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False Value (Rivers of London)
Nnnggghhh. I may need to stop buying these every time they come out. I loved the first few, but the series has increasingly missed more than it's hit for me, and while this had some really nice moments, it mostly missed.
General book negativity for False Value under the cut, including some major negativity about Peter/Bev.
To be fair, I struggled with the book in the beginning because of the interlacing time periods, which made it (from my perspective, anyway) very hard to follow or to engage with the new characters. And I am not convinced that this is strictly a "me" problem, because I have had absolutely no problem following other nonlinear books (including Girl on the Train and the Magicians books). The issue with this book is that the two interweaving storylines were very close together in time, taking place in the same geographical area with the same set of characters, leading to an intensely disorienting experience every time we switched chapters in which everything is almost the same but not quite, and then you have to remember which parts of the plot are past and which are present. It was intensely frustrating.
... so there was that. But then once we got into the middle of the book things started to smooth out, and there was a ton of fascinating and cool worldbuilding and various plot threads that looked like they were going somewhere and were all interconnected ... and then, for me anyway, completely failed to land. The book doesn't really go anywhere. It just kind of peters out in a weak climax that doesn't really resolve anything (though the haunted steampunk computer was delightfully eerie).
I mean, it's possible, in fact likely, that a lot of this book was simply setting up dominoes for later books: the magic drones, the possibility of magitech Russian election interference, Skinner, the Librarians.
But you still gotta land it somewhere. And I did not feel like this book landed. Like, for example, why was Skinner building the magic computer? I assumed early on that it had something to do with manipulating elections/markets/etc. But I didn't feel like that was ever resolved. In fact, Skinner in general was a big weird blank - how did he find out about magic? Did he know about the ghost thing, or did he think he was building a true AI?
I was equally puzzled by Peter's total lack of curiosity about true magitech/the possibilities inherent in it, given that combining magic and technology has been Peter's entire thing, with the tech cave in the Folly and so forth. And it's true that the steampunk computer was horrible and creepy, but the drones are actually kind of amazing, and the fundamental idea of being able to blend computing and magic is something that I felt like Peter should've been all over, which he wasn't because .... big tech companies are bad, or something? I mean, yes, the uses they were being put to were awful, but the underlying concepts were really neat, in a way you'd have thought would have had Peter immediately going "ooh" and thinking of ways to incorporate it into the Folly's increasingly complex magic/technology hybridizing.
It felt like the entire book was joyless and lacking in curiosity and exploration simply to make a point that Big Corporations Are Soulless even though a lot of what they were doing was actually pretty cool, and the kind of thing you'd think Peter would have been all over, but instead he just didn't seem interested at all, and what's even the point of putting Peter undercover in a tech/geek atmosphere in which he never geeks out about anything? It felt like Peter's generally inquisitive nature was completely thrown over for the sake of making a point. It's fascinating and cool when Peter and the Folly are working on it, but all the wonder goes out of it when more than 10 people get involved, or something?
... So yeah. The book on the whole was a lot of cool ideas going in a lot of directions that just kind of skidded off into nothing at the end. I'm sure some of it will be picked up later (I'm pretty sure this book was setting up dominoes for a couple of big plot arcs/Big Bads to come), and we did get some cool bits like Chin and Nightingale's duel, which was great, as well as some nifty worldbuilding like the magitech and the fascinating/horrifying specter of the 2016 election being magically tilted. But on the whole, it seemed like there was a lot going on in this book that should have been thematically connected but never quite tied together.
And then there's Peter/Beverly.
I rarely have hard NOTPs among canon couples. Usually at worst I'm merely neutral on it. Whether or not I was particularly enthusiastic about the pairing beforehand, once they're together it's usually not hard to slide my brain into a headspace of seeing what canon wants me to see about why they work together, and/or just elide it as "well, it's canon, nothing to be done" and move on.
But I find Peter/Bev grating, and I'm hating the pregnancy as much as I thought I would. I think this book helped me pinpoint a bit more of why I don't like it, without actually helping.
