Nothing gets me on my crazy Catholic bullshit like a new Tamsyn Muir book. When I finally (FINALLY) got my hands on Nona the Ninth, after ten thousand (fact check: two) years of pining for it, I curled up on my sofa with it and my Bible and unfortunately no wine because I was on a clean living kick, and read it and thought of tweets like “New Revised Standard Version in the streets, King James Version in the sheets”, a tweet you were only spared because I couldn’t stop reading Nona the Ninth long enough to write it.

One fact about the Locked Tomb trilogy is that any man who falls behind is left behind; by which I mean that it is impossible to describe the events of this book to someone who has not read the prior two books. I know this to be true because I have read Harrow the Ninth eleventy-thousand times, and I have even written a blog post that tiresomely explicates its references to memes and Bible verses, yet when I picked up Nona the Ninth and flipped to the end to check how things were going for certain parties, the pages that I read were goddamn gibberish. I remember this from getting the ARC of Harrow the Ninth. Here was I, all determined to discover what was going to happen, and here was the end of Harrow the Ninth like “and then Mercymorn exploded, and some sunglasses, and we went under the River, and there was a Body GOOD LUCK BITCH.”

I love it here; I love everyone in this bar.

Thirty seconds after I had finished reading Nona the Ninth, I handed my copy to my mother. She said, “Were any of our theories right?” and I just stared at her with unseeing eyes like a necromancer whose blindness may or may not have protected her from the blue madness wrought by Varun the Eater (Number Seven). She said, patiently, “Who did Nona turn out to be?” and my facial expression did not alter because the fuck do I know. (I think I do know. But I am not confident.) It’s like when the first of my Twitter mutuals copped to having read Harrow the Ninth, way back in the innocent time before the plague, and I immediately DMed them to demand they tell me if Gideon was alive, and they were all like, “S…ort of? Yes? Or, maybe?”

If this makes it sound like Tamsyn Muir continues to be coy with the giving out of answers, that is an accurate takeaway. Or to put it another way, Tamsyn Muir has this uncanny knack for letting loose an avalanche of answers, at the end of which you have ten thousand more questions than you had in the first place. Of those, the one I have been shrieking most loudly at my friends-and-relations (who bear it very patiently, considering) is WHO THE ABSOLUTE ENTIRE LIVING FUCK IS E!!!! (I refuse to inquire if Gideon and Harrow are going to be reunited and okay. Of course they are going to be reunited and okay. They might both be dead; I am not sure; it does not affect my belief in their future happiness. I did a little Tarot spread for them, and the outcome card was the Six of Wands, so things are going to be fine.)

“Jenny please just tell us what the book is about.” Yes, okay. Sorry. So the book is about a girl called Nona, who only attained consciousness a short while ago, and who is living inside a body that doesn’t seem to be hers. She lives with Pyrrha (I love Pyrrha so much) and Camilla, who sometimes is Palamedes, and she goes to a school where she has a little gang of friends who are children. This is good for Nona because although she seems to be nineteenish, she is in many ways a child too. She can’t read, but she can speak every language. She loves everyone in her life, including and especially her teacher’s little dog Noodle. She and her little family are in constant danger from threats that include the armies of the Nine Houses, a Resurrection Beast in ?orbit?? or something? over their planet, and various Blood of Eden factions.

If I am absolutely honest, I have to confess that Nona is not quite my thing, as a character. Obviously she’s a good girl, and she cares about her people and she cares about Noodle, and that’s all well and good. But if I am anything, I am a second-book-in-the-trilogy bitch all the way up to my eyeballs, and if I am anything else, I am soft for a Shuos Jedao / Captain Flint type, and what I am saying is that Harrowhark Nonagesimus was always going to be the narrator of my heart. Good though Nona is, she was the least interesting character in her book, partly because everyone else has more information than she does, and I — frustratingly — had access to very little of it.

That said, Nona the Ninth is a banner book for fans of the Sixth House. If ever you have wished that fiction would give more space to best friendship (as opposed to, for instance, romance) between men and women, I believe that you will enjoy the whole arc that Palamedes and Camilla undergo, except uhhhhh possibly for one thing towards the end that I do not myself know quite how to feel about so I guess I’ll have to wait until Alecto the Ninth comes out to make a decision on that.

Major spoilers in this paragraph: When I was listing my hopes and dreams for the Locked Tomb trilogy, I said that I wanted a really really good Palamedes and Camilla reunion. Here is what I have learned, friends: Tamsyn Muir may give you what you said you wanted, but whatever the case, she will find a way to inflict the maximum amount of psychic damage on you as she goes. Before Nona came out, I spoke to a friend who was rereading Gideon, and they were like, “Can you imagine Crux’s face if he ever found out Gideon was God’s daughter? Like, I know that could never happen, but can you imagine?” and I was all “wow yeah that would be satisfying,” but secretly inside my own heart I was thinking, “It will not be satisfying and you will be devastated.” Anyway that was a very charming thing that happened to me, and I wanted to share it. Hopefully my friend was able to derive satisfaction from Gideon’s very spot-on burn of how badly Crux fucked up both her and Harrow. I certainly enjoyed it. I am very much in the tank for Gideon and Harrow’s devotion to each other, and it sends a zing of pleasure up my spine any time one of them heatedly defends the other. They’re so in love! They’re such good girls! I love them!

In interstitial chapters, John is explaining to Harrow — but he doesn’t really really seem to be talking to Harrow — what he did and why things are like this. You do not discover answers to questions like “is Harrow alive” or “where did necromancy come from really” but you do discover answers to questions like “why does nobody ever talk about Ulysses and Titania” and “is it chill and fine to turn cows inside out, or will people get upset” and “how soon did people start correctly identifying that John is a fucking cult leader.” There is also the creepiest possible scene which I will share here for extensive discussion in the comments:

He was scooping indentations in the sand, making big, print-block child’s letters with the tip of his forefinger. As she watched, he made a pothook–J–then the finned spine of E. He wiped that E clean, and replaced it with A. He wiped that clean, and he drew the prison bars of H. This J and H he barred around with an uneven heart.

Just a few quick follow-up Qs:

1. What?
2. How is John so altogether fucking creepy?
3. J is John and H is Harrow and A is Alecto, so who the shit is E?
4. What?

