fub

We took paper for signatures with us to Japan, and (almost) every evening, we wrote about our experiences. We also glued ticket stubs, maps and stamps into the signatures, so that we could make a nice souvenir book when we got home. And of course, there was to be a nice book-box to keep it in! Last Sunday we finished the last work on this.

( Souvenir book of Japan 2010 )

It’s a pretty cool souvenir (I think), but next time we need to be careful to keep the signatures much, much smaller!

My friend Gert (who used to be on LJ back when!), who is an avid quilter, is showing some of his work at the Bartholomeus Gasthuis in Utrecht, together with Maria, his former boss from when he worked in a quilt fabric store. We went to the opening, and after cutting the ribbon, Gert showed every quilt to us and explained some things about the fabric and techniques used, but also what he wanted to express with that quilt.



“Real Men Stitch” says this one, made as a banner, so it has rounded corners at the bottom.

This is his “Japanese treasure boxes” quilt, using upcycled kimono fabric for the colourful ‘treasures’ in the boxes made with the dark fabric. Most of his work is very colourful, and you can see how his work has become more and more expressive in colour, shape and theme. Really great to see these together to see the progression.



He always works very precise (something he learned from his large-scale cross-stitching embroidery work), and this is the only ‘improvised’ quilt on display. With the technique you make ‘random’ triangles of fabric and create rectangles from them, so that it always fits together. It’s like fir trees on a mountain range.



The cool thing about this 3D effect is that with this orientations, the boxes seem to come out of the background, but if you turn it around, the boxes seem to be indents in the larger boxes!



Some of his more recent work expresses his identity as a gay man, celebrating the work of Erwin Olaf and Harvey Fierstein. The Erwin Olaf quilt includes “pockets” made of tulle fabric after every ‘F’ block where a postcard with a photo from Erwin Olaf has been inserted.





He worked very hard to finish this quilt for the exposition, titled “Adam and Steve” (iykyk). It shows the couple Adam and Steve living on their farm, surrounded by their livestock and flowers and portraits of their friends. (They must live in a warm climate, none of them wear shirts…) The background fabric is toile de jouy, which has these idyllic arcadian scenes — but always with a man and a woman. So this is a delicious subversion and commentary on heteronormativity.



There’s more, and Maria’s quilts are also varied and completely different, which makes it a must-see for the quilt-lover in your life. Admission is free and the expo is until the end of September.



If you want to see more of Gert’s work, simply search for “real men stitch” and you’ll find it!

We went to see the Project Hail Mary movie. Very long runtime, but time flew by!

Project Hail Mary was one of the books I read last year that got a five star rating from me. So I was kinda interested, but I would also have been fine with missing the movie — I already read the book, after all. But when the trailer passed by on my feed, I showed it to klik and she was interested. And my mother had won two movie tickets in a lottery that she gave to us, so we decided to go.

Of course the movie is different from the book — there’s some visual elements in the movie that make for great scenes but are not present in the book, like the immersive video-wall. And the book is more of a “science detective” vibe: looking at the evidence and then forming a hypothesis and then using the instruments at their disposal to reach a conclusion and build on that. The movie glosses over most of those aspects and instead focuses more on the emotional aspect, like the bond between Grace and Rocky and how Grace gets involved in the whole project in the first place. I thought that was a good idea: a movie is better suited for emotional storytelling after all.

We had a great time with it. Whether you have read the book or not, you’ll appreciate the visuals and the focus on the emotional aspect.

One of the most interesting aspects of renovating the new house was the “heat loss calculation”. We wanted to see if we could go all-electric with a heat pump with only floor heating to keep the house warm. The temperature of the water pumped into the heating tubes by a heat pump is much lower than the hot water produced by a gas burner that’s pumped into radiators — so there were some calculations to be done. Based on the extra insulation we wanted to add, we should be able to calculate the amount of heat that is lost to the environment. The standard temperature difference taken is 30 degrees Celcius, with the idea that you should be able to keep your house at 20 degrees when it’s -10 outside.

