The Secret History of the Mongol Queens By Jack Weatherford

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens

By Jack Weatherford

“Let us reward our female offspring” Genghis Khan, the Secret History of the Mongols

Dr. Weatherford was born in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s the eldest of seven children and his father was an Army Sergeant so moves were common his childhood. He returned to South Carolina to attend the University of South Carolina, and graduated in 1967 with a B.A in political science. In 1970 he married his high school sweetheart Walker Pierce, and they stayed married until her passing in 2013 (RIP). She was not only survived by Dr. Weatherford but their two children and a wealth of grandchildren. He continued at the University of South Carolina receiving two master's degrees, one in 1972 for sociology and another in 1973 for anthropology. He then attended the University of California and received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1977. In addition to this, he earned a post doctrinal degree from Duke University in policy studies. He became a professor of anthropology for Macalester College in Minnesota and proceeded to get to work. He specialized in tribal societies, which is kind of a traditional place for anthropologists to specialize in. The discipline started with Europeans trying to study and understand tribal societies (Poorly. It is worth noting that today’s anthropologists consider the methods they used, even in the 1970s… often unethical. {I should note that modern Anthropology is much better at this}), sometimes with the worst of motives (In support of colonial endeavors) and sometimes with rose-tinted glasses (This is where the myth of the Noble Savage™ came from). Most of us even today are pretty firm in the idea that tribal societies are the natural social units of humanity, so his specialization isn’t shocking. Dr. Weatherford wasn't content to study and teach however; he started publishing books. His first book published in 1988 “Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World” made a case that the social, political, and culinary traditions of the Indians had a massive effect on American and European society. His most widely known book “The History of Money” was published in 1997. The books that might have the longest-lasting effect, however, are his three most recent, all of them focused on Mongolia and the history of the Mongols. Most specifically, the impact of Mongolian's most well-known son Temujin or as most people know him, Genghis Khan. Dr. Weatherford was and still is greatly celebrated in Mongolia for his work, receiving the Polar Star, the highest award Mongolia can give to a foreigner in 2007. In 2010 they awarded him a Friendship Medal. In 2012 Mongolia created a foundation in his name and named a medal after him to be given in recognition of the best work of scholarship on Mongolian history or culture written in Mongolian. If that wasn't enough to celebrate the 850th anniversary of Genghis Khan's birth, the government mandated that audio recordings of “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” and “The Secret History of the Mongol Queens” be played at every sacred spot in Mongolia. These days Dr. Weatherford spends most of his time in Mongolia and who can blame him? (... Holy Fucknuggets. Okay, yeah.)

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens was the second of his three works about the Mongols and was published in 2010 by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group which is a division of the far-reaching Random House (Okay, we need to hire Nicolas Cage to steal Teddy Roosevelt’s Trust Buster). However the seed of this book is much older, first planted on a trip to Mongolia in 1998 when an old woman hesitantly declared her belief that Genghis Khan had been born again, as Queen Manduhai. I should note this was not a popular opinion and Dr. Weatherford was inclined to shrug Queen Manduhai off, but as anyone who reads this book can tell you, no one can just shrug off Queen Manduhai. No matter where Dr. Weatherford went, there her memory was. When Dr. Weatherford began to grapple with the fact that the Secret History of the Mongols, a Mongolian text that was written by first-hand observers to the Khan's court, had been censored, the seed began to grow. A section had been clumsily removed, with the section after the line “Let us reward our female offspring” completely gone. (Oh man. This is gonna be the best kind of revisionist history. The good kind where the record is corrected because something was deliberately deleted.)The section before had been where Genghis rewarded his sons and other male kinsmen, so to declare that he would award his daughters and then stop... Seems strange. So Dr. Weatherford set off on the hunt to find out what happened by sifting through the evidence of Mongolian histories, Persian and Chinese records, and even Buddhist temple records. He assembled the history of Mongol noblewomen wielding power and the effect they would have for good and for ill on the Mongol Empire and even how it would be that a young woman - finding herself the last surviving queen of a dead puppet Khan - breathed new life into the shattered and sundered tribes of Mongolia for not just a unified nation but one more Empire.

The book starts by discussing just how Genghis Khan rewarded his daughters. Simply put he made them Queens. To go into detail, Genghis attempted to reorder how marriage worked on the steppe, banning the forcing of Mongol women into marriage or selling them into marriage (Good on Genghis. It seems that in this the Mongols once again became an exception to the generalizations that can be made of pre-modern peoples.). Before this, male kinsmen had the right to trade their sisters and daughters for livestock, although it was considered a low-class way of doing ways. A more honored tradition was the groom in question coming to live with his future wife's family and working for them (usually as a herder) and getting to know everyone. Genghis deeply preferred this way, even before uniting the tribes of the steppes, having offered violence to man for daring to suggest that he trade his sister for horses. This is in line with Genghis attempting to reorder his whole society and while he wasn't entirely successful, he did wipe away the old ways and organization for generations after his death. The daughters of the Khan were strategically married to the ruling families of highly placed vassal peoples and their husbands inducted into special military units that served the Great Khan directly. This made his daughters the de facto rulers of these people and they took to it well. If we're going to be honest, they often did a better job then his sons did (Shocking! Wait. No. The same is often true in Medieval europe. A Distant Mirror paints a pretty good picture of medieval male nobility and holy shit they were bloodthirsty manchildren. I cannot imagine it was much better in on the Steppes of Asia). Genghis unfortunately for his empire didn't spend as much time as he maybe should have training the next generation. Worse, most of his sons were raging alcoholics. To be fair to the boys, this was an epidemic in Mongol elite classes (You just mean elite classes, right?) after Genghis made his conquests. This has its roots in the fact that the native booze of Mongolia was made with fermented mare's milk and had a really low alcohol content. So when wine and other “civilized” liquors were introduced on a large scale to the now incredibly wealthy Mongol elite? It was like introducing Everclear to people who had only drunk Bud Light their entire lives. (To be fair, wine actually has a flavor that doesn’t make you want to commit ritual suicide, so that might play into it as well.)

