#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.”

[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...

[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.

[rizeam]

Okay, dear mutual of mine. I need a new audiobook to read sooo should I read the holy, the grand, the famed "THE TAINTED CUP"? Is it worth it? 👀

im going to tell you EVERY SINGLE THING i love about this book:

pathetic-looking empire: almost every setting in this setting is described so vividly about COMPLETELY washed up. There is mud everywhere. Every single citizen is in a consistent state of anxiety because of the eldritch monsters in the ocean.

the characters: we have the bisexual mistreated target employee and his outrageously rude (by that i mean iconic) boss. It's like watching Watson be half impressed and half terrified of Sherlock.

the magic system: it's very cool :D the powers some characters control has a cost. the powers are somewhat unnatural and not that glamorized

the mystery itself: the way the case goes is very satisfying, the evidence and answers don't come out of nowhere

the dialogue: reading this book's dialogue is the absolutely HIGHLIGHT of the entire book. listening to the audiobook version will be hilarious. It's a novacaine level of crack but with a different ✨flavor ✨

the names: they're really unique like---Dinios? Strovi? Fayazi? have you ever heard any of these anywhere else?

In conclusion, you should 100% read it :D. It was a ton of fun the entire time!

Also, thank you for asking me about this mutualll 🎀

[evenaturtleduck]

All my favorite detectives are strange little guys, and y'all I found another one. I've only had Immunis Ana Dolabra for less than a chapter but I already love her. What a weirdo [affectionate] <3

[anyagee]

New book crab approved.

🦀

[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.

[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?

[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!

[kazz-brekker]

i finished reading the tainted cup and one of the things i really liked about it is that the main character has the magically enhanced ability to perfectly recall anything he's seen and also has dyslexia, and gaining his cool magical ability didn't fix that. i just thought it was cool, i haven't seen fantasy deal with learning disabilities in that way.

[randombookquotes]

the tainted cup- robert jackson bennett

[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.

[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.

[rizeam]

why is it that whenever i read a good book it has no fanbase :(

PLEASE WHY HAS NOBODY ELSE READ THE TAINTED CUP???

[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.

[nine-fingered-entity]

you know the murder mystery book is good when you read it and then immediately reread it to understand all the foreshadowing and hints the second time around