I had a great time with this book. I enjoyed that our narrator was unreliable and I loved the dynamics between our MC and the rebels. I thought that the themes explored in this book were well incorporated, and the world was well-realized. This was a really compelling read from start to finish, and really isn't like much I've ever read. Awesome stuff!

Metal from Heaven is a book that demands your full attention—and that’s a good thing. I ended up restarting it twice, once after reaching 60%. On the third attempt, I was able to appreciate it for what it is. Initially, the comparisons to Gideon the Ninth led me to expect a shift in tone as Marney aged up, so moving past that expectation positively changed my experience!!

The narrative is in first person, with Marney as a sometimes unreliable narrator. To me, that is where the Gideon the Ninth comparison ends. She is “lustertouched,” a condition brought on by her exposure to ichorite. As a child, she is the sole survivor of a massacre that occurs when workers at the ichorite factory strike for safer conditions to combat the illness. After the massacre, Marney joins a band of rebels known as the Highwayman’s Choir, who introduce her to a life of resistance and revenge.

I am glad I didn't give up on it. I think if you clear your mind of comparing it to anything else, you can enjoy the creative way this book explores the cost of defiance in a world driven by greed and power. The writing style took some getting used to, but I was hooked by the end!

Metal From Heaven is my top book this year, full stop. It was an easy five stars, I would like to rate it six out of five stars if possible. I want to thank NetGalley, Kensington Publishing, and Erewhon Books for the ARC. It was...the best. I cannot be more grateful.

The prose was beautiful, the characters where tragic and powerful, the world was rich and full. Everything about this book was tailored to me, specifically. The blurb is incredibly accurate - if you want an anticapitalist, pro-environmentalist, feminist, Sapphic, pro-labor story full of tragic lesbians and suffering, this is for you.

All the pain in this book has a purpose - it isn't trauma p*rn and it isn't lip service to suffering. It describes complex loves, it describes dedication, it describes family. Despite all the pain, it is an incredibly hopeful book. So filled to the brim with hope and love.

If you can't handle the pain that comes with a deep love, this book is not for you. If you can't handle suffering that breeds radical hope, you shouldn't read this. The prose is oftentimes a little strange, it can take a few chapters to really understand what's happening and who our characters are. It never really becomes clear. If you're looking for a front to back, third person, plot driven book that easy to engage with, you should skip this.

This book will take some effort from you but it will be some of the best effort you ever put in.

11/10 no notes.

Marney was born as a 'luster touched' child with the ability to manipulate the metal ichorite that makes up the foundation of her world and also is forced to work in the factories that turn the metal into various goods. Her family and best friend are killed in an attempt to organize to strike and Marney is taken in by a group of outlaws. Once she reaches adulthood, she sets out on a path to assassinate the man responsible for her family's deaths.

This book is incredibly unique and definitely does not hold your hand in terms of explaining the world or the plot. Clarke has a disjointed writing style that still manages to be lyrical. It almost makes you feel like you are in a fever dream while reading. (I mean this in a positive manner, this book was gorgeous). That said, it did make the reading process slow so this may be one I wouldn't reread. Yet, I do think everyone should read this at least once.

First off, so many of the characters are either lesbians, genderqueer or both and it's great. I thought that Marney's aversion to her own sexual pleasure was such an important part of who she is as a person (as in she gives so much of herself without asking for anything in return).

The descriptions of Marney's luster touched fits were so well done that I felt like I was having the fit, just hats off to Clarke. They have a way of bringing the world to such vivid life without over explaining anything. There is a plot twist about 80% of the way into the book and it was so masterfully constructed that I didn't see it coming until about 20 pages before. (Was it frustrating that Marney didn't pick it up at the same time, yes but it is established that she's not the brightest crayon in the box so, that's in character). And the ending was just incredible and both predictable yet unpredictable at the same time.

Long story short, this book needs to be read as it's an experience that all scifi/fantasy readers should have.

Reviews going live on Goodreads, Storygraph and Fable on 10/26 and on Tiktok 10/27.

