#re road trip stories i want to reread ‘thick as thieves’ now. actually why is it called that tbh. like i guess it’s an outlier in the

[aldieb]

the first half of the siege of burning grass is a solid entry into my favorite genre-that-isn’t-a-genre, “two people who can’t understand each other go on a terrible road trip.” on one level, i think it’s an interesting twist to make the two dudes realize that they’re actually from the same cluster of small villages in the huge war machine country since it highlights the thematic question of whether geographic boundaries can make someone an enemy or an ally. but on another level, i think it’s a little bit of a cheap trick to make the characters very quickly connect over tiny familiar things like a word game that the people from round there play. because it feels so worked-for and rewarding when the exact opposite happens—the moment when one character in this dynamic is suddenly fascinated by something small but alien about the other, can’t resist trying to learn more about it, and thus opens the channel of communication a bit wider. idk, maybe this book is deliberately a total reversal of the encountering-the-other trope, though? the next half is a combination of a lesson in political organizing (this was good; fantasy about what The Resistance actually gets up to is lacking and the details felt real) and an action movie that you catch the final confusing 40 minutes of because you happen to flip to the tv channel it’s on (i… do not know how we got here). i just don’t get how a whole story about pacifism ended up hingeing on a bloody heist—i would say that it’s a refutation of pacifism, but that’s counter to the ideology expressed throughout the entire rest of the book. uhhh idk i feel like i say this a lot in the sff sphere lately but i’m glad that this type of book exists and also wish another of this type existed that was better executed. i want to know whether the author has read the dispossessed (also ends in a rather violent fashion as a result of revolutionary organizing but manages to square that with its purported themes). i liked the writing style a lot