The Cuckoo
I really enjoyed this one. The series was fun, but I think this had some of the best, most evocative scenes in the series. The pacing to the end of the book was a little strange, a little anticlimactic, but oddly, I found I kind of appreciated that – not a tidy bow on a series that didn’t have a clearly desirable outcome.
I’m painfully aware of how fantasy is used – often unintentionally – as a vessel for smuggling right-wing and racist ideologies; and a series that centered on two explicitly western European, mostly Anglo, societies trying to genocide each other, with strong Nordic influence and themes deeply intwined with toxic masculinity, is certainly not immune to those criticisms. But in the end, I think it could have been much worse in that regard. Bellamus was a fascinating and sympathetic antagonist, and while men definitely outnumbered women in the story, at least a few women have strength and agency, and the men were generally layered and human. Not a perfect book in that regard, for sure, but far from an outlier in the subgenre.