Ashes of the Sun combines the scale and sweep of Wexler’s six-volume Shadow Campaigns series (The Thousand Names, The Shadow Throne, and sequels) with the creative and appealing worldbuilding weirdness of the Wells of Sorcery, a tight, intense focus on character, and a driving command of pace and tension. On purely technical grounds—prose, structure, pacing—this is Wexler’s best work yet. And it’s good that Wexler’s acknowledgements flags up his Star Wars influence here, because damn if he hasn’t drawn on the Jedi Order and the Old Republic and extended them to the logical (dystopian, fascist, fairly horrifying) conclusion.

In the middling-distant past of this world, there was a war between the “Chosen” and the ghouls. It seems clear that no one exactly won: Chosen and ghouls are both, apparently, gone from the world, and in the wake of that war humans have to deal with creatures known as plagueborn, which live and grow by consuming and assimilating other beings into themselves. In the Dawn Republic, the Twilight Order see themselves as the heirs of the Chosen. Their remit is to hunt down forbidden magic (dhak) and those who use or smuggle it (dhakim) and protect the Dawn Republic from the plagueborn, but the centarchs of the Twilight Order are the only ones who can use the Chosen’s magic (deiat) and have a monopoly on ancient technology, so their power is ultimately, accountable only to themselves.

Ashes of the Sun has two siblings for its protagonists: revolutionary Gyre, who wants to see the whole system burn, and will accept almost any cost if it means eventually holding repressive power to account; and Maya, taken into the Twilight Order as a child and raised to be part of the system that Gyre abhors, whose mentor has inculcated in her a respect for ordinary people and their problems unusual in her peers—and also a high respect for the necessity and honour of the Twilight Order.

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At eight years of age, Gyre tried to fight a centarch who was taking his five-year-old sister Maya away to train as one of them. The centarch injured Gyre badly in punishment, destroying the sight of one eye, and this made Gyre absolutely, furiously, certain that no one should have the power to do that on a whim. For him, the Twilight Order are the jackbooted enforcers of a system that prevents ordinary people from advancing on their own merits.

Twelve years after that fateful encounter, Gyre lives in the underground city of Deepfire, working with a crew of thieves and revolutionaries who want to overthrow the corrupt rule of the local dux, Raskos Rottentooth. On the side, he’s tracking down rumours of a ghoul cache, a place that might contain artefacts of sufficient power to challenge the Twilight Order and the Dawn Republic. When he meets Kit Doomseeker, a self-destructive and amoral adrenaline-junkie who claims to have found that cache—and who agrees to take him to it if he and the crew he works with pull off a complicated and difficult heist for her—his choices lead him to prioritise power over loyalty, and to make some startling discoveries. They also lead him into unexpectedly direct confrontation with his sister.

Maya’s mentor has kept her away from the politics of the Twilight Order. But with her mentor sent off on a dangerous solo mission, Maya’s assigned to work with others, and has to navigate the order’s political currents alone. Her latest mission brings her to Deepfire, where she uncovers shocking evidence of corruption and secrets concerning a leader of her order. Isolated, and with few allies other than Beq, a young alchemist with whom she enjoys a mutual attraction, she’s forced to confront her order and prove her worth through a potentially-fatal duel—and pursue a mentor who may have betrayed everything she brought Maya up to believe in.

Ashes of the Sun works on an epic scale. There’s layers of history, and magnificent cool shit, and corrupt systems of power that still contain honourable people doing their best. But as a story, its real weight is in the personal: Gyre’s choices and personal connections, including his—unmalicious, but nevertheless—betrayal of friends because he finds other things more important; Maya’s coming of age and her reckoning with her order as not completely the font of all righteousness that she wants to believe it is, and her slow, tentative, youthful beginnings of a romance with Beq despite all obstacles. These are compelling characters, with compelling journeys, and though Ashes of the Sun gives a satisfying conclusion, it’s clear that this is only the beginning of a larger story.

One that will almost certainly include revolution, because I’ve yet to read an epic fantasy by Django Wexler that’s not invested in changing old systems for better ones.

Ashes of the Sun has scale and pace, and tension and batshit cool scenery, and I enjoyed it a hell of lot. (It’s also queer as hell: that’s always a nice bonus.) And I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Ashes of the Sun is available from Orbit.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

The post A Personal Story With an Epic Scale: Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler appeared first on Reactor.

Like the best buddy pictures, Ryan Van Loan’s debut, The Sin in the Steel, finds all its heart in the space shared by its two wildly divergent protagonists, Buc and Eld. Brought together under unlikely circumstances, Buc is a young street kid with a mind and a mouth that race faster than anyone can keep up, and Eld is an ex-soldier that doesn’t say much. They’re known for getting the job done no matter the circumstances.

When this unlikely pair is bring their practice to the Shattered Coast—a Caribbean-esque archipelago newly settled, but once wracked by centuries of violent hurricanes—they’re soon hired (err, well… blackmailed) by the Kanados Trading Company to track down the infamous Widowmaker, who has been sinking ships along a popular sailing route, threatening the import and export of sugar, a vital element in the Shattered Coast’s economy. Buc and Eld depart on an adventure that will take them to the Shattered Coast’s farthest reaches to discover a secret that has the potential to challenge the fate of the gods themselves.

Immediately I was reminded of Scott Lynch’s razor-sharp voice in The Lies of Locke Lamora, but Van Loan quickly separates himself from Lynch through a refined narrative style that relies as much on action as it does on its genuinely amusing dialogue. There are consequences to every action, costs to all magic. When Buc pushes herself too hard, she falls, and Eld has to pick up the pieces. A gun fight leaves another character wounded and having to hobble around for chapters afterwards. How many times have you read a fantasy book where the heroes escape fight after fight unscathed but for bruises? Van Loan is not easy on his characters, and it pays off in the way the novel’s action scenes often leave a ripple effect for later chapters.

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The Sin in the Steel is a blazingly fast book, with a pace that literally never lets up, but Van Loan, with all the skill of a worldbuilder with a dozen books under their belt, sprinkles many little secrets and surprises about his world throughout the action. He hands out lots of little morsels to chew on, but then moves you along before you have time to swallow. Rather than feel frustrating, the way Van Loan does this leaves you eager to learn more, and also immensely satisfied when you start to the put all the little pieces together over the course of the book. Writing a book that simultaneously provides an in-your-face plot and a genuinely well-built out and unique world is no small feat, but Van Loan has pulled it off.

I won’t spoil the worldbuilding too much, but The Sin in the Steel features one of the most promising and unique blends of worldbuilding and magic systems I’ve seen outside of a Brandon Sanderson book. It’s nowhere near as technical as something like Mistborn, but Van Loan mixes science and magic in a way that’s so brilliant I wish I’d thought of it first. Read closely, and you’ll find a world that’s so much more than your average faux-medieval fare. As you get deeper into the story, Van Loan starts offering hints about the origins of the Gods, and the moment it all clicked, I was grinning like a fool. I like writer who take chances with their worldbuilding, and from Van Loan’s archipelago setting to his magic system and history, The Sin in the Steel is bold and reckless—but, just like Buc, it gets the job done anyway.

The Sin in the Steel isn’t all action, though. Van Loan, a former Sergeant in the United States Army Infantry who served on the front lines in Afghanistan, weaves his plot through a thoughtful and deeply personal examination of PTSD. Eld suffers from his time as a soldier in the war against the Burning Lands, haunted by his experience in the face of weapons of mass magical destruction. Buc conversely deals with what we’d consider ADHD or something similar, and self medicates with kan, the Shattered Coast version of cannabis. Together, they navigate these challenges by supporting each other—understanding what the other needs, and how to provide it. It’s a thoughtful examination of how damaged people can find new strength in each other.

Like the protagonists of the best buddy pictures, Buc and Eld impress when they’re given room to bounce off each other, leaving the reader breathless as they careen from one unlikely situation to the next. A book like The Sin in the Steel couldn’t succeed without major chemistry between its heroes, but Van Loan delivers a duo that you won’t soon forget, and who are so much stronger together than separate.

One of my big gripes with a lot of modern fantasy that incorporates grimdark elements is that characters often fall too far on the side of grim and dark, and the writers forget to create a genuine connection between them and the reader. The Sin in the Steel can be a very dark book, with a lot of violence and some truly awful characters, but Van Loan avoids falling into this trap by couching all of his characters’ conflicts in past tragedies and ongoing struggles. We understand why Buc is defensive and caustic, we know why Chan Sha postures, we get the reasons for Eld’s mistrust.

The Sin in the Steel is a rip-roaring epic fantasy that mixes a genuinely unique world with an equally standout magic system. It’s full of characters you’ll root for and despise, who’ll make your skin crawl, and who you’ll cheer on from the sidelines. Packed full of action, tempered by genuinely thoughtful themes about mental health and trust. The Sin in the Steel tells a good self-contained narrative, with a satisfying conclusion, but also leaves the door hanging wide open for the inevitable sequels. In the spirit of A New Hope, Buc and Eld conclude a story, but stand on a precipice of a much larger narrative that promises to blow the scope of The Sin in the Steel out of the water. If Scott Lynch wrote Pirates of the Caribbean, it’d be a lot like The Sin in the Steel.

The Sin in the Steel is available from Tor Books.

