Mark Llobrera
Too Like the Lightning cover image

Too Like the Lightning

Ada Palmer

Genre
Fiction
Format
Paperback
Started Reading
Sep 25, 2022
Finished Reading
Oct 11, 2022

My friend Sam recommended this to me, and I would have finished it earlier if not for my copy of Nona the Ninth coming in. I was somewhat surprised that this was Ada Palmer’s first novel—it sets up a very rich world with multiple layers of narration and Palmer is clearly having fun tugging the reader’s sympathies this way and that with nuanced characters. There was quite a bit of resonance with Nona with respect to how each book plays with the presentation of characters’ gender—Lightning is quite overt in how it interrogates this via direct address to an imagined future reader in the book’s world. I’m already awaiting my library hold of the next volume in the series.