#the tainted cup !!!!!!

[bangbangwhoa]

books I’ve read in 2024 📖 no. 036

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

“That’s the problem with figuring shit out — eventually you run into someone who’d prefer all their shit remain unfigured.”

#books #2024 reads #the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett #booklr #lit edit

[space-blue]

Warm up sketch... This is Ana Dolabra, the fem Sherlock the world has been waiting on (at least tumblr). If I can make even just ONE moot read The Tainted Cup, then I'll be happy!!

Fun fact, Robert Jackson Bennett is the person responsible for my overwhelming preference for 1st person writing. It's not otherwise very popular in SFF, but he CRUSHES it in City of Stairs, which was an influencial series to me when I was starting out as a writer. I decided 'why not, let's try some present tense', and the rest is history.

Anyway his books are always mental. I love his worldbuilding. I wish I could rent a condo in his brains for a while, study him like a bug in my petri dish.

IDK how to dress Ana, but I might make a full length of her in am ao dai...

#the tainted cup #Robert Jackson Bennett #ana dolabra #fanart #tainted cup fanart #ana dolabra fanart #warm up sketch

[wp-blaze]

Belgrade or Bust!

We lolly-gagged this morning, as we had such a short day ahead. Coffee at a cafe, a stop at a pastry shop for some unknown but delicious delights, and a grocery store stop for emergency food (Snickers Bars) in case things went sour during the what we assumed would be 15ish miles into Belgrade. The […]

[literary-illuminati]

300 pages in now and The Tainted Cup is easily one of my favorite reads so far this year. 'Sherlock Holmes with all the dials cranked up several degrees in a biopunk fantasy empire organized around fighting regular kaiju attacks' turns out to be quite the page turner.

Between this and Foundryside now I'm kind of curious if Bennet just makes a habit of writing protagonists with magically-induced sensory issues, though.

#robert jackson bennett #the tainted cup #sff #tht

[crabs-with-sticks]

Just finished reading The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett and one of the many things I loved about this book was the way that it represented neurodivergency. I don't think I've ever read another book which has explored that to this depth (granted I haven't really gone out of my way to do this).

Like, Din having dyslexia was really influential to the plot and his character arc, but also wasn't like the only thing he was struggling with. And I loved seeing Ana being just...well very Ana, aka very autistic coded.

The moment at the end of the book (spoilers I guess) where there is just a beautiful moment of neurodivergent solidarity between the two. How Ana tells him that she chose him BECAUSE of his neurodivergency, and how she saw it as a strength. How she believes that the empire needs to be able to work for all of them. Low key made me emotional.

Anyway, would highly recommend the book. Its a fun murder mystery fantasy book with leviathans, spontaneous eruption of trees from the body (not a euphemism), and two very neurodivergent detectives with a very funny and endearing dynamic.

#loved this book #twas amazing #and I love Ana and Dins relationship #really great execution of straight (bisexual) man and loose canon woman dynamic #some of Ana's lines are so out of pocket in like the best way possible #the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett #shadow of the leviathan #jay talks about books #jay rambles

[oracleofmadness]

Alright... I have a confession to make. I've never read a book by this author before and I didn't even recognize his name so I had no idea he is the author of what, I have heard, is some really absolutely incredible scifi/fantasy. So I've been literally telling people, just absolutely clueless, how im so surprised this book is so freaking great! Lmao.... aaaaaahhhgg.. that's my life. Apologies.

Now that THAT is out of the way, I will continue to heap praises on this marvelous read. This story takes place in a dystopian style world in which there are attacks from titans at an enormous seawall that protects this empire, while the people that live within make heavy use of plants for protection and control. However, sometimes, these plants can be used to harm as well.

