Okay, book two of two of The Flame In The Mist series. For which I would like to say, "Good."

Because I wouldn't continue reading this series.

The first book has the protagonist, Hattori Mariko, escaping an assassination attempt and going off to hide in the woods to track down who ordered her death. At the end of the book, her brother and her betrothed found her and together brought her back to The Palace™. Technically Her Choice™ but in reality a false dichotomy, whatever.

So, now we follow Mariko in palace intrique. We see her with little political saavy navigate royalty and servants, making alliances and insulting some. During all of this, Her Love™ is in danger.

I was sufficiently engaged with the characters in the last book to read this one, but a subsequent book in the series likely won't be interesting to me.

If you like teen romance adventure with a medieval Japanese twist, sure. Otherwise, skip the books.

She’d never known the right words to do so before. Never known how to wield the right weapons. But ingenuity could be a weapon, in all its forms. Her mind could be a sword. Her voice could be an axe.
Page 16

But time had taught Kanako that what was expected rarely came to pass. Death always collected its due. The only thing that remained steadfastly true was power. The power you had. The power you gave. The power you concealed.
Page 33

“You may ask whatever you wish, But I do not owe you a response.”
Page 49

“It appears insults do have an effect on your brother. How predictable.”

“Insults are indeed a base form of intimidation,” Roku replied
Page 51

There — hovering in the darkness, with Ōkami by her side — Mariko realized that every person she’d ever met, from the smallest of children to the most notorious of thieves, had a life as intricate and significant as that of an emperor or a samurai or an elegant lady of the court. Not once in her seventeen years had she heard a member of the nobility discuss this. Those who served them had been born beneath unlucky stars and could never share the same sky, no matter how hard they might wish for it.
Page 78

Well, hello, Sonder.

“You do not know what it means to be happy,” the empress said. “Happiness is not a thing to be found here in the imperial court. We take moments of pleasure. Collect them and keep them tight in our chests. And we hope they are enough to fill whatever holes our truths leave behind.”
Page 86

Back at her father’s province, she had known people like the empress. Women and men who took perverse pleasure in exacting unnecessary revenge on others.
Page 94

When Ōkami spoke, his voice was soft. Apologetic. “That was . . . dramatic.” He sighed. “But I suppose I am to blame for that.” All trace of sarcasm had vanished.

“I have no excuse for provoking you, especially when you came to help me.”

“No.” Mariko shook her head, her right hand trembling as she brushed a tendril of hair behind one ear. “My behavior is mine and mine alone. You are not to blame. I let my anger take hold, and anger is a temperamental beast.”
Page 143

It had taken her losing everything she knew to finally understand. Feeling pain and sorrow was not at all a sign of weakness. It was a sign of love.
Page 145

“Our deepest truths are usually the hardest to conceal.”
Page 151

Perhaps this was what it meant to feel love. To be together and apart in the same instant.
Page 152

Leaders needed to know what lay around the next bend, even when moving through uncharted territory. A follower need only concern himself with each of his steps. Each of his breaths. He could move forward, oblivious to the path ahead. Trusting in those left to make the decisions.
Page 157

“I see mystery and sadness. Anger. Not necessarily because you were born a woman”—Mariko smiled in obvious remembrance of what Yumi had said not too long ago—“ but more because you have always been treated as less than what you are.”
Page 204

“The best jokes end with shit or death.”
Page 207

Okay, I need a t-shirt with this on it.

Loss had taught her yet another lesson. Real love was more than a moment. It was everything that happened after. Chaos in one instant, simplicity in the next. Everything and nothing in the space of a simple breath. It was clarity, sharp and numbing, like a winter’s morning.
Page 209

Ōkami did not cry, not even when he was sure no one was there to bear witness. He would never allow such weakness to overcome him.
Page 308

:eyeroll:

Ōkami hated heroes more than anything else. As a boy, he’d concluded that heroes cared more about how the world perceived them than they did about those they’d left behind.
Page 309