Implied major spoilers in this paragraph: I had a dream in graphic novel form about some Catholic teenagers ruining one another’s lives, and in the dream one of the Catholic teenagers was reading Nona the Ninth and she looked up from the ?page? (idk she was a pen and ink drawing, I don’t think there even was a page, it was a weird dream) and said, “Is E the Earth?” and now I can’t stop thinking about that. E is the Earth, right? Alecto’s the Earth? And if I may, how many fucking times has John rebuilt all his fucking friends? Please discuss in the comments. I am troubled by the implication that a) they possibly may have had different names the first time around; and b) John resurrected them after killing them; and c) it is not outside the realm of possibility that John has done this more than once. Eeeeeeuuuuurrrrrrrgggghhhh.

Have you read Nona yet? Did you love it? Do you have theories you wish to share in the comments?

The post Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir appeared first on Reading the End.

Our cast of characters includes Bambi-eyed lesbian Judy, waitress/writer Bette, a CEO and her trophy husband, a line cook (survived COVID only to perish at the hands of a megalomaniac!), and a young guy who’s hoping to get hired at the pharmaceutical company run by, coincidentally, the same CEO that’s just sat down for a meal. Judy hit her girlfriend in a recent argument. The trophy husband is cheating on the CEO. The CEO belittles and controls him.

I really, really did not expect to enjoy this episode, but it’s my second favorite so far (after “Dream a Little Dream of Me”). The comic was telling a story about the evil that lurks in the hearts of men, and that wasn’t something I found interesting or surprising even at age eighteen when I first read Sandman. Now, many years and one attempted coup later, I just don’t need to be told that everyone’s fundamentally bad. Luckily, the show isn’t trying to tell me that. It’s telling a story that’s more complicated and more true, that we all have good and bad within ourselves, we all choose to tell certain truths and certain lies, and the selves we curate with those choices are our authentic selves. John Dee isn’t revealing these people’s inner truths. He’s just changing how they curate.

It starts small, when Bette calls John “handsome.” Does she really think he’s handsome, John asks, cradling the ruby. No, says Bette. She just wanted him to like her. “I do like you,” John says, Dutch-angled-ly. Isn’t it better to be able to say what we actually think? I know the answer to this one! It is not! We think a lot of things, and the nice things we think aren’t faker than the mean things! I mean, sometimes they are, and that is why it’s a relief to go to New York City sometimes; but sometimes they’re not, and that’s why it’s a relief to come back home to the South sometimes. The world is a rich tapestry, and only rarely does it require us to stab someone in the neck with a diner utensil.

The CEO and the trophy husband snipe at each other. She thinks he’s cheating (he’s cheating). He thinks she undermines him (she undermines him). Mark, the guy waiting for his corporate interview, tells Judy to stop texting because her girlfriend doesn’t want to hear from her. (PLAID WATCH, Judy is wearing plaid.) Furious, Judy gets up to storm out, but she finds that she can’t leave. Nobody can leave. We’re in the end game now.

Under the influence of the amulet, Judy tells John everything. John is like the creepiest horror movie shrink ever, assuring Judy that nobody is judging her. Judy says that everyone’s judging her for being gay, and John shares that Bette told Marsh Judy’s girlfriend isn’t good enough for her. This doesn’t bode well for the vibe inside the diner! Thunder rumbles outside. Night falls. Bette goes into the back to hit on Marsh, the line cook, while he’s cleaning the grill. (PLAID WATCH, Marsh is wearing plaid.) Marsh tells her that he’s fucking her son, and Bette throws some utensils on the floor and storms out. I really thought she was going to stab him with one of those utensils, but I guess that’s coming.

Next, everyone fucks. Mark begs the CEO to top him. Marsh makes the trophy husband a burger in bisexual lighting. Judy waits for Bette to come out of the bathroom (sexual). David Thewlis looks very, very tired as he extracts a large tub of ice cream from the freezer.

For the third act, John tells the diner inhabitants that they enjoy their suffering, and that’s their truth. The truth, he says like a cult leader, is a cleansing fire. Bette burns her book manuscript. Mark hammers a nail into his hand, and Marsh meat-cleavers off his own fingers. Judy slits her wrists, and the CEO cuts her throat. Tearfully, Bette asks how this is a better world, and John tells her to embrace the darkness, which we all already know means that she’s going to skewer her eyes. I sensibly looked away, and I advise you to do the same.

After a quick prophecy from the Fates (the Fates are still very very cool), Dream stomps into the diner in his shitkicker boots, and he is not happy. Not a particular fan of humanity himself, Dream still tells John that people in the diner started their day in a reality that was founded in dreams, not lies, and all John did was to rob them of their hopes. The two of them head into a dream to duke it out, and although it’s quite spooky for John to be chasing after the elusive caped figure of his mother in Roderick Burgess’s old house (I’m thrilled to see Niamh Walsh again; she continues to make the most of very small moments as young Ethel), he eventually figures out that he’s in a dream. He sets the ruins of the Dreaming on fire and uses the ruby to suck more of Dream’s power away. Then he destroys the ruby.

Bad luck, John! All the power in the ruby reverts to Dream when it gets destroyed! Dream puts him back in Arkham Asylum, where I have to assume he’s not going to be hugely popular, right? Given that he splatted at least three guards that we know of, like, a week ago? And I’m kind of annoyed that this mass murderer gets to live while Dream mercy-killed Rachel two episodes ago. Whatever, I guess. As Dream strolls away all smug, we zoom in on a tres glamorous person in a white suit, who smiles their red-lipstick lips and says, “I’m watching you… big brother.” Dun dun DUNNNNNNNN. Mason Alexander Park has the perfect look for this character, and I’m excited to see more of them.

Number of things Dream cares about in this episode, other than his duty: Correctly, none!

Does Dream do a sulk? Honestly, Dream is the nicest version of himself when, as now, he has a mission that you and I want him to succeed at. Not one scrap of a sulk in this episode. He’s actually pretty nice at the end (because, again, of duty).

Fuckboy energy: 0/10. John Dee is so terrible and creepy that Dream doesn’t even register on the scale. Don’t worry, though! He’s going to be such a fuckboy next episode! (I assume.)

The post Sandman, Episode 5: 24/7 appeared first on Reading the End.

What you don’t realize about is that this is secretly an episode of The Amazing Race, a television program I have never seen but I’m pretty confident this joke works. Our teams are competing to find and retrieve the final tool that was taken from Dream during his captivity, a ruby of unknowable power. Last time Dream had it, he got captured by penny-ante magicians! Last time John Dee had it, he killed a whole bunch of people! Whatever the outcome of this thrilling race against time, you can be sure that the person who triumphs is going to use their winnings to really thrive.