This meant that in the generations after Genghis much of the maneuvering was done by the wives and daughters of powerful men. While strong male leaders like Kublai Khan would emerge as often as not they would be succeeded by weaker men, but there always seemed to be a cadre of women willing to do the dirty work of politics. As well as commit savagery on each other if they couldn’t find a man to do it for them. This wasn't without costs. For example, the daughters of Genghis Khan didn't have their kingdoms destroyed by outsiders but by their brothers and nephews looking to concentrate power (See? Bloodthirsty manchildren.{Considering what the daughter in laws and other female relations did to each other, the ladies weren’t any better}). Dr. Weatherford leads us through the savage infighting as the Mongol Empire began to fracture at the seams and beyond into the court of the Yaun dynasty and it's fall. However, a number of Mongols would remain in the steppes and resist all comers. It's here that a number of Mongol Princesses emerge like Princess Khutulun who served as her father's right hand in the fight to keep the Mongols united and independent from the emerging powers of Muslim warlords and Mongols who they felt had abandoned their culture to become degenerate aristocrats (The terms degenerate and aristocrat are redundant.). Princess Khutulun was famed for her strength, skill, and beauty; and declared that she would only marry a man who could defeat her in wrestling. Furthermore, anyone who wrestled her would have to bet 10 horses before she would even consider it. Her herd was over a 1000 horses when she finally did marry according to legend. However despite the heroic efforts of such women and men, the Mongol dynasties did fall one by one and the Khans found themselves prisoners and puppets to foreigners, ranging from Ming Emperors to Turkish warlords all of them trying to use the Mongols for their own ends and keep them weak and divided. This is where the star of the book enters the stage.

Manduhai was born to a clan that considered itself Mongol and possessed some military power but wasn't strong enough to be a player in their own right in the post-imperial anarchy that gripped the steppes. A new Muslim warlord named Beg-Arslan had emerged and found himself a tractable puppet Khan who could trace his lineage to Genghis Khan and married his daughter to the Khan. Manduhai was married (Was married? Passive voice? Fuck {At this point the reforms of Genghis had been tossed aside} Ugh.) to him at a young age but the marriage didn't seem to amount to much. Now there was excitement but it wasn't around her, it was around a young man, one of the last survivors of Genghis' direct line. Manduhai's husband adopted the boy as his heir and placed his hopes on him to reunite the Mongols and free them from foreign oppression. The young man proved foolish however and a falling out lead to his death with Manduhai's husband passing away shortly after. At this point, many young noble ladies (and men) would have met a disastrous and forgettable end but Manduhai was made of sterner stuff. She knew that her husband's heir had a son and she hunted down the young boy and found him. She then enthroned him as Dayan Khan and gathered her followers and proceeded to fight a decade's long campaign to not only reunite the Mongols but chase away every foreigner trying to rule them (Oh to be a fly on that wall. “You there, do you know who your father was?” “No, maybe vaguely, why?” “Don’t worry. We do! He was an idiot who got himself killed. You are a descendent of Genghis Khan, and thus the Khan now. Come, we have much to discuss and a resurgent Khanate to build!” “Um... Okay?!” {The boy was like 7} Even better.). She was so successful that the Ming restarted building parts of the Great Wall to keep her out. She went on to marry Dayan Khan after raising him to manhood (this was traditional for Mongols, in that marrying your older brothers or uncles wives was considered normal and even expected, you can also see this in the Old Testament on the other side of Asia). She would provide Dayan Khan 8 children and he would be loyal to her as long as she lived. Manduhai would come to be celebrated as a national heroine of the Mongols, rescuing them from disappearing into the ash-heap of history. While neither she or Dayan ever refounded the Mongol Empire, they were able to build a unified and strong state capable of facing off the Ming and Muslim states of Central Asia. It wasn't until the Manchus emerged in Manchuria that the nation Manduhai built would fall but her descendants would continue to exercise power until the 1940s when various factions purged them out of existence. However, her legacy and that of her protege husband Dayan continues, and Mongols revere them as the greatest Mongol monarchs with the sole exception of Genghis Khan. Let's be honest though, being second place to Genghis Khan is nothing to sneeze at.

Dr. Weatherford takes us carefully through an until now hidden part of history and does so with energy and gusto. Now, it's not uncommon for powerful women to be hidden from history by their successors. All manner of civilizations from the time of ancient Egypt have done so, but to peel back the censorship and try to bring forward the truth is an ongoing struggle. Something Dr. Weatherford should be and is commended for. To people who have even a passing interest in history, or reading about successful and powerful women or even people who just want to take a look at a good story that happens to be true, this is the book for you. Myself, I am always happy to find a new part of history I know nothing about and that it's a great story on top of that is an amazing bonus. The Secret History of Mongol Queens by Dr. Jack Weatherford gets an A.

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Next week, we will be welcoming a guest editor and a returning author.  One of the winners voted for by our Patrons, we will be reveiwing Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee.  If you would like to have a voice in a what books get reviewed consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for as little as a 1$ a month you can vote for what books will be reviewed in the upcoming month.

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The Dragon Republic R.F. Kuang

The Dragon Republic 

R.F. Kuang

Ms. Kuang was born in Guangzhou China on May 29th, 1996, but she grew up in Dallas Texas after her family moved there in 2000. She graduated from Greenhill school in 2013 and attended Georgetown University as part of the debate team. She was in China during a gap year working as a debate coach when she began writing the first book of this series: The Poppy War, which was published in 2018. This is the same year she graduated from Georgetown with a degree in Chinese History. She is currently pursuing her Masters of philosophy in Modern Chinese Studies at Cambridge University, where she is researching the wartime fiction of Northeast writers from 1931 to 1945 (Nice!). The Poppy War itself made quite a splash, being listed by Amazon, Goodreads, and The Guardian as one of the best books of 2018, additionally, I reviewed it and gave it an A. The novel also won the Crawford and Compton Crook Awards for Best First Novel and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. The internet also embraced this for the most part with Reddit dubbing Ms. Kuang Grimdark's Darkest Daughter and in this novel, Ms. Kuang shows no interest in pumping the breaks. Before I jump into this, there are going to be spoilers for The Poppy War here. I want to take this moment to really encourage you to read that book first and then come back and read this review.