Once you know the amount of heat lost, you also know how much heat you have to put in under those circumstances to keep your house warm if it’s already warm. So you want your heat pump to be able to output more than this number. But you don’t want to over-dimension the heat pump either, because the efficiency is low when it’s running at a low capacity compared to it’s peak output… So we went back and forth quite a bit.

This morning, it was -9 here. The heat pump was working at full capacity, but the indoor temperature dropped to 18.5 — half a degree lower than the set 19 degrees. But it was also heating the tap water at that time, and once that was done, it quickly regained the 19 degrees. It’s not been a sustained ‘middle freeze’ but it looks good.

But it does take a lot of electricity: the heat pump is less effective when the outdoor temperatures are lower, because there’s less heat in the air to pump (duh) and there are ‘thawing cycles’ needed because otherwise the outdoor condenser will just freeze shut. Yesterday was a peak day with 40 kWh used, and we’re on track to something similar today.

And that seems like a lot, but it’s just that now we have an app that gives us this information. In our previous, gas-heated house, we’d just burn gas and pump hot water around and we had no idea on how much we used.

De vuurwerk-traditie die ik ken is dat je naar buiten gaat even na middernacht, nadat je iedereen binnen een gelukkig nieuwjaar hebt gewenst. Daar wissel je gelukwensen uit met de buren, misschien schenk je de buurvrouw nog eens in uit de champagne-fles die je net hebt open gemaakt. En dan zet je drie bierflesjes met een laag water onderin op de stoep en dan ging je vuurpijlen afschieten uit het pakket dat je samen met je vader die middag bij de fietsenmaker had gekocht. (Zijn oudste dochter zit bij jouw zus in de klas, ze kennen jullie, dus hun wens je ook alvast een gelukkig nieuwjaar.)

Dat afschieten ging voorzichtig, met een sigaret die je van je vader kreeg bij wijze van lont. (Als je oudste nichtje er ook is, dan neemt die stiekem een paar trekjes tussen de bedrijven door.) Pijl neerzetten, lont buiten de flessehals. Zorgen dat er niemand in de buurt is. Dan de lont aansteken en zelf een paar passen achteruit gaan. Dan ging de pijl omhoog en dan volgde een knal en een kleurige vonkenregen.

Dat deed je dan een half uurtje. Soms waren er ook wat van die ‘potjes’, maar die mocht je pas aansteken als je wat ouder was. En dan was het op, en dan ging iedereen weer naar binnen. Soms was er nog een huis op het pleintje waar ze wat meer uitgegeven hadden en die gingen dan langer door met vuurwerk afsteken, maar dat vond je eigenlijk maar een beetje sneu voor ze: iedereen was al naar binnen.

Voor mensen met huisdieren was ook dat niet gezellig. Bij een vriendje die aan de overkant van het pleintje woonde, hadden ze zo’n grote Deense dog. Die zetten ze in de keuken, die aan de achterkant van het huis was, maar alsnog raakte het arme dier in paniek. Elk jaar vernielde hij de keukendeur in dat halve uurtje, best zielig.

Dat is de vuurwerktraditie die ik ken, en alhoewel dat niet perfect was, was dat nog te doen. Voorzichtig met vuurwerk, een leuk pakketje er doorheen draaien in een half uurtje, en dat was het dan. Maar dat is niet wat er deze dagen gebeurd in het land. Steeds meer en steeds zwaarder vuurwerk, hulpverleners die met vuurwerk bekogeld worden, al dagen van te voren zwaar geknal.

