Review: The Grief of Stones

The Grief of Stones by Katherine Addison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'd previously read The Goblin Emperor and enjoyed it, so I took the opportunity to pick up a pre-release copy of this book for review via Netgalley. I haven't read the second book yet, and though some events in it are mentioned, I didn't feel lost as a result. (I did sometimes feel lost, which I'll talk about more in a minute, but it was not because I hadn't read the previous book.)

In The Goblin Emperor, because the focus is on the title character, the mystery-solving that goes on by the Witness for the Dead who is the main character of this and the previous book happens largely offstage. That was a slight disappointment to me, and probably other readers, though I understand why the focus was where it was, and that therefore the mystery got sidelined. In this, and I believe the previous book, the mystery solving becomes the focus.

A Witness for the Dead, in the setting, is a type of priest who is able to communicate with the recently deceased to some degree, which makes investigating murders a lot less complicated sometimes (not always). Not that it's always murders; there are multiple minor consultations throughout this book with citizens who want to know anything from their deceased business partner's bestselling scone recipe to where their late wife hid their savings. These seem to function mainly to provide a feel for the world (it's a dystopian place to be if you're poor) and to emphasize that the Witness for the Dead's work includes a lot of routine. He's a minor civic functionary, in most ways. But there are several murders, some of which are solved almost immediately, others by careful detective work over multiple chapters.

The mystery/detective side of things, for me, was fine. It worked well. What didn't work so well for me was the untranslated vocabulary and the elaborate names.

In my review of the original book, The Goblin Emperor, I noted that my difficulty in following the names and words for everything had some justification, in that it mimicked how the main character felt, thrust into the midst of court intrigue and suddenly surrounded by a great many people who he had to keep straight. Here, there's no such justification. The author is a good writer, and I'm going to assume that she knows the effect of including so much untranslated fantasy vocabulary - it makes the world feel alien. Again, in The Goblin Emperor that was a feature, but here it feels to me like a fault, particularly since less would have been more. A light salting of special terms that I could guess from context would have been enough, but I got a lot more than that, and it pushed me back a step from immersion in the story. It went from feeling alien to feeling alienating. Because I had a pre-publication version, I may have been missing a glossary that will be provided in the final book, but even with a glossary I would have had to look things up often enough that I couldn't have remained immersed. As it was, I just had to put up with a lot of instances where a word was used that conveyed little or nothing to me.

Another justification of a lot of untranslated words could be that it emphasizes that these things are not direct analogues of things in our world; there's a significant difference. That's a good defence in theory, but in practice, there are untranslated terms where, as far as I could tell, an English word like "temple" wouldn't have been at all misleading. Also, some vocabulary is translated, like "canon" or "prelate" (the latter of which, in English, means specifically a high-ranking cleric, but which is used in this book to mean a low-ranking one).

I'm left feeling that the author has made some missteps with the vocabulary that diminished my enjoyment of the book and didn't compensate by producing any benefit that was visible to me, or couldn't have been produced with a much lighter hand.

On top of that, the names were hard for me to remember. I finished the book last night, and I would have to look up the main character's name if I wanted to include it in my review today. Often, I would come to a character's name and have to use my Kindle's search function to find previous instances of it and remind myself who it was.

Katherine Addison writes highly capable prose, and this is a book with a brain and a heart. It gets into my Best of the Year list, but in the lowest tier, because the excessive and unnecessary use of untranslated vocabulary on top of hard-to-remember names appreciably diminished my enjoyment.

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