The murder/mystery aspect (which was so fascinating) mixed with these very interesting details of the people, politics and, of course, the plants and their varying uses to enhance many humans, all this together makes just the best read. It's this author's brilliant ideas, especially the plants, their uses, and their side effects, but also the characters themselves who each are very well thought out and fleshed out in this story. Just the combination of all these factors, the smallest details to the main flow, the whole plot, idea, of the book... created for me a scary world definitely, but also a world I felt like I was in, literally inside of, every time I picked this book up (and, while frightening thought I very much so desired to be this enthralled.) Like I was walking by Din's side (the main character) the whole time and feeling like I was experiencing the exact same emotions as him. That's how real this felt to me.

So, if you can't tell, I loved this book. I am begging.... begging for more. Please!!!!

Out February 6, 2024!

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

#book #bookish #books #bookworm #currently reading #book review #read #bookblogger #reading #fantasy #sff #sff books #sci fi fantasy #scifi #science fiction #scifi fantasy #the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett

[anyagee]

New book crab approved.

🦀

#Robert Jackson Bennett #the tainted cup #crab

[ecoamerica]

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

#ACLA24 #ACLA24Leaders #youtube #youtube video #climate leaders #climate solutions #climate action #climate and environment #climate #climate change #climate and health #climate blog #climate justice #climate news #weather and climate #environmental news #environment #environmental awareness #environment and health #environmental #environmental issues #environmental justice #environment protection #environmental health #Youtube

[randombookquotes]

the tainted cup- robert jackson bennett

#the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett #bookblr #booklr #quotes #books #words #fiction #scifi

[terapsina]

So I read The Tainted Cup (amazing book, totally recommend) and there's one unresolved thing that is going to be driving me nuts until I finally get my hands on the next book years from now.

(spoilers for book under the cut, people-who-have-finished-the-book eyes only)

Excerpt nr. 1

---

Excerpt nr. 2

---

And.

No. That is NOT all that needs to be said of it. WHAT WAS THE LEVIATHAN TRYING TO SAY? PRETTY SURE WE REALLY NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE LEVIATHAN WAS TRYING TO SAY.

What is the empire trying to hide?

#i just needed to get that out of my system #the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett #books #terapsina's book rambles

[aki-chan2014]

A drawing I did of Ana Dolabra from The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. It's been a while since I've done a properly coloured in drawing, so it's a little rusty but I like how it has turned out. Plus I just had to draw something bc of how much I loved the book. I've even got a Din drawing in progress too, so look out for that.

#fanart #handdrawn #hand-drawn #my art #The Tainted Cup #Robert Jackson Bennett #Ana Dolabra #Immunis Anagosa Dolabra

[evenaturtleduck]

POV Your boss is winding up to either start infodumping about crabs or interrogating a new visitor about the smell of their piss and you can't decide which you would rather have engraved in your memory for the rest of your life.

#the tainted cup #favorite books #my art

[elliepassmore]

The Tainted Cup review

5/5 stars Recommended if you like: fantasy, sci-fi, greenpunk, murder mysteries, powers, disability rep

Big thanks to Netgalley, Del Rey, and the author for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

To start, I'll say I'm not sure whether to classify this book as fantasy or sci-fi since I feel it has elements of both. The world the book is set in is 'greenpunk,' with buildings grown from plants and things like AC from mushrooms, and the characters have powers augmented through some kind of medical procedure. At the same time though, there are leviathans that rise from the ocean depths and threaten the empire. The genre isn't really important, but I will say it isn't super clear-cut and think it could fit easily into both sci-fi and fantasy.

The world in the book is super interesting. As mentioned, the buildings are largely grown from plants, with some more plant-like than others. A lot of the buildings have fernpaper walls, which serve well to keep out the humidity and don't mold, while also being sturdy enough to stand and not too heavy in the case of an earthquake. A couple of buildings are made from a different plant that can be grown in any shape, allowing for a more personalized architecture. Plants are pretty central to life in the book, and are used for additional things like AC, vaccination, medical treatments, and human augmentation. I love all the plant stuff and think the focus on 'green' things is a really interesting worldbuilding piece that isn't used nearly often enough. We get a good background on how the greenery works without going too in-depth, though I honestly could read an encyclopedia on this world and be happy.

