Nettle & Bone
Sep. 19th, 2022 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI feel like the past few months have featured a lot of duty reading so it was weird and fun to read three books in a row that I simply wanted to read. For purposes of spoiler-avoidance I'm going to talk about them in three separate posts.
Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher, 2022. Like many Ursula Vernon books, very Ursula Vernon, which I continue to very much like. I don't think this one is set in the WhiteRativerse but it felt to me like a similar tone and kind of world - definitely more like those than like her recent horror like Twisted Ones or Hollow Places.
Spoilers behind this cut! I was a little taken aback by the ending - it felt a little abrupt and weirdly non-centric on the protagonist, like none of the key actions had been her moment and I had sort of thought there had to be one more thing somehow that would be her moment, and then there wasn't - but on reflection I think it was an interesting choice? Like, none of the rest of them would have been there if she hadn't been the one to gather the team and give them this mission, and I think that's an interesting role to put the POV in, rather than someone more in the spotlight at the climax. One of the other characters compares the five of them to a fist, at one point, and the protag says she supposes that makes them each fingers, but arguably she is more of a wrist, pushing the whole thing forward even if she's not the pokiest bit at the end. :)
Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher, 2022. Like many Ursula Vernon books, very Ursula Vernon, which I continue to very much like. I don't think this one is set in the WhiteRativerse but it felt to me like a similar tone and kind of world - definitely more like those than like her recent horror like Twisted Ones or Hollow Places.
Spoilers behind this cut! I was a little taken aback by the ending - it felt a little abrupt and weirdly non-centric on the protagonist, like none of the key actions had been her moment and I had sort of thought there had to be one more thing somehow that would be her moment, and then there wasn't - but on reflection I think it was an interesting choice? Like, none of the rest of them would have been there if she hadn't been the one to gather the team and give them this mission, and I think that's an interesting role to put the POV in, rather than someone more in the spotlight at the climax. One of the other characters compares the five of them to a fist, at one point, and the protag says she supposes that makes them each fingers, but arguably she is more of a wrist, pushing the whole thing forward even if she's not the pokiest bit at the end. :)