It had moved Raiden that one of her requests was for justice absent malice. He longed for the ability to convince his brother of the merit behind this. His brother’s idea of justice made Raiden’s flesh crawl as though he’d waded into a pool of maggots.
Page 315

The army she’d amassed in her enchanted world, biding time for the right moment to strike. Some of its ranks were young. Some were elderly. Some were infirmed. Minamoto Roku’s imperial soldiers would hesitate before striking them down. And in the heat of battle, to hesitate was to die. Many more were
Page 327

It was not up to his mother to save him. Just as it was not up to his father to give him answers. That was not the way of life. Only Ōkami could do what needed to be done. It was time for him to forgive his past. Not forget it. Only a fool would forget such things. But if he could not let go of the demons in his past, how could he ever hope to embrace his greatest fear?
Page 335

This troubling sentiment did not stop men from looking at Yumi with covetous glances. A part of Kenshin disliked the way their eyes followed her every motion. As though her beauty were a thing to be consumed.
Page 349

“Because if no one cares about what is right or wrong in the seat of our empire—the very seat of our justice—then all we hold dear is lost.”
Page 384

It was a strange feeling for Ōkami. To hate someone with such fire and know all at once that his death would bring Ōkami no solace.
Page 395

I have the book pile problem of having 5 books due at the library in the next eight days, which means that I have less than two days to read each of these books. Which is unfortunate, as Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a book I want to linger over, sit with, ponder. If I want to read these other 4 books before they return to the library, however, I'm not going to linger.

Cal recommended this book when we were at XOXO this year. We were exchanging reading lists (hoo boy, I thought I was doing well at a hundred books a year, I read at half Cal's pace), and he suggested this book. It's heavy, he warned me, don't read it if you're not in a good place.

Which was good advice.

The book is a dystopian future, science fiction, murder mystery novel. It is also a book about grief, about avoiding an all consuming loss, until you can't, and then dealing with it.

Which is why the timing of the book was great. That and after five non-fiction books in a row, I was ready for some fiction.

Anyway, the main character, Blaxton, investigates deaths in the Archive, a fully immersive reconstruction of the world, stitched together from all the digital recordings available of a given area and time. Most people have implants to immerse in this reconstruction, but of course said world is full of ads, because, yeah, that's the way it works, we can't have nice things.

Blaxton comes across an unreported death, becomes obsessed with solving her murder, and his already unravelled life come undone.

The plot is so well done. The grief and heart-ache is well conveyed. The whole plot is well put together, lots of early clues for the reader, along with "ohhhhhh" at the reveal. I strongly recommend this book, if you're in a good place to read a dystopian future, science fiction, murder mystery novel. If you're not in a good place, wait until you are, then read it.

The Buy, Fuck, Sell feed’s leading with a new leaked sex tape of President Meecham, the ten-year anniversary of Pittsburgh demoted to postjump news. PRESIDENT MEECHAM REVEALED AS DORM ROOM SLUT! MEECH’S PEACHES EXPOSED IN TEEN SEX SCANDAL!
Page 15

Yes, where the world is going, this is a reasonable projection of the presidency.

She touches herself and the talking heads comment: Everywhere, Americans have been given the choice between Love and Filth, and they have uniformly chosen Filth.
Page 16

How prescient of Sweterlitsch, though I suspect he wasn't expecting to be so acccurate so soon.

“Shit . . . Oh, shit. I’m sorry—”

“It’s all right to cry,” says the leader. “Let it out. Talk with us, share your story. Hearing each other’s stories helps us to understand we’re not alone. We were all away from friends and family when it happened. We’ve all lost everything. We haven’t been uniquely chosen to suffer—”

“I’m sorry,” I end up saying.
Page 31

“What does it matter if I die?”

“You don’t want to die,” he says, like he’s explaining simple math. “You want to see your wife again, you want to relive all the years you were blessed to have with her, and you want to somehow compensate for all the years you aren’t able to spend with her. You’re here because you want to remember your wife through healthy immersion. You want to live so you can grow old with the memories of your wife. You want her to live on through you. You don’t want to die.”

