Neon Yang

It's an old, familiar story: a young person hears the voice of an angel saying they have been chosen as a warrior to lead their people to victory in a holy war. But Misery Nomaki knows they are a fraud. Raised on a remote moon colony, they don't believe in any kind of god. Their angel is a delusion, brought on by hereditary space exposure. Yet their survival banks on mastering the holy mech they are supposedly destined for, and convincing the Emperor of the Faithful that they are the real deal. The deeper they get into their charade, however, the more they start to doubt their convictions. A retelling of Joan of Arc's story given a space opera, giant robot twist, The Genesis of Misery is a story about the nature of truth, the power of belief, and the interplay of both in the stories we tell ourselves. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The Genesis of Misery

kelsey

Alba Ramos

im sorry but the more i think about it the less i like it

~Anna~

1.5 stars, rounded up to 2. This review will have spoilers. Idgaf if you read them or not. This book pissed me off, and I will go rant about it now, in no special order.

I hate religious texts. And I especially hate people who glorify religious zealotry. I now realize it’s something that deeply triggers me, so excuse me while I rip into this book I despise.

When I heard this was a retelling of Joan of Arc, I thought it would be a subversive one. After all, it plays with that idea in the summary: Misery doesn’t believe in the hooey of prophecy, until maybe reconsidering it. I thought this would be interesting, bring in some depth to a legend I had never had any previous interest in. And I’m on a big sci fi kick this year and thought it would be a great read.

This is not accurate to how it feels in the book. I’ve seen more nuance in a middle grade book. No, this reads as a punishment turned text. I can feel the chastisement in Interlude 10 & the epilogue, hear the author chanting ‘na-na na-na boo-boo’ and pointing down to the reader as they read through 395+ pages of no substance with nothing having truly been gained after reading it. Making fun of the reader for not immediately being distrustful at all times and not thinking of the possibility of there being an unreliable narrator.

The prose in this book was strained and detached. Words like duodenal, pareidolia, and witsh are used fairly regularly in this novel, and not in any way to deepen our understanding of the world. The detatchment is so extreme I barely felt anything throughout the entire book. There also isn’t nearly enough dialogue to enhance character action, and most of the talking is Misery just convincing others. Which leads into another point I will talk about later: the secondary characters being written as just pawns. Everything has the vague pressure of someone being condescending to you, but in a way you hope will have some reasoning behind it, some catharsis and a releasing of all this unease.

It doesn’t.

By Chapter 9 I was questioning if I’d have to dnf this book. But by part three I was able to read quickly and I realized it wasn’t because I was enjoying any of this, it was because Misery had finally jumped the shark and finally sounded like the person Yang had wanted them to act like since the beginning. 

Everything about this preordained stuff with glossy, showy prose that lights up in tiny bursts made me realize this was what Yang wanted to write, and the messy characterizations and meh plot beforehand was not the focus. And this bothers me deeply. By part 3, Misery has convinced themself into a corner and instead of going back and forth like the old Misery might have done, we have a new character to replace her. A Misery 2.0, to do all the stupid things Neon needs them to do in order to learn from it. This isn’t a human. The closest thing I can compare Misery to is a cult leader with the largest pair of blinders I could ever imagine on. I hate this part 3 version of Misery. And I understand why this book led up to this, and I hate it for that, too. 

I agree with another reviewer about the lack of character depth. These stick drawings are made for Misery to interact and play with, and what could have been interesting subplots for the side characters dissolve into nothing, because they don’t matter. Nothing but weird alien gods do in this story.

Even one of the love interests, a women who seemed like would have an interesting reasoning for her behavior towards Misery, gets turned into a sad, shriveling creature who explains her backstory in a trite, flavorless manner the moment she gets ‘turned to godhood’. 

The queerness and the normalization of things like pronouns is of course a positive. But will that save it from its prose and plotting? Fuck no.

On page 295, there’s an example of clear consent and just like everything except the religion in the book it reads as detached and dispassionate. Page 354 crawls up past my skin into my heart and rips it apart. I’m horrified by all of these pairings. They don’t feel natural. I feel like I'm delusional when reading sections like these two.

The interludes may just be the worst part. They started out interesting enough, giving us a third person omniscient POV with worldbuilding and historical context. But soon it devolves into the same condescension the rest of the book inhabits. I understand zie are creatures that are not the same as humans and love to talk about it, but it all starts to blur together and makes me not even care to read it. 

I will consider to read Neon Yang’s other works, as part of this was my own personal biases against religious bullhockey, but I am not giving this a passing grade. The only character that was given the tiniest bit of nuance was Jericho, who isn't even in more than 100 pages of this book and only made me care as much as I did is because MISERY LITERALLY BREAKS HIS NECK WITH HER BOOT WHEN THEY'RE DREAMING. This was not a reading experience I care to have again.       
     
Read this book if you want to suffer, and in the hopes there might be a better sequel to make this book have a better purpose for existing. That's about it.

The Genesis of Misery

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