Let’s meet our first team! As you remember, John Dee has recently escaped from Arkham Asylum, splatting at least three people in the process. He looks terribly forlorn and pitiful in his asylum clothes, and a kindly woman—after hitting him with her car—offers him a ride. She is played by Sarah Niles, who you remember as the inexplicably chilly and hostile therapist from Ted Lasso. They bond over both having terrible mothers, and you can almost, sort of, slightly feel like John Dee might be okay, until he starts talking about the people he’s killed. At that point you just know that John Dee is going to kill very nice Rosemary and her very nice Rottweiler, so it’s stressful. I was so worried about Rosemary that I looked up whether she was going to survive, because this character is a sweet dear in the comics too and John Dee very much kills her. (TV Rosemary does survive. THANK GOD.)

Our second team are Dream and the raven he doesn’t want, whose name is Matthew and who is voiced by Patton Oswalt. In order to find the ruby, they first have to get Dream’s helmet back from the demon who has it, so they’re heading down to hell for some exposition, as if we the viewers don’t already know the backstory on Lucifer. I could have done with slightly more images of the things being done to the tortured souls of hell, but the visuals we do get, of humans half-transformed into cave walls and trees, writhing in agony, are quite creepy and awful. It’s nasty. I loved it. Dream explains to Matthew that Lucifer is miles more powerful than he, Dream, is, and that Dream isn’t an honored guest the way he was the last time he was here. I guess because of not having his helmet?

Their guide takes them on a path that Dream isn’t as familiar with, and things take a real turn when one of the tortured souls of Hell recognizes Dream. She’s a young Black woman called Nada, and when she speaks to Dream, he appears as a young Black man, which is a good echo of the comics that ???hopefully???? will make the optics of the Nada storyline less horrifying. Anyway, Nada is here in Hell, she’s being tortured, and only Dream’s forgiveness can free her. He admits that he still loves her, but he has not forgiven her. My fuckboy dial spun round and round at top speed, became a blur, and then broke off with a loud twanging noise. Dream is the worst, and after the last episode’s batch o’ violent deaths for characters of color, I was in no mood for this.

And yes! Since you ask! They did indeed walk past Nada on purpose! Lucifer wanted to fuck with Dream. I had mixed feelings because on one hand, hate this for Nada, but on the other hand, I’m incapable of not being delighted when someone fucks with Dream.

I can’t decide how I feel about Gwendolen Christie’s performance as Lucifer. I enjoyed her time with Dream, but more because of the way Dream is responding to her than anything she herself is doing. It’s a real “is she good or is she just tall” moment. What does come through is that Lucifer and Dream kinda like each other, or at least enjoy butting heads, but that’s not going to stop Dream from being autocratic, or Lucifer from fucking with Dream to the limits of her power. Dream doesn’t know the name of the demon that has his helmet, so Lucifer summons every demon.

She thinks this is very clever, but perhaps not to my surprise, Dream is unfoiled. He pours out some of his sand, which will bring “that which is mine in Hell” to him. Choronzon, Duke of Hell, shows up with spiky purple hair and Dream’s helmet, and he is not prepared to give the helmet back without a fight. Cool! Dream is going to fight on his own behalf, but Choronzon asks Lucifer to be his representative in the fight. If I were the ruler of all hell, I would probably not agree to fight on behalf of my lowly demon subjects, even to fuck with a self-serious member of the Endless, but of course Lucifer probably gets bored and needs to liven things up. She’s excited to fight Dream, and Dream gets a face on him like: This is bloody typical. See! This is how you make Dream relatable! Not by having him keep giving too many damns about his damn raven!

The fight between Dream and Lucifer is a) too faithful to the comics and b) way the fuck too slow. The genre of fight is that they’re transforming into things and trying to defeat each other as those things. Ultimately Lucifer says that she’s the end of all life, and Dream says he’s hope, and that’s the battle won. It is pretty anticlimactic considering all the writhing, tormented bodies Dream walked past to get here. I have also long been of the opinion that we’ve already seen the best version of this type of duel, and it was the duel Merlin had with the magnificent marvelous mad mad mad mad Madam Mim. It’s done! It’s over! The apex of this art form has been achieved! Other media should just admit defeat and go home.

(Matthew gives Dream a pep talk in the middle of this speech, but I thought that was really stupid so I refuse to say more about it.)

Dream walks away from Lucifer in slow motion with triumphant music playing behind him. It is just a little bit too much. That Tom Sturridge has resting Blue Steel face is good most of the time and is certainly in keeping with the character. But in this moment, with the slow-mo and the soundtrack trying to hype him up, I was forced to say aloud in the quiet of my own home: “The files are in the computer,” just to remind Dream that he’s not all that.

With the helmet in hand, Dream’s able to find his way to the ruby. It’s a real good news / bad news situation: Yeah, he gets to the ruby first and you think he’s won the Amazing Race, but, downside, John Dee was telling the truth last time: He changed the ruby so only he can use it, so the ruby knocks Dream out. John Dee strolls in, still looking as waifishly ill as ever, and picks the ruby up. When he goes back outside, he finds that Rosemary is still there, waiting to offer him a ride, and he gives her his amulet of protection to Rosemary. We all breathe a sigh of relief when the credits roll, because it means that Rosemary and her very good dog are going to live. Good luck, Rosemary and Susie!

How I’d fix this episode: Cut the exposition by two thirds and make the fight more exciting! For God’s sake! I have never seen a high-stakes fight that proceeded so slowly. Also, I would have liked to see more torments for the souls in hell. If the writers couldn’t think of any themselves, they were perfectly able to steal the ones that Dante talks about in Inferno. It is out of copyright.

Number of things Dream cares about in this episode, other than his duty: None. It’s literally just his duty all episode long. When Matthew gives him his pep talk (I’m not discussing it), the whole contents of the pep talk are just, You have a duty to me, your raven and your subject, and Dream’s like, oh yeah, good point, and gathers his shit together to win the fight.

Does Dream do a sulk? Sooooooort of. Like, the aftermath of his relationship with Nada is one giant sulk, and you see the traces of it as he’s walking away from where she’s imprisoned. But I think that’s not enough of a standalone sulk, so I’m going to say, no.

