And now as always welcome to the final post, the Playlist. Thank you all for your patience with the time this series took to publish. I can try and give an excuse, say that I got very caught up in my new Substack account where I intend to publish short fictions set in the same worlds as the books I’m working on, and while that would be true it would still be an excuse.
All I can say instead is I’m sorry it took so long and I hope it was worth the wait.
Now, check out the Playlist below and let us put the past behind us.
Ultimately my conclusion for this book review is very simple: don’t judge the book before you’ve actually read it. It would be easy to disregard Amygdala as nothing but a rather distressing book for a very specific brand of furry if all you do is look at the character designs. But, I want to make it clear, it’s more than that.
In fact it’s not really that at all. Sure, characters talk about having sex, a lot, but the story is in no way geared around that. This is not p***, it’s a political thriller gushed up in a fantasy world. The fact that the players here are animalistic monsters just adds another aspect for the writer to explore.
How would creatures that are so different to us, who don’t die, or age past their point of maturity, whose bodies don’t rot in the ground, govern themselves? Where does the animal end and the civilised remember of society begin?
The answer, for some of these questions, is a hard society in which failure is not tolerated and children are not valued as anything besides food. And yet, what I found so fascinating is that the qualities of kindness, mercy, and compassion can still flourish in the members of this society. They are not uniform monsters; they have the ability to choose a different way of being. And so the reader is forced to wander, if maybe that choice – the choice between compassion and coldness, or good and evil – is the greatest asset any of us possesses. So if someone tries to take away that choice, even if they claim it’s for the best of reasons, how good can that person really be?
All fascinating questions and all things Sam Fennah has fun exploring throughout ‘Amygdala’. So pick up a copy today and start expanding your mind now.
Well, here we are again … I hope this one didn’t take quite as long as the last one but to be honest I’ve lost count on how many weeks this took.
Outline of the Basic Plot
I have split the main basis of the plot into three parts even though in actuality there were a lot more moving parts and cogs to the machine than that. But as I don’t want to over bloat this post with a too detailed description I’ve decided to break it down into three main parts. Lucy’s Plot: which outlines the exploits of Lucy Lacemaker through the book. Celia’s plot: Which follows the Yolsh investigation. And the Court Plot: Which will cover the intrigues in the ruling class and their foolishness.
Lucy’s Plot
Lucy’s plot begins with her as a ‘fowler’ living on the streets. This might sound particularly sad but in this world all children live on the streets. It’s only once they’ve grown older and have ‘proven’ themselves that they get to come inside and sleep in a proper bed. Lucy’s doing alright though, she’s managing to avoid the chop shops that want to eat her and has made friends with a bookseller that’s taught her to read. But everything changes when she bumps into an old friend who’s involved with some dodgy dealings. One exploded ‘dollhouse’ later and she has to flee for her life to an entirely different city. There, through some cunning trickery, she becomes an ‘inker (that’s newspaper reporter to us humans). Unfortunately she soon discovers that her new boss is more entangled with the dodgy dealings she fled from than she could ever have thought possible.
Celia’s Plot
The Yolsh – that’s police to us muggles – are called in to investigate when a dollhouse explodes. Determined to find the truth the lead investigating officer brings in a private investigator to help. Celia, haunted by voices in her head and the demons of her past, is reluctant to take up the offer but agrees to take the job anyway. They follow the leads from the small town where the explosion took place to fighting pits, and toy shops, and all across this terrible country of theirs until they finally find …Lucy. And then well, my readers, that’s when things start to get interesting.
The Court Plot
And here is where the hanging threads of both our other plots get tied together and sewn back into the great tapestry that is the mystery of this book. I’m going to try and keep this as vague as possible, even perhaps, to the the point of causing confusion in the reader. Because I don’t want to rob you of the joy of piecing all the different pieces together. Of working it out, or failing to, before the author pulls back the curtain and reveals all both to the reader and the characters alike. I didn’t do this with the last review because let’s be honest at this point in the timeline who doesn’t know that Ned Stark dies?
So, I will proceed with caution.