Basically ... I don't mind that it's a pairing with some potentially skeevy aspects due to her ability to mind-whammy people (which this book both addresses and made exponentially worse by suggesting it's not even something she does on purpose, it just happens). I don't mind that; what I DO mind is that they sailed straight past the skeeve aspects to perfect domestic bliss without actually dealing with it.
I would be on board with Peter/Bev as a slightly creepy pairing in which she's clearly manipulating him a little bit but they both know about it.
The happy domestic thing, though, is really, really not working for me. All the more so because even aside from Bev's ability to control people (and I think this book heavily suggested that she does it all the time in subtle ways, even when she's not intending to), she also never explains things to Peter, or gives him a say in major life decisions like, say, having kids - it's all unilaterally Bev.
I feel like, if you've got this goddess/human relationship where the power is inherently tipped extremely heavily toward the goddess side AS OBVIOUSLY IT WOULD BE, you have to either lean into the skeeve (either in the sense that Peter is fully aware of how she's manipulating him and is okay with it, or that we know she's manipulating him against his will and it's supposed to be full-on creepy dubcon), or the goddess has to very strictly circumscribe herself where the mortal lover is concerned, and these books seem to be doing neither of these things.
I mean, maybe it's never been an issue because the books ARE very tightly in Peter's POV, and if Peter is being heavily manipulated he might not even realize it, so maybe there's going to be a major reckoning a book or three down the road. In the beginning, I kinda assumed that was where it was headed, but then we keep getting deeper and deeper into domestic bliss, and now she's pregnant and has been incorporated into his family, and I just don't even know. I was fine with Beverly as something eldritch and unknowable, but also with a human side, who occasionally manipulated Peter into sex. I'm a lot less fine with Bev the perfectly ordinary grad student in happy house-and-kids bliss with her boyfriend who also subtly tilts the mind of every single person around her toward serving her and doing things for her without really being aware she's doing it, and everyone is completely fine with this.
Early on, the Rivers were human but also eerie and numinous, and I liked them that way. I feel like the Peter/Bev relationship works much less well now that her eerie numinous quality has gone away and she behaves like an ordinary woman who oh-by-the-way has goddess powers and can make people do almost anything by sending a stray thought at them.
I did really like the comparison Bev makes between her mind-whammy and celebrity in general - that humans, too, have a way of bending probability and human behavior around them. It's a good point and I liked it. But I still maintain that direct mental manipulation is a bit different.
I guess the issue I'm having is that, if Bev is supposed to be an unapologetic goddess who knows that she manipulates people wherever she goes and doesn't mind because she takes being worshipped as her due, she's not entirely coming across that way, and if she's supposed to be a mostly-human who is trying hard not to manipulate the people around her or to interfere with their free will and struggles with guilt about it, she's not really coming across that way either - instead, it's an uneasy combination of the two that doesn't go together, and it's not really working for me.
So yeah, that was actually quite a lot of negativity. I think it might just be that these books are no longer my thing, and they haven't been for the last few books, even though there are still parts of them that I like a lot. Though, to be fair, I did really enjoy Lies Sleeping and I thought it might be turning the tide of my gradual drift away from this series, but apparently not.
General book negativity for False Value under the cut, including some major negativity about Peter/Bev.
To be fair, I struggled with the book in the beginning because of the interlacing time periods, which made it (from my perspective, anyway) very hard to follow or to engage with the new characters. And I am not convinced that this is strictly a "me" problem, because I have had absolutely no problem following other nonlinear books (including Girl on the Train and the Magicians books). The issue with this book is that the two interweaving storylines were very close together in time, taking place in the same geographical area with the same set of characters, leading to an intensely disorienting experience every time we switched chapters in which everything is almost the same but not quite, and then you have to remember which parts of the plot are past and which are present. It was intensely frustrating.
... so there was that. But then once we got into the middle of the book things started to smooth out, and there was a ton of fascinating and cool worldbuilding and various plot threads that looked like they were going somewhere and were all interconnected ... and then, for me anyway, completely failed to land. The book doesn't really go anywhere. It just kind of peters out in a weak climax that doesn't really resolve anything (though the haunted steampunk computer was delightfully eerie).
