First and foremost, props to the artist because this cover is absolutely amazing. There were moments when reading this book that I found myself having read four pages, yet completely confused as to how I got there. The scene transitions could've used some work but the characters and their scenes with one another were great. I'd be willing to read more from the author as I do feel they have a lot of potential for growth.

Thank you, NetGalley and Kensington Publishing, for the ARC.

Metal from heaven was both tender and violent, and the only way I can describe reading it is as "breathtaking”

While the Gideon the Ninth comp title played a part in me picking this book, I don’t think it’s really an accurate comparison, and it might end up disappointing some readers. However, I am struggling with finding a way to describe this book in a way that does it justice.

In short, Metal From Heaven follows a young girl named Marney as she barely escapes the massacre that takes her entire family and her childhood friend, whom she was in love with, and along the way encounters bandits who take her under their wing to join their large revolutionary organization, all the while she seeks revenge on the man who killed her loved ones.

While the prose is captivating from the start, it took me a while to get into this story itself. The pacing was somewhat slow, and the world is revealed to us bit by bit, which was frustrating and sometimes confusing, but the payoff is worth it in my opinion.

I enjoyed Marney as a POV. Her devotion and love for the people around her were beautiful to read about. Her connection to her childhood friend is an absolute highlight; the way it turns into worship of an idealized version of who she remembers her friend to be was heart wrenching. Even the way she sees the world (and therefore, how we see it) is influenced by her love for her friend, which was really fascinating.

I loved the lesbianism in this book, from the varied gender expressions, the history, the terminology, the communities, and the sex. I have not read any book that depicts lesbianism like this, and I am so grateful for it.

My only complaint is that I think some side characters and some plot points could’ve been fleshed out more.

Overall, this was a stunning book with a great main character, a well-realized world with interesting history and politics, and gorgeous prose.

Easily one of my favourite books I've read this year! I love how different this is from anything else I've read, I love the prose, I love the industrial revolution setting and the protagonist, I love how unapologetically gross and strange it is. I don't think this is all that similar to Gideon the Ninth (although I imagine that a lot of Gideon fans will enjoy this as well), and the comparison to The Princess Bride actually boggles the mind. I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys weird fantasy and prose that reads like a fever dream.

A brassy and bold undertaking in more ways than one, Metal From Heaven is a great book if you’re looking for something different and very overt about its intentions.

This book is not subtle. Nothing about it could be considered downplayed or nuanced. This book is 100% arguing that capitalism, corporate greed, and anti-unionism are bad and communal living and stealing from the rich are good (no complaints here, to be clear). It's unabashedly presenting an argument in this regard, which serves to make the themes and motivations of the characters easy to understand.

Unfortunately, the style of the prose is not so simple. I’ve read many challenging novels, and I enjoy books that play with structure and aren’t entirely straightforward … but this didn’t do enough with structure to compensate for the way it was written. Basically, this book is a whole whackload of sentence fragments. While it happens far too often to be unintentional, I found it choppy and entirely broke my immersion. If it was somehow related to the main character’s magical abilities, sure, but that’s never made overtly clear (and given everything else is overt in this book, having that be the one subtlety seems odd). Had the sentence fragments increased when she touched anchorite or during other times where choppiness would enhance the reading in a mimetic way, that would have worked quite well, but to just have everything sentence fragments all the time just didn’t work for me.

Moving back to the good stuff, the physical descriptions in the novel are excellent. You really understand what everyone looks like, which I think is one of the harder things to pull off. It’s easier to give everyone sort of minimal description and let them fill in the blanks, but the characters in this book were detailed and rich. The queerness was great, too—there’s a real “lesbians banding together” feel that welcomes you into the fold.

That being said, the characters are a bit “much” at times. This could be getting boring in my old age, but all of them had very loud personalities. It felt a bit like a carryover from YA where, at least the limited YA I've read, doesn’t lend itself to subtle characters. This, like the prose, is a preference thing. I think some readers will love these characters. Me, I’m like, does anyone just chill once in a while? Can we just sit down for five minutes?

