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This is a historical novel about a small group of scholars (mostly of color) in Oxford in the 1830's, with an added fantastical element of magical silver powered by language and translations. Historically, it covers a modified industrial revolution, British colonialism, opium wars with China, and even gets into the Luddites, all impacted and warped by the British empire being powered by silver. What I especially appreciated is that the magic silver mostly just exacerbated issues and functioned as a metaphor for power in all of these historical situations; this is not a book about historical divergence due to magic but rather a book where the magic is used as a metaphor to reexamine things in a fresh light.

The idea of magic silver here powered by translations is just so well done. Scholars (and thus language) are extracted from colonies to power silver magic as a parallel to other resource extraction. The scholars are ultimately not really wanted for who they are but for the utility of what they know. And, I also love the detail that the empire is eating its own tail by its continual expansion and globalization weakening the magic. It reminds me a little of Yoon Ha Lee's Phoenix Extravagant where the magic system itself was intricately tied to colonial resource extraction.

It's a slow-building book that doesn't pull its punches about colonialism, racism, white folks siding with the establishment, or (as the subtitle to the book directly informs you) the necessity of violence. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I really enjoyed this fantasy slash fairy tale quest story about a youngest daughter working to try to free her elder sister from abuse. It has fresh worldbuilding, many characters with depth, multiple older women characters, and ultimately a story about working together to free people from powerful and abusive men.

I think the weakest part of the book was the romance angle for me. It was cute, but I felt like I was missing some extra characterization about "why these two" other than just romance-through-proximity. This was all a bit of a surprise for me, as I quite enjoyed the various T. Kingfisher sad paladin romances. (One could make a good argument that Fenris may as well also be yet another sad paladin, which doesn't help here either.)

That said, I feel like the romance was an exceptionally small part of the book (arguably much smaller than other books in the same genre of story) and so don't let that put you off. I just feel like the story would have been more powerful had there not been as much understated flirting there and they had just been buddies working together to right wrongs (or even some explicit aro or ace angle, which is how I had been reading Marra the rest of the book).

I wouldn't describe this as a comedy book, but there were so many funny moments to the book that I had to hold myself back from posting a dozen quotes. I laughed so hard at the dust-wife's exasperation leading into her third impossible task (and it was such good characterization too). Overall, this was a lot of fun but I also found it to have quite a bit more depth than I was expecting.

I reread this book for the SFFBookClub this month.

Personally, I deeply enjoyed this book and series, but I think it is not for everybody. I highly recommend folks read the first two chapters online here to get a taste of the voice: www.tor.com/2016/04/12/excerpts-ada-palmer-too-like-the-lightning-chapters-1-and-2/. Mycroft the narrator is self-deprecating, frequently addresses the reader, and is most definitely a very unreliable (and heavily edited) narrator. You can read it in the link above, but never ever have I ever seen a book do so much world-building via content warnings.

This book (and series) is trying to do so much, and regardless of whether you feel like it worked or not, it's hard not to be in awe of the ambition and the sheer density of ideas threaded together here. In the first chapter we've got flying cars, a secret magic kid who can turn toys into real life, mention of a Church War and sensayers (religious therapists) in the wake of it, Mycroft letting the reader know that he's misgendering everybody for ~reasons~, legal punishment alternatives in a Servicer system, questions about free will, and alternative family structures called bashes. This is before we get into 18th century philosophy, ethics, religion, and Greek myth. FOOF

This book is really catnip for me even on a reread; I find Mycroft to be extremely engaging as a narrator, and I appreciate so much how all of these details are spooled out at just the right pace to keep me intrigued but not overwhelmed. It felt like each chapter was carefully crafted to introduce a new location, bring in some world details and history, focus on a slightly different set of world leaders, and push the mystery investigation of the 7-10 list theft forward. It never felt like too much, and I constantly hungered to find out more about the world.

I talked about this after reading Infomocracy for SFFBookClub, but I really appreciated how much flying cars in this story drove so many social changes. If people can be flown across the globe in a few hours, then borders lose meaning. And if borders lose meaning, then what does that mean for governments that are based on geography. Clearly, the hive system is not meant to be posited as some ideal government solution, but for me at least there's something idealistic and positive about the idea of people being able to (more) freely choose their own laws and government in ways that aren't constrained by the power of geography.

I enjoyed the rest of the series as well, but I feel like the first two books are by far the strongest for me as a reader. The final two books are no longer an edited history and so Mycroft becomes even more of an unreliable narrator (if such a thing is possible) and the fourth book goes off on some epic :drum: diversions. I enjoyed the final two books a lot (and the ending lands SO well) but in some ways it wanders much more philosophically and is not as tight of a story as the first two books for me.

Unsurprisingly, I have a bunch of gender thoughts on this book too, which I'm going to put separately, because there's a lot of them: books.theunseen.city/user/picklish/status/87074