A disappointing use of interesting ideas that never manages to fully engage with the framework it lives within.
Some books' endings, I can look at them and go... well, this isn't for me, I don't like how this went, but I can see how someone might. I often find this with ambiguous endings. Sometimes they hit just right, sometimes they pass me by, but I get that they're someone's jam. You can probably see where I'm going with this. I hated the ending of Asunder. I left a few days between reading it and writing this review, letting my thoughts percolate, and the thing I keep circling back to is how everything is tied up at/after the big finale, and how deeply, frustratingly unsatisfying I found it. I struggle to see, in a way that is not often the case, how this would work for anyone. I'm clearly wrong and it does, because I've seen praise for it! So much praise! But it is beyond the scope of my comprehension. Which is a shame, because it all comes down to something that's worked through the entire narrative, something that I think has promise, that is clearly thoughtful, clearly deliberate, something that left me slightly wrong-footed (in a good way, mostly), and trying to figure out exactly where the story was going, and what is was going to be.
It all comes down to expectations.
I could talk about the worldbuilding of Asunder, I can talk about the characterisation (both fine, trending good), I can talk about the plotting (fine) and the pacing (mixed). But that's not what's interesting about it, as a novel, so I'm not going to bother. Instead, I'm going to focus on the thing about it that I think makes it stand out* - exactly how it interacts with genre conventions, and the expectations that the weight of the existing corpus impose on/instill in readers. More than anything, while I was reading it, I was constantly uncertain about exactly what sort of a thing Asunder wanted to be, a quality in a book that has the potential to deliver an absolutely stellar story... or a distinctly mediocre one. Take The City and the City by China Miéville, as an example. The way that it plays with your understanding of whether or not there are genre elements in play is key to the impact of the finale. Not everything has to do it to quite that extreme, but it's a great example of how subverting the expectations of the reader can deliver something wonderful. There's also The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo, for something more recent, or The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. Books that play with exactly what kind of a story you're dealing with can deliver magic. Or... they can feel muddled, uncertain, unfinished things. I still haven't quite decided which one Asunder is, for me.
If you look at the fantasy genre, especially mainstream, tradpubbed novels, right now, and doubly especially ones with a female protagonist, it is very often the default for those stories to contain an element of romance. Not necessarily to quite the extent of romantasy, but a strong thread lying alongside the main plot, supporting the character development and helping to deliver a satisfying ending on an emotional level. It's another kind of payoff, another way for your hero(ine) to get their just deserts (or righteous comeuppance, or tragic crescendo, depending on how the romance plays out). So when Asunder gave me a female character who ends up stuck with a newly-met male character inside her head, having to become comfortable with that incredible, infuriating intimacy after a hard and lonely life... well, the cues were cue-ing, right? And then he turns out to be nice! But he has some mysteries... ohoho I know where this goes, yes? Except... it doesn't. It hints. It lets you wonder. But it also has the cute scholar she meets at the university flirt with her, help her more than she expects and ask her out to dinner. Is that just friendship or the start of something more? And then you meet someone from her childhood, and there are hints that maybe what they felt for one another was more than just friendship... or are there? No, really, are there?? Or am I just imagining it because I am so thoroughly, constantly used to seeing romance in my fantasy novels that I'm trying to figure out where it's going to come from, ending up jumping at ghosts?
That was my experience, for a lot of reading Asunder. Such hints as there are, for a good chunk of the book, are so gentle, so subtle, that I found myself second-guessing them and myself. And it wasn't just the romance. The story also sets up what seem like familiar structures, only to never quite grasp them and move onto something new instead, leaving behind a trail of brief encounters across the scenery of this imagined world. There are moments where the story veers political, and then drifts away again, just as it meanders towards adventures and heists and crime and magic and gods and empire, never quite committing itself to fully delving into any one box it opens. But nor do these disparate elements ever feel like their variety coheres into something greater than the sum of its parts. If anything, it reminds me of the structure of a myth, a fairytale, where events just sort of... keep eventing, until an unseen clock runs out and it's time to have a resolution now. A story unbeholden to the logic of the meta. I don't necessarily hate that. But I never felt like I could settle down into it either, I could never get comfortable enough to immerse myself fully into what it was giving me.
And then on top of all that there's a whole other bunch of expectations that don't quite have anything to do with the book itself. I came into this having seen a number of people talking positively, enthusiastically, nay even ecstatically about it. So, naturally, my expectations were set pretty high; I was waiting to be stunned. I never quite was.
It's like reading books for awards. The frame of reference you bring with you to the reading experience necessarily colours it. No one can read a text free from context. You can do your best, if it's something you want to strive for - I tend not to read proper, deep reviews of books I know I'm going to have to read with purpose (either for a review or for awards judging/voting), for example - but you can never truly free yourself from it. After all, something has to be the prompt to read the book, right?
