. You’ve been warned.
Oh my god oh my god oh my God oh my God oh my God OH MY GOD.
The wait is over! It’s STORMSONG! By C.L. Polk! The second book of The Kingston Cycle is here!
So. Witchmark is one of my favorite books that I’ve ever read, like, ever. C.L. Polk’s debut novel not only knocked it out of the park, she knocked it out of Earth’s atmosphere. Somewhere, out there, a baseball is going to pass by the International Space Station and the astronauts are going to be like “hey, who tossed a baseball out of the airlock? Damn it, Sergei, we talked about this!”
I think my metaphor has strayed a bit. My point is, I really liked Witchmark. My copy is up on that special shelf I have reserved for my All Time Favorite Books. Witchmark is one of those books that, once I started reading, I literally could not stop. I’m a slow and easily distracted reader, so finishing a book as fast as I finished Witchmark is a rare thing.
Needless to say, I might just have been a wee little bit hyped for Stormsong.
Just a little bit.
I mean, I did pre-order my copy the minute it was announced to be on sale on Amazon back in November of 2018. I may have taken to Twitter to beg Tor to send me an ARC (they didn’t, I do not blame them). I may have let out a fangirlish cry loud enough to break the sound barrier the moment an eARC became available on NetGalley. I may have obsessively refreshed my kindle app for, uh, several minutes waiting for the file to transfer.
And then I opened the file.
And I couldn’t read it. Some sort of glitch rendered the format of the eARC practically illegible.
You know that episode of The Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith just wants to be able to read his books in peace, but can’t? But then the nuclear apocalypse happens but he’s stuck in a bank vault and when he comes out, he’s the only dude left alive and he finally - FINALLY - has the time to read and...he immediately breaks his glasses?
Opening that illegible file felt just like that. It broke my poor little fangirl soul. So I complained. A lot. To an embarrassing extent. I think I must have re-downloaded that file at least fifty times, hoping each time that the file would magically reformat itself to legibility. When it didn’t, I gave up and moved on to other things because that’s how my attention span works. Brief flares of outrage followed by “meh.” The wheel in the sky kept on turning and then, it became 2020 and I was like, “fuck it, I want to read Stormsong.” So I went to NetGalley and downloaded the book...again.
And, what do you know, it had magically reformatted itself to legibility.
(Well, not magically, I’m sure some poor tech person at Macmillan/Tor-Forge spent a great deal of time finding the glitch and fixing it. I really hope they didn’t get yelled at because some insane fangirl complained a great deal on the internet... yeah, I’m a shitbird).
Anyway! After all of that, I finally got to read the book. I forced myself to take it slow - I couldn’t just swallow it whole like I did Witchmark and then be left with the agony of waiting for another book. Nope. I made myself savor Stormsong.
Told from Grace’s POV, Stormsong begins right where Witchmark left off: Miles, Grace and Tristan have destroyed the Aether network (Aeland’s power grid) after learning the truth of where all that clean energy came from, namely, human souls, harvested from those killed during the war with Laneer. In fact, that’s the whole reason for the war - gotta keep the lights on, so just start a war to produce more dead, then force imprisoned witches in the asylums to process the souls of the dead into energy so you can flick your light switch on and off at night for fun. And, you know, have heat and power factories and such. The public has no idea where aether came from, they only know that it seems to be gone and now they have no heat in the middle of winter.
Only, its worse than that. Grace, as a Stormsinger with the power to manipulate the weather, senses a massive, hurricane-sized storm just off the coast of Aeland. The storm, when it hits, will bring subzero temperatures and tons upon tons of snow onto a country that now has no heat or electricity. Thousands risk freezing to death and, with the last harvest ruined by a snowstorm, even more risk starvation.
Then there’s the Amaranthines - the immortal, God-like people who are kind of like this world’s Interpol. They want Aeland to answer for their atrocities. Queen Constantina, however, doesn’t believe she’s done anything wrong. So Grace is thrown headfirst into a political maelstrom, between the Queen, the crown prince Severin, the Amaranthines, and an increasingly outraged public. Then there’s the beguiling Avia Jessup. Avia abandoned a life as a wealthy heiress to pursue her dream career as a photojournalist, and she’s damn good at it. So good, she’s close to discovering exactly what it was that kept Aeland’s lights on. A secret Grace knows could destroy the nation.
But maybe exposing the truth wouldn’t be so bad?
When I finished Witchmark, I bemoaned the fact that it would be a very long wait for the next book. But holy shit is the wait worth it. Stormsong is absolutely phenomenal. It is a worthy follow-up to Witchmark and a magnificent continuation to The Kingston Cycle. The whole book is beautiful, magical, and romantic - it’s everything you’d want in a sequel - the story is carried forward with a fresh perspective, but not all the loose ends are tied up, and there’s some great setup for a third book which I am now dying to read. I loved getting to see thing’s from Grace’s perspective. As much as I love Miles, he lives in a world of very black-and-white morality, whereas Grace lives in a world of gray. Miles doesn’t have to deal with the political ramifications of his actions, but Grace does. She has to deal with the Queen and the Crown Prince and the Amaranthine Grand Duchess Aife...oh, and her and Miles’s awful father, Sir Christopher Leland Hensley, who, despite being in prison, still seeks to exert control over Grace.
The romance between Grace and Avia is absolutely lovely - it’s not the slow burn that was Miles and Tristan in Witchmark. Tristan and Miles were strangers who met and then fell in love. Avia and Grace have known each other for a long time, they ran in the same circles their whole lives, and it wasn’t until Avia was tossed out by her father that the two of them lost touch. The mutual attraction was there, but neither ever acted on it. It’s the events of Stormsong that that turn the spark into a flame, and it’s absolutely delightful to watch. Seriously, every time Avia and Grace are together you just want to:
My only complaint is that the ending is a bit abrupt - it ends in the middle of the action, and you just want to scream “no, it can’t end there, there has to be more, right? RIGHT?”
Hopefully there will be more. I absolutely need more. Witchmark ended in almost the same way - the main action has ended, but there is still a lot left to wrap up. For now, though, I’m going to dig in my heels and prepare myself for another wait. Waiting is hard, but the payoff is often oh, so sweet.
Still:
RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone who loved Witchmark, who wants a fantastic F/F romance, or who just loves Edwardian-style steampunk-y worlds with magic.
NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Homophobes, people who dislike fantasy/fun/romance, people who are just the worst in general.