Dat is niet die gezellige vuurwerktraditie, het is gewoon niet meer te handhaven. Als je al weken van te voren hoort dat hulpverleners en handhaving zich schrap zetten, dan is er echt iets aan de hand. En ik verwacht niet dat volgend jaar er niet geknald wordt, er zullen vast types zijn die zich er niks van aantrekken. Maar het gaat om het principe: weet je nog dat het volkomen normaal was dat er in restaurants werd gerookt? Maar dat doet niemand meer, de cultuur is gewoon veranderd. En ik verwacht dat dat ook gaat gebeuren met vuurwerk: mensen die per se vuurwerk willen afsteken zullen gezien gaan worden als sneue types, met hun zinloze rebellie.

I have always liked reading fantasy, from a young age. Maybe it started when I got the Dutch edition of Tanith Lee’s The Dragon Hoard? (Which is hilarious, by the way. If you have a young child in your life, this makes for a great book to read together.) I read a lot of the SF and Fantasy in the local library, especially as a teenager.

My parents put me in the “homework club” at secondary school. My grades were not good, because I was too lazy to really do any homework at home. The homework club convened every day (except the Friday I think) after school hours, and you’d sit there for two hours to do your homework. You were not allowed to leave before the end time, but if you had nothing left to study, you could read a book. I’m sure the intention was for the students to read books for their literature lists, but in the end we could just read whatever we wanted.

One of the boys at the homework club was reading something that was obviously fantasy, because it was titled “Dragonlance”. I think it was “War of the Twins”? Of course I was interested and I asked him about it afterwards. He described tabletop roleplaying games to me (which I thought was very strange and abstract) and how the books were like a description of what happened in the game. (Modern RPGs call this “the fiction”, which, in the case of Dragonlance, it literally is.) We got to talking about fantasy books and became friends in the easy way that boys can decide someone is a friend if they share an interest. Some time later, just before the autumn break, he told me that he was going to host a group to play these mysterious games at his house and that I should come too.

So I went there on the first day of the break (I think it took me two hours by bicycle to get there, he lived in a village at the other end of the city!) and I played my first tabletop RPG. So basically the Dragonlance books are responsible for getting me into RPGs — which they were designed to do, to get more people interested in Dungeons & Dragons. Except that we didn’t play D&D but Rolemaster, and it would take me another six years to play D&D in earnest. And I never read those Dragonlance books either, because I moved completely outside of the D&D “ecosystem”.

So when I came across the Collector’s Edition of the Dragonlance Chronicles, which are the first three novels to be released in the setting, I thought it would be interesting to finally read them. And it’s indeed interesting — but it’s not good fantasy. Be aware that the following will contain spoilers.

As I understand it, the books were written to sell more D&D by showing what kind of adventures you could have when playing D&D. And it is indeed a rather faithful recreation of the fiction that is created by playing D&D, if you squint you can see the rules systems operate just under the surface. That in itself is not bad, but it is also a faithful recreation of the kinds of adventures you’d have in an “epic” campaign played out by teenaged boys. It really has it all. The “you all meet in a bar…” beginning. The janky inconsistencies in background events because nobody remembered clearly what happened last session. The plot immunity, because as a GM you don’t want to kill off your PCs too easily so you have to insulate them from the worst combat results. There are all-powerful “GM NPCs” where a GM just wanted to play a cool guy (or gal) and basically used this NPC to overshadow the PCs.

The first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was written in 1984, well into the second feminist wave. But the way women are written and their relationships with the male characters is… not good. The romance (if you can even call it a romance) between Riverwind and Silvermoon make me wonder if the writers ever met two people who were in love. And for some reason they find it very important to let the reader know that all of the women are virgins. There may be a bit of fooling around, but obviously there is no sex before marriage! The single exception is Kitiara, who, to nobody’s surprise, turns up as an “evil” enemy commander. Much is made of how she takes men to her bed, and it takes only one night to turn a “good” character to her evil side. The message is obviously that sex does bad things to people!

There’s some sexual violence casually mentioned too. Some of it is in the past and not really dwelt upon (Tanis’ origin story), some of it is passed off as “just the way things are” (Tika having to deal with drunks pawing at her) and one bona fide attempt at rape that thankfully doesn’t get anywhere (when Laurana gets kidnapped). Yes, the 80’s was a different time etc, but it sure left a bad taste in my mouth.