The Dragon Republic picks some months after the end of The Poppy War. Our main character Rin has learned of her heritage as a Speerly. The Speerlies were an island people who worshiped the Phoenix, one of the sixty-four gods of the Nikan Pantheon (and others). Because of this, they could connect with the Phoenix to channel fire. Rin forged a connection with the Phoenix and became a Shaman: a person who has a direct connection with one of the gods and can use their powers in the physical world. This comes at a massive price, as Shamans must constantly duel their gods for control of their bodies and if they lose, often destruction and death are the results. Worse, eventually, every Shamen does lose and is overtaken by the god who is connected with them. The only solution for this historically was to entomb them alive in coffins of stone inside a mountain with properties that prevented the gods from breaking out. So if you thought your job had a crap retirement package, at least you have a retirement package (I mean, strictly speaking, this is a retirement package. She will be retired while being kept inside a package of sorts.). Rin isn't thinking about that however, as her list of immediate concerns is vast and overwhelming. First off is dealing with (or refusing to deal with) the fact that Rin used the powers of the Phoenix to trigger a massive volcanic eruption on the home island of her enemies the Mugen Federation and basically genocided their civilization (Is there a Hague? Someone build The Hague!). Second is the fact that her own Empress sold out Nikan to the Mugen and Rin refuses to die until the Empress is dead (Death to the monarchy!). This is gonna be a problem because the Empress is herself a Shaman and the Viper isn't an easy god to get rid of. The third is the fact that she and the rest of her Shaman empowered unit the Cike are outlawed with a massive bounty on their heads. Fourth her somewhat marginal alliance with a Pirate Queen (based on a historical figure like so many characters are in this book) isn't really paying off for her. Fifth, the Mugen Federation may be dead but there are still large armies of Mugen in the field and they are running rampant in the countryside, meaning the nation is an utter shambles. Lastly, it's hard for her to care about any of these problems or do anything to really solve them because she is so far gone in the throes of opium addiction that rational lucid thoughts are novel experiences (That seems like a really bad way to keep an angry god in check… someone get her Narcan and addiction counseling!). Now I'm not trying to knock Rin for that because look, you try surviving the invasion of your homeland by a vastly more advanced and better-organized foe, being experimented on like a lab rat and losing the only person you felt understood you and see where you end up (I’d probably end up snapping and becoming Stalin…).

Rin has few if any human ties left and a desire to keep the Phoenix from eating her soul. Opium at least lets her have a few hours of peaceful oblivion, so I see the temptation. Even if the addiction is slowly killing her. However, that option is going to be taken away from her. Her old classmate Nezha’s family not only survived the war but kept their power base intact. You see Nezha's father is the ruler of the Dragon Province and because the province avoided the invasion, their biggest problem is dealing with refugees (All on my own… with a million refugees… A cookie for the reference!). Looking out at the burning wreckage that once was the rest of their country, they've decided there's only one answer to this crisis. A good old fashioned civil war, but Vaisra, Nezha's father and the man in charge has a new vision for Nikan. He's going to create a Republic, even if everyone else has to die to get it (Oh this is gonna be bad…). Especially if the Empress has to die, which certainly gets Rin full-hearted support. In this book, we get a closer look at Nezha who served as an antagonist in the first half of The Poppy War. He was everything that Rin wasn't, wealthy, privileged, and prized by teachers and their peers. However, Nezha has his own secrets and his family has their issues boiling under the surface. Just how much they're going to impact the war and Rin is something you'll have to read the book to find out. Another burning issue is that the Dragon Province can't do it alone and the Empress isn't about to meekly shuffle off stage so Vaisra is turning to the other great foreign power beyond the sea.

The Hesperians are basically westerners, they're white, blue-eyed, blonde and tall. Even more technologically advanced than the Mugenese with firearms and airships and because they have a whole continent to themselves in the west, they're more numerous (No! Don’t do it! They’ll enslave your people in colonial oppression!). They worship a single male creator deity and consider the people of Nikan to be racially inferior to them. Ms. Kuang doesn't pull any punches here, as the Hesperians actions and history in Nikan basically mirrors the West in our world. In short, deeply exploitative and imperialist action covered by high minded rhetoric that falls flat in the face of the pervasive racism coloring everything they say and do. When I say the West here, yeah I am including the United States, as our own history in China is full of exploitative actions. While we never sought to make a colony out of China like we did the Philippines, the fact of the matter is we spent a lot of manpower, time, and money using Chinese labor for our economic benefit and trying to remake China in our own image. The desires of the Chinese be damned (And then we went and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act so they couldn’t even emigrate out of the clusterfuck we helped create. And the army slaughtered Chinese rail workers who demanded better conditions etc etc.). You can debate whether or not the individual westerners in China had benevolent intentions or not but you can't debate that people who are being told they're racially inferior and need to allow the erasing of their entire culture and identity aren't going to see that way. Especially when their nation is being carved up into special zones and they're being exploited for all they're worth; but back to the novel. Our main interaction with the Hesperians is through the Grey Company, a band of priests of the Hesperian god (Oh hell) who have come to decide whether or not Vaisra is socially advanced enough for aid and to study Rin like a lab animal (Thus proving that they are in no position whatsoever to determine who is or is not socially advanced.). The Hesperians are big believers in order (As judged by them, with all their ridiculous self-serving biases.{I’m not sure how you judge social advancement without falling prey to bias, it’s a slippery thing to judge}) and Shamanism is chaotic at the best of times. So the Hesperian’s response to this is to try and find ways to shut down Shamanism whenever possible (Never mind the fact that it is a concrete and certain manifestation of Gods who actually exist. {Ehhh, considering what the gods do here, I’m not sold at taking them at their word as to what they are, clearly they’re supernatural beings of great power but there’s more than one kind of supernatural being} Sure, but at that point defending monotheism, especially aggressively expansionist monotheism, becomes a bit difficult.). I can kind of see the Hesperian argument here, after all, remember that eventually, each Shaman is going to go mad and have to be entombed alive to prevent the god in their head from going on a rampage. On the flip side, Rin is a person and doesn't deserve to be poked and prodded against her will and told she's inferior in every way by a group of judgmental foreigners. Given her experiences with the Mugenese, you can understand why she's not happy about this (Yes).

