Slow to understand

It could well be me but it took me a while to figure out what was going on. When I got to the end it came together and I enjoyed the finale.

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Wonderful Ideas, but a Little Confusing

I feel so powerful ambivalent about this story and seeing other's strong reactions either way have only left me even more confused and rather sure that my brain is just as responsible as de Bodard for my utter discombobulation.

First of all, I came across this book by seeing it on a Queer book list and saw that it was in the Audible Included library. I had heard good things about de Bodard, so that was all the context I had going in. I wasn't aware it was a retelling of Beauty and the Beast and discovering the post apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy with Vietnamese mythology and folklore was an absolute delight. Quite frankly, you had me at sapphic romance with a dragon, so these elements were a wonderful bonus. There's also various diseases and bargains and magic based on word combinations. There's a lot. A lot of good stuff, but a lot. Possibly too much for a novella, which, it think, actually worked against the story and relatively low page count.

The worldbuilding is great. The eponymous Vanishers having toyed with earth and left it a post apocalyptic mess, leaving destruction, disease, and division as their legacy. An interesting situation with enigmatic and absent figures is a great place to start. I do think having it be a separate people to humans, rather than a more accurate previous generation/ culture gives humanity a bit of an unearned pass on the whole causing the Apocalypse thing, but we're doing sci-fi and remnant stuff, which is cool. There are also human villages seemingly based on traditional Vietnamese culture and dragons who apparently barter life for life for direly needed medical assistance.

The story opens with the most opaque chapter of a story that is tricky to parse, but gets easier as the narrative carries you along. Our protagonist offers themself to be taken by the dragon in place of their mother, after the dragon had been called for emergency care of a sick child. Instead of being killed or made into a concubine, something very oddly joked about by the dragon, the MC acts as school teacher for the dragons kids. A will they won't they romance ensues with complications around agency, withholding of important information, illness, and being sequestered away from the MC's people. It really isn't presented anywhere near as straight forward as that and at times I found myself confused and my focus drifting from the audiobook, leaving me even more lost and re-listening to a number of chunks along the way.

A lot of the prose is beautiful. De Bodard is clearly a skilled writer and I am keen to try other examples of their work. As a number of other reviews have pointed out, unfortunately, there is a real tendency to tell rather than show the relationships between the characters and the emotions and romance between the MC and the dragon. This includes the classic instalove problem and eschewing the slowburn romance, which is particularly strange as that is what Beauty and the Beast is all about, right? I like the characters, but they are all archetypes and adjectives rather than demonstrating their personalities and growth over the story. There is so much potential in them, and so much in this story to be honest, but they aren't given the space to breathe.

Something I really appreciated was the handling of gender with a few non binary characters and some interesting and respectful discussion of pronouns, including correcting assumptions and picking up on the pronouns a person uses for themself. There does seem to be a singular distillation of non binary as being a third gender and some contradictory descriptions of a character whose gender is assumed incorrectly and then is later described as something along the lines of being very obviously agender. Being non binary or agender or any other gender beyond men and women are not one thing, but an infinite spectrum, experience, understanding, and presentation of gender that doesn't have a look or aesthetic (although a young dragon in dungarees with a side shave would look sick). Androgyneity is a thing, but not all non binary folx are androgynous. I greatly appreciate the effort and inclusion though. The description and use of pronouns with how they relate to the way people refer to each other signifying their relationship and dynamic is also a really interesting thing to see, especially alongside the previous discussion.

With not seeing a lot of the romance and relationship development, despite us being told and aspects being discussed, there is a very weird power dynamic at play that I found uncomfortable. I totally get that there can be kinks around this and fully support people writing about that of that's their passion, bur that doesn’t seem to be the vibe of this story. They actually go so far as to discuss consent and agency a couple of times, which is great, but beyond declaring someone not your slave anymore, while still keeping seriously important information about this somone from them, doesn't really change anything about the dynamics or how things started. It might just be me, as I saw someone saying the opposite of my feelings on the matter in another review. But, yeah, I got weird vibes and was kinda uncomfortable.

I really wanted to love this and there are elements I do, but the level of confusion and just how much I didn't feel that I got to know the characters well enough and absolutely didn't see or understand the romance really hampered my enjoyment. Judging by a lot of the reviews, this might be a me thing and I am rather autistic with ADHD, which could well be a factor here.

Ultimately, I think it's a case of too many ideas in not enough space combined with beautiful lyrical prose arranged unconventionally that made this confusing, and then the lack of on page development kept me from really hooking into the characters. I'm still glad I read it and I am intrigued to read some more de Bodard.

The audiobook narration by Nancy Wu is wonderful and really adds to the mystical fairytale fantasy of it all.

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1 person found this helpful

Good

I’m a sucker for a story that appears to be fantasy as first but is later revealed to be advanced tech. Add a sapphic romance between a mortal and an immortal and you get a lovely story that doesn’t outstay it’s welcome.

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