I really liked the cultural gendered stuff from Easton's country and language and the usage of pronouns. Of course, I'm a linguistics nerd (part of my professional life, really) and the explanation of the 7 pronouns in their language and then continual use of them for Easten kanself was very fun and natural to understand and pick up on- though reading online, people seem to disagree (lmao that's fine). Though, it's interesting I was totally ok with this flex of pronouns when the main reason I hated reading Anthem the two times I was assigned it was the use of pronouns was way too confusing there (though I still stand by using "we" and "they" for EVERYONE bc it's a dystopic collective hivemind that wasn't really explained was way too much for my 12 year old brain who didn't want to be reading Rand to begin with). But here, it was clearly explained when and how pronouns were assigned in kan language so even if I got confused (which I didn't), I could just flip back to the page.
I'm also such a sucker for "let's get a woman's view on the late 1800s field of science," which was referenced just a bit through Eugenia Potter (apparently a fictional aunt of Beatrix Potter, per the Author's Note). I ran into this idea from a book I read and was obsessed with right around this time last year- Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill. I highly recommend that book if you like retellings/continuations of classic literature (it's a sequel of sorts to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), Sapphic fem protags (she's het presenting, though, because 1800s), realistic commentary on being a woman and being chronically ill and, God forbid, being BOTH in society, and historical science fiction. Does that make sense? Sci-fi from the lens of 1800s science, not today's science? Like how Frankenstein was written around fears of the knowledge that neuroscientists in that time would literally grave rob to obtain their human specimens? Isn't that shit kinda really cool? I found What Moves the Dead from a Goodreads "Readers also enjoyed..." algorithm from Our Hideous Progeny and it totally make sense. I need more of this shit so bad.
And more on the "let's imagine how women felt in..." everyone here should play the game Pentiment. There's some fun, I'd guess fairly realistic, imaginings of the lives of women in 1600s Bavaria. Reading some reviews of What Moves the Dead and mourning the existence of "wokeness" in their novella they willingly decided to pick up and read reminds me of people complaining the same about Pentiment. "A woman said they maybe didn't like how society was in that time period so therefore it's woke because women definitively didn't complain back then" is what it comes out as. Oh well, I'll just be woke trash then, I guess.
If it's not obvious from my gushing about the themes above, Easton and Potter were my favorite characters. The cover art is also super incredibly sick.
SPOILERS BELOW: Anyway, those are the themes but what about the plot? I liked how I had a few guesses of what was going on (with the most obvious being it), but was still given a little Eldrich twist in the end. There were times I thought it was a gh-gh-ghost zoinks and that it was some sort of haunted house story, or some sort of disease, and parts were like a zombie horror. And it was kinda all of those things, in a way. Fungal growth do kinda be like that.
Those hares. Those fuckin' fucked up hares, man. How unsettling. It really gave you a fantastic sense of "this shit ain't right." The mushrooms described as red and fleshy at the beginning juxtaposed with the bodies being described as white and fuzzy as the fungus overtook their bodies just made it all to be deliciously creepy.
I love tragedy that Madeline had just decided to lend a friendly hand to the glowy, sentient fungus to teach it to speak. That she still had faith in it being a good child just wanting to learn and explore. I could almost believe here, but also no way that could exist in our world. The pronoun usage came in play here so nicely when she was using va/van for it. She not only implied humanity giving it a human pronoun, but gave it one used for a child or for a close sibling. It implied a deeper, chilling connection with the fungus. Almost like she had named it, but she hadn't.
...END OF SPOILERS Anyway, I loved it. I want more. There is a sequel and I intend to read ASAP then send over to my sister, who read my copy of What Moves the Dead before I took it home with me on our trip earlier this month. I would love to continue this trend and find more literature like this. Goodreads puts the tags "gothic" and "horror" on both of these (among others) but idk, am I really cool enough to be a gothic horror girlie? Please, if you have related reads to what this sounds like, throw them my way. I hate to be an algo slave, but it hit well with this recc so I guess I'll pursue more from it on Goodreads.