As a whole, I found my interests would move in spurts. I would be super entranced for 10% or so, then kind of meh for another 10% until something else picked it back up. This could be because there is a bit of info-dumping worldbuilding that could have been woven in a way that was less clunky or trimmed back. There’s also a severe lack of transition phrases, which ties to the prose again.

I will say, though, the ending is batshit crazy wild, which was a lot of fun (in a sense). This book has a lot going for it, and I think a lot of people will love it. I loved the themes it was addressing, the power-lesbian dynamics, and the worldbuilding was rich despite how it was presented, but I didn’t love the book overall.

If you’re in the mood for something that starts off right in the thick of the action and is a high octane, no holds barred, these are my politics and screw an allegory. I’m telling it to you straight, queer as hell, not happy ending; you will enjoy this.

I need to say two things at the start:
1. You have to read to the end. Period.
2. The author did not hold back. At all. Not in the description of the MC, in the worldbuilding, in the brutality, in the fragmentation, in the prose per se, in the spice. I am pretty sure you haven't read anything like this before. I know I didn't.

The world is unique and incredibly rich. The way we learn about it is through Marney, who loses everything in the beginning, and then finds a new way and a purpose. The purpose is revenge. And in a way, love.

At this point I feel that my review is as fragmented as the narration of this book is. Which, in a way, is fitting. We are in Marney's stream of consciousness, and in the first part there's vignette after vignette until we hit the turning point.

I'm not sure what to tell you about this book. If you're really into it, I think it has the potential to alter your brain chemistry. If you're not....you might still be fascinated.

I love that it's queernormative, and that the MC is so very different from other heroines. I appreciate highly what the book is doing. I'm just not sure how I'm feeling about it.

Sorry that this review is not helpful.. Just read the book I guess. It's definitely worth it.

4/5 stars

Thank you @netgalley and @kensingtonbooks for the eARC!

#MetalFromHeaven #Netgalley #Bookstagram

A tale on female rage and revenge. This is by far the strangest book I’ve read in years. Marney is an incredible character. We follow her story from the massacre of her family up to the journey of her revenge. It’s beautifully written, the book contained twists I didn’t expect and turns I’d been waiting on since the moment I read the first chapter. This is one of those books where the character is a bit detached from the reader, we don’t fully know what Marney is doing or why, and even though I usually don’t like books like that, it makes so much sense with this one. This is not a romance, it’s a tragedy, an emotional tale of the world falling apart around you. It’s hard not to like this book, do I love it? I don’t know.. probably not, it’s not what this book is meant for.

The book grasps a side of queer relationships that is hard to find in lesbian fiction. I’ve noticed after 200+ read books that lots of writers almost seem afraid to write heavy sex scenes between women. As if because it’s two women, some “man”handling wouldn’t happen. It’s frustrating and often boring to me. Marney is not always a sweet lover, she can sometimes be rough, sometimes unkind, depends on what her relationship with her partner is. Finally a queer character that doesn’t hold back, it was nice to read about dynamics that don’t always hold hands and gaze into each others eyes during ‘love making’.

A part I found lacking in the book was the romance, a personal preference. That was not what Marney’s story was about. It doesn’t lack love, it’s full of it actually; I can even argue it’s the main subject of the book, the driving force behind Marney’s character. She’s full of it, her passion for life is difficult to grasp since it’s full of violence and she seems to not always stand with two feet on the ground, but it becomes clear and beautiful once you see her traverse in her path for revenge. She does everything for the ones she lost, her family, friends and first love never leave her. She carries them with her in her heartbreaking journey and narration throughout the book. She’s one with them. It’s as if she talks to her childhood friend with letters that she expects no response from. This book is written in first person with Marney sometimes referring to that friend/ first love as You. Marney speaks to you.

Because the basis of a romantic storyline was lacking for Marney (at least with someone alive), I wouldn’t usually have picked up a book like this. I don’t regret it one bit, but it still is saddening to read. I loved Vikare however, a wild, intelligent and passionate character. She formed a love interest in a way I suppose. They fit well together, but as expected, Marney is not really tied to their world in the way she would’ve if the massacre of Burn Street never happened. You know it from the beginning of this book that Marney won’t have a proper happy ending, if it can even be called happy? It’s painful since Marney deserves the world.

