Tag Archives: Natasha Pulley

The Hymn to Dionysus

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

Ooh, Natasha Pulley just keeps getting better and better at her special talent, which is weaving truly brutal social commentary through a cover of fantasy action. I went into this one with less trepidation after The Mars House, and I’m sort of wondering if The Mars House was a setup. There are enough notably similar themes between the two novels that I began to think of them as a pairing of sorts, though very, very different in setting, character, and plot.

The Hymn To Dionysus has an even more light-hearted tone right off the bat. Our protagonist is a happy child soldier in ancient Thebes, and if it doesn’t exactly sound like a happy existence to a modern reader, well, sometimes that’s just the case with fantasy, especially historical fantasy. I mean, look at the majority of children’s and young adult media, right? The Hunger Games and Naruto, just to name a few right off the bat – full of deeply traumatizing events for young children who just sort of make do, and that’s what our protagonist does, too. His life has some downsides (murdering, enslaving, etc.) but there’s plenty of upsides, too (his military unit is like a family to him, he gets to travel and see all sorts of sights). He and everyone else in Thebes are just going along, until Dionysus, the god of madness, shows up and suddenly they can’t just go along, and the full awareness of it all starts crashing down on them, and it is devastating, for both the characters and the reader.

As if all that wasn’t enough, there are some striking comparisons to our current world. My ancient Greek history isn’t up to much, but I started getting the impression this was set toward the end of the Grecian empire, with a years-long drought devastating all levels of civil society. As field slaves run away, figuring capture and death is better than starvation on the stringent food rations, the military is charged with rounding up ‘criminals’ to work the fields for the necessary food for the city and given a quota to meet, which rang direly true.

It ends as satisfactorily as possible, more so than I’d imagined it being able to after a whole series of gasp-worthy twists, and left some scenes indelibly imprinted in my head, so I’d generally recommend this, though I am looking forward to returning to something a little more gentle next (spoiler: I didn’t do that).

The Mars House

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

You know how there are rare authors that you as a reader just trust implicitly? Like, even if the story doesn’t seem to be making sense or clicking, you know they’ll pull it off in the end. Well, I don’t trust Natasha Pulley – in fact, I actively distrust her. This is not to say that her books aren’t consistently excellent. They are! She just has a real habit of throwing in some actual crime against humanity, and having all the characters shrug it off like no big deal.

I wouldn’t even read this one until Kinsey read it first and gave me the all clear, and even then, I read it in a sort of mental flinch state. This also made me very suspicious of the slightest hint of genocidal tendencies in characters, so I was extra judgmental of them all and not quite able to actually like them as much as perhaps I would have otherwise.

Our main character is a principal ballet dancer for the Royal Ballet who has to flee the climate crisis in London for a colony on Mars. There, he is consigned to manual labor until a conflict with an anti-immigration politician forces the two of them into a contractual marriage (it makes marginally more sense in the context). This would all be brutal to read if the protagonist wasn’t such an utter golden retriever, just overall cheerful (and a little egocentric) regardless of harrowing circumstances around him.

It seemed clear from the outset that the politics were not all that they seemed, but I stayed extremely wary of Pulley trying to trick me into rooting for a war criminal or some such. Instead, though, she wove a very satisfyingly complex mystery that pulls in geopolitics, gender and cultural identity, disability rights, and so much more. The core relationship is, of course, the draw, but I find myself continuing to think through the various linguistic and cultural extrapolations Pulley creates here.

Christmas Stories

by Anna

As I get older, I find I have to work a little harder to generate a holiday spirit among all the daily life stressors and nonsense, so I like to gear up with some seasonal reads:

The Haunting Season: Eight Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights

I bought this because it includes a Natasha Pulley story about Keita and Thaniel from her Watchmaker of Filigree Street series, which I adore. The general reader reviews are mixed, with many readers saying that Pulley’s story was the weakest since it doesn’t stand alone if you aren’t familiar with the characters. Being well familiar with the characters, though, my experience was the opposite: I very much enjoyed Pulley’s story, always happy to get more of Keita and Thaniel, but was disappointed in the other stories.

