Shadows of the Short Days (Hrimland Saga #1), by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson

  What a delightful dark Icelandic folklore inspired fantasy! If you liked the Arcane animated series, Shadows of the Short Days feels just like that. Young revolutionary young women who go too far, mad knowledge obsessed geeks who go too far, fascist governments with crazy magical steampunk SS corps going too far, and dark and depressing, as any good Nordic writing has to be. The writing of Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson is good, the world building really detailed, I loved it!

  One thing I didn't like was the info dump at the beginning of the book, a bit like the Irulan presentation in the beginning of Lynch's Dune film, which made me think it was also mandated from up high so that the book doesn't put off the normies. It introduces some sort of space colonization story that doesn't really fit with the rest of the book, for starters.

  Another thing that was hard to swallow were the characters. They were very well written, but all of them were selfish delusional assholes. Hard to truly root for any of them.

  But the story was amazing and I lapped it up. An alternate world Reykjavík where magic of two types is real, magical creatures are real and the human government oppresses everything not human, especially the halflings. One of the protagonists is one such halfling, a young woman determined to start a revolution for equality and freedom and ready to walk over corpses to achieve her goal. The second is a student of magic, expelled by the unimaginative authorities of the university, and willing to do anything to understand and tap into the source of magic. They attract the attention of the sadistic government magicians who will, of course, also do anything to achieve their goals.

  Needless to say, things don't really go great for anybody involved. In a world where you can drink or take drugs to alter your magical abilities, not even these sure way solutions to relax and chill the hell down can work.

  Bottom line: it was a very exciting book to read and I intend to continue the series, although not right now. It was actually taxing to live through it and the ending was quite satisfactory. Honestly, this doesn't need a continuation, even if I am glad there is one.