Rin starts this book lost but still tied to the memories of the people she lost in the first book and unable to believe in herself. This makes her easy prey for Vaisra even though she doesn't believe in democracy. Again being fair, why would she? Rin has never seen or experienced Democracy, it's an alien system that turns everything she knows and has experienced upside down. Especially since having grown up in the poor rural south of Nikan, she knows just how close-minded, ignorant and selfish the average voter would be (See, democracy is great, but there’s a certain… I’ll call it social infrastructure that has to be built up for it. You can’t just impose it on a population by fiat without, ironically, having the political investment of the population first. If you do they won’t be invested in the norms that allow democracy to function.). She's however willing to kill and even die for Vaisra's ideals of a Republic because she can't accept the idea of operating under her own power and agency (See what I mean? Democracy requires exactly that and without it… well…). Rin has to wrestle with the idea that there's no one she can trust to tell her what to do and she needs to chart her own course and make her own decisions. Being Rin, she will, of course, have to learn this the hard way... The very hard way as she has to confront the Empress and worse while worrying about just how far will Vaisra go to protect her from the foreigners he insists he needs more than anything. This might seem like odd behavior for a woman who can summon forth the power of a god, but it makes perfect sense for someone reeling under the weight of the last big decision they made. After all, when you ask yourself what's the worst that can happen and the response is you could destroy entire civilizations in a fit of rage and grief... You tend to want to avoid making decisions. Rin doesn't have that luxury because - given her power - everyone will try to use her or get rid of her. So rapidly the choice is for Rin to become a disposable pawn in someone else's game or become a player in her own right. There's also the question of if Rin doesn't believe in the old imperial system or in the new Republic that is being promised, what does she believe in? What is she going to be fighting for beyond her own freedom, especially since she's gonna need people to sign on with her? Who are those people going to be, what is she going to offer them, is she even going to do this or decide to stay a pawn and avoid the crushing weight of responsibility?

In The Poppy War, we saw the creation of Rin's personality and power. I noted that in The Poppy War, Rin had plenty of choices. She could have chosen a different path than Shamanism, she could have tried different ways to succeed but she didn't. Because she wanted the power. However, as we see in the Dragon Republic having power is one thing, knowing what the hell you're doing with the power or why you use it is another. Rin learns what and why she's using her powers for and whether that's something she can get from someone else or if she can only generate that from within herself. It's far from the only conflict in the book. This is a book full of grand naval battles, magical duels, shocking reveals about the past and even an elemental duel in the sky above a massive naval battle for the fate of a nation. I like the fact that Ms. Kuang doesn't pull her punches here, the Empire is one massive mess in the aftermath of the Mugen invasion. On top of that, the end of the invasion doesn't end the factionalism or divisions within the Nikan nation but makes them worse by adding pressure to the fault lines. This isn't a cheerful book but it's one I had trouble putting down and it's one operating on several different levels. The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang gets an A, as it matches the skill and intelligence that The Poppy War showed and then some. As Ms. Kuang has promised book 3 either in 2020 or 2021. I'm looking forward to it. If only to see how much bigger a mess Rin makes.

If you enjoyed this review and others like it, I encourage you to consider joining us a https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads, where for a 1$ a month you can vote on upcoming reviews, and for 3 dollars see the full comments of your mad editor and my own valiant responses. Join us next week, as we end August on a Non-fiction note and check the Secret History of Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford!  Until then, Keep Reading!

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen
Black text is your reviewer, Garvin Anders. 

She Who Hears All Whispers By DaVaun Sanders

She Who Hears All Whispers

By DaVaun Sanders

It's been a while since I've reviewed anything by Mr. Sanders. In this review series grand tradition of full disclosure, I know Mr. Sanders. We've worked together, being part of the same training class in 2014 where he was dubbed Mr. Radio for having the best voice in the class (Don’t worry, I’ll keep Frigid honest). Since then, we've both transferred to different departments but I still consider him a friend and count myself lucky to do so. That said, as my editor will tell you, friendship will not stop me from giving an honest opinion and I will attempt to do so here.

Mr. Sanders has lived in Phoenix since 2002 after earning a degree from Washington University in St. Louis. He started writing novels after the Great Recession forced him to step away from architecture in 2008. He has since then written three novels, a variety of short stories and scripts, and found time to start a family with his wife. He is currently the proud father of twins. He is also an acquiring editor of Fiyah, an online magazine for Black writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror (Good for him!). All while working a day job. My current theory is that Mr. Sanders doesn't sleep for more than 2 hours a day but I could be wrong (No no. You’re probably right.).

She Who Hears All Whispers take place in the disease-ravaged Revealed Lands within a society that embraces the very thing ravaging it (I will not talk about the lumpenproletariat, I swear). The Phage as it is called is a collection of highly infectious diseases with a variety of symptoms, none of them good. At best it causes shortness of breath and saps strength from your limbs. At worst it causes crippling pain while encasing your body in orange growths some of which are flesh-eating (Nice). To be honest there seem to be at least dozens of the Phage, all with different effects on the human body. It can be airborne, spread through fluids, blood, all manner of methods of infection. Society has embraced the Phage due to the fact that some people can use the Phage to fuel what I'm gonna call magic (Well then. That… alright. I’ve seen people sacrifice more for arcane power.). Powerful Phagelords can fly, destroy entire city districts with phagefire and listen to conversations from vast distances. The Phagelords use people called kaydka (fun fact, this is a Somali word which means reservoir as near as I can puzzle it out) to carry reserves of the phage for them that they can draw power out of. The Kaydka themselves can also take their own Kaydka, making themselves into a center-point of an entire system of disease-driven strength (... Holy Fuck it’s a magical ponzi scheme). This has evolved into a system of vassalage and oaths all focused on infecting people and using that infection to feed magical power to the people at the top. This is sealed by a blood ritual called Qaadasho (another Somali word meaning something like to take or captivate) which increases the amount of phage you can pull from a person and the distance you can pull from using an exchange of blood and flesh to link the two people. It's gory but feels very real as a ritual. (Can you imagine the thought process by which all of this is discovered? “Hey Steve, I bet if we become blood buddies I can use your disease for power” {well if you’re physically close to them you can pull power without needing a connection, the ritual just makes it easier and work over longer distances, plus allow you build that pyramid!})Worse it seems that the more destructive the strain to human well-being, the more power you can draw from it. So the elites at the top also experiment with the phage to create more powerful varieties to infect their people with... So they can draw from it for more magical power in their struggles against each other (No, this… this isn’t an allegory at all! Nope!). They do have to be careful, however, it is possible to draw all the phage out of a Kaydha, thus rendering them immune to the phage for the rest of their lives. These people are called damiyann (I have to admit here that my research broke down here can I couldn't find any sources for the word) and many yearn for such a gift and many who fear it.

