What. The. Fuck.
Why, in all the talk about Elliott's Cold Magic series, didn't anyone warn me that its worldbuilding contained
(spoiler, if you consider stuff from 1/3 through a spoiler)
great ice sheets . . . covering the northern reaches of Hibernia, covering the lands north of the Baltic Ice Sea, covering the Helvitic Alps. Reaching, so Kehinde at the inn had speculated, across the northern pole of the world to join with another vast shelf of ice that smothered the north of the continent we called Amerike which lay beyond the western ocean, the continent that had given birth to trolls instead of humans.
We've already met some trolls and they are very intelligent and cultured, but serious, what the fuck? Haven't we established how hideously offensive it is to erase American Indians from alternate-history fantasies with the whole Patricia Wrede blowup just after RaceFail? And replacing them with actualfacts nonhumans, wow, just, no.
I was already not very into this book—the overtness of the exposition in conversations is grating on my nerves—but this was like running into a brick wall. I'm putting this down now, and unless something epically awesome and subversive gets done with this setup, I'm not picking it back up.
Assume spoilers in comments.
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