Fantasy. I picked this one up because the author makes bookish content online that I quite like – her taste in books isn’t the same as mine, but it’s related, and she’s smart and politically interesting so I enjoy her videos. The book is a vaguely-medieval-Europe, dragons-and-castles-and-magic sort of fantasy that I don’t read a ton of these days, but it is infused with a sensibility that is Scottish (she’s from Edinburgh), feminist, socialist (in a broad sense), queer, and hopepunk, so I couldn’t very well *not* read it. It is an interesting mix of embracing some conventions of this type of fantasy and turning others upside down. The island of Albiyon where it is set, for instance, got rid of its monarchy a century before, and it is a sort of medieval parliamentary social democracy-slash-cooperative commonwealth, including a faction that are clearly High Tories (without using that language) wanting to roll it all back, as well as street-level (clearly BNP-inspired) nativist thugs stirring up trouble. The book is self-published, and there were a handful more copyediting errors than a professionally published book would generally have, plus a number of instance of sentence-level wording and flow that I suspect would have been changed. But Menzies is a good writer and I enjoyed the storytelling, though it is also clear that the her fiction skills will grow and develop as she continues to write – a process I am keen to follow.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.