The Thousand Eyes

[psocoptera]

The Thousand Eyes, A.K. Larkwood, sequel to The Unspoken Name. I really enjoyed this, definitely recommend it if you liked the first one (but you really have to read that one first), and I will put the rest behind a courtesy cut. :) Larkwood continues to have a vivid imagination for settings, and I thought she came up with some interesting story beats for doing a sequel. I was initially not excited that there was so much Tal in this book, but given the, uh, complex identity arcs around both Csorwe and Shuthmili, I totally see why we needed Tal as a main POV, and I actually ended up way more invested in his finding-a-place-for-himself arc than I might have thought. This one felt like less of a Le Guin riff to me and more of its own thing, although if you told me that Larkwood still had feelings about the whole Fred/Illyria thing from Angel The Show I would not be surprised. (I should note that I've never seen ATS beyond ~two episodes, I just read a lot of Spuffy back in the day and some of it was adjacent to that plotline.) I didn't buy right away into the reveal of having the ancient unspeakable darkness god incarnated as a smart-mouthed teen, like, wow, speaking of Buffy, that was a very television-ready choice, but after thinking about it more I kind of love the idea that the cult was sacrificing fourteen-year-old brides to it for thousands of years due to a misunderstanding over it eventually manifesting as a fourteen-year-old. Or maybe it eventually knew itself as a fourteen-year-old precisely because all those sacrifices had shaped it that way! Interesting either way, and I liked Tsereg.