The city of Mataano Qahndo is one of the great cities of the Revealed Lands, ruled by She Who Hears All Whispers, who also called the Matriarch or the Boundless Mother. She is served by her lieutenant phagelords, called The Matriarch's Daughters. The Daughters provide much of the administration and justice in the city, carrying out their overlord's will. They are all also magic users with Kaydha of their own to draw from magnifying their powers. So while even the Matriarch can't be everywhere at once, she doesn't have to. The Daughters can be in plenty of places. The city sits next to the Bay, widely believed to be the source of the phage. The Matriarch sends children out to dive into the bay and drag up animals and plants that might have new strains of phage to increase her own powers. This gives her an edge over rivals and allows The Matriarch to rule as an unquestioned goddess dispensing reward and punishment, cure and infection as she sees fit among her people. As a result, there is a constant stream of rural people, often called riftlanders come looking for a better life for even a Kaydha can find more luxury and comfort than some of the villages out there (Given these diseases… Fuck. Okay, this is thoroughly dystopian.).

One of those riftlanders is a woman named Suraldisha but she's not coming to Mataano Qahndo in search of a new life. She's coming to end a life but not just any life. Suraldisha is aiming at the most dangerous of targets. She's on a mission to kill the Matriarch herself (Good for her! You go girl! Slay [the] Queen! Slaaaay!). She's bringing a dress, a fish gutting knife, a bag filled with small bones and a secret that might be enough to set the whole city on fire. That fire would be metaphorical and literal by the way. She'll have to get inside the city, avoid an active guard force, survive phage pits and more just for a shot at her goal. However, she is possessed of a monomaniacal focus on her goal and just enough mental agility to reach out to others that could be of help to her. There's also the small fact that she doesn't have much if anything left to lose so she is willing to give up anything to achieve her goal because that's the only thing of value left to her. Interestingly enough though, the question isn't just can she take down the Matriarch, but is that enough? Because while the Matriarch is a tyrant and quite likely deserves death (there is no likely about that), in the end, she's only an element of a giant system of misery and oppression that runs on the devastation and sickness of its people. Kill one phagelord and another simply rises in her place. Because it's the nature of complex systems to make everyone expendable, including the elites. Destroy one member of the elite class and the system will swiftly fill that void with another one. The new boss may be worse or better than the old boss but the dictates of the system will limit their behavior. If for no other reason that if they don't tailor their behavior to the system they find themselves in, they'll be replaced by someone who does. Suraldisha may have to ask herself if simply murdering arguably the most powerful woman in the world is enough to achieve what she wants... Or if she needs to set her sights even higher than that.

As I've noted in Seedbearing Prince, the book series by Mr. Sanders that I reviewed in the past, there are few people out there who can world build with the kind of vivid imagination that Mr. Sanders brings to the table and do so as thoroughly and believably (From what I’m seeing...yeah.). She Who Hears All Whispers is a short book but Mr. Sanders uses his space with efficiency and gusto, keeping tightly focused on the story but giving us enough detail and information to realize that there's an entire world out there beyond Sauraldisha's experience. The story also benefits from well-written action and magical duels and Sauraldisha’s own intense character. She is a very driven and focused woman but not an idiot, despite making mistakes throughout the story. I will note that here it is a good thing to have your protagonist make mistakes and have to pay a price for those mistakes and Mr. Sanders doesn't hesitate on that front. Sauraldisha does, however, dominate the story completely and doesn't leave much room for the small supporting cast. So we're not given much delving into their motivations or thoughts. Given that some of them were more educated about the world around them and interesting characters in their own right, that's unfortunate in my opinion. Some transitions in the story aren't as smooth as I would like. I understand what Mr. Sanders was trying to do with his final reveal and why it was done but I'll honest and say I just don't enjoy that style. I can't go into that without spoilers but I'll just say it wasn't for that it would have gotten a higher grade. Still, She Who Hears All Whispers is fantastic at what it does and how it does it. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in taking a look at a strange new world and deeply and vividly human characters within it. She Who Hears All Whispers by DaVaun Sanders gets a B and a recommendation from me, it is available both in print and kindle.

For those of you who would like to take a direct look at Fiyah Magazine, please take a look.  Let them know I sent ya.  https://www.fiyahlitmag.com/

Now, this review wasn't chosen by our patrons but as part of my goal of looking at stories review by independent authors.  That said, if you like the idea of someone grabbing stories by independent writers and giving them a review, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can vote on what books get reviewed for as little as a 1$ a month.  Next week I return with the Dragon Republic by Ms. R.F. Kuang, join us to take look at the sequel to the Poppy War!  Until then, as always Keep Reading! 

The Dread Wyrm By Miles Cameron

The Dread Wyrm 

By Miles Cameron

The Dread Wyrm is book III in the Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron. We've already reviewed The Red Knight and The Fell Sword, books I and II in the series. Before I start I want to slap up a spoiler warning, at this point there is no way for me to review the book and discuss the characters without involving some at least minor spoilers. So if you're interested in reading these books without me ruining the surprises... Go read them and come back. Seriously this review will still be here. So now that y'all have been properly warned, let's just jump right into it.

The book takes place entirely in the land of Alba (aka Not England), the kingdom of men that lays right up against the bounds of the Wild, the wilderness where many non-human races dwell in strange and alien civilizations. Things are not going well in the land of Alba. Our protagonist and increasingly grumpy hero Gabriel, aka the Red Knight, is returning home from the ancient Morean Empire a conquering hero and newly made Duke of Thrace and is expecting to take part in a Tournament where he can cement his reputation as a great warrior and general once and for all. When in actual fact, he's walking right into a civil war on the brink of exploding, just when the no-longer human-sorcerer Thorn has gathered new armies of creatures from the Wild to hurl into Northern Alba. Worse Thorn has ceased to be a free agent and is now nearly enslaved by something even more dangerous and wicked then he is. On top of all this, Gabriel has to deal with the fact that his mother is coming to visit him and is towing along the lady of his affection, the Nun Amicia (Wow mom. Wow.{She’s an abusive, controlling sorceress, what are you expecting here!?!}). Amicia is still keeping to her vows and has only grown more magically powerful in the meantime but let's focus on Alba first.

