kalanadi's review
Too dense and confusing, too much effort to understand even the slightest bit of what was happening. Reads like an archaic epic ballad, but it's 400 pages and half the words make no sense unless you're a Shakespeare scholar.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape
wealhtheow's review
2.0
Three tales set in the realm of Cloud, which seems to be a medieval Europe-like world. Ashes is both a mythic figure and someone that women play at being, or become. It's all very interesting, but also difficult to follow. The book will suddenly start referring to "he" after a long section exclusively about women, with no indication of what man or mythic male character is intended. The writing is beautiful, but tangled. For example:
Contains a whooooooole lot of sexual assault, which made me give it up after only about 30 pages. I can only deal with so much!
They are sisters, stone and thorn tree, dark and light of one moon. Annis, Malykorne. And they are rivals for the hare, his love, his death: each bears him in her lap, as child, as lover and as lyke. They wake his body and he leaps within them, quick and starkening; they bear him light. Turning, they are each the other, childing and devouring: the cauldron and the sickle and the cold bright bow. Each holds, beholds, the other in her glass.
Contains a whooooooole lot of sexual assault, which made me give it up after only about 30 pages. I can only deal with so much!
windsinger's review
1.0
This seems more like a dream than a story. The writing is disjointed and confusing and leaves more of a feeling than a coherent plot. I struggled through a few pages and then looked at the reviews that said the entire book is written the same way. I couldn't get through this.
vg2's review
1.0
Disjointed writing that focused more on being beautiful than any coherence in its story; the language is so overwrought, it felt at times as though a thesaurus had been held over the page and wrung dry. Stir in a ridiculous number of single-word sentences, unnecessary question marks and italics used so liberally that the emphasis is diluted entirely, and I felt exhausted at the end of each chapter. I think I would have enjoyed ‘Cloud and Ashes’ more had it been a novella or a collection of poetry, instead of 400+ pages without any variation. I found myself skimming over whole pages, and only finished in order to truly say that I gave it a fair chance. Really not for me.
brontesaurusrex's review
5.0
Process of reading this book--
Me: "Wait, so by wood here, do you mean wood, a forest, madness, or arousal? Does Law mean... well, laws or a hill? Is Jack Daw's Pack a pack of cards, a gang, or something he carries his stuff in?"
Book: "Yes."
Me: "Cool, I guess I'll just take ten minutes to read every page, then."
Cloud and Ashes is a book that my brain doesn't fully get, but my gut does, to the point that I adore it both in spite of and because of its density and brutality. I can really probably only get as precise about my thoughts as those old Victorian reviews of Wuthering Heights going on about its "power." I get the plot, I could tell you the events from beginning to end, but that's really just the beginning of what this book is and hardly does it justice. Equally important is the tangled folk mythology of the world of Cloud--cyclical, circular, overlapping--and the language where one, two, or all possible meanings of a word can be the correct one at once. It's complicated and messy, but it makes perfect sense in a John Barleycorn sort of way.
Nothing about this is easy to read. Even the moments that are relatively simple to digest as far as what's happening are full of suffering, violence, and fatalism. Maybe Annis was onto something stopping time in Moonwise, because the things Ashes--and the girls who become Ashes--have to go through to keep the year turning are terrible.
But for all that, it's also beautiful. It's heartbreakingly beautiful. I've never read a book that feels like it's as old and convoluted as actual folklore that's been passed down through generations by oral storytelling traditions rather than writing. This is the best depiction of the power of lunar symbolism probably ever.
So that's incoherent and unhelpful, but I've gone through this book three times now and by then you start feeling like you need to say something about what brought on multiple reads and why they're probably not enough.
Me: "Wait, so by wood here, do you mean wood, a forest, madness, or arousal? Does Law mean... well, laws or a hill? Is Jack Daw's Pack a pack of cards, a gang, or something he carries his stuff in?"
Book: "Yes."
Me: "Cool, I guess I'll just take ten minutes to read every page, then."
Cloud and Ashes is a book that my brain doesn't fully get, but my gut does, to the point that I adore it both in spite of and because of its density and brutality. I can really probably only get as precise about my thoughts as those old Victorian reviews of Wuthering Heights going on about its "power." I get the plot, I could tell you the events from beginning to end, but that's really just the beginning of what this book is and hardly does it justice. Equally important is the tangled folk mythology of the world of Cloud--cyclical, circular, overlapping--and the language where one, two, or all possible meanings of a word can be the correct one at once. It's complicated and messy, but it makes perfect sense in a John Barleycorn sort of way.
Nothing about this is easy to read. Even the moments that are relatively simple to digest as far as what's happening are full of suffering, violence, and fatalism. Maybe Annis was onto something stopping time in Moonwise, because the things Ashes--and the girls who become Ashes--have to go through to keep the year turning are terrible.
But for all that, it's also beautiful. It's heartbreakingly beautiful. I've never read a book that feels like it's as old and convoluted as actual folklore that's been passed down through generations by oral storytelling traditions rather than writing. This is the best depiction of the power of lunar symbolism probably ever.
So that's incoherent and unhelpful, but I've gone through this book three times now and by then you start feeling like you need to say something about what brought on multiple reads and why they're probably not enough.
robyotter's review
5.0
If you're into mythic fiction, I HIGHLY recommend this book. The prose is often thick and the dialog is archaic (I had to look up several words - clew means skein), but by 50 pages or so I was used to it, and it is well worth reading.
aquariansunchild's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
4.0
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