Regardless, the narration was gorgeous. Definitely a challenge for a non-native speaker, the comparison to Gideon the Ninth is accurate for this book. August crafts a beautiful and intricate world with detailed politics and multisided characters traversing in it. I will be giving this book a 4.5 on Goodreads for world building, character design and plotwriting. Thank you Kensington Publishing on NetGalley for the copy in exchange for an honest review.

The only thing this has in common with The Princess Bride is the concept of Inigo Montoya. As for Gideon the Ninth, let the record show I dislike Gideon’s narration so much I've DNF’d GtN three times.

So what does Metal from Heaven feel like? Easy: it’s Robin Hood. But a Robin Hood set in a fantasy* late 19th Century/early 20th Century where the Merry Men are a bunch of motorcycle riding dykes trying to usher in a communist revolution and their Sheriff of Nottingham is Andrew Carnegie. If that sounds like fun to you, beware: reading this is like jumping headfirst into something as dense as Dune for the first time—the vocabulary, the culture, and the names will make you crave the glossary Dune is now packaged with so you can make sense of what’s going on. And just when you think you’ve got a hang of your bearings, the setting will shift and you have to start all over again with a dozen new characters from different parts of the world (all of them with different religions, different styles of names, nicknames, connections, etc.).

I’ll be honest, there's a lot of characters in this I could tell you nothing about. A lot of characters I might have a vague idea of one thing about them. They were, frankly, set dressing. Only a few characters really matter and they'll be the ones our protagonist thinks about when they're no longer in the room. Usually bad character work is a huge deal breaker for me, but this just isn't a character book. Not really. Marney, our protagonist, is the only character you need to enjoy to appreciate this story. And even then doesn't mean you have to like Marney. Marney is difficult to like. In particular, she's going to really piss off some readers with her romantic choices which is a big deal because, while this book isn’t a romance, it hinges on a specific romance. What a mess! Still I adored this book.

If you do pick this one up, I feel like it's imperative to note this book is hard to judge without reading the full story down to the last page. It's like trying to offer an opinion on something like Evangelion. Too much hinges on the end. The secrets of this world aren't even hinted at until like 90% in.

Honestly, speaking of Evangelion, my final verdict of this book is that it wishes it was an anime. The part of the cast that falls flat as words on a page would pop as anime characters. Luster, ichorite… all that nonsense wishes it could be animated by Trigger.

Alas, it’s a book instead.

*This book is labeled/marketed as fantasy, but I would argue it’s sci-fi. Even the title feels like it’s alluding to the sci-fi nature of ichorite. The characters, however, don't know they're in a sci-fi world. They attribute things to religion so… I get the “fantasy” label, but… yeah.

This book was unlike anything I’ve read before. When I started it I knew I was going down a path I hadn’t travelled before but the writing made me want to buckle up and enjoy the ride. There’s a part of me that loved it but I think there were parts that felt a bit overcomplicated and it made it difficult for me to settle into the story. Though the ending felt like the perfect end to the story.

“You can't be your own company if you're a woman like me. We cannibalize ourselves. We remember things. Memory's a scourge!"

I have been a fan of Clarke since The Scapegracers and this books has solidified that even more. This book marks their adult debut and, boy, does it achieve everything it sets out to.

Straight away, this book draws you in with prose which is so lyrical and poetic that you are instantly sucked into this industrial landscape. The contrast between the lyricism in this book and the more comedic style writing in The Scapegracers shows just how successful Clarke is at what they do.

My absolute favourite thing about Clarke is their ability to write such beautiful, gorgeous, delectable characters. Harlow, Candor, and Tricksy had been on the page all of 5 seconds before I decided that I loved every single one of them and that they were my precious children. You will also want all of them to end up with Marney because obviously in a Clarke book you’re going to wish that they could all just be one big happy polycule.

The only thing that took away slightly for me was because of how lyrical it is, sometimes it can be hard to grasp what is going on, especially towards the end. Where I definitely knew what was going on, but also I definitely had no clue what was going on too.