Okay, where to start? Well, in times past the Kivouachians were ruled by a giant beast known as Freyda. But she was a monster, who made her people into monsters, and so she was overthrown by her children. Or at least the three children that mattered: Sombra: the Grand Architect ; Winifred: the Grand Whisper; and most important of all … Locket: the Grand Voice. Ever since the day these three overthrew their mother they’ve ruled their people with a firm, logic based, system of laws. Kivouachians may be animals but they do not have to be uncivilised ones.
They believe, at least most of the time, that their rule, their laws, are the only thing keeping their savage subjects from falling into complete decline. So why would anyone fight against them? But things are going wrong. There’s a conspiracy in the shadows. Things are being leaked to the public that should have been kept silent. There’s more at stake here the one dollhouse exploding. History long best forgotten is about to repeating; and waiting in the wings, for the fallout of all this chaos, is Methusa. Her manifesto clutched in her claws. A manifesto that speaks of enforced kindness and societal pity. It’s a dream shes had for many years ever since the death of the only child she ever loved. She’s going to make the world right and no one, not even Locket, is going to stop her this time.
There, I think that’s just about vague, and informative enough, to get people interested in reading this book … which really is the whole point of a book review if you think about it.
Themes of the Plot
The Ability to choose
The people in this story are not good people not a single one of them – and yet the book poises the question if we take away even just the choice to do bad don’t we make good completely irrelevant. It’s our ability to choose, how we live our lives, the people we help, that truly makes a society.
Take away choice and all you have left is a dictatorship … and those never last.
Surprise Twists in the Plot
Probably too many to count and each one more shocking than the last.
Adaptational Changes to the Plot
Well, it has a completely different plot to the YouTube series so … everything? Yep, everything seems like the right word here.
Cecilia is a former Yolsh (that’s policemen for us humans) dragged back into working with her old colleagues when a Dollhouse (brothel, I told you this wasn’t a kid’s book) mysteriously explodes. She has a dark past, even considering the world she lives in, and is haunted by voices in her head that won’t let her be.
I think Cecilia has the, perhaps, dubious honour of being my favourite character in The August Few because despite the fact that she lives in a world where might makes right literally there’s something in her that feels that it – or at least the way her people go about showing it – is fundamentally wrong.
How do I explain this better?
In Cecilia’s society a person can be anything they want to be, in theory, so long as they’re strong enough. Doesn’t matter what your gender is or your sexual orientation, or on vey rare occasions your disability, if you’re strong enough or smart enough you can accomplish anything.
That sounds nice doesn’t it?
Empowering even.
Except well … what happens to people who loose?
Remember the people of this society are monsters in more than just appearance. Their society does not encourage compassion for those who they deem ‘failures’. Failures are beheaded, their brains destroyed and their bodies put on display in the most humiliating way possible and used to carry the next wave of monsters. And that’s if you’ve been lucky enough to survive to adulthood …. if you’re a kid who fails you just get eaten.
Which now that I say it out loud may be a less awful fate.
All characters believe that this way of doing things has made their society strong; and if you find yourself failing in that society then it clearly has to be your own doing. Your own mistakes. No wider circumstances involved here. And when I say every character I do mean every character even the ones fighting to change things.
The closest we come to a proper rebuttal of this belief is a character like Cecilia who while she doesn’t dispute that this seems the only way her people can exist in any kind of society – they are all animals after all – doesn’t believe it makes their world a great one, but rather a sad one.
And that’s the point … a world with no rebuttal to any one prevailing rhetoric is never going to be a Utopia, regardless of what that rhetoric is. This is a sad world, but it is only those like Cecilia, who are not quite in step with what is considered normal, can truly see it for the tragedy it is.
Least Favourite Character
Lucy Lacemaker
Lucy Lacemaker is the main character of the story. Starting the tale as a fowler ‘that’s child for the muggles in the audience’ the book is essentially her coming of age story, at least from her perspective. It is the story of how she grows from a scrappy fowler just fighting to stay alive to an ingenious inker whose skills of forgery are coveted even by the antagonists of the book.
During this journey she comes to whole heartedly embrace and love ‘Locket’s Law’ (that’s might makes right for the laymen) and expounds on its virtues to anyone who will listen.
