association-list

For Chill, by Eliz­a­beth Bear

I really wanted to like Chill.

Hon­estly I did. I loved Dust, I think, although I’ll have to check my notes. I for sure love it in my memory.

I rec­og­nize that it’s the middle book of a three-​​book sequence, and that it’s set­ting up and lead­ing up.

I loved get­ting to know Tris­ten and Benedik and their var­i­ous fail­ures, and their problems.

I loved revis­it­ing the world.

But they have no agency.

We spend the entire book on a jour­ney that is basi­cally wasted.

If they’d been a day or two later, Cynric would have been reborn all the same, from how I read it.

In an ideal world, Tris­ten goes off after Ari­an­rhod and returns with Cynric a chap­ter or two later, and this is done off­screen. We spend that time watch­ing Ben and Caitlin patch things up, or try to, and then some­thing else hap­pens. Per­ci­val doesn’t spend the entire novel being wounded.

I can’t seem to find any­thing that I’ve writ­ten about Dust. Hope­fully when Cleave/​Grail is released I’ll have the time to read through them all at once and write some­thing more substantive.