The Wicker King

I think I expected this book to be speculative! It is not speculative. Rather, it's one of those books where a speculative thing and a mundane thing are going on at the same time and you can't be sure to what extent, if any, the speculative thing is real, because someone's psychotic.

That's something that deserves significant dissection, but as a person who has never, to their knowledge, hallucinated, I'm not the person to dissect it. An interesting point is that the rules of the purported hallucination are extremely consistent, and that interacting with them produces the expected result. However, there's also a clinical explanation with no chance of misdiagnosis, so: either it is an actual hallucination, or it's both an actual hallucination and an actual other world at the same time. Neither the hallucinator nor the narrator seem to have a strong and consistent opinion as to which it is.

On a story level, I kind of like this effect. On a psychosis-is-severely-misunderstood-and-stigmatised level, I'm morally bound to withhold judgement until I've seen what someone who's experienced a similar kind of hallucination has to say about it. (I've actually seen no discussion of this whatsoever, though also: I haven't gone looking.)

I can judge the codependency, which is possibly even more important to the book as a whole, better. It's portrayed well, and it's unusual among self-aware codependency narratives in the way it ends. I find this... more hopeful than the usual, but verging on too hopeful. It edges onto wish-fulfillment territory, which isn't always a bad thing - I'm just not positive it's a wish that should usually be fulfilled, though in this case all parties involved appear tentatively willing to put in the necessary work, so... this isn't really a complaint about the book, just a thing I kind of wish I could discuss with someone.

Selling points: cool mixed-media & printing effects; mostly good portrayal of mental illnesses, with caveats that I can't judge anything to do with hallucination; bi rep; poly rep (though it's subtle, not an established or establishing poly relationship so much as people figuring themselves out); teens being fucked-up messes.

Warnings: mixed media & super-short chapters (almost a series of flashfics rather than a novel in parts) make for an unusual effect, takes a bit of reading to get into; high school bullshit; people make bad decisions; people are in bad situations with no good decisions to make; not sure on the portrayal of hallucinations.

THE WICKER KING is a tale of compulsion, mental illness, loyalty, love, and consent; finding how far a king and his knight can go to save the world without burning up.

I loved reading this. The two main characters are so intertwined, so vivid and resonant that it took me half the book to realize that only one of them was actually a POV character. The way the story is told in one to two page sections made it feel like I could take a break anywhere if I needed to, if it ever got too intense for me. Instead I barely paused, inhaling it in a single sitting. 

The story is very focused on the MCs and their intense relationship, but has a few secondary characters and devotes enough time for them to feel like full characters. In a book so focused on the interior worlds of just two people it would be easy to have other characters be ill-defined and mere window-dressing. Instead their reactions to the MCs both established the secondary characters in their own right and helped to build up the MCs by commenting on things they were unable or unready to consider. Some of the secondary characters are also love interests, and they're handled in a way that maintains their agency even as they are allowed less and less space in the MCs' world. The photos, documents, and slowly darkening pages helped with world-building and mood, but even without that assistance this story is absorbing and fascinating. There were two worlds to build, and both were excellently laid. 

This is primarily about someone having difficult telling apart fantasy and reality, and the best friend doing his best to help. There are voices of reason trying to provide stability at various points, but the extent to which they do or do not succeed is crucial to the story, so take care of yourselves and check the CWs before proceeding.