Fuckboy energy: Fuckin… twelve zillion out of ten. His fuckboy energy when he’s talking to Nada, and then talking to Matthew about Nada, is through the roof. Dream is a total crapsack. I do very much like the actor who plays the version of Dream Nada sees. His name’s Ernest Kingsley Jr., and he’s starring as the title character in a forthcoming Hulu adaptation of Washington Black. Can’t wait! Cheekbones!

The post Sandman, Episode 4: A Hope in Hell appeared first on Reading the End.

In Buffalo, New York, Joely Richardson, as Ethel, is hawking some art in several different languages. This is very sexy of her. She is clearly too young to be Ethel, but a thrown-in line later on tells us that she’s made herself youthful by supernatural means. If that’s the case, I wish they’d just stuck with the original actress, who exuded a fascinating combination of warmth and steeliness. The Corinthian breaks into her house to let her know that Dream is out of his cage and will be coming after both of them. As a reminder, the Corinthian has teeth for eyes. He wears sunglasses, but underneath the sunglasses, his eyes are teeth. I miss his little straw boater from the olden days.

Dream sulkily admits to Lucienne that he will need to consult the Fates to find out what’s happened to his stuff. Lucienne is against this; she thinks maybe he should ask his siblings for help, maybe let them know what’s been going on with him. Dream says stonily, “I am quite sure they know what happened to me, and not one of them came to my aid.” That is actually a really good point! Is this addressed in the comics? It’s kind of hurtful that none of them even missed him! Anyway, he doesn’t have enough power to summon the Fates, so he has to go visit Cain and Abel and unmake their pet gargoyle, Gregory. Cain and Abel do not, let’s say, feel like an integral part of the story here—one of those times where adherence to the source material isn’t serving the show well. Even more insanely, Dream cries about unmaking Gregory. That would never happen!! Dream is nice enough to make a cute lil gargoyle, but he is not nice enough to cry about unmaking one.

After picking up some stuff from other people’s dreams, including a snake and a large egg, Dream summons the fates (Maiden, Mother, and Crone). They give him cryptic answers about the whereabouts of his stuff: Johanna Constantine was the last person to buy his pouch of sand; the helmet was traded to a demon in exchange for an amulet of protection; and the ruby passed from a mother to a son. When they leave, Lucienne notices that Dream didn’t give them the egg, just the snake, and he says that the egg is not for them.

Abel, whom Cain has bad-temperedly stabbed after Gregory’s demise, wakes up in a shallow grave with the egg beside him. He takes it back to show Cain, and it hatches into a new baby gargoyle! Eh, the new gargoyle is fine. I miss Gregory. Justice for Gregory! Abel tries to name the baby gargoyle Irving, and Cain kills him again because all gargoyles have to have names that begin with a G, and it’s very annoying that Abel has not done so. Lol. Does Neil Gaiman have siblings? The naming of pets is indeed very contentious and it makes sense siblings would come to blows over it. I judge this to be truth in television.

When Abel wakes up again, he exposits to the baby gargoyle that Cain always kills Abel, and Abel really doesn’t mind. Then he tells Goldie a different story about two brothers who are nice and kind and brotherly, and the older brother never hurts the younger brother at all. Goldie receives this with interest. “And they’d be happy,” says Abel. The scene should have cut here, but instead Abel says he doesn’t mind being killed if it makes Cain happy, and he chipperly wanders off and it’s a laugh line. I am mostly enjoying this show so far, but can it please be more ruthless? I feel like it’s scared of hurting me, but I have come here to be hurt.

In the waking world, Ethel is still bantering with the Corinthian. After some heavy flirt-and-threat action between them (I ship it), she tells him, that she got rid of the helmet and pouch years ago (smart), but that she gave the ruby to her son, John, and it consumed him. The Corinthian takes off his sunglasses and leans more heavily on the threat side of things, but Ethel pulls out her amulet of protection (as mentioned by the Fates), which sorts of sklooshes him into evaporating blood ribbons. Don’t worry. Our teeth-eyed pal will be back. Ethel goes to visit her son in the hospital/asylum (I guess it couldn’t be Arkham Asylum for copyright reasons, but you and I know it’s Arkham Asylum really). John, played by David Thewlis, is not a fan of hers, due to all the many lies she has told him in the course of his life.

Back in the Dreaming, Morpheus tells Lucienne that he’s going to London first, to get the sand, and then to Hell for the helmet. Lucienne advises him to take a raven with him, because a raven could go back and forth between the realms and keep Lucienne posted on what’s happening. I still do not completely buy Dream’s grief over Jessamy, but it’s absolutely in character that he’s all, I am Dream of the Endless, I don’t need a baby-sitter. He’s confident he can take Johanna Constantine. I am alight with desire to meet Johanna Constantine and maybe go on a date with her.

Elsewhere in the dreaming, a bunch of globby blood ribbons reconstitute themselves into the Corinthian. He still does not have his stupid little boater hat. I liked the boater hat! Lucienne tries to convince him to do his duty and be a loyal subject of Dream. “He doesn’t give a fuck about you or me,” says the Corinthian. “He only cares about himself. His kingdom.” This is true enough to be interesting! Even more accurately, as the Corinthian whisks himself back into the waking world, he tells Lucienne: “You can’t change him. You can’t save him.” HIGHLY ACCURATE.

How I’d fix this episode: I enjoyed this episode, and I think Tom Sturridge and Vivienne Acheampong have good and interesting chemistry, despite the fact that all their scenes have been pretty exposition-heavy so far. I just feel that the show overall needs to be more ruthless. It’s been shying away from gore, and Dream is caring about way too many things. I am going to start keeping count of the number of things Dream cares about in each episode, and you will see it’s unreasonable and out of character.

Canon fodder: There is no reason for Cain and Abel to be in this episode. It’s actually a case where they were better integrated into the original — Gregory is the one who finds Dream all sodden and pitiful, and takes him home to Cain and Abel. As things stand, we spend a weird amount of time on Gregory’s death and its emotional impact on everyone. Gregory is cute and all, but this feels superfluous.

Number of things Dream cares about in this episode, other than his duty: 4 (his realm being all fucked up, the fact that his siblings didn’t come save him, Gregory’s death, and the raven who died last week). I wouldn’t mind him caring about Jessamy and Gregory as subjects of his realm, but I simply do not buy his caring for them as people. Arguably he also cares about Cain and Abel enough to get them another gargoyle, but it feels perfectly in character that he’d just drop off this gargoyle egg and never speak of it. I’ll allow it.