Absolutely spectacular in every way. I think I've been waiting for this book my whole life. Clarke's writing was fresh, beautiful, daring, and I didn't want to put this book down. I will be recommending it to all my friends and look forward wholeheartedly to future books by this author!

I'm really tired of books being described one way in their dust jacket summary, and reading an entirely different way. I guess I was expecting a really cool sapphic sci-fi fantasy written similarly to other current SFF and this read like a literary novel. That's not what I signed up for. Also, it was written almost as if it was simultaneously one long letter to someone as well as the main character badly narrating her movements to herself. Idk, I was lost from the get go and after a while, when I still couldn't figure out what exactly was happening, I gave up. Definite DNF, however, I want more Sapphic SFF so three stars.

Ok. I'm here. I finally crossed the finish line crawling on my hands and knees. I slept on it and honestly I am still having difficulties parsing my thoughts on this.

I was extremely excited for this and I think I made too many assumptions based on the blurbs and taglines and all that fun stuff to the point where it really hurt my reading experience A LOT, which is what contributed heavily towards my rating. This is why:
1) I would peg the setting as a fantasy steelpunk sort of setting, but make it fantasy steel instead, which was GREAT. I loved that aspect so much!! Not so much 'punk-rock' because it felt too western for that?
2) It's advertised as a political call-out, however I was expecting more political commentary - or at least more than: "capitalism kills and is evil but socialism is worth dying for". I was not expecting it to lean more into the constructs of religion and nepotism and really it got super muddled at that point as to what the author's intention was with this.
3) I could see where the comparison to Gideon the Ninth came from in the sense of the frenetic prose that almost seems to riff on the English language. Do I feel like it's on the same tier as Muir? Not really, but it's unique enough to keep interest.
4) The comparison to The Princess Bride is absurd. This book isn't even a romance, unless you consider an obsession with a dead girl romance. Either way it doesn't have the easy humor, Inigo Montoya character, or really anything that made TPB unforgettable. And you can't label anything that's vaguely second chance romance as being similar to TPB, that's just silly.

Anyway to try and sort my thoughts I'll just make my list:

Pros:

⛏️ The beginning of this book! Wow! What a bang of a start! I was hooked almost immediately! You've got labor strikes, death, escapes, banditry, train robbing!!! Almost a wild-west vibe filled with comradery and lesbians! It was great!

⛏️ The varying degree of identities of the characters. Not just gender, which comes up a couple times, but within the scope of lesbianism and thoughts of dysmorphia/dysphoria.

⛏️ The last 10% of the book. Look, with all the religious allegories going on, I was expecting a Jesus Has Risen moment. Glory and all that! I was not ready for <spoiler>the hatching of sentient, hive-mind metal kaiju</spoiler>. Plus, the very last sentence was perfect. It made the second person story-telling angle turn the entire book into a repeating cycle, which would tell the creation of the world, industrialization, and the end of the world over and over. It was a nice touch.

Cons:

⛏️ World building in general. There's a lot of it, but it feels like it's all in the wrong places? Or too little or too much all at once? There is no real balance. Example: At like 80-ish% I found out there are TWO MOONS in this setting. This feels more important than an offhand after the book is almost over?? But I do recall, after a lot of thinking, that a character mentioned a moon phase of "waning gibbous" towards the beginning, which would indicate one moon, right?? There are a lot of religions, I think maybe... 4 or more distinct ones? Only 2 of them do I have any general idea about what they are about and even then that's being generous. I think the author has a very good idea about their separate distinctions and founding myths and beliefs etc, but it doesn't really come across the story with any real clarity.

⛏️ Confusing cast of characters. As in their names and who is who. Everyone has at least 2 names, with the exception of only a few characters in a cast comprised of ugh idk somewhere in the 20s? Example: "Perdita Perfection" being called Perdita, Dita, Perfection, and sometimes even Princess Whatever Her Last Name Was - interchangeably, sometimes within the same sentence. Some characters change their names from childhood to adulthood and MC doesn't bother making the switch and uses both names whenever bc why not.