And, just like many times where I've read an award shortlist, Asunder suffers because I'm holding it up to this unfairly high standard. It's not, for me, a stellar book. It's not world shattering, not emotionally devastating. It's fine. It's... probably a little unmemorable, but so are the vast majority of stories. It treads familiar ground in familiar ways, changing some of the aesthetics, the vibes, but ultimately delivering the sort of standard fare that the genre thrives on, because not everything can (or should) be a work of deathless prose that lasts through the ages. But much like the expectations the story framework set up around romance, around plot points, I am incapable of seeing past the expectations set by the critical response I've seen before reading - and it simply does not live up to either set.
For the genre ones, there are two reasons I could see for this - is it playing with my expectations and it's simply not working for me, or is it failing to craft them at all, and what I'm seeing is the baggage I have brought with me, unasked? I'm unsure to what extent it is which of those. If it is the latter, I do think this is something of a failure by the book - it's leaving something on the table that could be put to use crafting the story into something tighter and more thoughtful.
In any case, we now come back to the crux of the problem with how those expectations are crafted and managed throughout the story - the ending. For every genre, there are some assumptions about what the story's end might look like, whether as rigid as the happily ever after of true romance, or the less formalised but no less present mores about a satisfying wrap up of threads that tends to accompany traditional SFF. Asunder... neither meets them, nor convincingly flouts them in a way that feels deliberate. It instead does the secret third thing (confuses me). By the time we get towards the conclusion of the story, some of the less clear aspects of plot and interpersonal dynamics have been spelled out, and we begin to see the shape of what the ending might look like. There's a glimmer of some possible goal that maybe the characters will achieve, or maybe fail to achieve, but there could be pathos either way in that. And then the story drops into a big dramatic scene, one that feels perhaps longer than it needed to be, that is all action and tension and then... well. It's hard to discuss this without explicit spoilers, but essentially, neither the good nor the bad ending comes to pass, and instead various threads are simply dropped. We're robbed of the catharsis in either direction. There's a hint that resolution could come later, maybe? Sort of? There's a solid impression that things will continue in the next book. But what felt like a genuine framework had finally been set up, and then is entirely ignored in how things shake out. It was the worst sort of cliffhanger ending, rejecting any sense that the first book in a series needs to also function as a contained narrative, as well as a part of the wider whole.
Perhaps Hall has been playing with the reader's expectations all along, and this final subversion of the norms of story resolution is just the pièce de resistance? It's perfectly possible, I suppose. But if so, it entirely fails for me. Without some sort of emotional conclusion, even one that is less impactful and necessarily subordinate to the longer term one that will come in the sequels, the story feels unnaturally abbreviated. I see no benefit to the end state of things that has been brought by this subversion, and the cost is of any satisfaction with how events played out, just after I finally dared to hope there might be something to cling onto.
Especially when this is sat alongside what is quite a quotidien story in how it crafts a fantasy narrative, I find it hard to think it's just a clever decision that has passed me by. In something more nakedly ambitious in its approach, I might buy it, but it feels like "right at the end" is not the correct moment to unleash as-yet-untapped seams of narrative anarchy. Certainly, by doing it that way, the story seems doomed to please no one - those who want full weird, full subversion, don't get it for the vast majority of the book and so remain mostly unsatisfied, and those who wants the more traditional structure feel cheated of their conclusion. Who is this designed for, exactly? Who actually likes cliffhangers?
However much I talk like I know what I'm on about here, obviously I can't account for authorial intent. I'm not psychic. And also, frankly, it doesn't really matter (up to a point, at least). But the perception of intentionality matters a great deal - whether or not I enjoy a book is going to change enormously depending on whether it feels composed and deliberate vs just... a bunch of things happening with no particular coherent drive. It such a hard thing to quantify because it's something that so often comes down to "feeling". And whatever Hall was actually wanting and doing here, the feeling I get from it is a muddled one, of a story that hasn't quite been pinned down into a coherent place, nor with a clear signal of how the readers will interact with it. When you remove that, when you remove that clear sense of purpose, what remains is a bunch of perfectly fine ideas, characters and events, but without the soul that makes them into something substantial. It's a shame, because those ideas, characters and events are perfectly fine, but this is too big of a problem for any of them to overcome. They need tying together, and it simply does not feel like they have been.
*Being brutally honest, in those categories combined, I think this a perfectly fine but unexceptional book, the likes of which I have read a number of times before and will again. If you like trad fantasy but updated to more modern mores - great, have at it. If there's a downside to it, it's that the events of the story feel a little bit "a thing then a thing then another thing" rather than something with a definitive structure and drive. There's your tl;dr review.
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The Math
Highlights: interesting world, pleasant characters, cool pseudo-warlocky magical powers
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10
Reference: Kerstin Hall, Asunder [Tordotcom, 2024].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