I mean, it's possible, in fact likely, that a lot of this book was simply setting up dominoes for later books: the magic drones, the possibility of magitech Russian election interference, Skinner, the Librarians.
But you still gotta land it somewhere. And I did not feel like this book landed. Like, for example, why was Skinner building the magic computer? I assumed early on that it had something to do with manipulating elections/markets/etc. But I didn't feel like that was ever resolved. In fact, Skinner in general was a big weird blank - how did he find out about magic? Did he know about the ghost thing, or did he think he was building a true AI?
I was equally puzzled by Peter's total lack of curiosity about true magitech/the possibilities inherent in it, given that combining magic and technology has been Peter's entire thing, with the tech cave in the Folly and so forth. And it's true that the steampunk computer was horrible and creepy, but the drones are actually kind of amazing, and the fundamental idea of being able to blend computing and magic is something that I felt like Peter should've been all over, which he wasn't because .... big tech companies are bad, or something? I mean, yes, the uses they were being put to were awful, but the underlying concepts were really neat, in a way you'd have thought would have had Peter immediately going "ooh" and thinking of ways to incorporate it into the Folly's increasingly complex magic/technology hybridizing.
It felt like the entire book was joyless and lacking in curiosity and exploration simply to make a point that Big Corporations Are Soulless even though a lot of what they were doing was actually pretty cool, and the kind of thing you'd think Peter would have been all over, but instead he just didn't seem interested at all, and what's even the point of putting Peter undercover in a tech/geek atmosphere in which he never geeks out about anything? It felt like Peter's generally inquisitive nature was completely thrown over for the sake of making a point. It's fascinating and cool when Peter and the Folly are working on it, but all the wonder goes out of it when more than 10 people get involved, or something?
... So yeah. The book on the whole was a lot of cool ideas going in a lot of directions that just kind of skidded off into nothing at the end. I'm sure some of it will be picked up later (I'm pretty sure this book was setting up dominoes for a couple of big plot arcs/Big Bads to come), and we did get some cool bits like Chin and Nightingale's duel, which was great, as well as some nifty worldbuilding like the magitech and the fascinating/horrifying specter of the 2016 election being magically tilted. But on the whole, it seemed like there was a lot going on in this book that should have been thematically connected but never quite tied together.
And then there's Peter/Beverly.
I rarely have hard NOTPs among canon couples. Usually at worst I'm merely neutral on it. Whether or not I was particularly enthusiastic about the pairing beforehand, once they're together it's usually not hard to slide my brain into a headspace of seeing what canon wants me to see about why they work together, and/or just elide it as "well, it's canon, nothing to be done" and move on.
But I find Peter/Bev grating, and I'm hating the pregnancy as much as I thought I would. I think this book helped me pinpoint a bit more of why I don't like it, without actually helping.
Basically ... I don't mind that it's a pairing with some potentially skeevy aspects due to her ability to mind-whammy people (which this book both addresses and made exponentially worse by suggesting it's not even something she does on purpose, it just happens). I don't mind that; what I DO mind is that they sailed straight past the skeeve aspects to perfect domestic bliss without actually dealing with it.
I would be on board with Peter/Bev as a slightly creepy pairing in which she's clearly manipulating him a little bit but they both know about it.
The happy domestic thing, though, is really, really not working for me. All the more so because even aside from Bev's ability to control people (and I think this book heavily suggested that she does it all the time in subtle ways, even when she's not intending to), she also never explains things to Peter, or gives him a say in major life decisions like, say, having kids - it's all unilaterally Bev.
I feel like, if you've got this goddess/human relationship where the power is inherently tipped extremely heavily toward the goddess side AS OBVIOUSLY IT WOULD BE, you have to either lean into the skeeve (either in the sense that Peter is fully aware of how she's manipulating him and is okay with it, or that we know she's manipulating him against his will and it's supposed to be full-on creepy dubcon), or the goddess has to very strictly circumscribe herself where the mortal lover is concerned, and these books seem to be doing neither of these things.