Aidan Moher is the Hugo Award-winning founder of A Dribble of Ink, author of “On the Phone with Goblins” and “The Penelope Qingdom”, and a regular contributor to Tor.com and the Barnes & Noble SF&F Blog. Aidan lives on Vancouver Island with his wife and daughter, but you can most easily find him on Twitter @adribbleofink and Patreon.

The post Blazing High Seas Adventure: The Sin in the Steel by Ryan Van Loan appeared first on Reactor.

Video essayist Lindsay Ellis’ first novel, Axiom’s End, is every bit as cinematic and action-packed as her viewers and fans might expect. Set in 2007, it follows Cora as she grapples with her own first contact—an alien she calls Ampersand—and with what it means to not be alone in the universe. As Ampersand’s only translator, Cora is poised to learn more about alien life and history than any other human before her. With her father’s conspiracies breathing down her neck, however, she has to face the question: who among humanity can she trust with this dangerous new knowledge? Certainly not the government—or her loved ones—that have been lying all along.

When I say Axiom’s End is cinematic, it’s not just because I associate the first contact genre more with film than I do novels (though that’s certainly part of it)—it’s also fast-paced, visual, and satisfyingly trope-y. Ellis knows how to make tropes—from protagonists befriending their alien counterparts to dogs (almost) dying to raise stakes in the first real action scene—effective without ever feeling cold or methodical. Besides being thrilling and readable, there’s real heart to the novel, and that more than anything is its sticking point. You can’t help but be invested in Cora and Ampersand’s awkward, blossoming relationship. In fact, rooting for them in all their strangeness and prickliness (even if you don’t relate to them very much) gets to the center of the whole project.

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The novel is, after all, about estrangement—not just between humanity and alien races, but between humans and other humans. Cora’s relationship with her father is present in every moment of the novel, even when Nils isn’t directly named. Excerpts from his blog even intersperse the chapters—the reader can’t forget about him and neither can Cora. Their goals are in conflict despite them never interacting and even (presumably) without Nils ever knowing. There’s a real sense of loss and grief that comes from this, of what might-have-been and what might-be-impossible. Ampersand acts a stand-in for Nils—providing comfort and companionship for Cora where before she had been alone, and even grappling with the questions of transparency and responsibility that Nils constantly elides. It’s lovely to witness, even when you’re not sure you can trust Ampersand—and isn’t that just a fundamental truth about building any kind of relationship?

Because of this relationship, I thought often while reading Axiom’s End of Leah Thomas’ YA novel When Light Left Us. Thomas’ novel—about a family dealing with the aftermath of an alien encounter—harkens from the same sub-genre, though its sub-sub-genre (child contact versus thriller) makes for a very different tone. That said, the books are fascinating to hold side-by-side. They both deal with recovering from the loss of a father and with learning how to form trusting relationships in his absence. They both look specifically at the role of language—its imperfections, its limitations—in making those connections. Their similarities made me wonder: what is inherent to this sub-genre that would attract this kind of reading of loss, loneliness, and connection? The inherent barriers of language and culture are certainly part of it, though I think it gets to something more fundamental than that: the sense that the universe is so much bigger than us pervades first contact stories, so where better to explore our own personal estrangement? What does it mean to be alone or together in a world so vast?

Despite what I found to be quite deft and graceful themes like the ones I’ve discussed here, the novel is clumsy in places. I experienced many instances of “well, that’s convenient”—such as Cora constantly happening upon key events, or her being able to crawl through a building’s vent system on a dime (yes, I know it’s a trope, don’t @ me). It’s easy most of the time to suspend disbelief due to the intense pace of the action and narrative (for instance, I didn’t bat an eye at characters delivering exposition—and boy are they forthcoming!), but every once in a while, my incredulity conflicted with what is otherwise a pretty emotionally real tone.

Overall, though, Axiom’s End is a delight—insightful, humane and engaging, even in its imperfections. Its setting alone—pre-Obama and pre-Tea Party, a moment when hope and cynicism were basically mud-wrestling—sets a mood of distrust and malaise, and invites readers to reflect on alternative aftermaths to recent history. (And then of course—minor spoiler—it must have been awfully satisfying to write George W. Bush’s resignation!) The choice was inspired on Ellis’ part. I will happily pick up another of her novels, sequel or otherwise.

Axiom’s End is available from St Martin’s Press.

Em Nordling reads and writes in Louisville, KY.

The post How Not To Be Alone in the Universe: Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis appeared first on Reactor.

Bethel is a land governed by a strict, fundamentalist religion. The Prophet rules the people and his Apostles enforce his will. The citizens in this rigid, harsh society worship a brutal god, one of fire and punishments and retribution. Anyone who acts against the will of the state or in defiance of tradition are declared witches and blasphemers and burned at the stake. Before she was even born, a dark skinned man from the Outskirts of Bethel, was executed by the Prophet. Her mother, young, pregnant, and desperate for vengeance, fled into the Darkwood and made a deal that cost her everything.

Seventeen years later Immanuelle, the daughter of the witch and the blasphemer, carries the burden of her parents’ sins. Rejected by most of the Bethelens and unable to live up to her family’s expectations, she feels lost. But a frightening incident in the Darkwood changes everything. A deadly curse takes hold and Bethel is wracked by plagues…and Immanuelle is the key to everything. With her dead mother’s secret journal guiding her and the Prophet’s handsome heir at her side, she will face the worst of humanity and battle the darkest magic.

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For a dark fantasy like The Year of the Witching, setting is just as important as character and plot. Locations make manifest the existential horrors the characters experience. It’s a good thing, then, that Alexis Henderson is so damn good at it. The Darkwood haunts Immanuelle like a monster lurking in the shadows, and the scenes where she explores it are as creepy as any good horror story. Bethel, too, is just as vivid. Rotten with puritanical ideology and patriarchal prejudice, it unsettles as much as the Darkwood. Bethel’s religion is built on the belief in the Father, a god of fire and brimstone. His cathedral is an expanse of cold stone and sharp glass. In the Outskirts, they still worship the Mother, the goddess of witchcraft and the moon, and Henderson contrasts their church as one made of warm wood and earth. It’s impressive work that reels you in.

Much has been made of the story’s feminism, but little on its intersectionality. Immanuelle is not looked down on by her community solely because she is a woman or is genetically kin to the dark skinned people of the Outskirts; she is looked down upon because she is both. She exists at the intersection of dual oppressions, one based on gender the other on skin color. The social hierarchies forged by sexism and racism trap her at the bottom. Not even her relationships with the Prophet and his Heir can pull up her rank; white supremacy and the patriarchy made sure of that.

Yet because Immanuelle is also biracial and lighter skinned than her Outskirt relations, she also exists in a state of comparative privilege. She lacks privilege in all-white Bethel, but she suddenly has it when she enters the all-Black Outskirts. In Bethel she is the token Black person who must bear the weight of representing an entire people, especially when she does something the white people don’t like. To them, her father’s Blackness has corrupted her femininity as much as her mother’s rebellion. It is a strange place to be, even more so as a young person already struggling with trying to find her place in a hostile world. I am a light skinned biracial Black woman who has lived and worked in predominantly white spaces for most of my life. While Henderson left much of Immanuelle’s biracial experience as subtext, readers like me will pick up on the nuances.

Unfortunately, the book’s ending doesn’t quite live up to everything that precedes it. Henderson lets certain characters off the hook and doesn’t demand as much from others as she needed to. I wish she had pushed Immanuelle a little harder instead of falling back on debating the difference between doing what is right and what is just. The fizzle of the climax puts a dent in Henderson’s fiercely feminist message, but not one big enough to kill the thrill of the story.

Full of blood and bigotry, The Year of the Witching is a chilling twist on stories about religious extremism and occultism. What’s not to love in a book where dangerous witches, cruel men, and oppressive religious zealotry collide, and the outcast girl who must sacrifice everything to stop them? With a keen eye and a sharp tongue, Henderson breathes new life into an old trope. Alexis Henderson is a fresh new voice in dark fantasy, and I look forward to hearing more from her.

The Year of the Witching is available from Ace Books.
Read an excerpt here.

Alex Brown is a teen services librarian by day, local historian by night, author and writer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her on Twitter and Insta, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

The post “Blood. Blight. Darkness. Slaughter.”: The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson appeared first on Reactor.

Set in an alternate 1940s New York, Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Trouble the Saints interweaves history and unreality, the atmosphere of noir and the magic of fantasy, to form a moving, literary love story. It’s anything but a traditional love story, though. The love in its pages is romantic, familial, platonic, and generational—it is beautiful and it is painful in the way only beautiful things can be. And it is troubled at every turn by the consequences of racism: grief and trauma, fear and twisted desire, survival and community. The love in Trouble the Saints is bound up in a world and in a history that does everything it can to suppress it.

I should say first that I am not Black and can only bring my own perspective to my coverage of this novel. I am therefore not going to attempt to speak to the emotional realities of racial trauma, passing, or intracommunity conflict as portrayed in the book—they’re outside of my personal experience and I recommend you seek out reviews by BIPOC for better insight on those topics! Instead this review will focus on the novel’s themes, and the way that Johnson’s graceful structure and character-building lend themselves to those themes.