Now in the last two books, the nation of Alba increasingly found itself hosting an ever-growing army of foreigners from Galle (aka Not France). That's not a metaphor, this is a literal army of foreign Knights and their soldiers who have moved into the capital, started taking positions in the government and are quietly trying to push the natives out of the government (And the Kingdom… tolerates this? In the actual middle ages there would be a not-so-civil war already. Nobles would be hacked apart during peace talks on bridges etc.{The common folk burn down the archbishop's palace and the city militia has a street fight with the Galle’s infantry, I wouldn’t say they’re tolerating this.}). To the point that the arch-bishop is now a Galle and is preaching against the native orders of Knight-Wizards who hold the Wild at bay through combat ability and magic use (Now that just seems counter-productive.). The Galles are led by Jean De Vrailly, who believes himself the greatest knight alive and is almost as good as he thinks he is (Oh god. A narcissist. Though not uncommon for medieval nobles. Most of them were arrogant man-children So points for authenticity!). I would like to take a moment to really take a look at our antagonist because I think he's a great one. I loathe De Vrailly. I mean I really hate the guy but I love the amount of work and complexity that has been poured into him. Because De Vrailly isn't some schemer or underhanded baby-eating monster, he's a person who honestly believes what he is doing is ordained by God and is the best for everyone (God save us from people who believe themselves his annointed.). Now, that’s easy to say but where Mr. Cameron shines is in getting you to believe that De Vrailly actually believes this. To the point where he thwarts his own allies plots if they don't match what he believes is honorable. That's not to say he's a good person, what he believes is honorable is incredibly self-serving but you realize that De Vrailly lacks the self-awareness to recognize this. So when De Vrailly demands that there be a trail of combat to prove the guilt of Queen Desiderata even when his own cousins and allies are practically begging him to just kill her and be done with it; you realize this is a guy who sincerely believes that all the terrible things he's done are right and justified and that God is smiling down on him. I can almost see De Vrailly as a victim of his own culture, but his fellow Galles and members of his family don't feel so bound by the code of honor that De Vrailly preaches. Even the other honorable Galles think that De Vrailly is incredibly self-serving in his beliefs but is willing to take on the burdens those beliefs demand down to the last jot and title. To the point that when berated by a twelve year old for taking hostages dishonorably he gets down on bended knee apologizes and admits fault. While being willing to massacre defenseless peasants for daring to demand he obeys Alban law, and burn a woman alive. Not to mention his pure rage at having the common people of Alba resist his authority and his troops and even dare to fight back against their abuses (There we go. There’s that civil war!). I find De Vrailly morally hideous but a wonderfully realized character and the type of person that is unfortunately found everywhere and in every time.

Vrailly has come to Alba because he has visions of an angel promising him that he will be the next King of Alba (Delusions of grandeur, check!), but to do that he's gotta get rid of the Queen Desiderata because she's pregnant. So Vrailly and his allies have accused her of adultery and trying to plant a bastard from one of her lovers on the throne. This is easier to sell than you would think because the King believes himself sterile to a curse that... Well, he earned that curse by raping his sister, Gabriel's Mother (Woah! And we’ve gone Full Game of Thrones. Well at least there is a curse for that…). In fact... Gabriel is the result of that. Now Desiderata was unaware of this and honestly believed her husband to be good, if not a very wise man (Honestly this is really common. “Oh, my husband would never do that, I know him!”. We see it all the time. Even when it's their nine-year-old saying he touches her.). This is actually very believable to me, because way back in the first book, The Red Knight, my first real impression was that the King was generally an okay guy who just wasn't very wise or smart. As the plot unfolds though more and more of the King's character flaws become apparent and you generally find yourself swinging between contempt and pity. The pity comes from just how badly he's being used by the Galles because since De Vrailly can't be everywhere, they're willing to drug him into suggestibility and encourage his self-destructive habits (How honorable of them). What makes this a civil war is the number of Albans willing to side with the Galles, for personal gain or because they're afraid not to or because they think the Galles can do a better job holding back the wild.

Our mercenary heroes cannot afford to just focus on human problems though. Thorn has finished rebuilding himself and his army but finds himself in thrall to a greater darkness with a greater agenda. One that may lead to the destruction of the whole of human civilization as a prelude to the real campaign of destruction. Thorn is coming and he intends to burn the entire north of Alba into ashes and to avoid making the same mistakes he did last time, he's found himself an ally. That being Hartmut Li Orgellus, who was introduced in one of the many, many plotlines of the second book. Hartmut is also a Galle, sent into the wild north of Alba by their king to create a Gallish presence there and destroy the northern frontier of Alba and thus any resistance to De Vrailly. Hartmut is in a lot of ways De Vrailly if you stripped away most of his good traits. He's ruthless to the point of condoning slaughter and depravity, overriding his own officers when they object. He refuses to even speak to commoners, issuing orders as if he was speaking into the thin air. On top of that, he's a hypocrite as he insists that everyone who fights him should follow the rules of chivalry while ignoring any part of chivalry or any other ruleset that would restrain him in any way whatsoever. So, of course, he's willing to ally with the genocidal Thorn and his crew of people eating creatures and monsters. Best of all, their first target is Gabriel's family home where his entire family lives. Well minus one brother who joined the mercenary company.

