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I have read enough Butler to recognise her style by now and though it is brilliant and terrifying it’s a bit too cynical to be a fun read. I think the vision presented in this book is right on the money on the politics and economics but universalises a too dark view of humanity.

Or maybe I’m wrong and I’ll just be eaten by the cannibal drug gangs when the collapse picks up a bit more speed.

It’s a fun, swashbuckling space adventure with lots of queer under/over/just tones. It makes sense. Well, like most sci-fi it makes absolutely no sense at all, but at least the author has clearly worked to make it feel internally consistent in precisely the way that YA fiction in particular seldom does.

CRUST PUNK ANARCHIST DEMON HUNTERS!!!

This book feels like a YA novel in that it touches on a lot of YA topics; the untrustworthiness of adults and the adult world, of childhood friendships and of growing up, etc. And also of evil, both cosmic Lovecraftian evil and much smaller sized evil in a way that feels mature and also fresh.



It’s also a fun, fast-paced read with great world building.

This book was written by someone who thinks alcoholism is a fun pastime and useful literary device to induce spontaneity, who has to insert a pop culture reference in every second sentence, and who seriously believes that politics is about having a the best binder with voter demographics. The politics of this book is the most smug post-political liberal brain worm bullshit I have read and the plot isn’t even that good to compensate, to the extent that it exists at all. If this is an escapist fantasy it’s an escape out of the frying pan and into the fire of bleak capitalist realism.



2 stars for cute Henry and good writing around Complicated International Relationships. I only cried once.

The series is really taking off now. It’s poignant and whimsical and funny. It’s got it’s own logic and massive urban fantasy world building of the kind that Harry Potter had, but it’s also apparent that we do books so much better now. It’s got queer representation, in the text (and subtext), that isn’t tokenised.



And best of all it’s doing interesting things with all the standard fantasy tropes: villains, magic, magical schools and good versus evil. I think this author thinks a lot more of her audience than previous children’s and YA book authors have, and that we will get much more sophisticated internal

politics than we would have seen in previous generations of works.



Also, this will be a great movie.