The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

All three of these Wormwood books are perfect for Weird fans. Not that you have to be weird as a fan to enjoy them, merely that you must enjoy Weird fiction, be tolerant of cthulhu-like alien entities who provide rather miraculous services in return for a foothold in humanity. Wait. Isn't this just an alien invasion story?

Sure, like Fight Club is just a story about self-help groups.

We get a solid return for main characters in the previous two, get thrown into time-travel, end-of-the-world, last-stand alien repulsion, and, surprisingly, a rather large part of the novel deals with gay rights.

The subtext is solid, but it never gets in the way of the over-arching tale. Which is big. It spans across a lot of countries and across a theoretically huge amount of time, and although there IS time travel in this, it doesn't take up a lot of page-time.

I loved the big story. I enjoyed seeing old characters come back. I wasn't as impressed with the amount of character-building in this one as compared to the first or especially the second books, but it felt like a pretty good send-up to me.

The most impressive part of these books is the all-out genre-bending courage it takes to make them. I'm a big fan of Tade when it comes to this. His two novellas gave me a huge wonderful taste and three out of five novels pretty much solidified it. Imagination is key. They're full of it. :)

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