(Also can I just say I guessed the part of the plot twist straight away in chapter one and I was so happy with myself)

So if you choose any book to read this year about a bandit and her found family of recluses, let it be this one. I promise you will not be disappointed.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC and the opportunity to get my hands on this book in advance!

Well. I'm not sure.

There's a lot to love about this book, but there was also a lot to loathe. I think this will be an effective book for many, and maybe I just read it in the wrong year, wrong month, wrong time in my menstrual cycle, but it just didn't work 100% for me.

The first chapter of this book is maybe the single most impressive openings of all time. It harkens back to real-world labor movements during and after the industrial revolution. The writing is sumptuous and effective in building this super dreary, tense tone. The first half is kind of written in these vignettes that kind of give the whole book this fragmented feel, as if the main character is desperately trying to hold everything together when everything's gone to/will go to shit. It feels nervous, almost weary, like you're grasping for threads just out of reach. Marney, the main character, was a very successful protagonist. By that I mean she's memorable and unique--it feels like you're reading from the perspective of someone else. The world building in this book was also quite effective, though I don't think it was particularly original or outstanding. I think the author does a pretty good job at not info-dumping at the beginning.

However. I feel like a lot of the strengths of this book were also reasons why it just didn't work for me. I think moment to moment there were so many fun, interesting ideas and so many cool scenes that I genuinely really enjoyed, but it's just bogged down by this heavy dreariness. There were no emotional highs and lows here, I never felt anything aside from the oppressive weight of seriousness. I'm not asking for cozy-warm-fuzzy-feelings! I'm asking for any feelings at all. Worry, sorrow, something. I didn't feel SHIT! All the characters in this world are kind of insane; they are gruff and downtrodden and listless, even the ones who are supposed to be happy. They all blend together because of this. It's really hard to feel things for characters who barely even seem separate from one another. You might think the fact that they follow different religions would help differentiate them but... not really. The religions, for the most part, feel kind of... same-y. We're told people who follow different religions act differently, but we don't really experience this 'cept for when we're being told as such. And everyone's always monologuing. Always!!!! Twice or thrice or even four times a chapter! And then this looseness of the novel, the fragmentation, sometimes it feels ineffective 'cause Marney will go from thinking about having her bones dissolved and her skin cut into strips and then in the next paragraph be rubbin' and suckin' on some ladies clit. WOAH THERE NELLY!!! It jumps around in ways that sometimes feel a little silly and that kind of take you out of the moment.

I personally liked this book a lot more when I started taking it a little less seriously, but it's hard 'cause it's written in this super serious, heavy, contemplative, metaphysical manner. YKWIM? I dunno. I wish I liked it better. Maybe at a more ~intellectual~ time in my life I will, but, for now... three stars.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC of this book.

I loved the first few chapters but then the pacing really fell off. I’m glad I stuck with it because then it wrapped up nicely and I loved the end, but that middle chunk was slow and I almost DNF’d.

I got the eARC from NetGalley so thank you to them!
Wow. This book was so beautifully written. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on but I always knew how the characters felt and it made me feel as they did. It's so difficult to talk about this book because it's so unique and hard to describe. It's told in second person as the main character Marney tell "us" (who is someone from her past) the events of her life. This book is mostly vibes without too much plot but the vibes are done so well.

3,5 stars because a part of me wants to say 2,5 and another 4,5.

This was a wild ride for me. I LOVED the first 2 chapters. You get thrown right into the action and everything feels gritty and horrible and you can just FEEL the world. After those 2 chapters though I kind of had to drag through for a while and nearly DNF'ed and probably would have if I wouldn't have chased the high the first 2 chapters gave me.
The problem is in the first 2 chapters the MC is a child but because this is an adult book with very explicit sex scenes later on the MC of course has to age quite a bit before we can start the actual revenge story. So what follows are snippets of the teen years of the MC that are just not well paced and because you constantly jump around you get whole paragraphs of messy VERY purple prose that are supposed to give you an introduction to the new scene but that quite frankly brought me to my limits of understanding what's going on which I never really had before (not even in one of the comp titles: the locked tomb series).
I liked the writing during the actual scenes when there was dialogue and stuff happening but sometimes I'd just sit here and not know what was going on.
Thankfully starting in chapter 9 the actual revenge story starts and the actual plot unfolds and then I loved it again (and my reading pace increased significantly).

