I found the focused self-control and resilience of the protagonist inspiring, and I was rewarded with a very satisfying conclusion. This is a novella with a compelling character and some really interesting ideas, and I will definitely be looking for more from Thompson.
“After all, it’s so much easier and pleasanter to think that everything must be fine, and it’s one’s perceptions that are skewed, rather than the situation; surely, if something were wrong, one of The Adults would step in and fix it.”
It was an engrossing read; the characters continue to be fully engaging and the protagonists sympathetic (even though not always in agreement with each other), and the rich worldbuilding continues with interdepartmental squabbling providing insights into the politics.
The novella starts when Dorothy Gentleman wakes up and discovers she’s been uploaded off schedule and into the wrong body, and she finds out soon that someone else is dead. As one of the ship’s detectives, she shelves her personal feelings (that’s my little in-joke) and immediately starts investigating.
The novella is a retelling of a reasonably well-known fairytale murder ballad, so alert readers may anticipate some of the story beats. There are two sisters, and a suitor, and a warning from beyond via music. But even if a reader has an idea of where the story is going, there are bends in this river of a plot.
It’s not a long collection, containing about 40 poems (some just a few lines, many several e-pages long), a foreword, a list of content warnings/triggers, a fascinating multi-page afterword, and an appendix that lists which fairy tales inspired which poems. I don’t necessarily recommend trying to read all the poems in one go, since that may blunt their edges and impacts, but rather reading a few per day, taking time to savor them.