D&D has a bad case of biological essentialism: all kender are child-like in demeanor, all dwarves are grumpy, etc. That is reflected in these books as well: Tanis is a half-elf, which means he is some kind of diplomat because he straddles two “races”, making him the leader of the group of course. And we only really see a single dwarf, and he’s grumpy… On one hand you know what to expect, on the other hand it makes the non-human characters a bit predictable and as the story progresses a bit tiresome.

The characters are supposed to be good friends, but they spend an awful lot of time full of mistrust of each other, very angry or outright fighting. Maybe this is also modeled on how teenage boys form friend groups? Raistlin deserves a special mention — we’ve all played in a campaign with an asshole who played an asshole character under the guise of “that’s what my character would do!”

The trilogy compares itself to the Lord of the Rings: the back flap even has a quote from Dragon Magazine, which names it “…a trilogy that should at last satisfy the old demands for ‘something to read after the Ring books.'” They don’t name the books by name, perhaps because TSR (the publisher of both D&D and these novels) had been sued by the Tolkien estate 7 years earlier for using names from Tolkien’s works and they tread more carefully after that. And of course Dragon Magazine is full of praise for the trilogy, because that was published by TSR too!

But that’s where any comparison has to end. Tolkien’s works are epic in the classic sense: there is a rich world with a rich history, some of which we get a short peek at. Things are going on just out of sight and the characters make a plan on how to achieve their goals in the middle of that. In these novels, by contrast, everything is just a set piece that is there, waiting idly for the characters to arrive. At no point did I have the feeling that there was a world off-screen (if you can call it that for a book) that was believable and in motion. It’s all so… pedestrian.

The scale certainly is meant to be epic: a world-spanning war with the evil side using dragons! And the first dragon we meet is terrifying! But soon, they’re relegated to being merely flying mounts with teeth and an attitude, and the whole thing feels cheapened. It’s like “oh, yeah, the dragons are also around somewhere…” and I feel that if you call your novel cycle “Dragonlance” there should be more dragons and more lances in it than this cycle has. We only see a dragonrider using a lance against another dragon, and it’s turned into some kind of slapstick with a kender and a dwarf crawling all over their dragon mount…

And yes, there are “funny” moments in there as well, whole scenes turned into some kind of slapstick. That certainly doesn’t help with setting an “epic” mood! Another gripe is how whole episodes are just skipped. “Oh, when we re-join our heroes they went to the ice wall and retrieve a piece of a dragonlance from a dragonrider encased in ice, and are now on their way back.” I mean, how is that not a big part of the story!?

Is it all bad? I mean, it’s not good, but I did read the whole thing and gave it 2 stars. Because it is interesting. You want to know what happens next, how the story develops, what new set piece is next. I did not read the whole thing through in one go — I had to read a little ‘palate cleanser’ in between the second and third book because it was getting to be a bit much. But if you frame it as pulpy fantasy aimed at teenaged boys, then it’s enough to keep your attention. That being said, I will not seek out any of the other books in the Dragonlance setting. Once was enough for me.

With things in the house quieting down and both of us working from home, we have more opportunity to cook. Things that require a lot of time but do not require constant supervision are ideal to cook during work. Things like proofing and baking bread and boiling down chickpeas for hummus can just be started and either be on a timer or you can just check every once in a while.

And we’re converting more and more things to plant-based alternatives. We’re not fully vegetarian, but if there is a vegan alternative that works well for us, we’ll use it. One of those things is toasted shredded tofu. You shred tofu and marinade it in smoked paprika, onion and garlic powder, plus a dash of MSG and a good splash of soy sauce. Then you spread it out on a oven tin and roast it in the oven, basically drying out the flakes. The result is like shredded ham, except vegan!