There is some very interesting world building in this book which escalates until the very finale which made me actually gasp because I thought the idea was so cool.
A lot of the mythology was really cool and there were some really powerful sentences and ideas brought up in that context that I enjoyed massively.
I love that this is a (mostly) queernormative world and nearly everyone is a lesbian so big yay for that - I love when women.

The characters are pretty flat for the most part. They all serve a specific purpose and don't really have room to stray from that but they are overall fine in my opinion.

The book is overall very much based on being anti-capitalism which I love as well.

So yeah this book definetly has it's weaknesses and especially in the first half really stretched out my patience but after that I really loved it and devoured nearly 300 pages in a day.

This was an absolute banger. The cringe-inducing "fear her wrath" tagline and Gideon the Ninth comparison really do it a disservice, in my opinion. While it is a revenge tale on its surface, that felt, to me, like a smaller component of a story really about the lengths a person will go to, not just for love, but for the kind of idealized vision of love one is capable of building in their internal world, entirely separate from its flesh and blood provenance. Such a spectacular read.

I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but this is going to be a difficult one for me to review because I’ve genuinely never read anything like it before. Also because I really liked the first few chapters and loved the end few, but the middle section really didn’t do it for me.
- The worldbuilding was a highlight for me. It had a really unique flavour and a lot of depth to it that I really enjoyed reading about. The magic was also really unique in that it had a really detrimental effect on the user and I really liked that aspect of it.
- The writing style was another really unique aspect. In places, it was wonderful and impactful (like the opening few chapters, during action sequences and the ending). It was also brilliant during the magic-using scenes as it captured the confusion and fear and feverishness so well. But, it did drag for me a little bit towards the middle and sometimes just made things a bit confusing/blurry when they didn’t need to be. I enjoyed it overall (we have too many books with the same style of writing) but it got a bit much in some places and a bit fluffy. I’ve enjoyed books with similar styles before, but those have all been novellas and so it didn’t get to be too much.
- In terms of plot, as I said earlier, I enjoyed some aspects of it and didn’t like others. All the parts focussed on Marney’s vengeance were fantastic, but I’m not a big romance fan so I just didn’t enjoy that aspect of the story at all. I kept waiting for the vengeance plot to get going but the plot just felt like it meandered a bit. Once the romance was moved away from, I loved it! But there was a lot. Take this with a pinch of salt as I’m sure others will love the romantic aspect, but it just wasn’t for me.
- I did enjoy most of the characters though, funnily enough, Marney was probably the one I connected to the least, perhaps due to the slightly odd pov style (which I did like, particularly the second person parts). But the diversity of the characters was great to read about and none of the side characters felt flat or boring- in fact, I'd love to hear more about a lot of them!
- Overall, this was a really unique read that had great moments, but the more romance/sex focussed sections really dragged for me to the point where I did consider dnfing. I expected something a bit like The Rage of Dragons, but it wasn't, so that's on me I guess! I’m glad I didn’t because the ending was brilliant, but I can’t say I really enjoyed this one overall.
- However, that doesn’t mean others won’t so I’d still recommend this to anyone looking for something dark, original and different with a romance element and some pretty great plot twists.

This is a book driven by intense love for community, collective action, and lesbian sex, which I think we can all agree are things we ought to see more of in society these days. The writing style is lovely, with a distance that reminded me at times of Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice and a poetic tinge that never felt overwrought. It was refreshing in how it approached lesbianism as community and history and not just desire (though desire is certainly a pulse throughout). I'm not a queer scholar myself but I know enough to tell that the author has spent time with lesbian history through the evolving weirdness of gender and sexuality, the butch/femme dynamics, the fact that the main character is stone. I don't know that I've ever seen a stone protagonist in pure fiction. It was raw and delightful.