Perhaps it was because I was already familiar with Pulley’s characters, but they were the only ones that I actually liked. Most of the other stories featured either selfish or delusional characters, I suppose to ‘justify’ the hauntings one way or another? The plots also seemed overly complicated and obtuse, so each story ended just as I felt like I was starting to get a feel for it.

Sentenced to Christmas

By Marshall Thornton

Marshall Thornton writes the most ridiculous rom-com and cozy mystery plots featuring a cast of hilarious dirtbag characters, and I get a real kick out of his books. As befits the title, the plot of this book is absolutely ridiculous: arrested for burning down the patriotic Christmas tree in front of a conservative talk radio station, our protagonist Gage is sentenced by a crackpot judge to spend Christmas with the prosecuting assistant district attorney (his own defense attorney being Jewish) in order to “learn the true meaning of Christmas.”

The thing about Thornton, though, is that his dirtbag characters then often react with more realistic cranky befuddlement, and it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny. Only one thing stops me from wholeheartedly recommending this: Gage’s friend and assistant is introduced as non-binary, and that being a point of contention with their family, especially around the holidays. Unfortunately, Thornton presumably forgot, and uses she/her pronouns for them for a chunk of the middle of the book. I am confident that it is an unintentional writing error, and amazon reviews mention that some editorial errors have been fixed, so hopefully this is no longer a caveat.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

by Rebecca

This is a tricky review to write because this book was fascinating and well-written, but I didn’t care for it and I don’t think it quite managed to pull off what it had intended to.

I have a great deal of respect for Natasha Pulley as an author, and really enjoyed her previous three books. She always has really interesting concepts and does amazing things with timey-wimey stuff, and this book is no exception. The Kingdoms is unrelated to the previous series, with its own world and characters, mostly around an alternate history of the Napoleonic War (1805 – 1807), but also in “Londres” some 93 years later (1898 – 1900).

Not to include too many spoilers, but as you might guess, this delves into time manipulation and changing timelines and people changing because of changing timelines even more than any of the previous books had. Unfortunately, I think this is the first time she didn’t quite manage to pull it off.

The chapters skip around in time a lot, and I often had to just go with the flow rather than completely understand how the parts interconnected, and there are some parts that I don’t think make sense based on the internal world-building. I considered reading the book a second time to more fully track the course of events, but that brought me to my second problem: I found all of the characters vaguely unpleasant in a wide variety of ways. For good and valid reasons: they’re all horribly traumatized in a variety of ways too, but that just makes reading about them even less pleasant. A mixed blessing was how low-key they all were about the horrifying circumstances and the even more horrifying adaptive behaviors.

The only part that I really enjoyed was the last 50 pages or so in which everything came together and a variety of explanations clicked into place and there’s a couple of impressive feats. There’s even a mostly happy ending (as long as you don’t think about it too much.)

So, to sum up: I didn’t enjoy it but I hope that there are other readers who did. And I’m impressed with the writing that tried to do something really difficult. I’ll still keep an eye out for anything else that Pulley writes.

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley

by Rebecca

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow
by Natasha Pulley
2020

According to Amazon, this is the second book in the series, but I would have put it as the third book, even if it does continue on directly from the events of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street with the same characters. But the author wrote The Bedlam Stacks in between and set it in the same world with references back and forth.

The whole series is really good and this book might even be my favorite but now I need to go back and re-read all of them just to see. One of the things that I really enjoyed even as it ratcheted up the tension so much, was the exploration of the edges of power: how individuals can have immense power, but it is never infinite and there are always going to be points where it ends. In some ways, it also seemed very thematic with the last book I reviewed, Return of the Thief, as there is one protagonist who is doing their best to manipulate events, and you want them to succeed but not only is that not guaranteed, but sometimes you can’t even tell if it’s working or not because some of the long term successes depend on failures. But Pulley make’s this all the more fraught because our primary point of view character, Thaniel, isn’t even sure what Mori’s goal is. I also just love reading the love and devotion that has Thaniel follow along, trying to be supportive even as he’s also struggling to figure out what being supportive would even be. It just gives me so many feels.