⛏️ Mid-book slump. I feel like something was lost just at the halfway point. There is the very important plot point that is supposed to rocket Marney into the second-half of the book to accomplish her page 1 goal, but it suddenly goes flat? Marney just sort've stops doing things and there is a massive focus on graphic sex scenes (that's cool but where did the plot go??). The prose loses the edge that the first half of the book had, like the author found it difficult to keep it up? I almost DNFed several times between 55% and 91%.

Thank you to Netgalley and Kensington Publishing for a copy of this book.

I am really sad to say that this book is not a good fit for me, and yes, it's not it, it's me. I loved the idea of it, and the world sounds fascinating. To be honest, the characters we meet (up until the point I have read, at least) sound cool and fascinating, too. I think that fascinating can be a good word to describe what I have read. But the writing wasn't right for me. It's not that it is bad, but to me reading it felt like a chore more than a pleasure. Mainly it's because it has some dreamlike quality to it, and I know that for someone the right word here would probably be "lyrical" but nope, for me it is "dreamlike quality" and this does not work for me, simple as that.
I tried because I was interested in what I was reading but... I didn't really want to work for it. So I decided to let it go, but if dreamlike vibes can work for you, then by all means, give this one a try, because it can be phenomenal if it works for you!

Thank you to NetGalley and Erewhon Books for letting me read an e-ARC of Metal from Heaven by August Clarke! I've rounded up my rating from 4.5 to 5 for the purpose of this review.

Marney Honeycutt is luster-touched. After spending her childhood working with ichorite, she cannot stand to be around the substance without also being in pain and experiencing hallucinations - it seems to slowly eat away at her body from the inside out. Marney witnesses the death of her entire family when they’re picketing the ichorite factory that is completely decimated by Yann Chauncey, and she’s the only survivor.

The entire book is written in an almost stream-of-consciousness format with Marney frequently addressing the reader as “you” (their childhood friend and would-be lover, Gwyar who was killed in the attack). We are thrown right into this world of child labor, capitalist greed concerning ichorite (a toxic substance stronger than steel), and Marney, who wants to avenge her family and friend’s deaths by single-handedly killing Yann Chauncey, herself. We witness her journey as an orphan taken in by the Choir (a group of bandits) to an undercover socialite trying to win the daughter of Chauncey’s hand in a series of marriage games. The plot twist at the end got me really good (loved it and audibly gasped) and the final chapters were a mind-boggling experience that took me 10 minutes to adjust to (just read it and you’ll see what I mean), but I cannot emphasize enough how much I just LOVED the journey.

The story is an absolute fever dream tinged in pink hallucinations and consistently bloody and brutal undertones. It is not a fantasy tale for the faint of heart. It took about 50% of the book to feel completely immersed in the world and to understand the jargon, and then the last 50% of the book is a mad dash of chaos to the bitter end. I have to add that I was surprised this is a standalone novel, as I think a duology may have served it well and would’ve presented an opportunity to flesh out some key characters more. Overall, I loved this book. I would absolutely recommend it to fans of The Locked Tomb series for its lesbian shenanigans, scheming games, and butchy revenge. This novel was just so HOT and outside of my normal fantasy reading experience and every bit was worth it!

So: this is a book which is wildly and unapologetically itself. Don't come to this book expecting it to make space for you. It proudly takes up its own space, and it's up to you whether you're along for the ride.

This is a fantasy novel set during a faux-Industrial Revolution which stars a tattooed queer motorcycle gang, in which basically everyone is a lesbian and almost every combination of characters has had sex (symbolically or otherwise) with each other. "Be gay, do crimes" doesn't begin to cover it. It is not about characters changing or growing or doing a little hero's journey or anything cute like that; it is a punk anarchist anticapitalist dyke manifesto.

So settle in, don't fight it, munch on the crunchy yummy and occasionally experimental prose, roll with the sweeping sometimes-disconnected vignettes and bursts of ideology, embrace the symbolism and the rich embodied sensual style, and you'll have a ball. I did and I am a very different person than August Clarke.