In terms of the augmentation, there's a breakdown of the different augments people can have, with grafts being temporary and more for things like increased immunity in humans or faster growing in plants, while suffusions are permanent and change a lot more about a person/plant. If someone is employed by the empire and has a suffusion they're called a Sublime, with Sublimes categorized into how their suffusion works (axioms are good w/ numbers, linguas are good w/ languages, spatiasts are good w/ spatial relations, engravers who memorize everything, cracklers who are superhumanly strong, etc.). It was really interesting to read about the suffusions and the different Sublimes, and I really enjoyed the background info we get on the augmentations. I also thought it was pretty cool how the augmentations seem to be everywhere, including to help plants do different things and to help medications and vaccines be produced against the wide range of issues people might come across.

While this is a SFF story, the bulk of it is the murder mystery. It's twisty and deliberate, but at the same time has moments when it's very fun. Ana reminds me at times of Benoit Blanc from Knives Out and I really enjoyed her method to solving mysteries. There's a good mix of humor and seriousness here, and I think Bennett struck a good balance between the two.

Din is a Sublime engraver recently assigned to be Ana's investigative assistant. He's a rule follower and so his and Ana's approaches clash at times, though never majorly. Din is very clearly dyslexic, which gave him trouble in training, and at times he runs up against needing to read things during the investigation, but he's figured out a work around using his engraving skills which I found to be a really smart way of going about it. He's clever and a good observer, and is able to put the pieces of things together quickly even though he's new to investigating. I liked seeing things through his eyes and and way he would meticulously go through a scene to find evidence. It was particularly interesting how he interviewed people because Din seems to have a knack for knowing how to circle a conversation around to what he really wants to know without being too obvious about it, thus putting the interviewee at ease and getting them to open up. It was wonderfully subtle the way he got people to open up.

Ana is the main investigator on the case and is not the sort of investigator you'd expect. She prefers to stay in her house (or later on, in her borrowed rooms) rather than going outside to investigate on her own, and when she does leave the comfort of her accommodations, it's with a blindfold on. I suspected she was autistic throughout the book, and then toward the end she basically comes out and says it (without saying it since...you know...this is a SFF novel not set in our world with our terminology). She's quick to make deductive leaps and is often several steps ahead of everyone else involved. It was fun to read as she snapped through deduction after deduction, using the evidence Din collected, and coming to a conclusion that made sense but you didn't always see coming. Ana is also pretty funny and I enjoyed the humor she brought to the book.

There are a bunch of side characters who come in and out of the story as needed, and I found them to be pretty well fleshed out. It definitely felt like each character had their own lives and concerns and didn't just cease to exist once they left Din's presence. Miljin is the side character who's probably around the most, he's one of the investigators working the case with Ana and Din. At first his demeanor was pretty gruff and unwelcoming, so I didn't think I'd like him much, but over the course of the book his character grew on me and I actually ended up liking him a lot. He's just the kind of person that doesn't immediately warm up to people, but once he does he's got quite the quick brain and lots of humor and advice to go around.

As mentioned, the main point of this book is the mystery. At the beginning, Ana was making all sorts of leaps that I just took her word for, but as the story continued, I began being able to make guesses of my own. Some of the stuff I was able to guess correctly, sometimes in a surprising way, but other times I was still puzzling it out when Ana and the others came to their conclusions. There are so many moving pieces and different elements to the mystery going on in this book, I enjoyed trying to figure out the solution myself as well as seeing what the actual solution was.

Overall I greatly enjoyed this book and I'm definitely looking forward to the next book in the series. This is the kind of book that makes me want more SFF backgrounds for mystery books, it added a really interesting layer to things that I enjoyed.

