2022 book 169

 Marie Brennan's The Tropic of Serpents

I liked this book a lot better than the last time I read it, maybe I just appreciate slower fantasy these days. And this did have a fair amount of action! I do still think the illustrations are kind of racist, but the narrator's descriptions of this fictional version of Africa bothered me less this time (maybe because I knew to expect it or it wasn’t as bad as I remembered—though it’s arguably still not great). I get that authors are playing with the trips of actual historical travelogues/writing, but I can’t think of one example where a European-analogue interacts with a “foreign” analogue that isn’t at least a little cringeworthy.