'til daylight sends me home

It's boiling hot, I'm already half in holiday mode (although I have two more days of work left before going on leave), and I've just read a book which made such baffling narrative decisions that I think I'm going to have to write a separate post about it.

Let's answer the penultimate two fandom meme questions.

( Days 17-18 )

( The other days )

The wretched of the earth

This post is a bit atypical for me. Generally, when I post about books I've read, this falls into one of two categories — a longform review over on my reviews blog, dolorosa12 (if the book really resonated with me), or a brief summary and reaction as part of an ongoing reading log. I don't avoid negativity or criticism, but for the most part, if I want to dig into something in depth, it's because I liked it a lot. Standalone posts criticising books are not normal output from me.

With all that being said, I am boggling at the narrative choices made in the book I have just finished, The Court of Miracles by Kester Grant, to such an extent that I felt my bafflement warranted a full post.

I had thought the book was going to be a fairly standard YA fantasy heist novel (in the vein of Six of Crows or The Gilded Wolves), set in 19th-century Paris among a fictionalised underworld.

What it actually turned out to be was a YA retelling/reimagining of Les Misérables, intertwined with a post-colonial reimagining/reclaiming of Kipling's Jungle Book. For context, I have read the former (in English translation) but not the latter, and have spent enough time in fannish spaces vaguely adjacent to Les Mis musical fandom to have a rough idea of the musical as well. So far, so standard YA retelling — the idea to do so in a work of fiction is not utterly left-field, and it was published at a time when fantasy heist novels were a popular YA trend.

( Cut for book spoilers )