Like all the books in the series, there’s a theme of clockwork: of seeing gears interact with on another and only slowly tracing those interactions and putting together all the pieces to figure out what the complete work is intended for. It comes to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion even as the process is fraught and made me realize how much I trusted Pulley as an author to have an excellent plot and how little I trusted her to keep her characters alive and well.

I very much recommend this book, but I’m kind of curious to know if it can be read as a stand-alone. So much of the book is already wading through uncertainty that I’m not sure if not having read the previous two would make it any worse. But in general, I definitely recommend it as a full series.

The Bedlam Stacks

by Anna

By Natasha Pulley

Bedlam_StacksOh, man, you guys! This book is so good! The Bedlam Stacks is the second novel by the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, and I’d forgotten how good that novel was, too! They both have this beautiful atmosphere of dreaminess and suspense, and all the characters are so smart and interesting, even when they are at odds with each other, and the dialogue is so witty!

So, The Bedlam Stacks is about a guy who works for the East India Company as a smuggler, which the book fully recognizes is super problematic. Merrick Tremayne travels around the world, steals other countries’ protected resources and brings them back to London for the English company to sell at a huge profit. When the story starts, he has been injured in China and convalescing at his decrepit family estate. Though he isn’t fully able to walk yet, the company asks him to go to Peru to steal some cuttings of a native tree that is the main ingredient of the only known malaria cure at the time.

I would say that this is a stand-alone book and you don’t have to read The Watchmaker first, but you actually do. There is very little overlap in characters and setting, but to borrow from the clockwork theme, there’s a small but important cog in the story that you won’t understand if you don’t already know the secret of The Watchmaker. One of the very cool chapters when things start falling into place won’t make any sense at all, and will probably just confuse everything worse.

That said, The Watchmaker had one key magical element that transformed the very mundane London setting. The Bedlam Stacks exponentially expands the world-building to an entire region in Peru, where what we would consider magic is built into the way of life, both to the benefit and detriment of the locals. I loved it, it broke my heart, and I can’t stop thinking about it!

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Rebecca

watchmakerThe Watchmaker of Filigree Street
by Natasha Pulley
2015

I got the automated email from my library letting me know that a book on my hold list had finally come in, but I only vaguely recalled putting a request in and no real memory of why I had done so. But, wow, am I glad I did!

The book is set in 1884 London, although with a significant section of backstory set in 1870s Japan. Our protagonist is Thaniel, a telegraph clerk at the Home Office in London at a time when Irish nationalists are trying to instigate a revolution and are throwing bombs at government buildings. It’s also about ten years after Japan underwent a revolution, and they still have their own set of nationalists vs modernists, and have a significant immigrant population in England. One of those immigrants is Mori, the titular watchmaker of Filigree Street. Another main character is Grace, a female physics student at Oxford college. Then there are dozens of other characters who are all interesting and quirky and suspicious in their own ways.

It reminded me a bit of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore but better. It’s unclear for a significant portion of the book whether or not there’s a magical/supernatural element to the world. Is this book fantasy, science fiction, or straight up literary fiction? The answer to that would be a spoiler, so I’m not going to answer.

The plot, such as it is, is to discover the mystery of a particular watch that came into Thaniel’s possession and saved his life from a bombing. The vagueness of the plot does not stop it from being amazingly suspenseful. The tension really comes from Thaniel trying to figure out just what is going on, and who he should be trying to help versus who he should be trying to hinder. I stayed up way too late finishing this book, the day after I picked it up from the library.

The climax wobbled a bit with Pulley trying to add more traditional plotting and tension in unnecessary ways, but I still really enjoyed the book and highly recommend it.