Now you would think given the fact that I clearly don’t like ‘Locket’s Law’ that that is the reason that I don’t like her. Well, I’d like to say for the record that no it is not. Alright, not wholly. This is an alien society, full of alien creatures and individuals, so I can accept that they will have some views, and practices, that I find slightly repugnant. And I’m more than an experience enough fiction lover, and fantasy lover, to enjoy them and often like them anyway. And yet, there is just something about Lucy’s views by the end, or rather the way that she expressed them, that really set my teeth on edge.
It was as if only she was smart enough to really see and understand the beauty of their society. That only she was mature enough to understand how it really worked. And by the end every time she heard someone’s sad backstory, or reason for why they might not whole heartedly agree with the way the society was run, she would just keep repeating that it was their own fault. That they were just blaming society for their own mistakes.
Now, don’t mistake me, when I say I don’t like Lucy Lacemaker I’m not calling her a badly written character. No, indeed not, I think she’s probably the most well written and rounded character in the book. And I think this attitude that she develops near the end is quite deliberately put in there by the author. Not because he is arguing for this kind of world, or even that the Kivouachians can only exist in this kind of world, but because that attitude not only gives her the motivation she needs to outwit the antagonists of the book but because I don’t think he intends for her to be correct at all.
Because no ideology, no matter how right one individual may think it is, is ever going to be wholly correct and right for the world. The world, both theirs and ours, is made up of a patchwork of greys and exceptions. So when Lucy calls people too naive to understand she’s really just showing her own naivety. And I’m ninety nine percent sure of this because she’s called out on this crap … by Cecilia. Who warns her near the end of the book to be careful on the words she says when she’s high on logic.
Man Cecilia is such a cool character … why can’t these books be solely about her again?
Oh well, maybe Lucy will improve by the sequel. I mean she can’t possibly get worse right? Right?
Character most changed in the Adaption
It might be a stretch to call Satellite City an adaption. Because truthfully it’s not really. For one thing it came out years before the book was even a thing. And also, it’s made by the same author. However, it is still very relevant to the discussion – and the nearest thing we have to an adaption of any kind for this world – so I’m just going to push ahead with it like it is one.
Satalite City is a Web Series made by Sam Fennah and starring him as well. It resolves around these groups of creatures called the Kivouachians who are from a place that existed before the big bang. In fact, its destruction caused the big bang and everything that existed after that.
The Kivouachians we meet in the series are refugees from that world, that place, that existed before. Though I never did understand how they survived the death of their world. Still, that is who they are and the series is basically a slice of life show, sprinkled with a bit of cosmic horror and political machinations, as we watched these monstrous abominations just try to live their day to day lives.
And the leader of these monsters is a creature known as Ludwig.
Ludwig
In the show Ludwig is, as stated above, the Leader of the Kivouachians, the Grand Voice if you will. It is his goal to lead his people to a grander glory and a return to if not their home world, then an earth he will make very much like it. And he will do this by mixing the blood of his people with earth creatures. All this so that his people can rise again because what Ludwig believes more than anything else is that their home was a great place. A place where anyone could be anything so long as they were strong enough. A place where the weak died and the strong more than survived they thrived. What he believes is Locket’s Law.
In the book Ludwig is a rebel who one hundred percent believes the antagonists anti-locket rhetoric. Oh, he doesn’t start off the book doing so, but much like Lucy this is his coming of age story too, so that’s certainly how he ends it he book. However, before we dismiss this as just a complete rewrite I of the character it’s worth noting that he is a child. Technically speaking. Having not reached his moment of maturity.
Maybe the biggest change is that the book Ludwig hasn’t yet become anything yet. Not who he was in Satellite City, not someone else, he is still … waiting.
Character I was surprised by my reaction to the Most
Locket
Locket is the Grand Voice of the Kivouack – it is her law that rules the land. It is her will that governs it so. She believes whole heartedly in the right of the strong not only to rule over the weak but to destroy them completely.
Now, from everything else I’ve said here you would think that would be someone who I would hate. And believe me, before I actually read the book I really thought I would. But gosh damn it she’s just so fascinating… and it’s hard to hate a character that makes her book such a good read.
She’s not the straight monster that I expected to find when I sat down to this book. She doesn’t growl or slobber or sneer ‘Mr. Burns style’ over her fallen enemy. In fact, despite creating the law that would make it socially proper to do so, she doesn’t seem to be particularly happy about any of her victories at all. She’s polite and open, though not currently convinced, to the possibility that her way might not be the right one. There is only one thing that Locket believes in, more than even the animalistic nature of her subjects, and that is the power of logic.