Does Dream do a sulk? Yes, a giant one, in his ruined throne room, and then the sulk intensifies when Lucienne brings up his siblings. Very realistic.

Fuckboy energy: 6/10. Tom Sturridge does some highly fuckboy face acting during the scene with the Fates. I feel like he’s hitting his stride.

The post Sandman, Episode 2: Imperfect Hosts appeared first on Reading the End.

Sandman is a very comics-y comic. It’s epic in scope, and it does that thing to which comics are uniquely suited where it just abandons its lead for big chunks of issues at a time in order to tell different, small, weird stories in the same world. One of the volumes is just about a bunch of people stuck in a hotel together during a storm, and each issue in the volume is a story that one of the people at the hotel is telling the others. Sandman is weird, and it’s one of these foundational comics that taught the form what it could be, and I have loved it for half my life, and it’s in my fucking veins, so it has been hard for me to be cool about the new Netflix adaptation, which I so dearly want to enjoy and even dearly-er want to tell the entire run of the comics. I fucking need Brief Lives. I need it. I NEED IT.

All of that is to say that I do not think the first episode of Sandman took the correct lessons from Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, for my money the best book-to-movie adaptation there has ever been. The lessons Sandman took from Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring were that people really dig voice-overs and long swooping camera shots. The first part is simply untrue. People hate voice-overs. They are terrible. Fellowship gets away with it because they put it over good and interesting visuals, and also you just really can’t start the story without the exposition about what the Ring is and why we should care.¹ The long swooping camera shots are fine if what you’re swooping over is God’s own country of New Zealand,² but if you’re swooping over a CGI version of Dream’s realm, it just gives a lady flashbacks to the early Harry Potter movies, which is a bummer because JKR is a TERF supervillain now, and also cinema has advanced since the turn of the millennium when those movies were made.

But, whatever. Fine. We start with Dream doing a mopey, portentous voiceover as we pan through his realm. He’s got a librarian called Lucienne (not sure why gender-swapping her necessitated a name change, but Vivienne Acheampong really captures the character’s nervy intelligence from the comics, and also she is very very pretty), a pet raven, and an escaped dream called the Corinthian who you definitely remember from the comics because he fucking has teeth for eyes and that’s so fucked up and nobody should have to live with that. Thanks for the nightmares, Neil Gaiman! Just as Dream is about to stop the Corinthian from going out into the mortal realm and doing evil, he’s trapped by a spell cast by a two-bit Aleister Crowley knock-off, Roderick Burgess. Burgess is played by Charles Dance. Charles Dance eats it. Charles Dance was made for this role.

I felt so frustrated with all the interstitial voiceovers in this episode! We don’t need this. If the show would trust its audience a little more, we’d be fine! Like, we get it! Dream has been imprisoned in this glass bubble and he’s mad about it! He’s the king of dreams, and stuff is going wrong with sleep. That makes perfect sense and does not require further explanation! Tom Sturridge can dedicate himself to what he does very well in this episode, which is resentful seething while looking ropy and dead in his glass bubble. Charles Dance has a queer son called Alex who feels deeply uneasy with all this imprisoning of Dream, and I have to say that every moment where he makes eye contact with Dream is electrifying. The silent, desperate chemistry between these two people whose lives Roderick Burgess has ruined is by far the best thing about the episode. (After seeing more episodes of this show, I would like to report that one of Tom Sturridge’s gifts is having truly excellent chemistry with just about everyone.)

Time goes on, and we catch a few glimpses of how life has changed. Now that he has control over Dream’s helmet, focus stone (a ruby), and pouch of dream sand, as well as a working grimoire, Burgess prospers. Alex meets an ambitious blonde woman called Ethel who becomes his father’s mistress. Niamh Walsh makes the most of her limited screen time, imbuing Ethel with a core of steel that makes me wish we might see more of her. Pretty soon she gets pregnant, and when Burgess proposes to abort the child, she makes off with Dream’s things and the bulk of Burgess’s fortune. We’ve had the fuck around portion of Burgess’s life, and we have now proceeded to the find out. Burgess goes down to the dungeon to taunt and entreat Dream to give him what he wants — his favored older son’s life back, and/or wealth and prosperity beyond Burgess’s wildest dreams — and in the course of a scuffle with his unfavored younger son, Alex…. kinda kills him. Nobody seems to care, which, fair enough.

Alex meets a hot gardener who becomes his boyfriend. His hot gardener makes quite a face upon seeing Dream imprisoned in the basement, and honestly I would not stay in a relationship with someone who had a naked, seething, dead-looking man in a glass bubble in his basement. That would be a deal-breaker for me. Paul, the gardener, grows old with Alex (again, I would not). We see him wheeling Alex down to see Dream one last time, and as he wheels him away, the wheelchair smears the line of the summoning circle that’s keeping Dream captive. Paul glances back at Dream meaningfully. Thanks, Paul! Like I think you should have done this decades ago, but hey, you came through in the end. I want good things for you, Paul, old chum.

Dream escapes. It’s quite a cool, stylish sequence that makes better use of visuals than any of the big swooping establishing shots. But I don’t think Dream kills the guards? I don’t think Dream kills anyone, and what really grinds my gears is that they defang the truly quite horrific punishment Dream metes out to Alex in the comments, which is that he’s perpetually inside of a nightmare, and every time he wakes up, he just wakes up into a new nightmare. In this version of the story, Dream just puts Alex to sleep forever. It’s very anticlimactic.

After meting out no punishment at all (disappointing), Dream heads back to his own realm. Lucienne is there, but the realm is in ruins. Dream vows to rebuild.

How I’d Fix This Episode: This entire episode should have been from Alex’s perspective, and he should have received his creepy-ass canonical punishment as a climax. His miserable complicity in Dream’s decades-long captivity is genuinely interesting and emotional. To retain the necessary exposition, Alex could have had a sort of mental connection with Dream that results in his dreaming things about Dream’s realm, the Corinthian, etc., which would also have heightened the uneasy connection he feels to Dream and made his refusal to let Dream go even more unforgivable.

Does Dream Do a Sulk? Yes. This episode is one giant Dream sulk. Tom Sturridge does a great job.

Fuckboy Energy: 1/10. Dream tears up when Alex shoots his raven right when the raven’s coming to try and rescue him. I’m sorry, but that would never happen.

The post Sandman, Episode 1: Sleep of the Just appeared first on Reading the End.