I mean, maybe it's never been an issue because the books ARE very tightly in Peter's POV, and if Peter is being heavily manipulated he might not even realize it, so maybe there's going to be a major reckoning a book or three down the road. In the beginning, I kinda assumed that was where it was headed, but then we keep getting deeper and deeper into domestic bliss, and now she's pregnant and has been incorporated into his family, and I just don't even know. I was fine with Beverly as something eldritch and unknowable, but also with a human side, who occasionally manipulated Peter into sex. I'm a lot less fine with Bev the perfectly ordinary grad student in happy house-and-kids bliss with her boyfriend who also subtly tilts the mind of every single person around her toward serving her and doing things for her without really being aware she's doing it, and everyone is completely fine with this.
Early on, the Rivers were human but also eerie and numinous, and I liked them that way. I feel like the Peter/Bev relationship works much less well now that her eerie numinous quality has gone away and she behaves like an ordinary woman who oh-by-the-way has goddess powers and can make people do almost anything by sending a stray thought at them.
I did really like the comparison Bev makes between her mind-whammy and celebrity in general - that humans, too, have a way of bending probability and human behavior around them. It's a good point and I liked it. But I still maintain that direct mental manipulation is a bit different.
I guess the issue I'm having is that, if Bev is supposed to be an unapologetic goddess who knows that she manipulates people wherever she goes and doesn't mind because she takes being worshipped as her due, she's not entirely coming across that way, and if she's supposed to be a mostly-human who is trying hard not to manipulate the people around her or to interfere with their free will and struggles with guilt about it, she's not really coming across that way either - instead, it's an uneasy combination of the two that doesn't go together, and it's not really working for me.
So yeah, that was actually quite a lot of negativity. I think it might just be that these books are no longer my thing, and they haven't been for the last few books, even though there are still parts of them that I like a lot. Though, to be fair, I did really enjoy Lies Sleeping and I thought it might be turning the tide of my gradual drift away from this series, but apparently not.
no subject
I think so, too. I also feel that the series is starting to suffer for having Peter as the only narrator, with the author simultaneously becoming aware of Peter's flaws as a narrator (I felt like this book was actively pushing back against his tendency to never say what he feels about anyone ever) and not really being able to work around it because he is the narrator and he really hasn't changed in howevermany books it's been.
And you're right too that the satire about the big soulless corporation (which wasn't even that funny, or well done: that many Douglas Adams jokes, really? Maybe in the eighties) totally drowned out anything interesting about the Rose Jars, or the Mary Engine (which just turned out to be....evil? I guess?). Ada Lovelace turned out to be mainly a namedrop, which was really disappointing.
Yeah, there's SO much in this book that's interesting and cool, but then a lot of it just falls flat, and most of the corporate satire did for me; it felt very 80s, in general, or 90s maybe, and I could see the notes he was trying to hit, but it was also like ... I've seen this done better elsewhere. We got the point in 5 pages. What are you going to do with it? And the answer was, unfortunately, not as much as he could have. Though the heist and fight was really cool. That was really the high point of the book.
And then there's Peter/Beverly.
Hoo boy was there ever.
This made me laugh. I was afraid I was going to hate the pregnancy and BOY HOWDY was I not wrong.
And in spite of all the attempts to show her doing other stuff, it feels like Beverly is now nearly all about her mystical pregnancy, and think every time she talks with another woman, it's always only about that. It wouldn't be so annoying if I had more of a sense of Beverly as a person.
YES, I'm having this exact problem. Weirdly enough I thought I had a better sense of Bev as a person back when she was a lot more supernatural, unknowable, and eerie. Now she feels like a baby incubator. Part of the problem is just that we only ever see her through Peter's eyes, but it's also impossible to get any sort of feel for what she wants out of the relationship or what she expects from the babies because they never talk about it! In fact the book seems to explicitly cut away whenever they're about to directly talk about anything related to the relationship, the babies, or their future.