#book #book review #books #book recommendations #fantasy #bookstagram #booklr #bookblr #bookaholic #bookish #the tainted cup #murder mystery book #mystery #murder mystery #scifi books #scifi #advanced readers copy #netgalley #netgalley reads #lgbtq characters #eco horror #disability representation

[drowninginabactatank]

Today's booktography: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett 🍄

#the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett #bookblr #bookworm #reading #bookish 📚 #booktography #aesthetic #leaves #mine

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #25 – The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

The fact that I put in a hold for this is basically a triumph of marketing. I saw Jackson Bennett doing an AMA to promote it, which reminded me that a) he existed and b) I liked the one book of his I’d read. So 20 people in the hold queue ahead of me latter, I finally got a chance to give it a try. Shockingly, this actually worked out incredibly – this was easily one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had all year.

The book follows Din, a recently promoted Assistant Investigator mainly notable for the incredible invasive grafts and suffusion that left him with grey skin, dyslexia, and a literally edetic memory. The last bit is the most relevant, as his incredibly eccentric Investigator uses him as combination Watson and CSI, running around collecting all the evidence and conducting most of the interviews so she can make her grand deductions in peace.

The case in question is the murder of an esteemed and well-regarded commander through the unconventional method of a tree sprouting in his chest cavity and growing several feet over the course of as many seconds. As things are wont to, the investigation quickly spirals out of control, dragging the investigators to a logistical hub days from the Seawall protecting the empire from leviathan attacks and implicating true imperial grandees.

So, this is a murder mystery. An extremely high concept one, full of leviathan-blood enhancements and supernatural contagion and a whole society structured and organized around the constant struggle to stave off apocalypse, but ultimately still very much an intentionally tropey murder mystery. Every clue is mentioned as Din notices it, always before it’s relevance to the plot is revealed. There’s an extended reveal where the Investigator just lays out the whole mystery as she’s’ deduced it and baits the villain into doing something stupid. One of the supporting cast is revealed to have been one of the killers all along. The entire thing occurs with a ticking clock meaning the investigation has only days to find an answer. It’s all there.

To be clear, this is not at all a complaint. Maybe it would be if I read more mysteries, but as it is the whole set of tropes is a very rare treat for me, and it’s all executed very well. And I adore a well-done drawing-room reveal scene. Not that I did, but I appreciate that I could have tried to outguess the plot and figure out the whole mystery ahead of time from the clues given (instead of just noticing most of them and having a vague sense of where people were headed – though I def thought the governor’s second paying a weird amount of attention to Din was a threat and not the love interest). The whole thing was just a joy to read, even if the characters were all a bit exaggerated and archtypal, and the ending was a bit too neat and tidy for my tastes.

The setting isn’t exactly novel – creepy quasi-horror rich biopunk settings and horrible kaiju whose corpses warp the world around them being harvested and processed for raw materials became fairly well trod ground at some point – but it’s hardly generic or the expected standard either. It’s very well-executed, and the murder mystery conceit basically requires each new relevant addition to the story being clearly explained as we meet it, which was handled with surprising grace/without devolving into multipages reams of exposition too often.

It was very amusingly obvious (and then confirmed in the acknowledgements!) that the entire subplot about ‘preservation boards’ (bodies to ensure there’s no unintended side effects of growing/processing weird biopunk reagents in a given region) being abused to obstruct and delay vital progress to – literally – raise property values for the landed gentry, was directly inspired by Jackson Bennett having read a lot of articles about malicious abuse of environmental protection legislation in the US.

Politics-wise – I mean it’s a conceit of the whole story that the empire is essentially, if not benevolent, then at least necessary and well-intentioned. Riven with corruption and patronage networks, warped for the interests of the landed elite, full of negligence and despair – but at it’s core a good thing to work for, and receiving awards and mandates from on high is a good thing. The issue is the boyars and not the tsar, all that sort of thing. Which works for the story, but I’ve at this point read enough SF/F that really digs into the whole empire thing that the lack of subversion there took me almost by surprise.

