🩷 Book Review 🩷
📚 Lives of Bitter Rain
✒️ Adrian Tchaikovsky
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Thank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

For a novella it packed an absolute punch! This book was the perfect size to help deepen the development of the MC Angilly and helps the reader to connect more with her. It was short, sweet, simple and yet perfect.

Avctual rating: 4.25

Tchaikovsky has been on my TBR list for a long while, se when I received the ARC of this novella I was quite excited — and I'm not disappointed. Actually, this short story made this series jump right at the top of the list, because now I'm way too curious about this world and the stories of its people to wait another while.

The structure of the novella is appealing, taking the reader through important events in Angilly's life up until "Days of Shattered Faith" and thus focusing on her character development, which I've found interested and well done. She's complex and her internal struggle about what is required of her and what she might want to do but isn't sure about shows perfectly throughout the all book.

Tchaikovsky's prose is rich both semantically and structurally, adding density and depth to already intricate world and story. For me, this richness allows to read this novella also as a stand-alone for someone like me who has not read anything by Tchaikovsky yet but wants to familiarize with both this form and content. In fact, even if related mostly to events and characters of the third book of the saga, I never once felt like I was reading a spoiler and I understood enough of the setting, the story and the characters to really craving more about it.

Between Tyrant Philosophers novels proper, a shorter entry filling in the background of Angilly, the Palleseen diplomat from Days Of Shattered Faith. In a concluding note, and nodding to his own reputation for being ridiculously prolific, Tchaikovsky admits that it began as preparatory work to fill out the character before he realised that whoops, he'd accidentally written another book. But you can see why this material wouldn't have fit in Shattered Faith, even aside from that being a hefty enough book already; each of the main novels takes a particular location within the march of Palleseen imperialism, over a relatively short space of time, then hops from one character to another within that moment of crisis, whereas here we follow one person through a lifetime and a variety of different postings. As for what we see there...well, I would have said it was a matter of colouring in a few more shades on the tapestry the other books created, but there's another Goodreads review giving it five stars from someone who's not just new to the series, but to Tchaikovsky full stop. And certainly it has the classic satisfactions of the bildungsroman, watching how early experiences leave traces on a protagonist, are reversed or overcome by what's learned later, which doesn't necessarily rely on the reader already being familiar with Angilly as the somewhat louche yet privately haunted veteran she'll become, but gains extra weight if they are. All of this against the background of a regime determined to perfect the world, eradicate mystery and irrationality – something most readily compared to the Romantic characterisation of science, but where the ever-tightening ratchet of purity feels like it has plenty of other points of analogy in our own zealous times, not least in the way that today's acceptable leeway can be tomorrow's unforgivable infringement. Which is of course a particular concern for the diplomatic corps, operating at the fringes of Palleseen influence, obliged to make compromises in pursuit of a greater good that might well disown them once the ground has shifted. I think I might have said this about Shattered Faith, but if so I now shift the accolade: probably as close as you'll get to Graham Greene in a book that also features a giant frog.

Also, the Red Grieving Bat Society would be a brilliant band name. Though my ability to take Pallesand seriously has been slightly compromised since I discovered man-eating sandcastle Pokémon Palossand.

(Netgalley ARC)

A clever, impactful little expansion pack of a novella for Tchaikovsky's earlier Days of Shattered Faith. Lives might not be that compelling as a standalone, but it fits into and fills out its sibling work so well that you hope it'll be printed together with it in the future.

Where Days was a sprawling, ambitious work split over a huge cast of new and old characters, Lives is a short and singularly focused work, its sole mission being to flesh out the closest thing that book had to a single protagonist, the one-time Palleseen ambassador to Usmai, Sage-Invigilator Angilly. This is entirely the right move to my mind — as a sympathetic Pal who embodies imperialism's ambivalence about its own conquests, Angilly was already one of The Tyrant Philosophers' most compelling creations, but Days could never quite decide whether to focus on her, various returning heroes from the last two books, or fun facts about the East India Company, Angilly's doomed (d)alliance with the Usmai prince Dekamran was written as though it was the beating heart of the story, but in practice Tchaikovsky split his attention instead of committing to the bit.

Lives, by comparison, has no trouble committing. There are a few background crossovers with the other books in the series, but the novella really exists to explain how someone as urbane, and liberally-minded as Angilly could also be the loyal product of an authoritarian state like the Palleseen Sway. In so doing, it loops back nearly into one of Days' most interesting themes: the Pals might be trying to remake the outside world in their image, but they are being hybridised just as much as their new subjects. Angilly being literally reshaped by her narrow escape from a rebellion and learning to flout Pal rules through her work in Outreach are obvious examples, but new characters like the half-Allorwen Ballanders and a particularly memorable (and gruesomely corrupt) quartermaster in Jarokir drive the point home, and I really hope it's one Tchaikovsky continues to push at.

There's plenty more to enjoy about the novella, from the seamless way it gathers in some of Days' loose threads to its on-point meet-cute between Angilly and Dekamran, but the real value of the book is this: nearly a year after finding out how Angilly's story ends, I finally felt the catharsis that was intended for her. I honestly don't know how I feel about authors patching their books like live-service video games, but if that's what it takes to make Days hurt the way it was clearly meant to, I'll allow Tchaikovsky to bend the rules just this once.