A couple of things I think METAL FROM HEAVEN does really well:

- I loved the portrayal of religion, particularly the way faith can entangle with your life and sense of awe/desire and how you conceptualize yourself, long past the point where you're orthodox or observant. Given the whole punk burn-the-world-down vibe, I was really surprised to discover that - in many ways - this is a nuanced story about someone finding a richly meaningful place in her usually very gender-essentialist and homophobic religion. Also the way the Torn Child riffs off the Trinity/the suffering Jesus/the Church as Christ's body/...imma have to get back to you on that one. Really good stuff.

- The second person pays off, trust me. (I am so here for my two nickels: bizarre sapphic second-person SFF novels about bodies, cf HARROW THE NINTH.) Also the way it connects to all the other worship and awe and desire and lust...The thematic/symbolic throughline in this book is just so well done.

- There is some fabulous representation here of how gender and sexuality can be intertwined in complex ways. This is definitely representation of a very specific kind of messy nonconformist queer experience which not all queer people share, but it is so rare to find and well done and I felt lucky to be let into it.

- This is also a book which is constantly curious about community, care and softness, the slippery boundaries of what love can be. There are no "normal" relationships here and quite a big cast of characters (most of whom have 2-4 names to boot...), so it can be a lot to keep track of. But even that feels intentional. It's almost baiting you: why DO you have a problem with a big messy network of characters, huh? Why DO you want one protagonist to have all the flashy agency?

Some other things METAL FROM HEAVEN is not trying to do:

- Many fantasy novels spend a lot of their attention on plot, magic, worldbuilding puzzles, complicated explanations and reveals, etc. IMO this book has a solid plot throughline, but this is not Metal From Heaven's preoccupation. You are here for the vibes, the characters, the politics, and the embodied symbol world. Don't get impatient when it pauses the plot throughline for character vignettes or sex scenes, you will drive yourself nuts.

- Yes, the ending is weird, but our protagonist does have hallucinatory out-of-body magic. And it pays off a ton of the magic, character, political, and thematic throughlines. It follows. Just remember: this is a not a story about people changing, it's a story about people being and wanting. Roll with it. Soak in the vibe.

- This is not Queer Rep 101; this is Queer Rep 301 at least, made for the gays first and everyone else second. This book is not going to apologize for Making Things Weird or being problematicTM.

- This is also probably not the book for you if you get bothered about historical accuracy, or about being preached at. This book has opinions, it has a point, and it is not embarrassed about it.

Great read. Highly recommended if you're here for it.

Thanks to Netgalley and Kensington Publishing for an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Metal from Heaven is a high-stakes revenge story set in a fantasy world moving through its industrial revolution. It's topped off with political intrigue, the highs and lows of high school football -- I mean organized banditry for a cause, secret identities, the precursor to the L Word, and unadulterated intimacy (physical, psychological, spiritual, and everything in between).

We follow Marney Honeycutt, an ex-child worker and sole survivor of the Yann Chauncey Ichorite Foundry strike massacre and her self-imposed destiny to kill Yann Industry Chauncey, and the radical love she experiences along the way.

This book is bloody, dramatic, capitalist, and horny. One of my favorite four combos. And it is absolutely brutal.

In the best way, of course.

The titular "metal from heaven" is an azure luster-y substance called **ichorite**, named in the same vein as ichor, blood of the gods. Marney is one of many luster-touched, a person exposed to ichorite for prolonged periods of time (usually from a young age), but she also holds a unique ability to feel and meld ichorite to her will at the cost of potentially deadly "fits".

I saw this book pitched as being for fans of Gideon the Ninth and The Princess Bride. While I can see the similarities between Metal from Heaven and The Locked Tomb series (mostly their absolute manic, almost chaotic, lesbian energy), The Princess Bride felt a lot less on the nose. The Traitor Baru Cormorant feels like a more apt comparison in my opinion.