Not that the empire’s all nice – the grafted specialists with superhuman strength or eidetic memory or perfect reasoning skills all die after a decade or two of service, and that’s just the price of keeping things running. A major subplot of the whole book is Din trying to hide the fact that his enhancements misfired slightly to make him functionally dyslexic (an issue, when your main value to be a perfect living archive). Not entirely sure if the series is really going anywhere with the whole disability theme beyond the very basic ‘the empire will only survive if it makes it possible for EVERYONE to contribute what they can’ beat it hit in this book – regardless, the fact that Din spend the entire book wondering what had been done to her boss’s brain that e.g. she spent most conversations blindfolded to help her focus, and while doing so can identify most forms of text on a page by touch, only to find out that no she’s just autistic was very funny to me.

#book review #sff #the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett

[libertyreads]

Book Review #4 of 2024--

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. Rating: 4 stars.

Read from January 17th to 20th.

Before I get into the review, a quick thank you to both NetGalley and the publishers over at Del Rey Books for access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review. The Tainted Cup is a Holmes and Watson-esque novel that follows investigator Ana Dolabra--a detective whose eccentricities are matched only by her brilliance--and her assistant, Dinios Kol who are called to work a case after a high imperial officer is killed when a tree erupts from his body. As they follow the clues, Dolabra and Kol just might uncover a darker secret than this poisoning. The Tainted Cup comes out on February 6th and is available for pre-order now.

I had such a fun time with this one. I'm a bit of a Sherlock Holmes fan girl so I was worried that picking this one up would set off a chain reaction of disappointment. But the way this story unfolds in this fantastical world and the way the mystery gets laid out for the reader makes it so much more fun and accessible to the reader. In most of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I've read over the years, there would be leaps in logic that were too difficult to follow unless you had very specific, detailed knowledge. And, while Ana does had a little bit of that going on, the author managed to find a way to keep the reader invested and to keep the reader's suspension of disbelief going. The world building and the pace of the story worked really well for me. There was a small section at the beginning where it felt like you were just thrown into the story, but given the fantastical world and how short that feeling lasted I'm going to say that part was still a thumbs up from me.

The characters are probably what I think could have used the most work. We do get some of the Holmes and Watson-esque interactions between our investigator and her assistant but I felt like we could have gone further with it. I still feel like I know so little about Ana. Maybe that's a choice the author made because of her being a representation of Sherlock Holmes. But I just wanted more from her. I also spent a lot of the book thinking there would be some dark reveal about Dinios but it never went in that direction. And I kind of wish it had. He's a little too squeaky clean for me. But know that's coming from a girl whose favor characters are all morally grey.

Overall, this was a fun and engaging read that I think fans of Sherlock Holmes can enjoy while acknowledging that it's separate from the original stories. It always felt like the plot was pushing me to read more and more which made it a faster read than I was expecting.

#for my first Robert Jackson Bennett I had a surprisingly good time with this one #I say surprisingly but that's probably only surprising to me #he is pretty well hyped and it makes me nervous #netgally #del rey books #book review #book reviews #booklr #bookblr #bookstagram #books read in 2024 #2024 reading challenge #goodreads challenge #goodreads #books #bookish #book #the tainted cup #Robert Jackson bennett #first ARC of the year completed

[kazz-brekker]

so strange to read an adult fantasy novel where the main character has an important job and is younger than me. what do you mean dinios kol from the tainted cup is 20, that's a baby!

#i turned 23 yesterday so being 20 was officially several years ago now #pie says stuff #pie reads #the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett

[living400lbs]

"We need plotters. Like your [Investigator] Ana. Even if she has pissed off a lot of powerful people.”

“She has?”

“Oh, yes. That’s the problem with figuring shit out—eventually you run into someone who’d prefer all their shit remained thoroughly unfigured.”

- from The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

#the tainted cup #robert jackson bennett #figuring things out