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Trouble the Saints is told in three parts and by three characters: the just and calculating Phyllis—passing for white and aware at every moment that her survival hinges on it; the kind and steady Dev—a police spy made sick with moral ambiguity; and the sweet and glamorous Tamara—a dancer kept innocent by the violence of others. Don’t let the novel’s three parts fool you into thinking it follows a three-act narrative arc, however: the novel’s first part resolves what readers will anticipate is the crux of the story—Phyllis’ relationship not only with her mob boss but with Dev. The rest is all consequence and fallout, echoing with the reverberations of trauma—personal, generational, and intracommunity alike. With traumas revealed obliquely instead of as climactic revelations, this story structure—and the story in itself—shifts traditional plot arcs while shedding light on the non-linearity of healing.

Trauma, though, is less at the heart of the novel than love. Phyllis and Dev are very much a “second chance” romance—and their desire and chemistry are palpable both before and after their reunion. Johnson writes sex and longing without ever substituting one for the other, with scenes as steamy as they are fraught with emotion. Deep friendships, familial relationships, and even acquaintanceships are described with no less nuance and care: Tamara describes her love for Phyllis and Dev as “a blood love, a bone love, and it ricocheted off of her other loves at unexpected angles.” Dev tends to his mother’s roses. Phyllis loves her young nephew despite his religious judgement of her gifts. And each of the three main characters struggle with the ethics of providing care and support for others, at risk of safety and reputation. At the center of these relationships is the classic “us” versus “I” conflict—from Phyllis’ willingness to give up her past life of brutality for Dev, to the many instances of complicity in racial violence in the name of security.

The intensity of Johnson’s portrayal of love and sacrifice make the novel’s perspective on racism all the more effective. Hatred is not portrayed here as an easy, static thing, nor is it presented as desire’s opposite. Instead we see racism at its most violent and its most banal, as something embodied and something that can morph white desire for the Black body into fear and disgust. We see communities turned against one another in a fight for survival. We see the insidiousness of internalized self-hate, the literal magic passed down by ancestors mutated into something ugly and self-destructive. It would be easy therefore to say that Johnson writes hate as well as she writes love, but I think the poignancy of the novel is in the complexity of their interplay. After all, we see too the pain present in the very acts of love that create joy and goodness within the novel—the weight of expectation, the unknowability of the other, the moral judgement at the center of justice. Love, in Johnson’s world, is not tempered by racial trauma, but transformed by it. But love too, is transformational—and that is ultimately more powerful.

This review and analysis do more service to Johnson’s themes and literary project than they do to her prose or her story. In the case of the latter: the fewer spoilers, the better; it’s a crime story after all, for all that I’ve talked about love and hate. In the case of the former: the prose in this novel will pull you in even when the story moves slowly. And it does move slowly, missing traditional story beats in favor of a narrative that unravels with the logic and fluidity of a poem. It’s worth every turn of phrase.

Trouble the Saints is just plain gorgeous. It is gritty and violent and achingly real, but stitched through with fantasy. It is bittersweet and affective, but subtle and sneaking in its emotionality. But above all: how nice to be drawn into a story so bursting at the seams with love in all its beauty and terror.

Trouble the Saints is available from Tor Books.
Read an excerpt here.

Em Nordling reads and writes in Louisville, KY.

The post Finding Love and Finding Trouble in Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson appeared first on Reactor.

16 year old Sarah’s father has hired a Russian blue dragon to help clear some fields, but only because he is desperate. He doesn’t trust the dragon, Kazimir, who seems to know much more than he should, and has taken an interest in Sarah’s safety. Sarah is a ‘pivot’ in a grand plan and without her, Kazimir is certain the world will end. Blue dragons, known for their scholarly ways believe in a prophecy that (while exasperatingly confusing) has lead Kazimir to Sarah’s farm. Sarah herself, as Kazimir tells her, is not special in any way—she is just someone in the right place, at the right time. It’s ‘not you in particular’, says Kazimir, ‘…but this time. This place.[…] This exact time. This exact place. And a girl.’ And so Kazimir is interested in Sarah from the very start, something she does not understand at first, as grateful as she is for his protection on a number of occasions.

She isn’t meant to talk to the dragon though; isn’t meant to engage with him, or even tell him her name, as per her father’s strict instructions. It is said that dragons don’t have a soul. It is said they aren’t to be trusted. But then all sorts of things are said about Sarah and about Jason, too.

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Sarah’s father is white, and her late mother was black. Jason’s mother, too, has died, but in a camp in Idaho, where his parents (both US citizens) had been sent to as potential enemy collaborators by sheer dint of their Japanese heritage. Both Sarah and Jason ‘effectively invisible’ at school, existing on the peripheries. But they’ve both experienced enough racism to know what small town mentality is like, particularly from the town’s deputy sheriff. Deputy Kelby is a right nasty piece of work, and stands for everything wrong in America back then (but also everything wrong in America now). Xenophobic, racist, sexist and bigoted, he doesn’t hold back from making Sarah and Jason’s lives miserable. His interactions with Kazimir are funny, though, not in the least because he insists on treating the dragon as if he is subordinate. Kazimir, of course, rises well above the nonsense of human classifications. ‘You a Communist, claw?’ asks Kelby, to which Kazimir only replies, ‘I am a dragon’.

Dragons exist, just as Chevron gas stations exist, just as diners and farming and Russian satellites and the World Wars exits. But while dragons mostly stay away from human wars, keeping themselves out of politics and violence, they do on occasion hire their services out, where their brute strength and fire power help them do things like clear fields in record time. They are both incredibly magical, and also an accepted part of reality:

‘How could such a creature even really exist? How could they not just be a magical fantasy? If they hadn’t always been there, no one would have believed in them.’

Some humans believe more than others, though, including a cult simply called the Believers, that began two hundred years ago in BC and Alberta to ‘worship dragons’. It is ‘insular and so surprisingly antihuman—despite being exclusively human in membership.’ Dragons themselves have nothing to do with the Believers, and keep largely to themselves, and that is the ‘great joke of it all …—even when Believers were committing crimes on their behalf—the dragons seemed to ignore them as much as they ignored everyone else these days, which was to say, almost completely.’

It is in this cult that young Malcom is raised in, his faith in its methods and prophecies utterly unshakable…until he befriends and then falls for a young Guatemalan Canadian man called Nelson who has run away from home, and so for Nelson, feels a love greater than what he’s known in his life spent worshiping dragons. With Malcom, Nelson too becomes caught up in the race to fulfil the prophecy, as two FBI agents chase them down.

Sarah, Jason, Malcom, Nelson. When the lives of these young people collide with Kazimir’s, everything changes—not just for them, and not just for the world they know.

Multiple award winning writer Patrick Ness always delivers, and never, ever holds back in doing what he wants—like throwing dragons into a mix. Burn, is a fast paced thriller with a complex plot and filmic visuals that never loses sway over the reader. His characters may be in the ’in the hands of goddesses & madmen,’ but his readers are in for a deftly written and (as always), thought provoking ride.

Burn is available from Quill Tree Books.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and appropriately lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories and interviews writers for the Tor.com podcast Midnight in Karachi when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

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At the outset, Survivor Song gives us a glimpse into a tragically familiar tableau: the United States in the midst of a pandemic—a highly contagious variation of the rabies virus, passed through saliva, with a near 100% fatality rate due to its rapid onset. There are government-mandated curfews, a food shortage, and strict shelter-in-place laws. We see all this through the eyes of the very pregnant Natalie, just outside of Boston, as she faces an even more familiar struggle: parsing conflicting information in the form of social media posts, radio interviews, and byzantine government statements, trying to figure out what exactly she needs to do to keep her unborn child and husband safe.

But she never gets the chance. An infected man bullies his way into her home, kills her husband Paul, and attacks her. A single bite to Natalie’s forearm is the locus out of which the entire song spins. Natalie seeks help from her longtime friend and doctor, Ramola, and, like an epic poem, the pair embark on a zigzagging journey to get Natalie treatment for her wound and a place to safely deliver her baby.

Ramola (lovingly called Rams) is the Sam to Natalie’s (Nats) Frodo. She is level-headed, ever practical, and a fierce protector, willing to go to any lengths to ensure Nats’ safety. In fact, it’s the grounded Ramola who makes sure this story does not become a fairy tale. From the start, she will not abide the magical thinking that can bloom in a world facing an unanticipated cataclysm like a pandemic. She uses logic and linear thinking—a whiteboard in her mind—to tackle the chaos around her. And, when the word “zombie” enters the narrative, she eschews it. As Natalie makes real-time voice recordings to her unborn child, she teases, “Can you hear Auntie Rams tsking me each time I say ‘zombie’?” But even as Nats pokes fun at her, Ramola’s disapproval makes her concede the truth of her own mortality, the truth her magical thinking protects her from: “Dead is dead. There’s no coming back…it’s easier to say zombie than ‘a person infected with a super rabies virus and no longer capable of making good decisions.”

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Ironically, we can see that Ramola is imaginative, perhaps more so than Nats. Throughout this ballad of survival, she vividly describes daydreams of returning home to her native England (though she asserts it’ll never happen), and, as they pass a dead fox on the road, even recounts her favorite Grimm’s fairy tale, The Marriage of Mrs. Fox. She wishes she could carry the beautiful creature into the forest, lay it to rest at the base of a tree, and cover it with leaves and pine needles. Part of her wants to transport it elsewhere, to where there is no sickness.” But, just as she begins floating into this daydream, to escape the harshness of her circumstances, and the totally screwed-up world at large, she sharply pulls herself back to real life, and the reader with her.

