Autumn colours are starting to come in. Some maples in the neighbourhood are fully red; others still green. The cherry trees are green, but the aronia and weigela bushes are bright red. These birchleaf spiraea are just on the cusp.

New York, 1899.

A merchant orders a golem to be his wife. He barely has time to wake the golem before he dies of appendicitis, on board a ship to New York. The golem is left masterless and alone in the strange city.

A tinsmith in Little Syria, also in New York, accidentally lets out a djinni from a copper flask where the djinni had been imprisoned centuries earlier by a sorcerer. The djinni is still bound to human form and unable to access most of his powers.

The two now struggle to find a place for themselves in this city full of humans. They both wear human-shaped bodies, but neither of them feels at home among humans.

The golem was made to serve and obey. Now that she has no master – whose wishes she would fulfil before he even utters them – she is buffeted by the wishes and desires of everyone around her. She is lost, fearful, alone. She is stronger than humans, tireless, but also very aware that if people knew what she is, they’d be so frightened of her that they would destroy her.

The djinni is the opposite. He used to be the master of everything he could see, flying freely across the Syrian desert, constructing fantastical palaces on a whim, entering people’s dreams. Now he can do none of that, and he chafes at his limitations. And like the golem, he cannot let anyone know what he is.

Neither of them needs sleep. They both look for something to fill their empty waking nights with, in order to not go mad from boredom, and this is what causes them to meet. They recognize that the other is something not-human, and they are intrigued.

The golem is newly made, innocent and ignorant. The djinni is hundreds of years old.

The golem is feminine servility. The djinni is masculine arrogance.

The golem is earth, heavy and stable. The djinni is fire, flighty and sizzling.

Both are forced to live in a human body, to live among humans and follow human conventions. With time, pretending to be human makes each one more human. The golem learns to want things for herself, and to dare to feel. The djinni learns to care about humans, and to want things for others. They learn to make friends.

There is a plot behind all this, and it’s interesting and well-crafted and comes together nicely in the end. Perhaps there is a touch too much action and excitement in the end for my taste – it doesn’t quite fit in with the more moderate pacing of the rest of the book. I think I could have read this book even if there was no plot and no denouement at all. I would be happy to just follow these two around and look inside their heads while they figure themselves out.

There are plenty of supporting characters, whom I also enjoyed getting to know. Some reviewers complain that the author spends too much time on their back stories, when the characters only fulfil a very brief role in the main story. I loved those parts. The bit players are essential, and for me, this was a way of honouring their importance.

The writing style is uncomplicated, unassuming, quietly elegant. The tone is warm-hearted: people may argue and disagree and sometimes do stupid things but they’re all fundamentally decent and kind. It’s no light-hearted feel-good story, but definitely a hopeful one.

Altogether I enjoyed every aspect of this book.

Meanwhile, my browser’s spell check wants to correct “golem” to “google”. What an uncultured browser it is.

A sunny and lovely day today. I did my workout out on the deck, and had lunch there afterwards as well, with a thick cardigan on.

This time of the year, the sun doesn’t clear the cherry tree even in the middle of the day. Only small patches of sunshine peeking through its branches reach the deck, and the shadows are long.

That rain I avoided? Ingrid, poor girl, had a scout hike this weekend and got all of it dumped on her. She said it had rained non-stop from eight o’clock on Friday night, to twelve noon on Saturday. Ingrid is a third-year “adventurer” (as her age group is called) and she and her friends had managed it reasonably well, but the first-yearers had been quite dejected. Fortunately they got sunshine on Sunday, so the hike ended on a better note.

Now our deck is full of drying camping gear, because just about everything she used was soaked.

Ingrid says she herself was dry and warm and got a reasonable amount of sleep. But she was completely exhausted after the hike, to the point of sickness. Her head aches. Her entire body aches. She’s flushed and hot and cold at the same time. I can see from just looking at her that she is not well. Had I not known about the hike, I would have been certain that she’s coming down with something.