The Theft of Sunlight is a companion novel to Thorn that doesn’t (in my opinion) require prior knowledge of Thorn in order to read it. It follows Rae, a country girl who comes to the royal court and becomes handmaiden to the new queen, Alyrra (Thorn from Thorn!). There she begins to learn how to navigate the treacherous world of the monarchy and aristocracy, all while trying to discover who or what is behind the epidemic of child-snatching that has been plaguing Menaiya. Determined to recover the lost children, or at least find answers for their families, Rae faces the dangers and intrigues the city has to offer — and the confusing, irritating charms of a thief called Bren.

Intisar Khanani’s trademark as a writer is “good girls trying their best.” I felt such affection for Rae almost immediately — she’s spent much of her life being told that she’s not good enough because of her clubfoot, and she is fiercely protective of her sister, who can do magic. (It is important that nobody finds this out, because Rae’s family doesn’t trust the Circle of Mages and doesn’t want them anywhere near Niya.) When she goes to court — initially to visit her cousin Melly, who has married up — she hopes to have the chance to push more powerful people into doing something about the child snatchers. She emphatically does not want to be the queen’s attendant. Like, at all. But she can’t pass up the opportunity to gain the ear of the queen, who (presumably) can pursue the child snatcher problem in a more organized way; so she agrees to this life that she knows will be hostile and unfamiliar to her. She is a good girl. I want the best for this good girl.

Like her past novels, The Theft of Sunlight has its fair share of darkness and moral ambiguity: not just the ever-present threat of the child-snatchers, but Rae’s own feeling that she is becoming morally compromised by staying at the court, by spending time with Bren and other members of the city’s underworld, by spending time following the queen around rather than pursuing the child snatchers. But there’s something tremendously comforting about Khanani’s writing, despite the darkness, and I think it has to do with her careful, weighty articulation of values.

“Bren. Would it have been all right if I angered you and you punched me instead?”

“No.” His voice is suddenly hard, brooking no argument.

“Then why is it fine if I punch you?”

He looks at me, and the silence spreads out between us until I feel like I’m drowning.

“You see,” I say, my voice hoarse in my throat.

“No,” he says again. “Rae, there are certainly times when a woman punching a man is an irredeemable act of violence. When she is stronger, or more vicious, and she uses her actions to abuse him. But that wasn’t what happened…. In a fight between you and me, I would always win. We both know that. So your hitting me — it’s a sign of trust, in its way, that you could lash out and know that I wouldn’t hurt you back. It wasn’t abuse.”

“You’re right. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me back.” It hadn’t even occurred to me. “That doesn’t change the fact that I wanted to hurt you.”

“And you’d do it again?”

“No.”

“Then it is not all that you are, and it doesn’t have to define you. It’s something you did, which you regret. It’s not actually you.”

I look at him, his words clicking together in my mind: that this is the difference between me and [spoiler character], for his is a practiced violence, and mine was a single act, regretted. That I am not the same as him, for all that I was willing to let my anger ride me as it does him. I am and can and will be different; I do not have to let this break me.

I’ve seen plenty of books where a female protagonist hits a guy character who’s not specifically her enemy, but rarely have I seen the characters exploring the moral implications of the act afterward. I just appreciated this conversation so much! Rae knows that hitting someone in anger isn’t in line with her values, and the book gives her the time to explore what that action does and doesn’t mean about her.

Trust and truth are major themes in The Theft of Sunlight. Along a vast number of axes, Rae doesn’t know whom she can trust: Who will reliably accommodate her disability? Who will tell her what she needs to know in order to be Alyrra’s attendant? Who can share information about the child snatchers without placing Rae or themselves in danger? Who will tell her the truth, and who will lie? And the answers are, nearly always, complicated. Coming from a background where she has been able — most of the time — to speak the truth herself and trust the truth of what others tell her, Rae struggles to adapt to her new environment, where everyone around her is keeping some secrets, and she is, too.

I would like, also, to shout out the fact that a big piece of solving the mystery is TAX RECORDS. This is going to sound like a joke, but I am genuinely so high on this fact. Like, that’s so real! Financial records genuinely and truly answer questions, and point up new avenues for exploration. The fact that Rae acquires a friend and ally in the tax office just made my heart sing.

The presence of enslavers looms large in this book, so I do want to address how that’s handled (as the presence of enslaved people in fantasy novels tends to make me nervous). Khanani notes in an endnote that what’s being depicted here is inspired by, and draws from the experiences of, modern-day human trafficking, rather than historical instances of slavery. Because this book is the first part of a duology, Rae doesn’t come out of it with all the answers, but it’s clear that the problem of child theft depends on … drumroll please… corporate greed! While I tend to get nervous about depictions of fantasy slavery, I really appreciated that the book and its protagonist never lose sight of the horror of what’s happening. Any time another (upper-class) character casts doubt on what’s happening, someone else is there to insist on the urgency of the problem.

As a small warning, The Theft of Sunlight ends on a hell of a cliffhanger! I was forewarned about this by Legal Sister, and I was glad to know in advance what to expect. It’s a wonderful book that made me feel warm inside, a classic YA adventure that will leave you wanting more.

Note: I received a review copy of The Theft of Sunlight from the publisher, for review consideration. This has not impacted my review.

The post Review: The Theft of Sunlight, Intisar Khanani appeared first on Reading the End.

If you are not aware of the Queen’s Thief series, I do recommend popping out and purchasing The Thief for yourself. Though you will not be getting the full experience. I, myself, have not had the full experience, because I am a Jenny-come-lately who, despite the best recommending efforts of Legal Sister, didn’t read these books until 2010, which is when A Conspiracy of Kings came out. I did not wait; I did not suffer. Others among us (like Legal Sister) read The Thief when it came out in 1996 and commenced a waiting game for the subsequent five books that only bore full fruit in this, the year of our Lord 2020.

“Stop being weird, Jenny! Tell us what the books are about!” Yes, okay, so, these books are set in a society that’s inspired by classical antiquity, drawing specific inspiration from the Persian Wars and the small Greek states that held out against the Persian Empire despite odds that were, shall we say, daunting. At the center of the series is a boy named Eugenides, who is a thief. That is basically all I can say about the series without spoiling the entire thing. These books are a complicated machine, powered by intrigue and feelings. So many feelings. They also contain the angriest women and the softest men, including perhaps the purest cinnamon roll character in all of literature. Here is a further recap of the series, just so you know what to expect. (Book one: Road trip! Shenanigans! Book two: High-octane emotional devastation!)

