Review: The Lost Book of Anggird

The Lost Book of Anggird by Kyra Halland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kyra Halland can spell and punctuate, which is a lot less common than it ought to be for authors. It's unfortunate, then, that I don't always totally love her characters; they're often a bit grimier and grimmer than I really prefer.

Both of the lead characters here have a traumatic background from their childhood, the man more so than the woman. He also has a high sensitivity to pain, though it only seems to be a problem when the plot requires it to be.

The plot, in fact, has a lot of momentum, in the sense that it moves the main characters rapidly from a classic Odd Couple who consider each other vaguely attractive physically while being deeply annoying (because opposite) in personality, to banging like a screen door in a hurricane. I found the transition abrupt and inadequately set up.

Once they're together, they go off to solve a problem that, conveniently, they are uniquely able to solve, for multiple reasons that had to come together by chance. It's convenient for the plot, but not for them, since it involves getting people who don't approve of them to put them through difficult training while they're periodically threatened by other, adjacent people, and then they have to perform a difficult and dangerous task. Meanwhile, they're wanted by the authorities.

I stopped reading for a while, because I wasn't sure, at one point, that things weren't going to collapse into disaster that would be harrowing to read about, but it didn't; there was only a bit more torture (never a favourite of mine) and some comprehensive ignoring of all principles of justice and fairness. The government they had to deal with kept the populace contented and prosperous in order to keep them docile, but it was set up to be secretive and unaccountable, and quite capable of becoming dystopian and breaking its own rules when threatened.

Overall, then, although it was well written, had strong emotional beats, and was mostly mechanically sound, it wasn't a good fit for my personal taste, and so I place it in the lowest tier of my recommendations list for 2024. People with different tastes will enjoy it a good deal more, especially if they don't care about or don't notice the slightly railroaded plot.

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