Tremblay threads referential language and a meta-ballad through Survivor Song, too. Nats (hilariously) sings “Zombie” by The Cranberries, states how much she loathes Children of Men, shouts “Witness me!” in homage to Mad Max: Fury Road. Along with all of this, Rams and Nats cross paths with teenagers Luis and Josh who, quite literally, help them along their journey as they hitch rides on the boys’ bikes. With a youthful naivete, the boys live-narrate unfolding events as the plot of a zombie apocalypse—”this is the part in the zombie movie where the heroes team up with the randos”—much to the annoyance of Sam-like Rams.

By having Ramola remind us time and time again that the infected are not zombies, Tremblay forces us to reckon with the truth that this horror is not supernatural and not beyond the scope of our reality. And, by referencing the meta narrative of a zombie apocalypse, by making references to our own zeitgeist, he imparts the most frightening truth of all: this is not the horror of any possible future in a world that mirrors our own, it is the horror of a possible future in our very own world.

Why does Survivor Song work so hard to keep the reader firmly in the existential terror of the here and now? Is it to scare the shit out of us? It does that, sure. But, no, it’s not horror for horror’s sake, torture porn, an apocalypse narrative. Survivor Song actually gives us a solution, and a wonderfully simple one: refusing the lies we tell ourselves because we think they’re helping us survive, when they’re only isolating us from the gifts of others.

Ramola tells us she isn’t a religious person, and that “her faith is placed within the fragile hands of humanity’s capacity for kindness and service.” And, throughout Survivor Song, we see the other characters—the “randos” as Luis and Josh called them—exhibit selflessness of such enormity that it brought this reader to tears. And that’s what Survivor Song can teach us: instead of indulging or fighting our own magical thinking, our suspicion, and our basest instincts in the search for conspiracies and big lies, we accept our imperfections, our darkness…and exist with them. As Nats says to her unborn child, “You can’t always be nice. No one can…but that’s what people do, we prepare for the worst and think our worst but then we try our best.”

This is not a fairy tale. This is a song.

Survivor Song is available from William Morrow.

Lauren Jackson (LJ) is the marketing/publicity manager at Saga Press and Gallery Books. Her primary areas of interest are true crime, horror, Star Trek, and making spreadsheets. Her sun is in Scorpio with a rising sign in Libra and a moon in Gemini, for which she is seeking professional help. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @alsoknownaslj, or on Hinge if your filters are right.

The post Singing Our Own Tunes: Survivor Song by Paul Tremblay appeared first on Reactor.

It’s been, after all, an anxious kind of year.

Let me begin with a small excursus upon Alexander, whose youth—and whose months-long falling out with his father, Philip of Macedon, over what would be Philip’s final marriage, in the year before Alexander’s accession to the kingship—is the acknowledged inspiration from which Elliott brings us Unconquerable Sun.

The life of Alexander the Great is fertile ground for science fiction and fantasy stories. A young man—and Alexander is one of those historical figures who never outlives his youth: for him there is no settled maturity, no peak of satisfaction, no calm middle-age or decline into twilight years—inheriting a strong kingdom from a vigorous king at the height of his power. Already a respected military leader, he came into his kingdom (possibly through acquiescence in the assassination of Philip) before his strife with his father could blight his prospects or bloom into civil war: acclaimed king at the age of twenty by the nobility and military assembled to celebrate his sister’s wedding, he rapidly consolidated his power and proceeded to spend the next thirteen years of his life in constant warfare. His goal was, it seems, to conquer the known world: an ambition befitting a man who may have thought himself the son of a god—and not an ambition that could ever have realistically been satisfied.

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In Unconquerable Sun, the eponymous Sun is our Alexander: daughter of Eirene, queen-marshal of the Republic of Chaonia, and already a talented military leader with a track record of victory in the ongoing war with the Phene Empire, her position as Eirene’s heir is threatened when her mother marries a much younger—and wholly Chaonian—noblewoman, from the Lee family. Sun’s father is a prince of the Gatoi, a people held as barbarians who frequently fight for the Phene as mercenaries, and Eirene’s marriage may pave the way to see Sun disinherited—especially as one of Sun’s official Companions is assassinated. His replacement, at the behest of the Lee family, is his twin sister, Persephone Lee.

Perse entered a military academy under an assumed identity at age sixteen in order to get away from her family’s machinations. Five years later, her family pluck her out to be an expendable placeholder in their schemes. Perse is stubborn and canny, and holds most of her family in strong dislike: though Sun doesn’t trust her (and though Perse finds Sun a touch on the abrasive side) Perse would much rather help Sun thrive than see her family manipulate their way into more influence and control. Especially since part of their plan seems to involve assassinating Sun and possibly including Perse as collateral damage.

Meanwhile, other factions, including Sun’s father, are working on their own agendas, with their own priorities, that include the Chaonian succession and the war with the Phene. Elliott builds tension and revelation, counterpointing each to each with something of the rhythm of a thriller: deftly balancing the pace to bring us a compelling coming-of-age in a universe where the SFnal equivalent of reality television and social media has as much importance to politics as military might and dynastic connections. (If Elliott were more interested in hardware, and less in the—far more interesting, by my lights—people and society, it would be possible to consider Unconquerable Sun military SF. But space opera is so much more fun.)

There are three main viewpoint characters in Unconquerable Sun: Sun herself, Persephone, and Apama, a Phene pilot who gives us more of a view on the wider sphere than the Chaonian characters alone would allow. While Sun and Apama’s parts of the narrative are recounted from a third-person viewpoint, Perse is her own narrator. Though switching between “I” and “she” is a little jarring at first, the voices of the characters are sufficiently distinct that it soon becomes part of the novel’s delight. These are compelling characters, even if Sun, like her inspiration, isn’t exactly either restful or forgiving.

Sun, like Alexander, has a Hephaestion: hers is Hetty, her agemate and most trusted companion. This is a setting where queerness is normal (and where rulers may have multiple consorts at once, much as in the Hellenistic Mediterranean), so Hetty and Sun’s relationship includes a sexual element. Perse has her own potentially-burgeoning romance with a Gatoi soldier, but in each case, romance is intimately entangled with politics and more often, takes a back seat to the rest of the action.

There is a lot in this book: I’ve hardly touched on high-octane action scenes and acts of daring, rousing speeches, and cool shit that it contains. I’m kind of deliriously happy with its existence, and incoherently enthusiastic about how—simultaneously—seriously and playfully it uses its influences, and how vivid and engaging it makes its world. It is, in a word, fun. Also very good.

I want to sing its praises only slightly less than I want to read more of Sun and Perse and Apama’s stories. And I desperately want to read more of their stories.

Unconquerable Sun is available from Tor Books.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

The post Space Opera With the Rhythm of a Thriller: Kate Elliott’s Unconquerable Sun appeared first on Reactor.

The arc itself starts slowly, with Taako, Merle, and Magnus bumbling through exposition and item acquisition, and builds into a crescendo when they get on literal track to apprehend this volume’s villain. The Raven—elusive, hyper-competent petty thief—is in over her head when she starts to use the Gaia Sash on Goldcliff’s (already technically illegal) battle wagon race tracks. But her heart is still laid bare in the form of her racing partner Hurley, who will believe in her through thick and through thin, through vengeful gangs and giant octopi. Our heroes join Hurley in trying to prove the Raven’s goodness—through the tried and true method of defeating her in a splendiferous fantasy race battle.

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Pietsch and the McElroys have taken full advantage of the adaptation process here—not just in the visual jokes and emotive facial expressions, though those remain a delight—but also by making marked improvements to the actual text of the story. The pacing of this arc is much refined, and foreshadowing and characterization that were impossible in the heat of gameplay have been added to make the narrative feel more cohesive and intentional. The biggest change, though, is to Sloane and Hurley, whose relationship is rendered in so much more detail and depth than audio could allow. The podcast’s misstep into the “bury your gays” trope is unraveled as well—something that originally happens much later in the story, but which has been smartly rearranged to give us a much-needed happy ending for these sweet, tender lesbians.

Petals to the Metal’s less tragic ending is part of a larger overhaul as well, which is that the comic starts to weave in some of TAZ’s ultimate themes much earlier. Its last pages offer readers hope, kindness, and community—things we can all use a bit of in 2020, and things which will also grow in resonance and relevance as the comic series advances. The Red Robe’s monologue on the nature of man, “the want, the… Hunger” is—while certainly less cheerful—similarly a touch of foreshadowing to both plot and overall message, present in the original but emphasized here by the subsequent conversation with the Director. I have to imagine this will be a welcome addition for new readers, and as an old fan of the podcast, it just makes me emotional. This comic’s going to break my heart and put it back together all over again, isn’t it?

All of this being said, the original run of Petals to the Metal was already the first real foray into the meat of the story, and this remains true of the comic. More questions begin to bubble up—and more importantly be denied by our mysterious Director—and we see the Hunger for the first time (illustrated by Pietsch so effectively it gave me chills). The narrative (which is to say Griffin) starts forcing Tres Horny Boys to treat NPCs—if not more seriously—more humanely, and to doubt the information they’re being fed. The goofs will certainly remain in subsequent volumes—but they will be accompanied by so much more darkness, mystery, and heart than their predecessors!

