Posted by This book is chaos. The world is chaos, the family the MC belongs to is chaos, the magic itself is chaos, the science is chaos… the MC is also chaos. Peter, our MC, is impulsive, he’s scattered, he can’t think straight much of the time, and he’s got autism complete with sensory processing issues that give him issues throughout the book. He’s also got an insane family that makes things worse, and he’s being dragged back into their bullshit unwillingly. Sort of. He’s both willing and unwilling. You’ll get used to Peter’s self-contradictory feelings. Or not.
The opening scene has Peter receiving these injections that he thinks will help him survive his next encounter with his family. The injections are a little vague to me since there isn’t a ton of explanation — but from what I understand, when he takes them they can control/enhance his movements? He becomes a little more reactive to his environment, a little stronger, and a little faster in making decisions and processing things going on around him. However, I am very unconvinced they are helpful because they also make him lose control of himself. It’s almost like a potion that takes away your filter for impulse control, whatever he thinks about will come out of his mouth, he might throw a punch at someone involuntarily and things like that. So, the fact he so panicked to receive these injections so he could “better” deal with his family seems counterintuitive. It’s described a bit like enhanced muscle memory but I never fully understood what was happening.
So, he and his family have an extremely odd relationship. He is a quadruplet and the youngest of the four. His oldest sister is being crowned since his father has recently passed away. One of his other siblings thinks that they would be better suited for the leadership role. Since they’re all basically the same age, why shouldn’t any of the four of them have a shot at the crown? So, like, civil war comes into play, coups, back stabbery et cetera. Most of this book deals with the family drama and potential for a civil war unfolding. I have to say that the character work, dialogue, and interactions between everyone was my favorite bit of the book. This is a very different kind of character and it’s interesting reading from the perspective of someone who is also a bit scattered, impulsive, takes things very literally without understanding subtext in a conversation, and struggles with sensory input. He reminds me a lot of me in my 20s. I’ve become a lot more cohesive since that time of my life, but I definitely can identify with a lot with what he had going on. It truly would be easier for me, still even now, if people just said what they meant instead of having underlying meaning they aren’t telling me.
The world building, when I could wrap my head around it, was really neat. I love the idea of ghost fog infecting people, the spirits of the dead living in a fog that if you breathe in, you basically become possessed and you’re known as a “gaunt”. However the spirits died and how they were feeling at the time can consume your mind once you’re infected. Whether the spirits died being cold, being hungry… being violent, that’s now going to overtake your thoughts and consume your mind. Really loved all that. What I had a hard time understanding was the magical destruction that was everywhere. There were multiple extinction events which leads to this mis-match of technology from different civilizations. It appears to be a bunch of different worlds and societal technology all rolled into one world. Again, this is chaos. However easily I could accept chaos in a person’s mind, chaos in the world at large was harder for me. I really wanted a bit more explanation to the world because it seemed excessively random at points without threads holding the elements together. Multiple magical extinction events I guess would produce randomness but it made for muddy reading at times because I didn’t always understand what was going on clearly enough to envision the world at large. I did enjoy the mash up of science and magic that interlaced through everything. Instead of wizards we get “lab coats” who were more like mad scientists who study “corpse technology” which I took to mean remnants of gone civilizations from past extinctions both scientific and magical.
The pacing was kind of all over the place and it ended without a ton of resolution. There were a lot of threads still left open and although that feels very intentional, I struggle with books that don’t resolve much at the end but rather open it up even further in a cliff hanger kind of way.
I really struggled to know what to do with this rating. There were so many things I thought were excellently written, and so many aspects of the character building and prose I thought were strong, but there were other bits where I struggled. I have abandoned my rating system this year that I used to use where I broke everything down into categories and hyper analyzed my ratings…and this book makes me think I should resurrect it, lol.
7.75/10 and for purposes of SPFBO, rounded to an 8.