*Metal from Heaven* is probably more explicitly in your face than both of the above novels, so if you liked Gideon the Ninth and The Princess Bride this might be in your wheelhouse, but it's just something to keep in mind.

---
Writing-wise, Metal from Heaven is 50% punchy, 20% headache inducing, 30% gripping, and 100% feeling.

The propose is so so so beautiful. Not in a slow and a poetic way; moreso... sharp. It's stark and clear like a gut punch that knocks the wind out of you and leaves you feeling it hours after.

The pacing... is weird. Personally, felt very off. The introductory section of the story felt too slow and too fast at the same time. Marney is a questionably reliable narrator, mostly in part due to her idol worship of <i>you</i>. Stylistically, the prose feels very stream of consciousness. There were a good chunk of times where it felt like there a big skip, or some significant thing happened, and the dots just weren't connecting at first read. Reading this book felt like I was hallucinating almost, which, in all fairness feels appropriate given Marney's ichorite fits.

Everything starts to pick up around halfway through the book, once we're introduced to the core premise of how Marney will actually carry out her plans to kill Yann Industry Chauncey. Up until that point, it feels like a big lore / backstory drop (which, it technically is), and that's when the story really starts.

The reveal felt a little heavy handed to me, but I did love the idea that she inexplicably tied into Marney's fate, even if it wasn't the way Marney thought she would. I did love the two of them were foils to one another in the way that processed and internalized their trauma and grief, and the way justify themselves so similarly.

---

Marney herself is a compelling character. She is a big, fascinating mess, who has clung onto her perception of the idea of <i>you</i>, her childhood friend and... everything? It feels like a disservice to only describe her as a friend or a crush. To Marney, <i>you</i> is her reason for everything.

Throughout her life, she is solely driven by her desire to kill Yann Chauncey. There is this, powerful almost itching feeling that Marney's narration brings. Her desire and determination is palpable and heavy and you can feel every bit of it.

Other main characters and side cast are equally as interesting. There are of course the scattered here and there characters, but Marney's core circle are all incredibly well-written and interesting in their own right.

I myself adored Vikare and Sisphe in particular, and felt just so much feeling that I cannot describe for Gossamer Dignity Chauncey.

---
I would argue that Metal from Heaven is a happy story in many ways, depending on your definite of happy. It celebrates the love, grief, and worship that make us human in an all too human way. It explores oneness with the world, trauma and how we cope with it, the systems that chain and cage us, perceptions of self and the lies we tell ourselves, the hard and painful road of self-discovery, and the friends and family we find along the way.

More than anything, it's a story about you. About you, me, and us. About what it means to just be, in the best ways and the worst ways.

Metal from Heaven was weird, aching, and beautiful. It has good bones, even if it is sometimes a little too ambitious for itself. August Clarke aimed for the stars, and while they didn't quite get there, they at least reached the moon.

“A bloody lesbian revenge tale and political fantasy set in a glittering world transformed by industrial change – and simmering class warfare.” – When I read this in the synopsis I was like SAY LESS! I knew this was going to be a good one, and it absolutely delivered.

First off can I just say that it’s criminal that there isn’t a special edition of this book because I would buy it in a heartbeat! This story is a brilliant mix of revenge, revolution, labour rights, environmental destruction, and class conflict. It’s messy, it’s bloody, sexy and it’s unapologetically bold from the very start (you’ll know what I mean if you’ve read it).

I enjoyed the story, but I have to admit it took me a minute to get used to the writing style. There’s a lot packed into each page, with LOTS of descriptions, intricate worldbuilding, and at times, paragraphs that seem to stretch onto page long descriptions. But once I got accustomed to it, I couldn’t stop reading to the very end. The political systems, the religious factions, the magic, it was all of it very well-thought-out and woven together brilliantly. I just wish there had been a detailed map and glossary to help me keep track of everything. My pen and notepad were sick of me 😂😭.
The story is set in a dystopian world powered by ichorite, a toxic metal that fuels the nation's growth while poisoning its people. Our MFC Marney Honeycutt, is a child worker who survives a massacre orchestrated by industrialist Yann Chauncey's strikebreakers. Ten years later, Marney embarks on a dangerous mission to avenge her people and family by infiltrating the elite Chauncey family, pretending to be one of their own.

