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p and the deaths of the crew she frequently breaks what would be called in television the fourth wall speaking directly to her reader in often sarcastic terms sometimes you think she s learning from all the things that have happened to her along the way but at the end of the book when she leaves her lover q on what remains of a depopulated and strip mined earth and returns to space you realize she really hasn t which is aptly summed up in the novel s final line and only i am returned alone this book has moby dick s characters but the three main ones ishmael queeqeeg and captain ahab are gender flipped and known as isha q and a aside from that the bones of the classic tale are there pursuit and revenge hatred and obsession and the captain s all consuming quest to hunt down and kill what is here called the mobius beast the biggest difference is the setting instead of the oceans of earth we have the atmosphere of jupiter and these leviathans are huge sometimes hundreds of feet long alien creatures evolved in that atmosphere with lovecraftian tentacles and hundreds of eyes and alien like jaws within jaws these leviathans are hunted for their sperm their cerebrospinular fluid that harvested and refined powers human civilization humans have spread from the ruins of earth to most of the solar system but instead of relying on solar or fusion they rely on a limited natural resource although realistically given jupiter s immense size there are probably trillions of leviathans there hunting these creatures in the planet s deadly turbulent atmosphere the titular hell s heart besides being a quotation from the original book is i believe a reference to jupiter s great red spot is every bit as dangerous as it sounds and as foolish when there could easily be alternate forms of energy it only occurred to me after i finished the book that we could say the same things about fossil fuels in our reality this book sticks fairly closely to the plot and pacing of moby dick and employs a lot of the same terminology it is also and how do i put this a lot sexier than the original oh to heck with beating around the bush most of the characters here fuck like a lot isha is both involved with q and is captain a s fucktoy with only contributes to her cultish worship of the captain even as she realizes that a is likely leading them to their deaths in the end at the culmination of that three day chase the captain s death is almost anticlimactic a stabs the beast in one of its eyes and is riding the harpoon line out to confront it and the mobius beast simply opens the first set of its multiple jaws and snatches the captain out of the sky gulping her down like a crocodile snapping up a pesky insect after that it rounds on the pequod and crushes the ship and everything on it making its stores of raw spermaceti explode and only isha and q escape out of everyone spinning away from the ruins of the ship in a lifepod of course the heart of the tale is the hunt and the obsession and the crew s being led along by a charismatic narcissist they cannot bring themselves to gainsay sound familiar along the way there are discussions of religion and the awful predatory capitalism in this bleak nasty future there are no countries anymore just predatory pharmaceutical and corporate states that own and profit from every facet of society people are simply broken here like isha she knows it and the reader knows it i don t know if you could say i liked this book as much as i was drawn in by the author s audacity in retelling the classic novel the way she did isha s unique voice was the book s main draw for me and took me past what sometimes seemed like glacially slow pacing this book is what it is and you have to take it that way warts and all i think if you like it you ll really like it i m not going quite that far but i don t think i regret reading it either view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 5 25 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads may 21 2026 review the river has roots the river has roots by amal el mohtar my rating 5 of 5 stars this book surprised the heck out of me i went into it basically cold knowing nothing about it and closed the back cover on a beautiful story wonderfully told this is a fantasy that has the feel of a fairy tale centuries old a maybe true story that has passed into myth and legend and still has so much to say at its heart it s the tale of the love between sisters and how that love will transcend time and even death it also casts its magic in the structure of grammar and the language of music with lush supple prose just look at this paragraph most music is the result of some intimacy with an instrument one wraps one s mouth around a whistle and pours one s breath into it one all but lays one s cheek against a violin and skin to skin is holy drummer s kiss but a harp is played most like a lover you learn to lean its body against your breast find those places of deepest stiffest tension with your hands and finger them into quivering release you rock together forward and back your left hand keeps a base rhythm while your right weaves a melody through it and they flutter past each other as the music becomes more complex swells breaks shakes the body of your instrument in joy and grief alike in the wild wonderful grammar of being alive there are songs in this book in the mode of loreena mckennitt s take on the old english ballad the bonny swans murder ballads they re called and the protagonist uses one to reveal her murderer the man who drowned her for her land and sent her to faerie here known as arcadia this is esther hawthorn who loved a fae here named rin but who seems to be mab the queen of air and darkness esther s sister is ysabel the younger of the two who works with esther to guard the two willow trees the professors watching over the magical river liss the river that flows out of arcadia the river liss brings magical grammar to the human world and human witches conjugate it into many useful things esther is being courted by one samuel pollard and turns him down because she has fallen in love with rin in a jealous rage samuel drowns her in the river but because of her ties to rin a betrothal ring the river liss flows backwards and delivers esther s body into arcadia there she is reawakened into life but because she died on the other side she can only return to the human world in a different form she asks rin to make her into a harp and when rin brings her back to her parents house where pollard has shifted his attentions to ysabel esther sings a murder ballad of identification and pollard is exposed then she has to go back with rin into faerie but before they leave rin gives ysabel a hint on how she can find a hidden entrance and sing her way back in and years later ysabel does just that bringing herself and her young child into the fae lands and the sisters are reunited at last it s a simple enough tale but it has a lovely timelessness there is even an i narrator who is never identified and in the end who the narrator might be ysabel s child maybe doesn t matter i was completely caught up in the story of esther and ysabel this book is simply gorgeous and you owe it to yourself to read it view all my reviews posted by bonnie mcdaniel on 5 21 2026 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels book reviews books read in 2026 goodreads older posts home subscribe to posts atom my ratings system disclaimer i do not get paid for any of this i just post these reviews because i like doing it anyone and everyone following along welcome aboard one star bad to awful usually don t finish if i finish a book and label it one star it s almost always because the ending was so horrid it spoiled everything that came before two stars marginal i generally finish these but they have significant flaws in worldbuilding and or characterization my two main criteria with just enough good points barely for me to tough it out to the end sometimes i go into detail regarding these flaws it depends on how much the book irritated me three stars liked with caveats a lot of first novels fall in this category the flaws still exist but they are lesser and the promise is definitely there four stars really liked these are books that excite me with minor flaws five stars launching my socks into orbit amazing hits all my sweet spots the pacing is spot on the worldbuilding is logical and well thought out and the characters have depth i can usually rave about these books for several paragraphs and do quote of the day i know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey h l mencken a fragmented excerpt from the filer and the astronaut by louise carol the time has come the filer said to talk of many things of pups and picks and palimpsests of cadigan and king and why this movie cult is not and whether trolls believe but scroll a bit the pixels cried before you have your chat for some of us are full of links oh do not rush so fast no hurry said the astronaut they thanked him much for that a post of fifth the filer said is what we chiefly need filking and punnery besides are very good indeed now if you re ready pixels dear we can begin to read pixels said the astronaut you ve had a pleasant run shall we be posting here again but answer came there none and this was scarcely odd because they d scrolled up every one comment from stoic cynic on file 770 i wandered lonely as an airship that floats on high o er vales and hills when all at once i saw a fleet a host of modern dirigibles above the lake beyond the trees floating and dancing in the breeze for oft when at my laptop i browse in vacant or in pensive mood they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of altitude and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the dirigibles from wordsworth s steampunk phase comment by 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