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A review by ielerol
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson
3.0
I wanted to like this book more than I did. And it's not that I don't like it, or think that it's good. It's very well-written, it's doing some really interesting things, I would say that I admire it very much. But I also mostly didn't enjoy reading it.
The thing to understand about Trouble The Saints is that, despite the marketing calling it a love story and the comparison to The Night Circus, it is noir through-and-through. Everyone in power is corrupt, the people you thought you could trust were lying or hiding important secrets, the three point-of-view characters badly want to believe they are good people even as they're in the middle of betraying the values they claim to care about. Every time you think someone has found a chance for peace, it's undermined. It's good noir! But noir is very much is not the genre for me.
I will say, the ending is positively upbeat by noir standards. Our protagonists are caught too deep in the pattern of their own betrayals and self-deceptions to find a way out, but the future doesn't have to stay that way.
The thing to understand about Trouble The Saints is that, despite the marketing calling it a love story and the comparison to The Night Circus, it is noir through-and-through. Everyone in power is corrupt, the people you thought you could trust were lying or hiding important secrets, the three point-of-view characters badly want to believe they are good people even as they're in the middle of betraying the values they claim to care about. Every time you think someone has found a chance for peace, it's undermined. It's good noir! But noir is very much is not the genre for me.
I will say, the ending is positively upbeat by noir standards. Our protagonists are caught too deep in the pattern of their own betrayals and self-deceptions to find a way out, but the future doesn't have to stay that way.