If I have one complaint, it's that the distance of the prose (when it is not waxing poetic about you, recurring you) makes it hard to nail down Marney as a person. As an illustration of trauma and dissociative coping mechanisms, it excels. However, we got to the central conceit (Marney must seduce her enemy's daughter) and I found I could not imagine Marney in a room. This quality is essential in a character who must impersonate a noble and has the job of "being in rooms". The tension of anticipating Marney's response was lost when it should have been at its highest. We expect, from similar narratives, that her bandit ways will lead her to at least one faux-pas. Not so. She follows her instincts to fingerbang a princess at the dinner table and is entirely correct to do so. I have no sense of noble culture either from which to determine if this is a liability. The stakes build as the politics intersect more personal concerns, so it did not lose me, but Marney never felt fully actualized in the same way that the world did. The world lived and breathed and bled.

That said, I will be handing a copy to all of my lesbian friends and thinking about this book for a good while.

Metal from Heaven is a fascinating book that throws you into the deep end, that tells you to pick up a gun and fight for the glorious Hereafter. I can see where comparisons to Gideon the Ninth and the Princess Bride are coming from, but this book reminded me the most of Babel. Like Babel, the protagonist wants to crush the exploitative, imperialist industry that tore apart their life, and is unapologetically violent in their pursuit of revenge. It is a gritty, tragic story.

This book is beautifully written, and it will take its time to set a scene, to describe the outfits and furnishings and body language of each character, but the story is all the richer for it. The unique narration style—both stream-of-consciousness and second person—fit the obsessive character of Marney and the urgent tone of the story perfectly. The geopolitics and cultures in the book (especially the religions!) were fascinating as much as they could be dense and confusing.

My only real issue with this book was the pacing. From the description, I expected the competition for Gossamer’s hand in marriage to be more central to the plot, but it doesn’t come into play until the halfway point of the book. This story is the entire arc of Marney’s journey from child laborer, to thief, to fake noble, and I definitely was invested in some parts of this journey more than others.

What really stood out to me was the relationship between Marney and “you,” her friend that died in the strike at the beginning of the story. Their dynamic isn’t fully realized until quite late in the book, but without spoiling anything, it encapsulated all the tensions at play in the narrative and made for a wild ride of an ending.

Metal from Heaven is perfect for anyone who loves their fantasy books weird, full of dense politics, and driven by absolutely unhinged characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and Erewhon for an ARC of this book.

I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to its publication date that is forthcoming. I enjoyed the setting, pacing and the characters too. They were well written and seemed to jump off the page.

I think there are some really cleaver ideas in this book. Mostly for me the thing that brought it down was the pacing. At times I would be really interested in what was going on and would be into the story and then it would slow down and lose me. It would be interesting plot and then go back to internal monologue and character work. The main character was interesting and grew so my review is not to say the character wasn't fleshed out but the slowing down to do this would pull me out of it.

Getting into Metal from Heaven was a bit of a trial initially, but once I settled in it was a wild ride that carried me along through to the last few pages of the book. The worldbuilding is excellent with a solid depth and scope, particularly development around the Choir and the community Marney finds herself part of. The characters had a breath of life to them across the board, even those we only see briefly, and the reappearance and lives lived of some of the larger cast (Sunny I'm looking at you!) were a pleasant surprise.

Queer romances and the normalization of queer relationships is always pleasant and this book fit the bill: Marney's relationships and those of her friends are large factors in the story, and changing them or removing them would make the message and the story far less impactful. They also do some loadbearing worldbuilding with slang and language, which I thoroughly enjoyed. We have queer revenge! Queer crime! Queer chaos and shenanigans everywhere we turn, along with a side dose of yearning and regret that temper the joys and show the costs of that life of riotous joy, and make the characters consider what price is worth paying to keep true to themselves and what they love. The rich descriptions of everything about Marney's life bring us into the world, wrap us up in layers, and make it hard to pull away.

My only quibbles with this book come in the last section where our point of view character changes and the story takes a dramatic shift. I understand the author's decision here and the impact on the storytelling, but it felt very jarring compared to what had come before. Certain elements were foreshadowed but it did not seem to fit the feel of the rest of the story and I found myself having to force my way through it out of lack of interest. I understand why it was done and know some people will love it, but it was not my cup of tea.