G. Deyke reviewed The Fallen by Ada Hoffmann
[Adapted from initial review on Goodreads.]
4 stars
There is so much neurodiversity in this book, and it is excellent. This book focuses mostly on Outside madness in various forms - which resembles regular mental illness, especially trauma disorders - and there's special attention given to plurality in particular. Only with the addition of eldritch magic powers. This straddles a magical disability line, but man, it is really nice to see a team of nine people of which eight are mentally ill. Of course they're not all given the same amount of development (that would be too many characters!) but their illnesses aren't minimised, and the book does a good job of exploring the way people interact with each other. Especially: harmful things are done with the intent to protect, and it's handled really nicely.
(Also: the mental illnesses being paired with magical abilities feels more like it's nerfing the abilities than that it's making up for the …
There is so much neurodiversity in this book, and it is excellent. This book focuses mostly on Outside madness in various forms - which resembles regular mental illness, especially trauma disorders - and there's special attention given to plurality in particular. Only with the addition of eldritch magic powers. This straddles a magical disability line, but man, it is really nice to see a team of nine people of which eight are mentally ill. Of course they're not all given the same amount of development (that would be too many characters!) but their illnesses aren't minimised, and the book does a good job of exploring the way people interact with each other. Especially: harmful things are done with the intent to protect, and it's handled really nicely.
(Also: the mental illnesses being paired with magical abilities feels more like it's nerfing the abilities than that it's making up for the mental illnesses, and mental illness (and neurodiversity in general) is absolutely shown to exist in this universe entirely apart from the eldritch powers; these things do a lot to mitigate the magical disability thing.)
I do want to put one major warning on this book: it is one of those in which a person does something which will cause unpleasant consequences if they are caught at it, and being caught at it seems very likely.
Selling points: neurodiversity!!!; resistance and revolution; eldritch magic; backstories on several major things introduced in The Outside (Enga, Elu, the Morlock wars); people working out relationship problems in a good way
Warnings: honestly kind of a stressful read: you can see things going wrong well before they actually do
