soupçon/ˈsuːpsɒn,ˈsuːpsɒ̃/ noun
1. a very small quantity of something; a slight trace, as of a particular taste or flavorSunday Soupçons is where I scribble mini-reviews for books I don’t have the brainspace/eloquence/smarts to write about in depth – or if I just don’t have anything interesting to say beyond I LIKED IT AND YOU SHOULD READ IT TOO!
One letdown, one imperfect book I still enjoyed.
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Portal Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sephardic Jewish cast, major queer disabled character, MLM MC
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 22nd October 2024
ISBN: 1645660966
Goodreads
In this riveting sequel to The Pomegranate Gate, Toba, Naftaly, and their allies must defend a city under siege—while the desperate deals they’ve made begin to unravel around them.
After a near-disastrous confrontation with La Caceria, Toba and Asmel are trapped on the human side of the gate, pursued by the Courser and a possessed Inquisitor. In the Mazik world, Naftaly’s visions are getting worse, predicting the prosperous gate city of Zayit in flames and overrun by La Caceria. Zayit is notorious for its trade in salt, a substance toxic to the near-immortal Maziks; if the Cacador can control the salt, he will be nearly unstoppable. But the stolen killstone, the key to the Cacador’s destruction, could eliminate the threat—if only Barsilay could find and use it.
Deadly allies and even more dangerous bargains might be the only path to resist La Caceria’s ruthless conquest of both the mortal world and the Maziks’, but the cost is steep and the threat is near. A twisty, clever entry in The Mirror Realm Cycle, The Republic of Salt asks what personal morals weigh in the face of widespread danger and how best to care for one another.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Welp.
The Republic of Salt was one of my most-anticipated sequels for this year, after I fell hard for the first book in the trilogy, The Pomegranate Gate.
Alas, middle-book syndrome definitely got this one.
Very little really happened in Republic until the last quarter or so – up until that point, most of the story just involves setting up pieces for that last quarter. And yes, that’s often how climaxes work, but I think the difference is that, in a good story, the setting up is interesting for its own sake as well. Whereas here, we were just passionlessly moving pieces around to get them into position for the finale.
The finale itself? Pretty great. Not perfect, not stunning, but great.
But this book is just under 600 pages long. Meaning I had to slog through a whole novel’s worth of pages to get to the pretty great stuff. It was exhausting and very, very boring. Certainly the sense of wonder that infused Pomegranate Gate is completely lacking here – it was all very pedantic, practical, trotting from one place to another, doing things that had to get done like ticking tasks off a check-list.
And there was so much telling-not-showing. As an example, from a worldbuilding perspective, learning that the Mazik have very few soldiers because they don’t like to fight (because they’re immortal) was really interesting, but I wish it had been conveyed to us in a more organic way rather than in an exposition-dump.
The lack of explanation around Mazik magic worked beautifully in Pomegranate Gate, where it contributed to the sense of wonder that I loved so much. But here, with a much more mundane-feeling story, it seemed misaligned; the wonder was gone, so an explanation felt needed. Which meant that having no grasp of how this magic worked or what its limits were felt hand-wavey at best. Why can Maziks create any food they please out of lentils, but not spices? In our world, hand-made items are of higher quality in terms of craft, and usually of materials too; Maziks prefer hand-made stuff to magic-made stuff, but there doesn’t seem to be any difference in quality, so why does the difference matter? And the whole thing with the Mirror – the idea that the two worlds copy or echo each other – felt very vague to me. That the characters didn’t really understand it either didn’t help – I kind of wondered why we needed the Mirror at all. It might have been better to pull the whole concept from the story; I’m pretty sure that even without the Mirror, everyone would still be doing things. There are enough other reasons to stop Tarses and so on that the Mirror felt very tacked-on.
I have no idea why the Ziz is important, and the urgency around rescuing it seemed to come out of nowhere, appearing really abruptly without explanation. Prior to that point, the Ziz was barely mentioned! Turn the page, and suddenly Toba’s obsessed with it. Was the arc missing some text?
Both the romances feel so tacked-on, as if even Kaplan doesn’t ship the characters. Yes, Toba started to feel some attraction Asmel in the previous book, but I thought it was mostly just physical, and I wasn’t expecting it to go anywhere, because what on earth (or off it) do they have in common? But nope, here, have a romance, and both they and Barsilay and Naftaly just…have zero chemistry. I didn’t feel their attraction, never mind romantic love. I wouldn’t be surprised if Barsilay and Naftaly, at least, break up by the end of the trilogy, because seriously, there’s nothing holding them together.
Tsfira was great, and I wish this book had been more focused on her – I think she and the Peregrine had the most interesting arcs in this book, which, while not a high bar, were still the only ones I was interested in. The Peregrine especially got almost no page-time, despite everything that was going on with her – really weird narrative choices were made here, I’ve no idea why you would focus on Naftaly and everyone instead of, you know, zooming in on the characters things are actually happening to.
And please don’t get me started on the whole time-loop-vision-thing that shaped the whole climax. Convoluted and pretty dumb, imo. No thank you.
