The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

Tak! reviewed The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older (The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, #3)

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

4 stars

I appreciate that this one had an even more self-sufficient Pleiti, as well as exploring Mossa's fallibility. (I swear I'm not anti-Mossa, I just prefer the "two complementary equals helping people together" dynamic to the "superhuman investigator with sheltered everywoman sidekick" dynamic.)

This one felt more fast-paced and dynamic to me than Imposition, although I suspect that an objective examination would probably reveal that there isn't a significant difference.

enne📚 reviewed The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older (The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, #3)

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

4 stars

I wonder sometimes if too high expectations make me more likely to be disappointed in a book. I feel like the Mossa and Pleiti series should be my jam: it's lesbian scifi detective fiction set on an Oxford-esque Jupiter space habitats. This one was pretty good, but the first book is still my favorite.

The details of the mystery in this book are the most solid of the trilogy, and (in some ways) I like Pleiti getting a chance to try to do some investigating on her own. Unfortunately, the romance angle suffers from acute "please just talk to each other" syndrome where they each worry on their own about what the other is thinking and feeling.

This is also maybe a minor and petty opinion, but it felt like this book over-did loan words from other languages; arguably, in universe this could be part of the academic study of …

I wonder sometimes if too high expectations make me more likely to be disappointed in a book. I feel like the Mossa and Pleiti series should be my jam: it's lesbian scifi detective fiction set on an Oxford-esque Jupiter space habitats. This one was pretty good, but the first book is still my favorite.

The details of the mystery in this book are the most solid of the trilogy, and (in some ways) I like Pleiti getting a chance to try to do some investigating on her own. Unfortunately, the romance angle suffers from acute "please just talk to each other" syndrome where they each worry on their own about what the other is thinking and feeling.

This is also maybe a minor and petty opinion, but it felt like this book over-did loan words from other languages; arguably, in universe this could be part of the academic study of past earth so I can give it a little bit of a pass. However, it feels like a :chart_with_upwards_trend: from the first book which had none (to my poor memory), to the second book with a few, and this third book where it was so frequent as to almost become jarring. I could believe in the adoption of words like chisme or pues or klopt, but ... chiacchierare? chismoseando?

joachim@lire.boitam.eu

rated it

July 15