And we regularly eat okonomiyaki. One of the ingredients is shredded cabbage. I used to buy pre-shredded, until I realised that a whole cabbage is much cheaper and has a higher yield. We have a shredding attachment for the kitchenaid machine, so it’s not that much of a burden to shred the cabbage myself. But there’s always cabbage left. I’ve taken to pickling it, with whatever vegetable we had leftovers for or which is on sale that week. Usually I add a bit of turmeric to turn it into something resembling atjar. But I also like to bake it down with some sliced onion and other vegetables, with a good dollop of gochujang and soy sauce, and really cook that down into a nice spicy vegetable mix.

It’s a lot of work, and I spend more time cooking than I did before, but it is very nice to have these things just available and having made them ourselves. We’ve always done a lot of cooking, but we’re turning more into an “ingredient household” these days.

Here’s what we typically have for lunch: a thick slice of home-made bread, lightly toasted so the outside is crunchy but the inside is soft. We spread home-made hummus on that (so much tastier than store-bought!) and put some grilled vegetables on top of that with some truffle sea salt flakes and a crush of black pepper on top. (We get the grilled veggies in a bag from the freezer at the supermarket!) To that we add a bowl of lettuce that is topped with the shredded tofu flakes, the spicy vegetable mix and the pickled cabbage. We usually top this with home-made mayonnaise too — store-bought is always so sweet, and I put sufficient white pepper in mine to really make the taste pop. We get a mug of soup too, but that’s from a packet, we don’t eat enough soup in one go to make it worthwhile to make our own.

The day the photo was made, we also had some pickled daikon and some pear compote from the pears we got from our neighbour.

I am aware that it’s a kind of privilege that we have the opportunity to cook and eat like this. It works very well for us, I love having this hearty lunch together with my partner, a little pause in the busy day to recharge and regroup.

We’ve been living in the new house for 11 months now, but there were still two things that needed to be done to really complete the project. One was to replace all the windows — all 72(!) of them. It took our builder until September to do this, for reasons that are unknown to us, because it was clear when we bought the house that all the windows had to be replaced. And then he had to apply sealant to all the windows, inside and out, taking more time.

He did all the insides in a single day, which meant that the sealant of all 72 windows were releasing their solvent, which smelled strongly of almonds, all in one go in our open plan house. Luckily the weather wasn’t too bad, because we needed to keep the windows open to ventilate!

And then we had to make haste with painting the outside window frames, because it had been so long ago that anything had been done with them, and it was clear they wouldn’t hold out another winter. But of course it is impossible to find a professional painter who wants to take on a job at a weeks’ notice in October, so we had to do it ourselves.

We decided to keep the same colour scheme: bright red, deep blue and cream white. (There’s also some ochre yellow in a few spots, but that’s only inside and we will paint that over with one of the other three colours in due course.) But because the colours on the outside had already faded a lot (especially the red) we compared the “colour fan” we got from the DIY store with a doorpost inside the house. Clearly, it was RAL 3020, “traffic red”.



So we had a 2,5 liter can of paint mixed for that. But it is bright.



So we stared painting (after we first sanded, de-greased, applied primer, let that dry, sand again and de-greased again), but it became clear that traffic red is not actually the colour that was used originally. At first we thought that it would maybe darken a bit when the paint would dry? But it didn’t and the difference is visible.



So then we took a closer look at that doorpost. It seemed that someone had just re-painted only that doorpost, and had used traffic red for it! The difference is subtle enough that we never noticed, but once you’ve seen it, it’s very clear!



But that can of paint was around 300 euros, so that’s what we’ll use. I kinda like it, it’s so bright!

The second thing that needed to be done was the construction of the shed. We ordered it quite some time ago, but because of reasons, it was only built at the beginning of October. We chose thermically treated wood, a process that basically boils the sugar out of the wood. That makes it unattractive to bugs and mould, which should help keep the shed in good shape for years to come. It is 2,5 x 5 meters, so a very decent size!



