Reviews and Comments

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

Spoiler free version

Edit: I guess I never mentioned that this book is about the day that Moctezuma met with Cortez and all the things that were going on that day. One chapter is Moctezuma taking a nap

On one level this is a work of historical fiction. I love historical fiction, though I haven't read much of it since high school. Especially the political kind, and we've got all the things you'd expect of historical fiction in an imperial court: a mercurial, autocratic, deeply flawed ruler; a court full of people who live and die by their wits, some sympathetic, some not; constant danger and the threat of violence amidst the beauty of one of the great cities of the world, and even in this case a crisis brought on by the barbarians at the gates. I find myself really wanting to read more historical fiction after this, specifically set in one of the many ancient empires of Mesoamerica or South America, there is so much potential there.

It's described as anti colonial- there are several ways this is true, but one thing in particular is how it portrays the people incorrectly referred to as the Aztecs as a complex group with their own agendas, and with the Spanish being kind of secondary to it all. Just getting to hear the story from their perspective was great.

The names are a little hard to follow. I invented mnemonics to keep them straight. But I've seen much worse, at least the names are all distinct. It seems like a bad criticism of the book.

There's a lot more going on. I feel like I need to reread to fully understand it - in particular I'm not sure what the ant was about. A lot of people do a lot of drugs as the story goes on, including it seems the narrator, and I feel like it could use a few reads to wrap my head around it.

4 stars: loved this book, would recommend

I read this in like two days, first book in a while I've had trouble putting down. It had the constant tension I associate with a spy novel, but was a lot more introspective. I found it to be a pretty quick read for its length and for its literary-novel-ness, though the lack of quotation marks tripped me up a few times.

I saw some review describe it as "cynical" but I thought it was actually fairly optimistic, given the subject matter. I think it accurately describes the state of the world and am surprised that anything in there would be surprising in the year 2024, but there is a theme of a strange kind of hope in it. Every character is deeply flawed, but not absolved of the responsibility to do the right thing. The spy as protagonist, the "sympathizer", also lets you look at and understand the motivations of all the different sides in this war, not just as ideologies but also as people, and even when the motivations are actually deeply unsympathetic, most of the characters do seem very human (my one criticism is that this is a lot more true of the men than of the women). I also saw a review describe it as "funny" and that is probably not the first adjective I'd use, like it's not wrong but it is not the type of book you read if you want something funny.

It touched on a lot of subjects that I now consider kind of cliché in immigrant stories, but which were done so well that I did not feel that at all. Like the whole "stuck between two worlds" thing felt a bit more fresh, maybe because it did not buy into the model minority myth at all or discuss it at all. I guess making the protagonist a communist helps there, no pressure to be a doctor or lawyer. Some other reviews on other websites said it dragged in the middle part, but that was my favourite part. It was also a rare example of a mixed race Asian protagonist, and while some things did not quite ring true to my experience (though my background is otherwise quite different), its tendency to lean on stereotypes there didn't bother me too much and overall I thought it was much better written than such things usually are.

I haven't read a lot of spy novels and usually think of like, James Bond. I like that the protagonist is not a particularly tough guy and that he struggles with every aspect of being a spy in the ways that I think a real person would. In particular I liked the theme of the careful managing and splitting of identities. An obvious theme in a spy novel but I think one that also rings true to anyone who finds themselves, as the cliche goes, between worlds in some ways.

It is pretty graphic, though it only felt gratuitous in a few places - one particular scene I kind of rolled my eyes at.

Content warnings: some fairly graphic sexual assault, torture, murder, implied child sexual abuse. Racism (aimed towards the protagonist), misogyny (largely from the protagonist). Uh. bestiality?

3 stars - enjoyed this book, you might too

So on the one hand I would actually recommend reading this book if you don't know much about making things by hand. I definitely enjoyed the book most when it talked about stuff I didn't know much about.

On the other hand, there was a lot that annoyed me about this book.

First of all, the central conceit that there is something called craeft that is different from craft annoyed me, and yes this is the whole premise of the book so maybe it's unfair to complain about, but it still annoyed me every time it came up. I generally agree that traditional crafts are worth preserving and have value in and of themselves, and that they are particularly worth keeping around since climate change might mean we have to move away from certain types of mass mechanization and waste. (It's also very Britain-centric.)

However, this book is prone to the kinds of romanticization of pre-industrial life which I usually expect from people who have not actually made anything from scratch. Except he has! He should know better! I think the argument that it is somehow more satisfying to be more in touch with nature is somewhat undercut by the fact that needing to spend all day, every day, doing hard physical labour as a matter of survival kind of sucks.

If you ignore this kind of running theme though, the descriptions of various traditional crafts - many of which most people don't have the opportunity to do any more - is quite interesting and worth knowing about. Bonus points for standing up for basket-weaving. My hope is that people reading this book are inspired to learn a craft of their own, rather than just developing some kind of cottagecore theory of how life was better back then.