It should go without saying that the artwork and comedic style of the comics remain consistent, which is to say perfect. Pietsch hides so many tiny visual jokes throughout her panels, you’ll never want for a laugh on any given page. Not to mention the race at the center of the arc is fun as hell, packed with gags and action alike. Add to all this the first appearance of much-beloved characters like Steven the fish and Garyl the binicorn, and you truly have a recipe for success. 

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal is a treat. A silly, gay, gorgeously illustrated treat. Read it, love it, and savor these last moments of tomfoolery before Griffin McElroy learns how to make you cry.

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal is available from First Second.

Em Nordling reads and writes in Louisville, KY. They are also a level 3 halfling wizard named Linus.

The post The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal Races Into the Plot appeared first on Reactor.

While The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky both traced Elma’s paths from Earth to the Moon and then to Mars, Kowal has expanded the scope of her series by focusing on a new “astronette” for the third installment: ambitious, brilliant senator’s wife and WASP pilot Nicole Wargin, whose adventure on the lunar colony in The Relentless Moon runs parallel to the events of The Fated Sky. In doing so, Kowal reminds readers that humanity has a long way to go to settle the Moon, and that no two Lady Astronauts are alike.

At the same time that Elma is on a history-making three-year mission to Mars, her dear friend and fellow astronette Nicole grapples with present unrest on Earth. It’s been over a decade since the Meteor wiped out most of the Eastern Seaboard, transplanting the seat of government to Kansas City—where Nicole’s husband Kenneth is senator—and refocusing the world’s priority to escaping the increasing effects of climate change. But while the International Aerospace Coalition (IAC) works to establish and expand the lunar colony with new influxes of civilians and astronauts, the growing Earth First movement resists the narrative of leaving their planet… especially because it is clear that not every single human can afford (money- or health-wise) to go to the stars.

While past Lady Astronaut novels have explored the political challenges of resettling the human race, The Relentless Moon best embodies these obstacles in the tenacious Nicole, who would rather be showing people how to float-walk in zero-G but instead squeezes herself into high heels and grounds herself with Earth’s gravity in order to meet her peers where they’re at. Despite having the cachet and her own minor celebrity of being in the first class of Lady Astronauts, that aspect of her identity mostly makes her an oddity to the people in her Earth social circles. They can better stomach her when she’s Mrs. Kenneth Wargin, with her flattering laugh and undying support for her senator husband’s ambitions for the presidency. Seemingly the only characteristic that carries over between her two lives is her penchant for striking red lipstick-as-armor.

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The IAC’s semi-regular Moon missions, the next one of which Nicole is on, suffer setbacks in the form of increasingly suspicious accidents that further weaken public support of the IAC’s colonization plan. Paired with growing opposition and riots from Earth Firsters, it is a politically fraught atmosphere in which Nicole is planning to leave her husband behind for her next mission. Yet none of that will deter her from going to where she is at her best, both as a public figure and a pilot—even if higher-ups in the IAC are starting to murmur behind her back about the fifty-something astronette being “old hat,” and even if they aren’t giving her as many opportunities to prove herself as her younger, male colleagues.

A reader will likely empathize with Nicole’s impatience to get to the Moon already. The first third of the novel proceeds at a frustratingly slow pace, setting up the necessary conflict on Earth as well as the idiosyncracies of lunar living, albeit sometimes repetitively. It’s not until Nicole and her team are settled on the Moon, with a few hiccups, that the book’s action truly picks up—with sabotage. Leaving Earth doesn’t mean that you leave its problems behind.

Because what is at the heart of each Lady Astronaut story is the concept of distance and disconnection: between Earth and the Moon, or the Moon and Mars. When mysteriously-timed blackouts chip away at the colony’s calm, and a single incident of supposed food poisoning transforms into something much more sinister, what truly amps up the astronauts’ anxiety is the fact that they have to solve these issues on their own. Mission Control and their loved ones are just faraway voices with a 1.3-second delay, and they are still living (albeit with church services and bridge club) on a rock that could kill them in instants if their oxygen gets knocked out.

Part of the story’s slow pace is due to Nicole herself, a vexing (in the best way) enigma of a protagonist. While the in-universe news reports at the start of each chapter document the increasing tension on Earth, so much of the early scenes are filled with the same empty chatter without much action—because we’re witnessing them through the eyes of Nicole-the-politician’s-wife, who can only watch as her husband tries to manage the Earth First threat. Even after she’s back on the Moon, facing the potent cocktail of sexism and ageism from the IAC, she retains much of this making-nice persona—stubbornly digging her booted heels in, killing them with kindness. For someone so eager and accommodating to show off her various facets, Mrs. Wargin actually plays things very close to the chest.

The reward of reading, then, is sticking with Nicole until she unclenches enough to reveal the parts of herself that are not immediately apparent: the anorexia that lets her squeeze into gala gowns and exert control when so much agency is taken from her, that becomes unintentional self-sabotage just as the colony’s glitches shift from inconvenience to true danger. But as things get increasingly personal, Nicole also reveals another facet of herself, answering some questions of how she is so good with people, and it is spectacular.

Although it is physically impossible for Elma to be in the novel, bound as she is for Mars, her presence is keenly felt through glimpses of correspondence between her and her husband Nathaniel, waiting patiently on Earth for the years she’ll be gone. Their tender dynamic, the beating heart of the prior books, inspires Nicole and Kenneth on how to cope with their own long-distance relationship.

Yet the Wargins only work as well as they do because theirs is already a reassuring partnership of equals, especially for the time and for his position. Each anticipates the other’s needs, whether it’s a surprise Caesar salad (the ultimate declaration of love) or saying the right thing at the right party. If anything, their greatest source of tension—their future home—feels at times under-explored. Nicole clearly lives for her Moon stays, while Kenneth is gearing up to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. Even though the plan is to get as many Americans as possible to a new home off Earth, he has his reasons for staying on terra firma. This potentially marriage-altering dilemma gets a bit lost as the lunar sabotage ramps up.

On the Moon, Lady Astronaut Myrtle Lindholm and her husband Eugene see their own marriage tested: she with the daily dangers of investigating terrorist attacks on their home, he in struggling to rally the colonists and astronauts under the authority of a Black man. While the Lindholms seem to start the novel as merely supporting characters, Nicole’s crises create the space to bring them to the forefront as competent, courageous leaders. Really, every relationship in this series is impressively equipped to navigate an asteroid field of personal and professional barrages and come out the other side.

That’s the triumph of the Lady Astronaut books: exploring the dissonance of space travel, but also delighting in the moments of connection. The stories are strongest when they’re about two individuals, or two groups of humans, overcoming the expanse between them and working together toward some (physical or figurative) common ground.

The Relentless Moon is available from Tor Books.
Read an excerpt here.

Natalie Zutter is a playwright and pop culture critic, and a regular contributor to Tor.com, Den of Geek, and Read It Forward. Talk alternate histories with her on Twitter!

The post Lunar Self-Sabotage: The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal appeared first on Reactor.

In T.J. Klune’s The Extraordinaries, queer superpowers don’t have to be a metaphor anymore. Klune gives us an entirely queer central cast, with no homophobia save for a few awkward comments from a generally well-meaning father. Here, queer love and desire gets to breathe on the page. Klune not only explores teen queerness in its most awkward, nerdy, fanfic-inspired throes, but interrogates the queer celebrity infatuation, the crush on the hot popular kid—the dissonance between idolization and authentic, genuine attraction. And from it comes a queer romance that’s as tender as it is magic.

Nick Bell loves Nova City’s Extraordinaries. Well, he loves the superhero, Shadow Star, not his archnemesis, the evil Pyro Storm. Nick really loves Shadow Star…as in, he’s in the middle of writing an enormous, multi-chapter RPF (real person fiction) fic featuring Shadow Star and Original Male Character Nate Belen who is definitely not completely a self-insert. It’s the most popular fic in the fandom, and the closest Nick will ever get to meeting the superpowered guy who’s totally destined to be his soulmate—or so he thinks. 

One afternoon, Nick and his friend Gibby are about to get mugged, and Shadow Star saves them. More smitten than ever, especially when Shadow Star somehow knows his name, Nick decides that the best love interest for a superhero is another superhero, and thus begins his scheme to become Extraordinary himself.

That’s a pretty extreme move, but it’s not all about Shadow Star. Nick’s mother died a few years ago, and Nick’s dad is a cop. Nick figures, if he becomes Extraordinary, he can protect his father. He’s spent his life feeling insecure, but if he becomes Extraordinary, he’ll be someone else—someone who’s not a disappointment. He’ll be a hero and he’ll save the ones he loves.

So when an opportunity emerges to do just that, Nick nearly leaps at it—and discovers several very large secrets about Extraordinaries, the narratives of good and evil, and even his own heart. 

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There’s so much to love about this novel. Nick’s voice is energetic and distinct. He’s still processing  his grief, and it influences his choices every day in a way that feels completely real and relatable for me. I love how much he cries—especially when he checks himself for not being masculine enough, then checks himself again, shakes that off, and lets himself cry. He hugs his father, and his father hugs him back, and they take care of each other. 