Luckily our hero isn't without his own allies. As always he has his own crack band of knights, men at arms and archers capable of fighting and killing humans or nonhumans with equal skill and fierceness. The armies of the Morean Empire are marching, due to Gabriel saving the Emperor's life in the last book. In the Wild, there are forces opposing Thorn and they have rallied around the Fairy Knight, a mythical immortal whose magical abilities and fighting skills aren't to be dismissed. Within Alba the forces of the north organize themselves and in the south, the common people stubbornly resist the demands of the Galles, even if it puts the capital city at risk. Gabriel is going to have to convince every one of these groups to put aside their feuds and work together long enough to avoid extinction. Thankfully no one is an idiot about it, but there is still some resistance to the idea of hanging together to avoid hanging separately. If anything I would say that's the overriding theme of this book. If we don't learn to hang together and deal with our differences constructively, then we're all going to be hanged separately and leave nothing behind but bones to be gnawed on. This is further supported by another theme: how easily the law can be subverted if we don’t all hang together and insist on its enforcement. The Galles can ride roughshod over a lot of people because people kept refusing to work together and force the Galles to respect the law. Often they went to the King to do it, only to find he was either uninterested or unable to enforce the law fully. Mr. Cameron makes a point in this story that the Rule of Law great when all of us are working together; but if enough people simply ignore the law or refuse to enforce it, then it simply stops working. Which is food for thought (I can think of a few… poignant examples). Still, Gabriel is a powerful sorcerer in his own right and one of the great knights of the age, so if anyone is going to do it, it's him. After all, while Gabriel thinks he's the smartest and most capable man in any room he walks into, he’s more often right than wrong and even when he's wrong, he's smart enough to realize it and recover from it. But Gabriel is finding himself with a long list of work to do (I can imagine his daily agenda…). He'll have to rescue the Queen and protect her child; put a fast and decisive end to the civil war before it starts and cripples them against the armies of Thorn, and then gather everyone together to effectively resist Thorn and his new master. He's also got to do this fast because everything is already kicking off. Even as he arrives the plots are spinning, the armies are marching and he is running out of time.

I definitely enjoyed this book more than the last one Fell Sword. The plot threads are all coming together, so I can see how the plots are related, there are fewer story-lines to juggle and the action is well written and paced. There's a lot of action here too, as there are about a dozen battles as the various forces struggle to unite for the decisive battle of the war. I will make a note though that no one is safe in this book. There are a number of viewpoint characters that have been with us the entire series who die and often their death is in a single line. Which is brutally realistic but might be a turn off for some readers. There are some new characters introduced but mercifully few since the cast of these novels is already so large. The world-building is slightly expanded but for the most part with the book taking place in Alba we just learn more about the places we've already been which I like. Honestly, I think this is the best book of the series so far. Much is revealed, many stories are tied together and we get the pay off that was denied to us in Fell Sword, in some ways it feels like Fell Sword was just build-up for this book. While the ending is open enough to continue the story (which is good because there are two books left) it is conclusive enough that the book is a full story all on its own. I'm giving The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron an A. It took a while to get here but it was worth the trip.

This week's review was chosen by our patrons. If you would like a vote on upcoming reviews for as little as a dollar a month, consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads the poll for September is still open! Next week, we'll be reviewing a novella entitled She Who Hears All Whispers by DaVaun Sanders. An author whose work was reviewed in the dim early days of this review series (go ahead and look up the Seedbearing Prince for an example of Mr. Sanders work though!). Thank you and as always Keep Reading.

Conan Omnibus I: Birth of the Legend By Kurt Busiek

Conan Omnibus I: Birth of the Legend

By Kurt Busiek 

Odds are pretty good that you don't need me to tell you who the character Conan the Barbarian is. Created in 1932 by Robert Howard, Conan and his imitators have stalked through fantasy for 87 years now. If we're going to be honest Conan and the idea of the barbarian adventurer who climbs his way up civilization may be both the most American fantasy character out there and our most enduring donation to the fantasy genre as a whole. Mr. Howard, who sadly took his own life before hitting his prime, wrote twenty one full Conan stories and numerous fragments before his death. Many of those fragments were taken up by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter who reworked and in some cases rewrote some of Mr. Howard's work. Since then Conan has appeared in movies, live-action television, cartoons and video games with regularity. One medium he has thoroughly conquered however is comic books, with a Conan comic book of some type being in print nearly continuously from 1970. Marvel's Conan the Barbarian ran for about twenty three years, ending in 1993, with the Savage Sword of Conan running from 1974 to 1995. In 2003, Dark Horse Comics began their own run, entitled simply Conan by Kurt Busiek.

Kurt Busiek was born September 16, 1960, in Boston, Massachusetts. He did not grow up reading comics, as his parents disapproved of them (Dear god). Despite this when he opened his first comic at the age of 14 (Daredevil 120 in 1975) he was hooked by the history and connections to an entire fictional universe. He started making comics in high school and college and had several letters published in the reader's comments section of various comics. In fact, he's credited for the theory that the Phoenix was a separate entity and had merely replaced X Men character, Jean Grey, paving the way for her first return from death (And so it begins… See kids! Your supremely dorky fan-theory can influence the development of entire genres!). Busiek started working for DC and Marvel in the 1980s and over time would also work on his own ideas, such as the award-winning Astro City or Autumnlands (the first volume of which we did review). He was the writer for the first year or so of the Conan Series. So let's finally start talking about the book.

The Dark Horse series decides to tackle Conan from the very beginning, the small hill village in the dim, misty land of Cimmeria. Telling us the tale of Conan's birth on a battlefield (Woah, um… there’s a mental image), his childhood, and growth to a young man. The series also confronts the problem of tying the stories of Conan into a single linear narrative that is coherent as well as entertaining. Mr. Howard usually used the medium of short stories for Conan and he did not write in linear order. Adventurers leaped about freely from one period of Conan's life to another. Mr. Howard would claim to friends later that was how the stories came to him as if Conan was sitting with him and telling him stories from his life to pass the time or entertain him. Mr. Busiek tackles this by weaving in and expanding Conan lore from Mr. Howard's letters and using a narrative framing device. In this case, the series is framed as a vizier (possibly a dark sorcerer) of what could be the Ottoman Empire reading recovered scrolls of the Nemedian Chronicle (a fictional in-universe account of Conan's world) to a prince who finds himself fascinated by a long-vanished king. With the vizier/sorcerer complaining that there's no way that this chronicle could be accurate and has to be an overblown narration, Mr. Busiek gives himself some operating room for his own inventions and expanding on Conan's family. While Conan’s family doesn’t appear in Howard’s story, he did discuss it in some letters to fans. For example, stating that Conan’s Father was a blacksmith and that his Grandfather had spent a lot of time outside of Cimmeria. This meant that Mr. Busiek could bring Conan’s Grandfather to the fore as the man that Conan was closest to, able to calm and educate Conan about the world by weaving tales of the world to the south. A world of silks, gems, good food and drink, and beautiful women.