I’m still going to read book three, because, you know, presumably it will have Many Exciting Things Happening as everything comes together. But I think Republic was way too long, focused on the wrong characters, and was so dull. There were some great ideas – the demon/s, the killstone, the Peregrine switching sides – but they were stretched to cover far more pages than they needed, and bogged down in endless zig-zagging as the characters went from point a to b to c with nothing happening.
It’s hard to believe that the person who wrote this also wrote Pomegranate Gate.
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 12th September 2024
ISBN: 183786070X
Goodreads
Cornwall, 1786.
For years, the villagers of Mirecoombe have turned to their Keeper, the old and battle-scarred Lord Pelagius Hunt, mediator between the worlds of men and fey, for help. But this is a time of change. Belief in the old ways, in the piskies and spriggans, has dimmed, kindled instead in the Reverend Cleaver’s fiery pulpit. His church stands proud above the mire; God’s name is whispered, hushed, loved. And now, death stalks Mirecoombe on the moor. There are corpses in the heather. There is blood in the gorse.
Nancy Bligh is determined to do what Pel will maintain the balance between the fey and the human world, be the Keeper that he refuses to be. Blessed with natural sight, friend to spriggans, piskies and human locals of Mirecoombe, Nancy has power that Pel never had and never lets her use. But as Mirecoombe falls into darkness, perhaps her time has come.
A poignant and lyrical examination of faith, love and grief, Gorse asks what do we choose to believe, and how does that shape who we are?
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Gorse I’m more conflicted about, but this one’s more positive than not!
On the one hand, the set-up/worldbuilding is great, pulling from old-school British folklore but with a lot I’ve never heard of before – like the fact that a lot of the fae creatures were human once upon a time, before they were remade by the God Under the Moor. THAT IS SUCH A COOL DETAIL. Did Horton invent it, or is he just way more informed about this stuff than me? Either is possible! Whichever, I loved all the details like that and am really glad they were included. The magic here feels magical, and old, and often eerie; I’m too much of a wimp to enjoy the occasional gory moment that we get, but the horror-y bits do help drive home that these are not Tinkerbell fairies – not even a little. And when we learn more about the god, and his opinion/response to his worship fading??? Also seriously excellent. There’s a lot of surprises in Gorse, little things that run counter to our genre-trained expectations, and I’m especially admiring of the fact that Horton GOES THERE repeatedly – presents us with a threat, which I at least brushed off because ‘that kind of thing NEVER happens outside of horror’…but then it does! I approve.
On the other hand…most of the plot was eventually revealed to hinge on one of the main characters not telling the other MC things ‘for her own good’, and I hate that. Pel, the Keeper of the moor, just… keeps secrets for no good reason, doesn’t share suspicions that he knows he ought to, LIES about stuff – and the lies don’t make sense. His refusal to teach Nancy everything she needs to know also makes no sense, and though both Nancy and the narrative call him on it, it left a bad waste in my mouth.
There are a lot of mini time-skips, the kind of thing where someone changes their mind between one sentence and the next, but we don’t know or see why; or someone is abruptly on the other side of the room, things like that. I’m hoping these will all be polished out in the final version, but I suspect they won’t be.
‘Cleaver, if you won’t help then get out of the way. Now.’ The priest stayed kneeled.
‘O Lord. I beseech thee. Deliver my soul.’ His heart turning slowly, Cleaver nods, hesitantly, then runs out through the back of the chapel.
??? Why did Cleaver suddenly agree to get out of the way? Is my arc missing a few sentences? NO IDEA.
Worse, there’s way too many WHY DIDN’T YOU DO THAT EARLIER moments, where someone reveals a magic or power that could have resolved everything months ago if they’d just, you know, used it sooner.
The prose is…coarse? Jerky? It’s clearly deliberate, because the whole book is written in that style, and that helps. But it’s not pretty, and the lack of description is frustrating, especially when it comes to the fae and the like. It feels like a missed opportunity to be writing about nature, the natural world, the moor, without the kind of loving description we get in Hild and Menewood by Nicola Griffith. The plainness of the prose might be intended as a reflection on the hard, simple lives the people in this setting live, but even if that’s so I’d say it’s the wrong call.
Coarse or not, there are some great lines nonetheless:
Their heads are heavy with teeth
She has a lot to learn before he’s ready to pass the torch. He won’t let her get burnt.
The best stones have gone, taken to form the cornerstones of farmhouses, the foundation of a church. Old pagan rocks holding the new world on their shoulders.
So it’s definitely not unreadable; Gorse splashes along at a good pace, with plenty of Easter eggs for those who know their folklore (like Pat and Eponina, Pel’s dog and horse, both being white with red ears, Eponina at least confirmed to have otherworldly origins). Some details are amazing, like the magical tattoos, and Horton is excellent at creating the sense that there’s a much bigger picture we’re not seeing quite yet. The fact that Gorse is the first book in the Eythin Legacy, and we learn next to nothing about Eythin here, suggests we have QUITE a way to go.
I’m sure I’ll be picking up the sequel – I really want to see more of the world Horton’s created.
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