Nick’s personal experience with ADHD and how it affects his life, from the pills he takes to his interactions with loved ones, homework, and fandom, feels very full and honest. When he feels like he’s “too much,” his best friends and family don’t let him forget that they love him, for his hyperfixations and his mile-a-minute mouth and everything that makes him who he is—especially his best friend, Seth. His queer found family serves as the beautiful core of this novel, and it’s so refreshing to see an established f/f relationship alongside emerging m/m desire. 

As much as there’s fun antics, explosions, and plenty of wrenching twists, my favorite part is the sweet, genuine, fluffy romance. No big spoilers, but queer teens actually get to be both love interest and superhero here, and it feels restorative, on top of being terribly cute. Nick says it himself—he wanted to be part of a big gay superpowered epic, and I mean. Who among us hasn’t? And though it may not be exactly as he expected, he finally gets to. The romance is both swoony and cringey; it’s awkward and teenage and unapologetically gay and excellent. 

Throughout the novel, I had one major discomfort: the portrayal of Nick’s father and the narrative of police heroism. It read like Klune wanted to emphasize that though this is a novel about superheroes, we shouldn’t lose sight of the real folks who protect our cities on a daily basis, and respect their heroism—and that did not sit right with me. It’s not the simple matter of Nick’s father being an officer, but the fact that it consistently calls for carceral justice and police action. There are many examples, it’s the entire culture of the book. Nick’s father was demoted because he “punched a witness.” Nick asserts that cops should be paid more. When he ends up in a cop car, he jokes “record this so I can use this in a lawsuit I’m going to file against my dad and the city for police brutality.” Later, when Nick’s father saves a homeless woman and her baby, she asks, in a thick accent, if they’ll take her baby away—his dad asks if she’s a good mother, she says she tries, and he replies, “then I don’t think they will.” I do not have the same faith in police or child protective services, and the scene felt like Klune wanted to clarify that cops protect and serve “good people.” 

Sure, copaganda is pervasive in media, and a police presence is almost a given in most superhero stories, but that’s a very well-documented issue, and Klune chooses to emphasize an overtly positive stance. T.J. Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea is one of my favorite reads of this year, and I enjoyed the majority of this book so much—I love the rest of the father’s character, and his relationship with Nick—but I did not expect to find myself reading pro-cop rhetoric in a story about queer vigilantes, especially during Pride, this year. In a novel that ultimately complicates blanket understandings of “good versus evil,” that evidences how the media narrative of heroism and villainy can be and often is corrupt, we’re still supposed to accept a city’s police force as inherently honorable everyday heroes? They’re not even as removed as “super police” or magic or anything, the culture feels like that of America’s cops. I kept waiting for there to be some recognition, some criticism, but at least here in book one, it didn’t come. Instead of a superhero story that suggests cops are the true heroes after all, I want one that speaks to the emergence of superheroes, imperfect as they are, in response to how the current carceral system is racist, violent as hell, and far from restorative.

I have my reservations, and I do hope they get addressed in the upcoming novels. I think there’s a lot of potential for it. I don’t want to keep reading about good cops, but I love Nick Bell, and I very much want to know what’s next for him and his friends. The Extraordinaries is fun and funny, sweet and twisty, campy and canny and smart. It explores how far we’ll go to protect the people we love—not unfamiliar ground, but it feels fresh when it’s this unabashedly queer. It centers queer love, queer friendship, queer healing, and queers with magic, and sets up its sequels beautifully. I look forward to how they deliver. This is not a coming out story, but it’s an unmasking anyway—of getting to live as your true self, in all your nerdiness, grief, anxiety, love, and power. 

The Extraordinaries is available from Tor Teen.

Maya Gittelman is a queer Pilipinx-Jewish diaspora writer and poet. Their cultural criticism has been published on The Body is Not An Apology and The Dot and Line. Formerly the events and special projects manager at a Manhattan branch of Barnes & Noble, she now works in independent publishing, and is currently at work on a novel.

The post Love and Justice in T.J. Klune’s The Extraordinaries appeared first on Reactor.

I’ve written about secondary world fantasy that is beyond the “Great Wall of Europe” before, specifically about “Silk Road Fantasy”, mainly focused on Africa and Asia. Instead of being just places for “The Other”, on the margins of a Europhilic fantasy, we’re getting more novels and stories where African and Asian cultures, peoples, and geographies are front and center.

Take a look at a lot of fantasy maps which have taken their cues from European geography and Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and you can see very familiar geographies and forms. The ocean is generally to the west. The north is cold and very mountainous. The south is warmer, home to older civilizations, and there is contact with the “Other” lands and peoples of jungle and desert. The east, when it is depicted, bleeds off into steppe and grassland. The heartland itself has navigable rivers, cities, pastoral bucolic farms and the other physiographic trappings of Medieval Europe. But there are so many other models that writers might use, and for that, come with me to a topographic map of North America.

The potentials for fantasy set in North America are vast and relatively untapped as fodder for secondary world fantasy. Far more common is a post-apocalyptic setting, where characters wander America’s blasted landscape. But fantasy might use the topographic ideas of North America effectively in unique and original worlds: Coastal mountains. Basin and Range desert. The Mississippi. The Great Lakes. Pacific Northwest style temperate rainforests. Great Plains. Florida style Everglades. Ancient eroded mountains. And in general, landscapes that have been, widescale, irrevocably changed by continental glaciation in very visible ways.

Emily B Martin’s Sunshield takes that potential and runs with it to create a canvas for her characters and story. The action takes place in two major locations, although others are mentioned and effect the story. First there is Moquoia, a realm inspired by the Pacific Northwest, a lush and often rainy temperate rainforest environment. Rainbows after rainstorms are of strong cultural importance to the Moquoians, and the use of colors as signifiers in clothing and epithets is inspired and clever worldbuilding. The rich and powerful Moquoia as setting helps sharpen the political maneuvering and machinations which dominate the narrative in the parts of the novel.

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The Ferinno desert, which lies to the southeast of Moquoia, evokes desert landscapes. There is careful and evocative description of the desert. I am not a student and resident of the desert and so I am not certain what kind of desert Martin is evoking here (Basin and Range, Mojave, Sonoran or Chihuahuan) but it is clear that the author has carefully crafted her landscape and how people engage and live within it. It’s a harsh land but for some, it is indeed a home. The striking contrast between it and the rich lands of Moquoia is something that you simply can’t get in a European based geography. The feel of the people and the settlements within the Ferinno also has a American frontier west sort of feel to the settlements as well.

There are other lands, seen in Martin’s previous novels, mentioned with some details—Cyprien feels like something like the bayou of Louisiana or the swamps of Florida, Lumen Lake akin to the Great Lakes, and the Silverwood Mountains with deciduous forests the landscapes of the Appalachians. The final map shows an overall landscape that does not resemble North America. However to my eye, the pieces and landscapes work together in a rational way. There are, fortunately, no eyesore river splits or unlikely mountain formations.Our characters are three. Lark is the titular Sunshield Bandit, raiding caravans and stagecoaches crossing the Ferinno desert (again, the use of stagecoaches helping to invoke that North American feel to the verse) , particularly focusing on attacking slave caravans and slavers. Her anger at them has a strong political focus, more than halfway to the point of obsession in trying to deal with the flow of human trafficking. Tamsin’s chapters are shorter and more mysterious—she is a prisoner, but why she is a prisoner and where she is, and the motivations behind it all are an engine of plot that slowly but surely ramps up as the novel builds. I was uncertain where Martin was going with Tamsin’s plotline at first, but in retrospect, see how the author built the throughline of her plot straight from the beginning. Veran is our third point of view. He is the junior member of an Ambassadorial team from the East visiting Moquoia,. Veran is the translator for the main team of Eloise and Rou. There is a succession crisis of sorts (although it is complicated and infused with the interesting culture Martin posits for the Moquoians) and foreign ambassadors seeking succor, even a junior one like Veran, gets caught up in the machinations of their hosts in short order.

All three of the main characters are well drawn with clear character arcs, even poor pent Tamsin, and with chances for growth and chance. They all have secrets hidden either from themselves, the reader or both. Veran is the son of a Queen, but there are intimations that he is not all that he himself wants to be or could be, but the exact reason is not made clear at the outset. Tamsin’s role and importance and discovering who she is and why she is important enough to be a prisoner is the entire part and parcel of her plotline. And then there is Lark. Sure, Lark is a bandit, raiding caravans, having forged a small found family of refugees and fellow bandits in a corner of the desert. But what drives her, really? Where did she really come from and wind up in this role? It’s firmly established that Lark’s own memories and past are not entirely clear to her. It’s a mystery to help pull the reader through her story, to unravel her secret and to see how the revelations will change her in the offing.

Martin does an excellent job with her plotlines and her split screen approach. I get the feeling that Lark and Tamsin’s stories, set in the desert, feels a little more natural and vibrant than the Moquoian courtly intrigue that Veran deals with, but both give ample opportunity for the author to explore the characters and their space. The characters feel like the landscapes they inhabit and also the landscapes that they originated in, which is not always the same thing. There is a consciousness of ecology and ecosystems that make the worlds feel alive. A small telling detail of showing the author’s interest in such matters, even in Moquoia amid the political plot, is when Veran discovers the high ecological cost of the glorious walls of glass in the Moquoian Palace. The three plotlines do turn out to be more related than at first glance, but the connections and linking up does not feel forced. Martin spends good time early in the novel in character comments, in small actions, and their drives in order to bring the three plotlines together quite effectively. The action beats are also effective and well written. While Lark’s plotline is the obvious source of action beats for the novel, Veran also gets into situations where he has to exchange politics for physical action.