The young Conan we get here is a moody young man, often finding himself somewhat separated from the fellow children of the village. Shaped by the dangerous and grim land that he was born into, where his clan has to fight to wrest out a living from the hard hills, Conan grows quickly. A major issue we're shown is just how talented Conan is at fighting and killing, he is frankly more dangerous than most modern adults will ever be. This is a problem because being a child he hasn't learned the restraint needed to avoid tragedy. On the flip side, his society doesn't work that hard and if we're going to be honest, can't afford to work that hard to keep Conan restrained. Mr. Busiek takes pains to show us that life in Cimmeria is hard, rough and dangerous. Honestly, I appreciate the savagery, as there is a tendency to romanticize pre-industrial lifestyles and forget that it often means putting yourself completely and utterly at the mercy of forces such as winter or blight (The myth of the Noble Savage is utter bullshit that persists to this day and gets even more stupid than it was in its inception. You see it every time someone talks about how we need to go ‘back to nature’ in order to be healthy. I’m a biologist, I love nature, but nature is scary and being at its whims is not our friend.). Add in that the hills of Cimmeria teem with predators who view the humans sharing their habitat as a potential meal and that Conan's clan must often face raids and attacks from their neighbors. This is not restricted to other Cimmerians, although they fight amongst themselves fairly often; but other nearby ethnic groups like the blonde, blue-eyed Asgardians and their red-headed rivals the Vanir. Faced with so many dangers without, they need the strength and rage of men like Conan to stave off extinction and if that means putting up with their growing pains so be it (He may have killed the guy in the next hut in a drunken rage, but he killed ten Asgardians last week so it’s a net positive! {And a pack of wolves and a panther}). Although this means that Conan ended up crippling one of his clan-mates as a child (the boy attacked him and was trying to bash his skull with rocks to be fair) and killed another through accident and while he was punished, he got off lighter than others would. Which explains some of his later behavior honestly. This also shows us the fact that Conan doesn't realize just how strong he is yet and that he's not fully comfortable with himself. Of course, at this point, he's fourteen (Show me one of those who is comfortable with himself). I will note that Conan even at this young age is able to realize when he's wronged someone and attempt to make amends, accepting the guilt for the man he killed and submitting to the victim's family for whatever decision they come to. While Conan's morality isn't our 21st-century American morality, it is recognizable as a form of morality and his struggles to understand and act in what he views as moral and honorable behavior add dimension to his growing pains.

In this volume is also where Conan takes part in the sack of Venarium, something that was discussed in one of the stories that Mr. Howard wrote but never really got into. Venarium was a frontier town of the great nation of Aquilonia. That frontier is the southern lands of Cimmeria, rich in iron, tin, and other ores (Tin? Daaaamn. Getting into the head of an ancient person, a good deposit of tin will make you rich as fuck, what with tin’s scarcity relative to copper. Bronze is important yo! Even in the iron age). The Aquilonias are socially more advanced than the Cimmerians and as such see themselves as having a right to take land from the Cimmerians (Do they have a flag? </Eddie Izzard>). The Cimmerians don't agree with this and are prepared to make murdering Aquilonians the new national hobby as a response. Here Mr. Busiek doesn't shy away from the grim realities of such a war, as both sides commit atrocities without any restraint. Cimmerians raid and brutalize any Aquilonians they can get a hold of, while the Aquilonians in their turn ruthlessly hunt down and torture and kill any Cimmerians they find in turn. In the end, Venarium falls and the Cimmerians murder all the women and children they find in the fortress. Including a young Aquilonian that Conan had come to know and love, added with the loss of friends and family this brings the cost of such wars fully to the fore and makes for a powerful reason as to why Conan would leave his home. There were simply too many memories pushing him out and nothing left to keep him.

Mr. Busiek covers Conan's first journeys beyond those misty hills, heading north into Asgardian and Vanir lands, seeking the nearly mythical Hyperborea. From this point, he's able to work in new adaptations of Mr. Howard's work as well as original works of his own and do a good job of welding them together into a coherent whole. In this case, we see the Frost Giant's daughter, told as an episode in this journey to the far north. We also get Conan's first experience with the civilizations south of his home as he moves on to see the truth of his Grandfather's tales. It's here that we see more of Mr. Busiek’s original work with the inclusion of an immortal witch the Bone Woman as a background character and her servant the swords-woman Janissa. Janissa is an interesting character. At first, I thought she was just a Red Sonja stand-in but Mr. Busiek was smart enough to make her a very different personality and character. Janissa is more bitter and biting then most modern takes on Sonja and she is bound to service of the Bonewoman, who in exchange magically enhanced her strength and speed. She also fights much differently then Red Sonja using a pair of blades modeled on a Khopesh - a curved blade believed to be invented in bronze age Egypt. This lets her stand apart from Red Sonja, Belit and the other various warrior women of the Hyborian Age. That said there are parts of her origin that I found kind of distasteful. As part of Janissa's training was to be tossed in a pit, where she would be attacked by a growing number of demons. If they defeated her, which they often did, they would beat and then rape her. If she killed them all, she would be let out of the pit, well more like she wasn't allowed out of the pit until she won. Frankly, this just kinda feels unnecessary. I'm not saying you can't use rape as part of a character's backstory or never have it show up in your stories but there's a line between using it as a plot element and using it for shock value. There's a whole discussion to be had here, but I'll simply put it like this: could you get the same value from the story if you cut out the sexual assault? If the answer is yes, then you should most likely do so. This is really the only black mark I can lay on the Omnibus but it's not a light one, honestly though given how Mr. Busiek approaches other heavy topics, I view this as a well-intentioned attempt to call back to the older origins of Red Sonja, but in all honesty I'm no fan of that origin either.

Despite that, overall I enjoyed the comic and found it a compelling way to tell Conan's story and introduce people to his world. Mr. Busiek gives us a moody and savage young man struggling to come to terms with the world and himself but eager to force the world to come to terms with him whether the world likes it or not. He also gives us a world haunted by dark, hungry, ancient powers that also have civilizations that strive towards new heights and is full of people who feel real and alive. Despite some missteps, Mr. Busiek overall does an admirable job here. I'm giving the Conan Omnibus a B+ and I'm hopeful of seeing future volumes hit the A rank before too long.

Next week, we return to Miles Cameron Traitor Son Cycle with The Dread Wyrm, which was also voted for by our paterons.  If you would like to vote for books to be reviewed consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads whereas little as a 1$ a month gives you a vote on what books come up for reviews. Until then, Keep Reading!

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.