“You don’t understand,” I tell him, knowing that he does understand, that they all understand.
Page 32

“I schedule regular times to visit my memories of Kitty in the Archive,” he says. “Kitty was my wife of thirty-nine years. Katherine."
Page 53

I cracked up at this.

“We’ve been making memory maps,” Simka explained. “You draw the house you grew up in and write in everything you can remember about it, every detail. You’d be surprised how much you remember when you’re filling in a memory map, the specificity of the details. The kids never have enough room to write everything they want, so we journal, too—”
Page 59

This is an interesting exercise, by the way.

“Addiction and recovery from depression are difficult. There isn’t a quick fix—even complete dialysis and Adware reconditioning don’t treat the underlying causes of your addiction. You’ll have to work at this, Dominic. As they say, ‘You’re gonna carry that weight—’”
Page 62

People drift through the café, once captured inadvertently on security cameras or retinal cams, their profiles pulled from cloud storage, archived in the City because of the Right to Remember Act and used to populate these places, even these minor corners of the City.
Page 69

This idea cracks me up, the Right to Remember Act. After fighting so long for the Right to be Forgotten.

What would our lives have been like? Never sure, but I try to be realistic with my regrets, memories like these affording me a window, I think, to my life as it was never lived.
Page 70

Faces in passing cars are only blurs—petals on a wet, black bough—impressions inadvertently captured in Peyton’s background and sculpted here as part of the environment. These faces unnerve me. Faceless. I feel like they try to catch my attention. I feel like they want me to notice them, to notice them specifically, to turn my attention from Peyton and fill in their features with some streak of memory, but there’s nothing to remember about them, no details or memories I have that can flesh them out. I’ve never known these faces and they pass away in the peripherals.
Page 100

Much of politics is simply manipulating broad symbols.
Page 124

“When I talk with people who are suffering,” says Timothy, “they often tell me that they’re comforted because Christ associated Himself with sinners. Prostitutes and taxmen. Drinkers. The thief who was crucified with Him.

My patients often tell me that they’re comforted because no matter how depraved their lives, no matter what damage they’ve done to themselves or others, Christ will still save them. Christ will still save them.

They think they will somehow transcend the world, somehow continue sinning but find a spiritual perfection when the time comes because they believe their soul is pure so it doesn’t matter if their body is corrupt.

I tell them that Christ doesn’t accept us as sinners. We might be sinners when Christ calls us, but He doesn’t accept us as sinners. He demands that we abandon our lives to follow Him, to become like Him.

That doesn’t mean turning our backs to the world—it means just the opposite. He demanded the twelve abandon their lives in order so they might fully embrace the incarnation. He demands this of us—”
Page 129

We were alone that evening, coming to terms with our loss, with a miscarriage just like the thousands of other miscarriages that occur every day, every year, but ours so unlike the others because it was our daughter, our child that never was.
Page 147

“Let her go,” said Albion.

“What?”

“Let her go,” she said. “The dead deserve their rest—”
Page 246

Night by the time we drive through Ohio, the landscape changing to something as forgotten but familiar as my mother’s voice—flatlands giving way to the warp of fields and the hills that will become the mountains of what was once Pittsburgh.
Page 258

I understand the feeling of returning to the landscape as familiar as my mother's voice.

She waved as the bus pulled away and I walked home—the city quiet, everything shrouded in a profound white silence. I was so happy that night—an ecstatic contentment in that silence, a feeling like I’d come home, like I’d discovered where home was.
Page 270

This.

The doctors keep me updated—there’s a trio, one in Boston, the other two in Mumbai, faces on HD screens mounted on a roving turret. A doctor rolls into my room every other day or so, but since the turret webcam’s loose on its mounting, the doctors rarely face me when one of them speaks.
Page 316

This image seems just so right: teleprescence but broken.

“You could sit back and make it seem like you’re right there with them—”

“We’re watching the follies of man,” she says. “Why would I want to be closer than I am now? Besides, I got better stuff to do, like teaching you to piss for yourself—”
Page 317