In the end, as fine as the canvas that Martin has drawn here, it is the characters, and themes that are the abiding hallmarks of Sunshield. How the characters interact with each other and how they are part and parcel of the landscapes they inhabit are something I look forward to reading in more of Martin’s work. I am invested in learning more about her world and her core set of characters here, as well as those only mentioned off the page.

Sunshield is available from Harper Voyager.

An ex-pat New Yorker living in Minnesota, Paul Weimer has been reading sci-fi and fantasy for over 30 years. An avid and enthusiastic amateur photographer, blogger and podcaster, Paul primarily contributes to the Skiffy and Fanty Show as blogger and podcaster, and the SFF Audio podcast. If you’ve spent any time reading about SFF online, you’ve probably read one of his blog comments or tweets (he’s @PrinceJvstin).

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This is a delightful, odd book, and I was by turns fascinated, enthralled, and a little confused, but ultimately happy with the twists and turns of the text. Walton combines many of her passions into this story, and you will find yourself at times going on digressions with her, as our unnamed narrator delves into the importance and meaning of various works of art, restaurants and ways of preparing food, the creative works of Renaissance Italy, as well as what can almost be described as Shakespearean fanfic, of characters from Twelfth Night and The Tempest finding new life after their endings in Sylvia’s last book she’s working on, a fictionalized version of Shakespeare’s Italy, where characters from both works interact, love, cherish, hate, and exist together. If you think there are layers to this story, don’t worry, there absolutely are. But while the meta-commentary can be a lot, and the digressions entertaining but seemingly without reason, the two combine artfully. For there is a third narrative here, and it’s of our unnamed protagonist inside Sylvia’s head telling us, the reader of this book, about Sylvia. In his gambit to immortalize her, he must tell us of her, as much as she finds it irksome when he does.

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Through him we meet Sylvia, a writer of science fiction and fantasy, who has opinions on Worldcons, who is not close with her remaining family save one member, who has been through hell in a specific way, and found love in the climb out. Sylvia, who our unnamed protagonist loves and cherishes and is terrified of, for she is god to him, and can erase him with but a thought. Sylvia, who is dying and won’t tell him. Sylvia, who knows his plan to smuggle her into her own story, who knows he is doing so because he wants the same for himself, and humors him because why not? I found this one of the strongest aspects of the book itself, for after affairs of state in Thalia (the imagined Italy of Sylvia’s book), and after the lessons on art and architecture, after all that, is a writer who is trying to come to terms with her own end, and the beloved character of her imagination who won’t let her go. It develops into the beating heart of the novel, and soon, all these strands began to braid together in a final gambit to save the god who has meant so much to him, and in doing so, maybe save himself.

Or What You Will is the sort of book that may be doing a bit too much at any given time, but you’d never fault it for that. As a treatise on art, and the things we make, and the love we put into making them as we hope they will outlive us, Walton must. She must spin multiple plates, each of them rich moments of drama or education, or relationships, because this is the sort of book that demands that level of richness. If one is to pursue immortality, nothing can be left on the table; all the love one has for the world, for art, for pain, for family and friends, for story, it all must go into the cauldron and hope it is enough to summon you to the next world, to life everlasting. This richness is in service to knowing Sylvia, to understanding her wants and needs, knowing her pain and what she has survived to get here. And it works. By the end of the novel, whether it succeeds in the novel or not, you, the reader, know her. You, the reader, know Thalia and its magic, its inhabitants, the new lives of Duke Orsino and Caliban and Viola and Miranda, and yes, our unnamed narrator, who has worked so hard to imprint on you, the reader, the important of it all.

Because if you, the reader, know all this, it means you know Sylvia. And if you know Sylvia, reader, then she can never die. And neither can he. Across metatextual layers, Walton accomplishes what she sets out to do, and in some ways, it may not matter if it truly happens in the story. Sylvia and our narrator, through the act of reading, knowing, and empathy, become real. And that’s what matters. That is how they, and any of us, may live forever. Or What You Will may be at times quirky and rambling, but it truly captures the heart of what it means to make art, to tell stories, and why those things are so important. I can honestly say I’ve never read another novel like it, and I’m very glad, in reading it, to have had the chance to do my small part in contributing to immortality.

Or What You Will is available from Tor Books.

Martin Cahill is a contributor to Tor.com, as well as Book Riot and Strange Horizons. He has fiction forthcoming at Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Fireside Fiction. You can follow his musings on Twitter @McflyCahill90.

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Seventeen-year-old Xochi arrives in the grungy, anything goes San Francisco of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alone and adrift, she wanders the street in search of a way to make the pain go away. Instead she finds Pallas, the precocious 12 year-old daughter of a wild family of queer musicians. Now with a roof over her head and a job as a governess to keep her occupied, Xochi finally has a chance to breathe.

But her history lurks in the shadows of this new life, not just metaphorically but literally. After one reckless, raucous night, Pallas and Xochi summon two magical creatures called Waterbabies, and they declare themselves Xochi’s protectors. Anyone who hurts her is subject to their wrath, and that includes people from her past and present. As much as Xochi wants to shed her previous persona, she cannot move forward until she faces what has followed her to the city.

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All of Us With Wings

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Poetry and interludes from the perspective of a hyper-aware neighborhood cat are interspersed in the narrative, giving the story a heightened, theatrical feel that floats somewhere between magical realism and fantasy. Keil jumps perspectives frequently, but keeps the story flowing smoothly. With effortlessly impressive prose and a cast of fully realized characters, Keil crafts an engaging story of a young woman coming into her own

Xochi’s pain is burned into her soul, but she hides her secrets from her new friends. She tries to drown her past, but the Waterbabies dredge it all back up again. Because her unreliable mother abandoned her, Xochi has learned to sabotage her relationships, hurting others before they hurt her. And because the man her mother ditched her with manipulated and sexually abused her, Xochi cannot comprehend what a healthy relationship with a father figure looks like. So when Leviticus, Pallas’ attractive father, enters Xochi’s life, her feelings of parental longing get tangled up with sexual confusion.

Although he is only a few years older than her, he finds himself drawn to her for reasons he doesn’t yet understand. They shouldn’t. They can’t. They want to. But it’s not so simple as “older man takes advantage of a confused teenage girl” or “sexually charged teenage girl seduces an older man.” For many young women, this uncomfortable but familiar territory. Teens trying to fill the void left by being abandoned and/or harmed by their parents can lead them to make regrettable decisions about their body and who gets access to it. It can make it hard to discern between appropriate and inappropriate interactions with adults. And it can make it nearly impossible to see a way out of the encroaching darkness.

Keil doesn’t shy away from the realities of Xochi and Leviticus’ relationship. He pursues her and she pursues him (as much as a teen girl can pursue an adult man). In age she’s still a child, but by past experiences she thinks she is a world-weary adult. In truth she’s neither; she’s an adolescent caught between the past, present, and future and unequipped to understand any of it. She makes bad choices while living with her abuser in Humboldt County and makes even more bad choices while living with Leviticus in San Francisco. But Keil makes it clear that her actions don’t mean she deserves what happens to her or that she’s “asking for it.”

With Leviticus, Keil tries to explain but not excuse his interest in Xochi. For the most part she succeeds. He’s had his own share of familial pain that has thrown his sense of right and wrong out whack just like Xochi. Where Keil stumbles is the end. I won’t spoil the events, but suffice it to say Leviticus does not get as much comeuppance as I would like. I don’t want him to suffer – after all, he’s not a villain, just a troubled twenty-something – but Keil lets him off too easily. I’m not convinced he fully understands why going after Xochi was so awful and how his actions will affect her relationships with others in the future.

With its fraught and intimate subject matter, the lines between necessary and problematic get blurred. Some readers will find the content in All of Us with Wings triggering or emotionally painful, while others will find relief in seeing those same hard topics depicted with nuance. If ever there was a Your Mileage May Vary book, Michelle Ruiz Keil’s debut is it. But I hope that won’t stop you from at least giving this powerful novel a try.

All of Us With Wings is now available in paperback from Soho Teen.

Alex Brown is a teen services librarian by day, local historian by night, author and writer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her on Twitter and Insta, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

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It all begins with the death of Jonathan Lambshead’s grandfather. Jonathan hadn’t seen him in ages, not since his mother dragged him away as a child and escaped to Florida. He went back to England after her death and was stashed away at a boarding academy, but now he’s truly alone in the world. The executor of his grandfather’s estate, a deeply odd man known only as Stimply, tells Jonathan that the only way he can inherit the property is to catalogue everything in his grandfather’s home. A simple enough feat, he thinks. But upon arrival he realizes the extent of his grandfather’s hoarding. Every room, every closet, every nook and cranny is crammed floor to ceiling with junk, inexplicable items, and ominous notes left by Dr. Lambshead for Jonathan to find. And then there are the doors that lead to other worlds.

