A review by burningupasun
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

4.0

Trigger warnings: anorexia, lots of mentions of disordered eating, lots of jokes (from men) about physical abuse of wives, also the usual sexism, racism, etc.

This book was really good, it just also STRESSED ME OUT, haha. Don't get me wrong, this whole series is AMAZING. I love the alternate world the author has created, where there's an obvious break from our world due to the meteor, but where things are still realistic considering the time period. However this book in particular, is just a LOT of things going wrong again and again right up until the end... if you're an anxious reader it will probably stress you out. I had to put it down a lot, haha. But I did keep going and I'm glad I did, because it really was good and I enjoyed the end.

Although I did, in retrospect, have a slight qualm about the ending:

Spoiler

In the moment when I was reading it, I was like YES, of COURSE she becomes president, heck yeah! But then in retrospect, I kept thinking... after all the sexism the women in these books face, would she really have been able to get elected President THAT easily? I think I could believe it (I think she could do it based on her status as one of the first Six in space and on her husband's death), but I wish we'd gotten to see some of that. Instead it was like SURPRISE, she spent the whole book being told she was getting old and wasn't allowed to do must of what she wanted because she was a woman, and now she's president! I mean, we still can't even get a woman president in 2021! But I'm not REALLY mad about it, because I love that Nicole gets to be Madame President. I kinda saw it coming anyway when Kenneth died. (Which, by the way, was REALLY SAD.)