Like I said elsewhere, if the idea is they're equals somehow (and GOOD LUCK with that in any deity/human relationship ever) or that he balances her out (the concern for the intern who got fired because of Beyonce), it's really not convincing, and also sucks anything not vanilla energy right out of the setup.
THIS. I do think that's what we're supposed to be getting out of it - but the book hasn't really sold it; they went straight from hot dubcon to domestic partnership and I feel like the book is also trying to retcon it as "Bev never manipulated him and he was into her from the beginning", and I mean, he was into her from the beginning but it also pretty clearly had dubconnish overtones?? I can't figure out if Aaronovitch is trying to walk back from having set up his main pairing as a fundamentally dubconny one by just never dealing with it and occasionally trying to imply that the dubcon never happened, but it's not working. (For me, at least.) Though it would help if they'd explicitly have some conversations about the relationship/their future. This book sort of did that with the discussions about Bev's mind-whammy thing, but it also ended up steering around the thing they actually need to talk about, which is whether she's doing it to Peter and whether he's okay with it!
In fact, a lot of the conversations in this book had that overwhelming sense of frustration that I associate with Connie Willis's dialogue. It's fine to have pauses and omissions and conversations that aren't about what they're really about, but at some point you DO need to have your characters have an actual honest exchange of dialogue about something important rather than talking around it all the time!
no subject
I'm reminded of how some long-running series I've read switched to third person, or even multiple first person POVs (this happened with Sue Grafton's series). I feel like part of the problem is I haven't seen Peter grow very much. He was always a good guy, in a lot of ways he's the moral compass of the books, and that can be hard to keep going for book after book. I also feel someone with Peter's background might be at least a little ambivalent about policing, but that might be too much to ask for a paranormal mystery series. (I do remember the blurb for the first book being something like "Harry Potter crossed with CSI," LOL.)
most of the corporate satire did for me; it felt very 80s, in general, or 90s maybe, and I could see the notes he was trying to hit, but it was also like ... I've seen this done better elsewhere. We got the point in 5 pages. What are you going to do with it?
It felt VERY eighties. It also feels like there are these shadow organizations to the Folly -- there was one literally in the last book -- that are much more about power and wealth, and that results in Skygarden and presumably some of what Ty does and now not-Elon-Musk. A lot of that seems to involve people wanting a perpetual source of magic or to mechanize it. And there's the other side with people like Reynard the Fox and Foxglove's anti-magic aura and Molly's ability to send Peter back in the first book (did that ever come up again? No, right?). There are some really neat worldbuilding possibilities but he seemed to want Douglas Adams riffs instead. :-/
Part of the problem is just that we only ever see her through Peter's eyes, but it's also impossible to get any sort of feel for what she wants out of the relationship or what she expects from the babies because they never talk about it! In fact the book seems to explicitly cut away whenever they're about to directly talk about anything related to the relationship, the babies, or their future.
I REALLY felt that with the stuff about not getting married. Maybe there's something underneath that and the flimsy excuses are supposed to sound flimsy, but we've seen married Rivers -- Ty, and Isis and Oxley, and there are some other ones too I think -- and Peter already has power himself as a magician and prince of the realm and all that. (I did not appreciate the scene at the end with Old!Bev showing up and crying while belly-rubbing, which was like a cliffhanger. The pregnancy was schmoopy and awesome right up until the end! -- and then it wasn't.)
I can't figure out if Aaronovitch is trying to walk back from having set up his main pairing as a fundamentally dubconny one by just never dealing with it and occasionally trying to imply that the dubcon never happened, but it's not working. (For me, at least.) Though it would help if they'd explicitly have some conversations about the relationship/their future.
Yeah, I think a big part of this is Peter is so opaque -- which is partly just his personality (he deflects nearly everything), and it's also his function as the first person mystery narrator. But that only goes so far. Kinsey Milhone was also deliberately closed-off, but one arc in the books was about her realizing that and dealing (or not) with it. Peter's very charming, but at this point he also feels a bit superficial.