The Masquerade Series, Book 2
by Seth Dickinson
Read this book if you want to suffer
This book is like 170k words long, a bunch of stuff happens in it, there’s at least 3 povs that I can remember, but mostly it felt like a game of drawn-out grief where every new page might uncover and re-contextualise an old hurt.
There are moments of levity, including the occasional zinger of a one-liner (mostly due to Baru’s new gay colleague). Baru swears and drinks way more than she did in Book 1; thanks to her machinations she also wears her sapphic desires far more openly and spends a fair bit of time ogling muscly women and yearning like a useless lesbian.
If you ended Book 1 thinking There’s no way I could possibly love Tain Hu more than I do now, I’m here to tell you that you can.
There is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?
The Monster Baru Cormorant
This book and this series has made me think again about my relationship with colonialism, beauty standards, racism, homophobia, and internalisations of such. There’s a lot to unpack. A lot. It’s exhausting and terrifying but also necessary.
But in the mean time, there’s still a story to finish. At this point the only people I would be deeply unhappy to see sacrificed on the altar of Baru’s ambitions are the few people she cares about. The narrative hasn’t yet started making me feel guilty for feeling this way, but I’m sure the reckoning is coming.
I’m not sure I would read this book again, because watching someone on the path to destruction is not exactly pleasant. But it was still deeply compelling, I was never bored, and after finishing this I leapt straight into Book 3.
Rep in this book: some mlm characters, wlw, more poc main characters, a poc nb pov character who’s a leader in their community using they/them pronouns, widespread acceptance of nb people in cultures outside of the Evil Empire.
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