#plaguehands

ooh you’re on!

1. no bad news, patty griffin

2. we are the pipettes, the pipettes

3. gimme sympathy, metric

4. ca plane pour moi, plastic bertrand

5. joy! joy! joy!, sufjan stevens

ooooh my god i loved it. i fucking loved it. i loved it so much i had to stop after the scene where she accidentally unbuckles his trousers with magic and leave the house and conserve the rest of it for the next day, and that day, that day after the great trouser unbuckling, i went out on the town and wrote 6,000 words riding purely on sheer SEX MAGIC ENTHUSIASM. i am pretty sure i punched the shower wall after i read and i know it did not hurt me.

but honestly. i never read any temeraire, dragons aren’t my thing, but this was the most satisfying and original fairytale i’ve read in ages. ages. the best comp i gave it was “if howl’s moving castle was a full-on romance novel” and i do not say that lightly. having just reread hmc, it was Rightly Bestowed. (also “if cruel beauty had been written by a mature adult at the top of her craft instead of a twelve year old sulking at the back of anime club” but rightly far fewer people give a fuck about that.)

and i loved nieshka and i loved how many hackneyed on-market things nieshka was—awkward clumsy unstylish overlooked best friend of a beautiful girl and new inamorata of icy surly dude, again?—and how much the book made those things read brand new—how nonjudgmentally she was written, how wholly and vibrantly herself, tying a dress half-shut with a sash and stomping around the castle and stacking books by color. how much she loved her home (how much naomi novik loved creating rural medieval poland), how much her love mattered and shaped her magic and her story. how much she loved kasia, how much that mattered, more than anything else. and kasia herself, brave too-strong kasia. and sarkan the stone cold dragon disaster on his i haven’t felt things for a hundred years tap, like, oh buddy, get ready for the oncoming storm of emotions, magic, boners, and emotional magic boners. you are not ready, you will never be ready. (OF ALL THE EXCUSES HE COULD HAVE MADE~~)

and the magic was at turns delightful (academic versus naturalistic! BABA JAGA!) and the sex magic magic sex was GRAND. i love nothing like i love exciting magic scenes in y.a. novels that are just sex scenes with flashing lights. this is completely sincere, that is my favorite thing on this living earth.

also, evil ent sisters who forgot how to love. the monsters turned out to be just trees.mp3

i sorta see what you mean about pacing—mostly that it was paced unevenly, by which i mean the court stuff was not as snappy as the rest; she clearly didn’t love it as much (“novik’s one blind spot” i explained after reading, in VERY EXTREME *nerd voice* “is she doesn’t understand slytherins. but she loves hufflepuffs, gets gryffindors, and all wizards are ravenclaws.”). and that slow court action culminated in a sort of jarring rock slide—but she managed to make it feel intentional. in general i thought it was mostly economical/rich: a lot done in a little time. a lot! i read it in two days, coulda done in one. everyone i know has devoured it. in more market buzzwords it earns: UNPUTDOWNABLE