She doesn’t believe in morality as we, humans, would define it; so you can’t approach her with the argument that her way is wrong because it is evil. You must approach with the argument that her way is wrong because it does not work. And that is where her enemies fail because their entire argument is based on the concept of morality. Of doing something not because it is effective for society but because it is morally right to do.
Now, I am not in anyway trying to say that that is not a decent start to an argument but it’s not the way to convince Grand Voice Locket. And the truth is that her opposers can’t really make that logical argument that this ‘might makes right’ way of life is hurting their society because they don’t actually think it is. They believe that their society has advanced under this law; they just don’t believe that’s enough of an excuse for all the lives lost in favour of it. They argue for stagnation over carnage.
A proper argument against Locket’s law, or at least part of it, might be that every child has the potential to be anything when they are born. To aide and enrich their community in ways that we might not even be able to conceive of yet. So, shouldn’t they have the right to grow and flourish and reach their fullest potential in safety? Who knows what the fowler you throw in your soup pot could have done for society in fifty or sixty years. What inventions, books, art, or designs we may have lost when that life was cut short. You say that this law means that only the strong, only the smart, survive to enrich their community but I say only the lucky survive. And luck gives nothing back to society, it only takes.
Perhaps that might have convinced Locket, at least for a moment, but that would rely on the person making the argument actually believing it. But none of them do and so Locket wins by default. You would think that would make her happy and in a lesser written character it might, but that’s not who Locket is.
Hi, Wee Readers, well I’m back, and no this is not the follow up to my last post, sorry. But don’t worry I am still working on that and eventually you will see just what I thought on Amygdala’s characters. Well, some of them anyway. You will sit back and behold it in all its glory and you will think – this took a month to do?
But now onto our current post and why its subject matter had to take precedence over finishing my ongoing blog series.
You see … I’ve started a Substack account. Yes, that’s right. Specifically one to share my work; short stories, flash fiction, even sometimes the very occasional poem; that connects to the books I’m working on. In that, they’re set in the same universe.
I would like you, old wee readers and new, to please click the link below and subscribe. Do so now and be the first to read my opening story : The Man in the Salt. A short story of a man who vanishes from a doorstep and finds himself in a desert made all of salt. Click the link below, and subscribe while you’re at it, to find out what happens next.
Genre: Science Fiction, Fairy tale (proof if there ever was one that this genre is not always for kids), and Fantasy.
Format: Paperback, hardback, and Audiobook. (I recommend the audiobook if you’re going to read this book it’s very well made. It has its own album music and everything.)
Published: 13th February 2023
Wee Writing Lassie’s Shelf: What the Fuck did I just Read
Reasons for Reading: I enjoyed Sam Fennah’s online show Satellite City and was interested to follow these characters into a more fantastical setting.
A Warning: This is not a children’s book. I repeat despite many of the characters being basically talking animals this is very much not a children’s book.
In fact it covers topics and images that most adults would find disturbing and uncomfortable to the point where I started to reconsider reviewing it for ‘The Wee Writing Lassie and her Marvellous Reads’.
Eventually I decided to go through with it because not only is it very well written, and surprisingly thought provoking in its themes and prose, but it’s one of the most unique books I’ve ever read. Having said that do not pick this book up without preparing yourself first.
The characters are monsters, both literally and figuratively, who live in a society that believes wholeheartedly that might makes right. They eat their own young; have *** with headless bodies; and display their fallen enemies like trophy prizes. And even then I’m still not really covering the true horror that is this world. Having said that … it is still a really well written book so if you can get past that it’s worth a look at. Again … so long as you’re an adult. I cannot even begin the state how much this is not a kid’s book.
What Ho, wee Readers. I’m back again and this time with a more nature focused post. Nothing too complicated just a wee walk in Aden park with the Wee family. And the pictures I took during it.
This one was taken while walking so I’m aware it might be a bit blurry.
Well, we’ve come to the end at last Wee Readers, and for those of you who have been following my blog for any length of time know what that means it’s time for the playlist.
The Wee Writing Lassie 