I especially loved reading Marney’s character arc. Growing up in ichorite factories left her with “luster-touched,” a debilitating illness that causes her body to slowly shut down and her mind to hallucinate. Her journey from a tragic childhood to becoming a part of a choir (cough *gang* cough) and eventually a bandit was truly a wild ride. 👀

Overall, I ate up Metal from Heaven, even though the writing style sometimes had me struggling to keep up but that’s just me living on two brain cells that were struggling to survive, lol. If you’re looking for a revenge story with complex, morally ambiguous characters in a Victorian-style political fantasy world, you need to read this.

A huge thank you to Erewhon Books and Kensington Publishing Corp for providing an e-ARC and a finished copy in exchange for an honest review!

This piece is a beautiful evaluation of revolution from multiple nuanced angles. The multicultural landscape depicted all reference facets of a single significant event with a brilliance. The protagonist is a compelling representation of disability well supported by a network of mutual aid. I will be thinking about this work for a long time.

Rounding up from 3.5 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review..

If you like sapphic revenge tales that read like a Fever dream, this is the book for you! I loved the opening, the overall idea, and world building so much. Our main character, Marney, becomes a bandit with The Choir after her entire family is massacred.

Where I disconnected from the book was the writing style. It felt a little too dreamlike and I get that it’s from Marney’s perspective and she hallucinates all the time, but it did make things a bit hard to follow and I wasn’t as invested as I’d like to be. Overall a fun read of this is your vibe.

I’m so sorry, but this book was not for me. I found the narrator’s point of view exhausting, even though I’ve enjoyed other books where the protagonist seems to experience psychosis such as Harrow the Ninth.

The last 10% of the book was a complete puzzle, and not in the good way. It felt like this book wanted to be a series but was forcefully shoved into a standalone and suffered greatly for it. I added a star for this odd decision that I assume was imposed from the top down, and not a choice of the author.

As I had a negative experience, I’ve chosen not to repost elsewhere, as to not prejudice readers against this book. It wasn’t for me, but authors I respect have given high praise for it, so maybe it’ll work for you.

I know some people will love this, but I can't. The energy is non-stop over the top, which means there isn't any variation, everything is extremely important, but also, everything is the same. It is just tiring.

There are transitions that are hard to follow, needing re-reading, new slang that takes several pages to make sense, and world building without any real support. All those things bounced me out of the narrative.

I am unfortunately going to join those that did not enjoy this. In theory, this has everything I like - a FMC full of trauma trauma ready to avenge those that she lost, lots of women that aren't pretty and perfect and Only Good, lesbians, and a really cool world with cool magic and incredible worldbuilding. But I could just not get through this at all.

Something about the writing for this book was just so incredibly vague. It felt like reading someone's diary that they wrote as they were going through a fever dream or on some kind of hallucination - a few moments of clarity where I was like, "oh wow, I know what's going on" only to be thrown back into an incredibly dense paragraph full of description that, other than looking poetic, really did not tell me all that much about the characters, the plot, or what was going on. It also felt like the entire time was just going forward through snapshots, with nothing really linking scenes and to me that made it even more difficult to understand what was happening and who was present.

I also just could not get myself to care for the main character. The first 10% I was rooting for her, but I gave up and DNFed around 28% in when I could not get myself to focus after a pagelong description of something that just put me to sleep, and I zoned out after that. I tried skimming through it, but I think it is just not for me.

Would recommend this for those of you that like a bit of a vague, densely descriptive and flowery language all while not truly being all that proper, and if you honestly love a bunch of cool lesbians doing cool, at times unethical shit (or so I heard). Please don't let my review keep you from picking this up, because all my friends recommended this to me and loved it, so I think I am just not intellectual enough for it, but truly, do give it a shot!