Anyway, my non-spoilery review of Return of the Thief is that it was tremendous, there were elephants, it was everything I wanted it to be, and I feel joyful but also bereft to know this amazing series is at an end. What follows below the line is some disconnected and spoiler-filled fangirl screaming.

(I am not doing this to tease you! These books are so extremely serialized that even mentioning certain characters in affectionate terms is a spoiler. I’m so serious. It’s a spoiler to say with affection the full names of, I’m going to say, three? of the seven major characters.)

My opinions are as follows, and I have put them into bullet points:

• I would die for Pheris
• Megan Whalen Turner very clearly has spent the last twenty-four years thinking “What if Thermopylae, but haunted” and now we must all think about that too so thanks a lot, Megan Whalen Turner
• I can’t believe that after twenty-four years of dishing out the most devastating scraps of emotional availability, Megan Whalen Turner has produced a veritable feelings orgy
  • Irene buying Gen a horse like the troll she fundamentally is
  • Sophos picking out the horse for Gen like the cinnamon troll he fundamentally is
  • every single monarch of the Little Peninsula lowkey conspiring to protect Gen from going into battle
  • HIERO EARRINGS HELP ME WHYYYYY
  • Costis going absolutely feral over the prospect of Kamet being danger
  • Eugenides going somehow even more feral over the prospect of Kamet being in danger
  • “They do not smile at first, Your Majesty.”
  • “Why that orange tree? What that tamarisk bush?”
• It turns out we have been grievously underestimating the amount of murder of which Gen is capable
• Years and years and years and years and YEARS ago Megan Whalen Turner told us that Gen would see an elephant and be like “I want that elephant”
  • It happened.
  • Also, he fed them melons
  • Irene was like “where would you even keep an elephant anyway”
  • then, in the truest expression of love, she GETS HIM THE ELEPHANTS
  • I thought he was going to steal an elephant
  • This was better.
  • (because of my feelings)
• Of all the characters I would die for, I would die for Irene the most. Evidence:
  • Elephants; op cit.
  • “I did not become inappropriate all by myself!”
  • “I am not here to cut Sophos’s food him”
• THERMOPYLAE, BUT HAUNTED
• Disaster bisexual Relius (!) and disaster virgin Teleus (!!!!)
• the play to catch the conscience of the king
  • I was SO ANGRY at first
  • I was UNIMAGINABLY angry, like, I was ready to burn some shit down
  • not least because “swayed by a pretty face” like how actually dare you insult Irene Attolia in this manner
  • and then? Megan Whalen Turner?
  • just?
  • changed everything???
  • and Cenna said, “But it was funny, Gen, wasn’t it?”
  • and actually, it’s not Hamlet’s stupid fucking play plan; it’s someone who knows Gen well enough to call him by his nickname being an absolute dick to Gen
• I know I already did a whole bullet point about emotions but:
  • Pheris’s whole strategy of being underestimated
  • The King of the Strategy of Being Underestimated, Attolis Eugenides Eugenideides, doesn’t not fall for it
  • “To hell with Lader if he thinks I will not trust you”  H E L P  M E.
  • PHERIS
  • P H E R I S.
• the moment when Irene is like “you think Kamet is dead?” and Gen is like “yep” and Irene is like “without Costis burning down the entire Mede Empire about it?” and Gen is like “Ah.”
• The whole thing ends with a dance party! Just what you want!

This is the end of my screaming thoughts. But maybe I will add more later. Who knows? I love this fucking series.

The post Return! of! the! Thief!, by Megan Whalen Turner appeared first on Reading the End.

After numerous sightings of Mariko Tamaki’s latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I broke down and bought it from an indie bookstore near the beach. Endcaps work! Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is about a girl called Freddy whose extremely cool sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, keeps breaking up with her. No matter how many times Laura Dean proves herself to be an unreliable jerkface, Freddy carries on wanting her, even at the expense of her other relationships.

I love this book so much that it’s going to be difficult for me to describe it dispassionately, but I shall try. My primary memory from reading This One Summer is that the Tamaki cousins, unlike very, very, very many adults, have not forgotten what it is like to be a kid. Having read Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I stand by that position. It’s one of these universal being-a-teenager stories done with extraordinary sensitivity and loveliness: Freddy is in love with someone flighty and unavailable, and she keeps on thinking that if she does everything just right (or maybe is a slightly different person), the relationship will become what she wants it to be.

(Spoiler for that relationship: It won’t.)

Rosemary Valero O’Connell’s art for this book is exceptional and contributes so much to the mood and texture of the story, including my position that these creators remember being a teenager. She makes use of numerous stage-setting panels in between those with dialogue, so we get a sense of these kids, the things on their bedroom floors, their diner orders, their small gestures and mannerisms. Here’s a panel of Freddy and her best friend Doodle sitting in class, preoccupied.

The cat pencil case? The clock in the corner? Doodle chewing on the end of her hoodie’s’s drawstrings? I remember this so much.

Laura Dean is, if I may say so, an actually perfect character in a high school novel. The story is framed in letters that Freddy writes to a national advice columnist, and those letters frame the art to show us the lens Freddy’s viewing Laura Dean through. Oh my God it’s so good, how vividly the art and voiceovers show you that Freddy’s always, always got her eye on Laura Dean, whether Laura Dean is flirting with someone else at the opposite end of the cafeteria, or smooching Freddy casually in the hall between classes. There’s some shit Laura Dean pulls at the very end that I won’t spoil because it’s the most perfect un-operatic high-school-asshole careless shittiness imaginable. But just to give you a sense, here she is blowing off Freddy with style and charisma (click to embiggen):

The hardest thing about teenagerhood — if you set aside all the regular-life hard things that happen during high school, which are the same regular-life hard things that happen after high school (illness, family illness, death, money troubles, friend troubles) except you’re too young to have context for what’s normal and you have virtually no power to affect outcomes so you’re just fucking swept along by every tidal wave that happens by — is learning to set aside what everyone else wants you to be, and sorting out what you want you to be. And that’s fundamentally the story of Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, told with compassion and insight and not an ounce of condescension for these characters as they try to figure out their shit. I loved it. I laughed, I cried. I recommended it to everyone. I bought it for someone. I started a Best of 2019 post just so I could put this book on it.

In case you are not convinced yet, let me add that I skimmed through looking for a couple of images that would illustrate what I loved so much about the art and writing, and whilst doing that I read the end, and it made me cry again. Even without the rest of the book! What a great fucking book. Do yourself a favor and read it straight away, and you can thank me later.