Baru Cormorant is born on a backwater island paradise. When she is a young child, the island is annexed/colonized by the Imperial Republic of Falcrest.

The empire brings trade and modern medicine, but also strict ideas about “social hygiene” – eugenics and sexual mores. Homosexuality is outlawed; one of Baru’s two fathers is killed so she is left with the regulation two parents. The imperial staff also brings epidemics which kill many locals. The empire barely bats an eyelid. These things happen.

Promising island children like Baru are coaxed away from their families, inoculated against the epidemics, and brought up in boarding schools.

Baru, realizing that the islanders cannot fight against the empire, decides to subvert the system from within. Excels in her schoolwork, shows special aptitude in mathematics and aces the final exam. Is posted as chief imperial accountant to another colony.

Her plan to get to a position of power within the imperial bureaucracy in order to change it is the obvious betrayal of the book’s title. Getting there requires more betrayals, and betrayals within betrayals. This is a pretty bleak book.

The book excels in terms of technical execution. The plot is clever and intricate and detailed. Surprises aren’t telegraphed in advance and truly take me by surprise. The underlying idea itself really appeals to me: conquest by culture and administration, rather than armies with weapons.

But the book lacks soul. With the exception of the first few chapters about Baru’s childhood: those were immersive; I felt like I really got to know Baru as a child. Those got my hopes up, and the rest of the book really, really did not live up to them. This is a book about an accountant but it almost feels as if it was also written by an accountant.

Baru herself never convinces me, and neither do the other characters (with one or two exceptions). I kept mixing them up even to the end, because they were so flat and alike.

So was the world. I have no idea what any of it looks or feels like, apart from the volcanic mountain on her island. Oh, and the winter up north is cold. Who’d have guessed.

Baru is playing the long game, aiming to somehow [subvert/overthrow/remake] the empire. We don’t know what her goal is, and perhaps even she herself doesn’t know yet. This kind of decades-long commitment is only believable if we can see some kind of fire in Baru, something to propel her onwards through these long, soul-crushing years. Yet she never thinks about the things she should be doing this all for – her childhood island, her murdered father, her forlorn parents. All she does is plan and scheme and perform tasks.

And she is portrayed as too clever, too skilled to be credible. An eighteen-year-old math prodigy I can accept. But I really don’t think that this eighteen-year-old (who has lived half her life within the small world of a boarding school and never even set foot in a city!) would also be a genius plotter who outwits all the aristocrats and bureaucrats of an entire country, and plays them like chess pieces for years, nearly always winning. It just does not work.

The book sounded so promising. The basic idea was intriguing, and Baru sounded like someone whom I could identify with. (Which is generally not an important criterion for me when picking a book, but would have been a bonus.) Instead I really didn’t care about her, or any of the rest. Finished, but will not continue with the series. Would not recommend.

I valued my creature comforts too much to go to the photo meetup yesterday, but I made up for it today. One of the most valuable parts of a meetup is that someone has scouted out a great location – and I don’t need to be there on the day in order to use that! So I just drove to the same place today on my own.

Stendörren turned out to be a popular and much-photographed nature reserve right on the sea coast. A very civilized kind of nature reserve, with amenities everywhere – from bridges and walkways to loos and benches and picnic tables. The bridges and walkways are one of the main draws of this place: they take you to small islets just off the mainland, so you can get that archipelago experience without a boat.

Adrian would have liked this place, I think. It’s the kind of place where walking feels more like exploring. Any time you turn a corner, there’s something new. Even the largest islets are so small you can circle them in half an hour.

Off the rocky coast in one spot I found a whole bunch of jellyfish of all sizes. The smallest would have fit in the palm of my hand; the largest ones were like dinner plates.

They were hard to photograph – the water was anything but clear, and a wobbly, semi-transparent jellyfish is hard to focus on.