We put the back of the shed towards the parking spot, so that it creates a bit of a secluded area in front of the shed. We’re not quite sure what we’re going to do with the bit of garden there — it doesn’t get that much sun, so we can’t do anything too outrageous with plants.



We had our bicycles under a tarp, which made it inconvenient to go anywhere by bike — even though the distances are very bike-able, we ended up taking the car more often than not. We’re very happy we can put the bikes in the shed now, the convenience of being able to simply grab a bike and go has already proven to reduce our car usage!



We had a lot of stuff in the house that we would store in the shed, like tools and other bits and pieces. That all took up space in the house — we couldn’t even use the extra side door to go outside because it was barricaded with boxes on the inside. So we quickly got some shelving units and started re-organising. We now have a lot more room in the house, and we have emptied some boxes that were still left from the move and put those things in their definitive place.

There’s still a list of things to be done, but all the work that we needed to hire contractors for, is finished. I can’t think of anything I would have chosen differently. We love it here.

A travel-focused Friday Five.

1. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? If so, where? Did you like it? If you haven’t stayed in a hostel, would you?

Yes, once, in Glasgow. We hated it. We’re clearly not the target audience.

2. What is your favourite airport that you’ve been to? Why?

Airports are such a liminal space, catering to a specific set of functions for a specific set of people, which makes them more or less all the same. But we were forced to hang out on the Nagoya airport when we missed our connecting flight to Japan from Helsinki. Despite the setbacks, I enjoyed the atmosphere and the shops there. They even had a display with dorodango that won at a competition!

3. What is the best museum you have visited on vacation?

Probably the Victoria & Albert museum in London. But that’s one of the big ones. Of the more obscure museums I’d have to go with the Edo-Tokyo museum because it shows so much of daily life in Edo.

4. Have you ever made friends while traveling whom you keep in touch with on a regular basis?

I don’t think I have.

5. Have you ever had a conversation with a seatmate on a plane?

In 1999 I flew to San Francisco for the SIGIR conference in Berkeley. I had a window seat. When we were flying over the west coast of the US, he started pointing out things to me. Turns out he owned a company making conduits for airconditioning and he had done a tour of Europe for the past six months in order to sell his product. He asked me where I was going, and he offered to bring me to the BART station with his car. In the end, he drove me to my hotel in Berkeley (I paid for the toll). So friendly to make such a detour for a total stranger, delaying his return home to his family after all those weeks.

And in 2015 we flew to Kyuushu (one of the main islands of Japan), leaving from Dusseldorf with a stop-over at Schiphol. We were sitting in the back in a row of 3 seats. The man sitting in the remaining chair also came from Dusseldorf and he was visiting his Japanese girlfriend in her hometown on Kyuushu. We compared notes (we were going for a tour of Kyuushu) and then we said goodbye as we arrived. And we met him again at the gate on Schiphol waiting to board for Dusseldorf — he had been in the exact same plane as us! We shared photos, it was fun.

I haven’t been posting here for some time now, because composing a blog post would cut into my reading time. Remember kids: if you are determined enough, you too can turn reading into a vice!

When I was a Young Adult myself, YA was not a distinct category, and thus I read Old Adult sci-fi and fantasy. So I read Tanith Lee, Frank Herbert, Jack Vance, Ursula LeGuin, and many more. In retrospect, I don’t think all of them were appropriate for a 15-year old, but hey — I got away with it because the adults didn’t care, in true Gen X fashion.

I’m reading for fun, so I’m not looking for anything too heavy, and there is a lot of YA fantasy. So it seemed like a good place to start, and there are thousands of websites with lists of recommendations of what to read. And I thought that, once I got underway, I would find more books to read that are similar to the ones I started out with. And one series that consistently pops up in those recommendation lists is the Glass Throne series by Sarah J Maas. And my local library has all seven books (in the Dutch translation) so I set out to read that — the first book in the series is the first book I tracked on the Storygraph and might be the first book I loaned from the local library.