Thank you to Kensington Publishing and NetGalley for this e-ARC for review. I’m quite excited to read it and will provide a review promptly.

4.5 stars rounded up.

This book is for communist and anarchist queers who loved Gideon the Ninth but also kind of wished Catherynne M. Valente had written the prose instead.

My number one tip to you is to keep paper and pencil at hand to write down character names and attributes because this book does no hand-holding and every character has at least three names, sometimes up to five. It takes place in a fully realized fantasy world of many different cultures and religions and there's no guide to help you keep it all sorted (unless it's added to the official release). It's a glorious mess.

So, what the hell is this book even about? Our protagonist Marney is the only survivor of strike-breaking massacre at a factory that refines a strange and magical metal called ichorite. She is "lustertouched", born allergic to ichorite but also with a magical resonance to it. In the aftermath of the massacre she winds up joining the Choir, a gang of political radicals who have overthrown a baron and are keeping up the charade of him still being alive while the people live in a socialist commune funded by stealing from the rich. There are many ways the charade can fall, and the most obvious ticking clock is that the baron had a young daughter who at some point needs to appear in high society or things will get too suspicious. Meanwhile, Marney has sworn to kill Yann Industry Chauncey, the man who discovered how to refine ichorite and ordered her family killed. These threads eventually come together as the Choir spies an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by entering a disguised Marney into a competition among nobility for the hand of Chauncy's daughter in marriage.

<i>We must resist the ossification of precedent. We march toward Hereafter, not tomorrow, we march past tomorrow, we know tomorrow will be hard.</i>

This is an intensely political book. While many different political philosophies are exposed by characters on the page, the true core is to the far left. Reading such a radical political underpinning in a fantasy novel, a genre with deep conservative roots, was extremely refreshing. I've never experienced it before and I hope it blasts open a dam. It felt like clarke was writing this book because they wanted to read it, not to chase any trends or to the tastes of the mass market. I hope it blows up. I hope it goes nuclear.

It's also extremely queer. I immediately made the connection from the in-book word crawly to queer (and several other words I fear I don't have the license to type), especially when Marney starts using it around people who call themselves Lunarists or astrologists. It's wonderful to have a stone butch protagonist. The sex scenes are perfectly woven into the story. It's a sapphic book for messy, sexual, sapphic punks.

The actual storytelling is where I struggled. This book meanders. Marney often reflects on things and directs a large amount of her narration to her dead first love, sometimes in the middle of other things. Marney is also prone to seizures, hallucinations, and fits when exposed to ichorite. It's a book you cannot skim or listen to at 3x speed. I feel a lot of fantasy is written where the prose is as unobtrusive as possible, so you barely notice the words as you turn the pages. This prose is sharp and present; the book demands you look at each word. If you don't, you actually can skim right over important plot developments. Overall, I found the back 60% to be far more enticing than the 40% that came before. The pacing also speeds up beyond that point. The ending is beyond my dreams.

In short, it's a damn fine novel that didn't work perfectly for me. I want to give a copy to every radical that helped shape my burning queer self as I came of age, into the hands of all my friends making messy queer art, and to all people who are dreaming of the Hereafter.

Thank you NetGalley, Kensington Publishing, and Erewhon Books for this ARC I received in exchange for my honest review.

My kingdom for a map and a dramatis personae!

At about 40% I asked my Buddy Reader "Anyway, what the fuck is [redacted]? What the fuck is [further redacted]? What the fuck was happening with that [redacted] on the [redacted]?"

There were eventually answers to those questions (some sooner than others), but by the time we got to them, I was kind of past caring. In the best possible way.

Much like Clarke's debut The Scapegracers, the story here is meandering. It sometimes feels like it takes forever to get to any sort of point, but I firmly believe this is a feature of their writing, not a bug.

I hope this book finds its audience so I can have more people to talk about it with. This might be the single most queer female gaze focused book I've ever read? Truly, absolutely, wonderfully off the rails and delightful.

(Ignore the people who say this is a second person narrative. It's not.)