The forest was full of large mushrooms, especially some kind of boletus-like ones. The largest ones were often lying in pieces – I guess their size and shape invites kicks. But I also found this lovely family of fly amanitas. With actual flies on them (in the last photo)!

In Soviet Estonia, you didn’t go to the supermarket and come home with fresh fruit and berries. You could buy fruit and berries in the market, when they were in season. But mostly you got them in your grandmother’s garden. Everybody had grandmothers, and all grandmothers had gardens with fruit trees and berry bushes. Because even in Soviet Estonia people wanted fruit, and that was about the only way to get any.

Fresh fruit doesn’t keep all year, so most of it was preserved as jams and squashes, or in syrup.

Jam was for everyday use. On bread, porridge and pancakes; stirred into water to make a drink; in crumbles and cakes. Fruit in syrup was dessert. Raspberries in syrup (vaarikakompott) were my favourite.

During berry season, I think my mother and grandmother were nearly always either picking fruit, cleaning fruit, or cooking it into jam. There were often jam jars cooling in the kitchen of grandma’s cottage.

Most of my childhood’s jams were made of fruits that Swedes know about, even if they don’t grow them much. Quince jam is an exception; I don’t think most people here know that quinces exist or that the fruit are edible. Aronia berries are another oddity. They’re tart and astringent when raw, just like quinces, and sloe for that matter. But they make a great squash, and aronia and apple jam is lovely.

Jam was stored in glass jars. There were no preservatives available (apart from sugar) so it was important to thoroughly sterilize the jars and lids, and then close them so they were airtight.

The simplest kind of lids were made of blue rubber. I’m no expert but I don’t think those were very good.

There were glass lids that had to be fastened with a special kind of clamp. You put the clamp across the lid, and then you twisted the clamp so that its ends gripped the lid to the jar. There were ridges on the lid that pushed the clamp tighter the more you twisted it.

Later a third, fancier kind of lid became available – single-use metal lids. A special tool was used to tighten those. This kind of lid is still used, apparently. I’ve never seen them in Sweden, but googling in Estonian brought up stores that sell them.

I have no photos of any of these things. But I found this photo of raspberries in syrup, made in Estonia, with the right kind of lids on the jars. Click to visit the original Estonian blog post.

I did not go to the photo meetup. Too unappealing.

Instead I picked the Japanese quince bush clean from all fruit. There was more than ever on the largest of the three bushes; some branches were chock-full. The others barely had any. I guess they are still young.

Not that we need much more quince than the 4 litres I picked! I spent two hours chopping and de-seeding and cleaning them. They’re small, and hard. And there are so. Many. Seeds. Everywhere. I actually gave up before I’d cleaned all the fruit and threw the smallest ones away.

Eric will be turning some of the fruit into marmalade. I love quince marmalade – it has been my favourite since I was a child (along with cherry jam).

The rest I asked him to candy. I bought some candied quince at the airport in Riga some years ago and both Adrian and I swooned over them until we ran out. Hopefully now we can recreate that treat.

I had been planning on attending a nature photo meet tomorrow morning. The gear is packed, the camera is charged, the breakfast is prepared.

Now that I’ve seen the weather forecast, I’m not so sure I want to any more. I can handle rain but in these amounts I definitely don’t enjoy it. And it’s an hour and a half to drive there in good weather, and the same back of course. Do I want to get up at 6:30 on a Saturday to spend 3+ hours driving in order to get soaking wet? Hmm.

Met some colleagues for banh mi and pétanque. It was nice to see some people.

Four teams met each other, two and two, and then swapped. Our team won the first round and was then annihilated in the second one, 13 to 1.

I cycled there and back. An hour each way – a good workout. I like cycling fast enough to work up a sweat, so I turned up in sporty trousers and a tank top. Thought I might feel underdressed, but with all the dust from the gravel, and the wiping of hands, the others in their somewhat dressier black trousers were soon looking far grimier than me.