I read other books in between, but today I finished the last book in the series, and I have Thoughts.

In The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya, the expert swordsman, sees the Dread Pirate Roberts approach. He thinks to himself that it would be fun to fight left-handed, as a way to challenge his own skill. And to his surprise, his opponent fights left-handed as well — such an interesting situation! But his opponent is better than him and pushes him back towards the edge of the cliff where they are fighting. Then Inigo smiles, and when asked why he is smiling as he is losing, he says: “I’m not left-handed!” and switches to right-handed fencing. Now, Inigo drives back the Dread Pirate Roberts, but when he has been cornered, he confesses: “I’m not left-handed either!” and switches to right-handed fencing too and re-gains the upper hand! (I read the book, did not watch the movie, but this clip is of that part of the movie.)

To us, “I’m not left-handed either!” is shorthand for something being revealed that the reader (or viewer) had no way to know beforehand, an underhanded narrative trick. It’s funny in The Princess Bride because Inigo is playing this trick and then the trick gets played against him — but if a character in a story shows (or unlocks) an ability just in time, it’s a bit lazy. For sure, negative things happening to a character can be a great way for personal growth and sudden realizations, and of course you need a way to let the reader come down from that tension arc in some way. But if the only way you know how to do that is by having the character shout the equivalent of “I’m not left-handed either!” and do something that the reader had no way to see coming, then it becomes irritating.

The thing is that Sarah J Maas is so very good at it. She is well-versed in creating these desperate situations. The set-up is certainly grand and epic and sweeping, so there is a lot of room for evil plots coming to fruition and for the good guys to get into dire straits. And the series starts slow, so the tension arcs are longer and you have more time to think things through. But by the third book things heat up, and especially the last book, which has to resolve so many plot lines, has 900+ pages of these tension arcs, one after the other, almost all resolved by “I’m not left-handed either!” That made the first part quite a slog, but I was determined to finish the series, and as it progressed I fell for the trick, even if I saw it happening.

For example, the main character sends some letters out. And then in a later book, a fleet arrives to assist in a battle, and it is revealed that she called in some old favours and this means they narrowly escape destruction! As a reader, you had no way to know that one of those letters was to the commander of one of these fleets, and that they would heed the call. It’s just a deus ex machina, a ploy to save the characters from whatever dire fate was closing in on them.

And so the series becomes some kind of “desperation porn”: all seems lost and the enemies are closing in, and surely the characters won’t be able to escape this time. But lo and behold, it is revealed that one of the characters (it’s often the main character) is actually not left-handed either, and they get away semi-unscathed! And as the series progresses, that loop speeds up. By the last book, we get such a loop every few pages, it’s pretty exhausting.

I don’t think Sarah J Maas is a good writer. Her characters lack depth and most of them are kinda unpleasant (with Elide being the only notable exception). The characters are one-dimensional actors in a grand plot.

The real star is the plot — it is certainly grand, and I like that. In all fairness, some things were plotted out in advance and then the pieces of the puzzle fall in place and suddenly some things make a lot of sense. I liked that. I think she is very good in thinking of a plot and how that develops and gradually opens up, but it would have been better if someone else had done the writing of how characters in that world actually experience that plot.

There are also some… concerning… patterns in the book. Of course romances are part of the story. But almost all of them have a huge age gap — sometimes hundreds of years. And while she seemed to try her best to be ~diverse~, all the relationships that get any kind of space in the books are very heterosexual. In fact, all the main characters that do not end up in a ‘safe’ heterosexual relationship are killed off in the battles at the end. All of these are certainly some choices the writer made!

Was it a waste of time? Certainly not, I enjoyed my time reading the series even though there were quite a few eyerolls in there too. Do I recommend it? No, I don’t think I would — surely there’s better stuff out there. Will I read anything else by Sarah J Maas? No, I will not.