The first book in the Antasy series is "The Prophet of the Ghost Ants," and I could not locate this in the San Jose library system nor the link plus system that retrieves holds throughout libraries in California and even the University of Nevada in reno. For that reason, I was going into this book a bit blind, but the publishers blurb for this first book was helpful for understanding how the setting in the book, and context/background came to be:
"In a savage landscape where humans have evolved to the size of insects, they cannot hope to dominate. Ceaselessly, humans are stalked by night wasps, lair spiders, and marauder fleas. And just as sinister, men are still men. Corrupt elites ruthlessly enforce a rigid caste system. Duplicitous clergymen and power-mongering royalty wage pointless wars for their own glory. Fantasies of a better life and a better world serve only to torment those who dare to dream."
Anand, who I surmise figures more prominently in the first book, is the leader of a rather socialist experiment in the midst of warring lands on all sides. His cousin, Plethoo, is a big part of the second book. Plethoo hates Anand, for a reason that's probably understood by reading Book 1.

The interactions between humans and insects in this book is fascinating. There's even a part where some kind of sex is going on between priestesses and crickets:
" 'she comes! Hail cricket!' The priestess shouted as a chubby, dark, and Shining cricket entered the tabernacle, with her long antenna twitching around her head. The people rose, pressed hands together, and bowed to the cricket as it crawled its way to the altar. Some made contact with it, touching its legs or tails, and then wiped its oil on their hair and faces. Soon other crickets entered and followed the first to the altar. The priestesses halted their chirping to lower their heads and arms, and knelt to assume the mating position."
Apparently, the priestesses fool the female crickets into thinking they are males, and tricking them into depositing their eggs. You will have to read this to believe it lol.

I have a small cactus and succulent garden, and one of my favorite cactus is the prickly pear, or nopal. Here's a part I loved:
"One of the few sites to break up the landscape were growths of the paddle cactus, a clustering plant with thick, juicy leaves that were spotted with prickly dots of sharp hairs and had edges lined by sharper spikes. At the top of the paddles was their round and intimidating red fruit. These were covered in patches of hairs that could break off and sink into human skin, resulting in a painful irritation or even death. [Remember that these humans are tiny, and the cacti are not.] Anand remembered eating pickles and preserves of cactus fruit in Dranveria, but only on special occasions, as they were expensive and dangerous to harvest."

The datura plant figures largely in this book, too. I know of one Facebook friend who tried it once, and more or less said she'd never do it again.
It's harvested, and used, for one thing, as ammunition in fighting and war. It's packed into eggshell skins, and dropped on soldiers from pilots on locusts, which incapacitates them.
"... After these were the Great patches of datura, that lovely but deadliest of plants, with its enormous Moonflowers and it's Thorn-covered fruit. The smell from the flowers reached his nose, which was pleasant at first and then made him faintly dizzy, then mildly ill. He was painfully reminded of the time he had wandered up to a datura, so taken with its massive blossoms that he crawled on its leaves to touch its bright white sepals that fused into a single tube. Sometime later, he remembered, he woke up ill and with blurred vision. For days, he was stuck in a waking daymare where he argued and wrestled and punched at a larger version of himself. During all of it, he endured an endless thirst and a constant need to piss that left him aching with a thousand inner itches he could never scratch."
And a battle scene of a villagers' army who have been "datura-fied":
"Polexima was stuck in the saddle, struggling to rise in it, when she heard a buzzing from overhead. 'Thank Cricket,' she said inside her breathing mask, then wiped sweat off her goggles. Eggshells fell and exploded, releasing fine powders. Soon, the ragged villagers' army was coughing, then seizing, then shouting, then weeping. They wandered in blindness, colliding and attacking each other, shouting at themselves and using their fists to bang their skulls until they fell on the ground to bang some more. Some were rolling around, violently wrestling with invisible partners, or each other. Others screamed at the heavens, then down at the ground as they tried to peel their own skin off with their nails or daggers. Some bumped around, screaming in panic from sudden deafness and hoping to hear their own voices as they tore at their ears. One man was licking the air, over and over, while another man stopped yanking out his own hair to yank out someone else's.
Daytura madness. May I never know this agony, polexima thought."

Just as they do in our own reality, different cultures worship different "gods." In this case, some Revere crickets, some Revere ants, some Revere other insects.. and their rituals are no less amusing than the ones from our own silly religions:
"... A few of the musicians with thicker clubs stood at upright drums of stitched human leather and began their somber beating. A choir entered, and dance-walked down the aisle to join the orchestra and commence the first of the ant Queen hymns, 'praise her odors,' followed by 'tireless is her womb.' "
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