The post Review: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero O’Connell appeared first on Reading the End.

I’m going to take Max as an example, partly because I love Max and her dresses and how she does her hair, but also because her motives don’t change much over the run of the show, which makes it relatively simple to talk about her without getting into major spoilers. I will talk about the show’s trajectory in broad strokes, so if you absolutely can’t abide any spoilers whatsoever, just take my word for it that you want to watch Black Sails and that it’s better than Game of Thrones.

In the first season of Black Sails, Max has this fucking awful rapey plotline that I don’t even want to think about and really fuck this show for trying to be Game of Thrones when it should just have been its excellent gay piratey self. But the one tiny glimmer of a silver lining is that it provides Max with a really consistent motive throughout the rest of the series. She never wants to be currency again; she wants it to be impossible to dispose of her; she wants to have the power and run the table. That’s what is going to drive her.

The first thing Max does after she’s finished with the extremely dudes-wrote-this rape plotline (it wraps up circa episode six) is gain access to the levers of power in her immediate sphere, the brothel where she works. Her only resources right now are information, so that’s what she uses. Rather than displaying loyalty to her fellow sex workers when she sees them cheating on their payments, she shops them to the new brothel owner. At the same time, she’s working to undermine him, not enough to destabilize the whole enterprise, but enough to give herself an edge on him. Then something changes: It turns out the new brothel owner is not a dingbat like most of the men Max has had to deal with in the past; he is Captain Jack Rackham.

There’s this absolutely phenomenal scene where you think Jack is going to tell Max he’s wise to her tricks and they’re not going to work; but actually what he says (because he, too, has consistent motivations!) is “We should work together.” And because Max actually wants the thing she wants more than the writers care about contriving dramatic moments, Max agrees to work with him — creating, in the process, a fuck-ton of really dramatic and exciting and emotionally engaging plot. As it turns out, plot can arise out of characters — which is one of the things that makes Black Sails so great.

Now something else has changed. On Max’s mental map to get herself from the position she’s in to the position she wants to be in, Jack Rackham has shifted to actual ally. They will be allies, though uneasy ones, for the course of a full season — as long as their interests continue to align. (If this is making Jack Rackham sound like a sucker, I promise you that he is not. He is my treasure; he is incapable of giving a bad line read; everyone in this show is my dearest, best treasure.) But their partnership allows Max to accrue more resources, and she, because she is also my dearest treasure, uses them to best advantage: When things go to shit on Nassau at the end of Season 2, and everyone else is dashing about and panicking, Max is buying real estate. Because she doesn’t know who’s going to end up in charge when the dust settles, but she knows they’re going to need somewhere to sleep and drink and have sex.

Early in Season 3, Max and Jack’s interests fall abruptly out of alignment. What Jack wants — and again, this is consistent throughout the series! — is to be famous, infamous, a pirate captain whose story is known and told again and again. Max wants access to the levers of power. And at the start of Season 3, her access changes, because England comes to Nassau. Again, Max quickly moves to align herself with the most powerful person in the room, using the resources she has available to her. Money, property, sway over public opinion. She makes deals. She shows England what it needs from her.

But although she can, and does, make herself indispensable to the English, she can’t do that and maintain her partnership with the very pirates the English are trying to put a stop to. She’s ferociously defensive of her own agency, which means the partnership with Jack has to go. You see it coming over the course of several episodes, and it still hits you like a ton of bricks. The character work makes it painful; but the character work also makes it inevitable.

(There’s like four other reasons that I can think of right now why this particular split is so painful, but they’re kind of involved and more significantly spoilery. You will just have to trust me that this split has been seeded in ways that make it a cornucopia of emotional parallelism and sadness.)

Not to belabor a point, but the key to all this is that nothing changes about Max’s wants or Jack’s wants. Max doesn’t suddenly decide she wants to save a sister she’s spent seven seasons hating for excellent reason. She doesn’t go to a besieged city intending to kill a bitch and then abruptly decide it’s too scary and she’d better head out. The only change is the circumstance. Three seasons of building Max’s character make it impossible that she would do anything other than abandon her partnership with her pirate pals (even if we, personally, want everyone to stay friends). That’s why it works; that’s why it hurts.

A Final Note

I have chosen this one tiny element of the show to highlight. There are so many more things like this, all clicking together like the finest machineries. I’ve told this story from Max’s side, but there’s another version of it to be told from Jack’s side. If we wanted to get into the spoiler weeds, there’s a lot more to be said from the perspective of Jack Rackham’s really-real-from-real-history partner, Anne Bonny. And that’s just this plotline! One among many! Most of the time it’s not even the A plot.

Here’s the other thing: None of these characters are in my top five favorite characters on this show. That’s because this is the greatest show on earth. Nobody in the entire show has ever done anything wrong, not once, not ever.² Please watch Black Sails and please talk to me about it.

The post A Pitch for Consistent Character Motivations in Prestige Cable; or, Please Watch Black Sails For Real Because It Is So Good appeared first on Reading the End.

I adore and cherish romances where one of the principals appears to be a familiar type of character you’ve encountered a hundred times. Proper English only employs Pat’s pov (which is fine because Pat is a treasure), which means that we see Fen through her eyes only. If you didn’t know KJ Charles (or that this is an f/f romance), you might believe that Fen was going to serve the role characters like her usually serve: the flawlessly femme and frivolous YEAH I JUST DID THAT society bitch who exists to make Pat (not like other girls tm) feel bad about herself. Instead, Fen is fucking great. She lets people believe that she’s frivolous because it’s what they already want to see — but Pat is paying attention, so she’s able to see that there’s way more to Fen than curls and boobs.

Proper English is a murder mystery with a twist, that twist being that it’s also a romance novel, which means that everybody you care about has to end the story relatively happily. It’s great! I can’t believe I never thought of this as an innovation for a murder mystery! One of the saddest things about (some) manor house murder mystery novels is that the person who did it might end up being someone whose love story you were kind of rooting for. That can literally never happen in a romance novel. If the love is true, the lovers must be innocent. HOORAY. Moreover, the person who gets murdered also can’t be someone you cared about that much. It’s so good! I can’t imagine why murder mysteries haven’t all chosen to be romance novels.

If you love Agatha Christie but wish that she had included way more ladies kissing and way less racism, Proper English has you covered. It’s out on Wednesday, so you still have time to live your best life by preordering!

Note: I received an ARC of this book from the author for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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