Jonathan and two of his best friends from Poxforth Academy, siblings Danny and Rack (and Danny’s pet rat Tee Tee) tumble through one of the doors and end up in Aurora, a Europe where magic runs wild and Aleister Crowley is trying to conquer the continent. The Order of the Third Door, a mysterious group Dr. Lambshead was a member of, wants to prevent Crowley from becoming emperor by any means necessary. But they aren’t the only group who, for their own reasons, don’t want him to win. You see, Crowley isn’t working alone. His familiar (who isn’t as subservient as Crowley thinks) is an infernal monster called Wretch who has other plans for his master and Aurora.

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A Peculiar Peril

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On Aurora, Europe and Britain never colonized anyone and is looked on with the same level of disdain and disregard by everyone else that white westerners look at their former colonies in our world. Crowley is allowed to wreak havoc in Aurora’s Europe partly because the rest of the civilized world doesn’t care about some unadvanced backwater and partly because they see Europe as a sacrificial lamb – stage the war there and destroy him before he spreads his influence out. It’s a neat and unexpected twist, one that plays out gradually and subtly.

The basic plot involves Jonathan, Danny, and Rack journeying across Aurora to get to Prague so they can take a door back to England. They’re joined by two adults – a scheming woman named Alice who, like everyone else, has her own secret plans that make her Jonathan’s ally only while their plans happen to line up, and Mamoud, a member of the Order – and other non-human allies. Enemies, those sent by Crowley and Wretch and others up to their own devices, as well as allies who want what Jonathan has and can do also give chase. Mishaps ensue and wild adventures are had. It’s hard to explain in detail what goes down without either spoiling key plot points or just listing off random and weird occurrences with no context. Suffice it to say, the plot is straightforward but the execution is wholly Jeff VanderMeer.

It took me a little bit to settle into A Peculiar Peril. At first the story alternates between Jonathan and Crowley, but VanderMeer soon throws in other characters that expand the world in fascinating ways but also slow down the narrative. Jonathan occasionally feels sidelined in his own story. There is clearly more to him than meets the eye, but because we spend so much time with everyone else (and because this is a duology that needs to save some secrets for the second book) we don’t get much in the way of answers. That’s fine, though. Part of the fun of a VanderMeer novel is VanderMeer himself. His writing style is so unique and compelling that I get as much enjoyment from the act of reading as I do from the actual story.

Besides the bonkers elements, there are lots of little moments of heart, soul, and truth. Jonathan stifling his grief over losing his mother and never knowing his father until it finally overtakes him is handled well. VanderMeer allows him to feel and cry and mourn in a way that feels true to his personality. Danny comes out as queer. Rack assumes Jonathan is asexual and later, in a scene where he is compelled to tell the truth, Jonathan’s revelations confirms he’s somewhere on the asexual spectrum. I didn’t love the way that bit was written, but I rarely like how allosexuals handle acespec characters; it could’ve been done better but it was hardly the worst I’ve seen. There are also a few characters of color (one of whom is also disabled) and thankfully none are reduced to tropes or stereotypes.

If you want a weird and refreshing summer treat, A Peculiar Peril is exactly the book for you. I never knew what to expect, and each new development was as delightful as it was unusual. This isn’t the kind of book you blow through in an afternoon. It demands careful attention and a solid time commitment. But it is so worth it.

A Peculiar Peril is available from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Read an excerpt here.

Alex Brown is a teen services librarian by day, local historian by night, author and writer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her on Twitter and Insta, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

The post Portal Doors, Talking Marmots, and Disembodied Heads: A Peculiar Peril by Jeff VanderMeer appeared first on Reactor.

Not much has changed for me as an adult. My time in Iowa left me feeling incredibly connected to corn—I wax nostalgic whenever I drive by a cornfield—and I have too much natural anxiety to want to participate in anything related to horror. Sometimes it happens, but usually for reasons adjacent to the scary media. When I discovered that Carrie was a musical, I had to see the Sissy Spacek film and read the book. Two years ago, I finally went to my first haunted house, convinced by an ex that it was a good idea since the proceeds went to a local charity, and I hated every second of it. It takes a special creator to truly make me want to dabble in horror.

Rory Power is that creator.

At the insistence of one of my co-workers (who is also from Iowa, which is unimportant for this story but always tickles me when I think about it) at Brazos Bookstore, I picked up Powers’ debut Wilder Girls last year. It terrified me, but something about her prose, her characters, and her ability to construct a foreboding environment kept me reading all through the night. I finished in a day, and I was hungry for more. When I found her announcement for her second novel, Burn Our Bodies Down, I was ready.

Bodies checks all of my boxes: Sophomore standalone novel? Check. Interesting and unique premise? Check. Addictive mystery? Check. Queer lead? Yup, check. Spooky corn?? I didn’t even know this was a box for me, but check, check, check.

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Let’s talk about the plot for Burn Our Bodies Down. Margot has lived with her mom ever since she can remember. It’s always been the two of them and their lit candle in their suffocating apartment. Despite being shut down at every turn by her mother to find out about their family past, Margot still wants to know: who are they? Who came before them? How can she find the rest of her family? When she uncovers a bible gifted to her mother as a child, Margot finds the confirmation she needs that there is more to their family than just the two of them, and she leaves for a town called Phalene. Her arrival in the town is not the happy homecoming she expected, though. A fire, a murder (or two), and family secrets run deep in the core of Phalene. Not knowing who to trust, Margot must uncover the truth behind her family lineage before the toxic relationships in her life leave her trapped forever.

This book is so full of twists and turns that it’s hard to discuss the plot in any detail past that. Every detail is a clue, and I don’t want to spoil this journey for anybody. What Powers has done with this book can only be described as magic. Margot wants to know about her family, her history, her story, and Powers keeps me invested in that goal every single second. Powers’ prose engulfs you.

If you loved the internal fear and the uneasy tension of Wilder Girls, you will not be disappointed by Burn Our Bodies Down. Powers has this ability to write environments that are characters themselves. I will never forget the school in Wilder Girls, and I will never forget the pale pink liquid filled corn of Burn Our Bodies Down. Taking something familiar and twisting it just enough to tell you that something is wrong, but not giving you any notion as to what that wrong may be makes me shudder. Even more fun is that Powers in this book focuses more on internal and interpersonal fear and horror. Yes, there is some body horror like in Wilder Girls, but the horror in this thriller is more psychological. It sticks with you. I read Bodies in February, I am writing this review in July, and I still see every visual detail in my mind.

Outside of the environment and the plot, there is one more thing about Bodies that I really appreciate. I love that Powers has written a lead who is queer, but her queerness is not defined by her relationship status. Margot is single, and she is still queer. Her sexuality is not something hidden behind a smokescreen until it is revealed through a relationship that she is A Gay. She can be queer all on her own. You can put this book on your LGBTQIA+ lists even though the lead is single! Thank you, Rory Powers, for doing this. We always need more queer rep that isn’t defined by a love story; we exist on our own, too.

Burn Our Bodies Down is a triumph of unease, and I am waiting with bated breath to see what Rory Powers does next. She has made me a lifelong fan, and through the frightening stories she’s created, she’s made me a braver reader.

Burn Our Bodies Down is available from Delacorte Press.

Cassie Schulz is the Events Assistant for Brazos Bookstore. You can find her on Twitter @kerfufflepuff where she tweets about books, musicals, and cats. You can also find her on Instagram, co-managing the page @tag.ur.lit with a fellow queer disaster who loves YA Lit as much as she does.

The post Fields of Foreboding in Rory Power’s Burn Our Bodies Down appeared first on Reactor.

Soraya is the twin sister of the shah of Atashar, but their lives run on opposite courses. She has kept to untouched seclusion in the palace through her entire life for the safety of herself and others, as one glancing brush of her skin is lethal. Her lush rose garden and occasionally her mother, brother, or childhood friend Laleh are her only companions—until Laleh stops visiting. However, when her brother brings a captured demon home with him to Golvahar, Soraya sees a chance to bargain for a cure to her curse… except bargaining with devils for knowledge comes at a high cost, and the consequences of Soraya’s actions far exceed the scope of her imagination.

First and foremost: the prose of Girl, Serpent, Thorn is sprawling, luxurious, and handsome without ever sacrificing the fast-paced narrative tension it constructs via constantly evolving intrigues. Bashardoust combines evocative, mythopoetic description with an intimate point of view that links the personal, emotional experiences Soraya has to the wider world she inhabits. Her desire is both a desire for simple human touch and for a totally different life, as neither can be separated from the other. Her yearning, to understand and ultimately fix herself, drives the catastrophe that strikes her kingdom… but yearning also, and more importantly, drives her costly efforts to save Atashar once the full scope of consequences comes to light.

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While the device that drives the novel is central to the actual plot—being untouchable, poisonous, unlike one’s family, in need of acceptance and love—it is also… Distinctly queer, thematically. Soraya is a touch-starved, lonely young woman who has only known a handful of other people in her life. Laleh, the first object of her desire as a child, has decided to marry her brother at the start of the novel. It’s no wonder that when the young soldier Azad expresses his admiration for her, his own desire, she responds to it instantly. It’s also no wonder that, when later faced with the fierce and beautiful Parvaneh, Soraya discovers another form of desire—one for someone alike in kind to herself.

Light spoilers follow.

Bashardoust distinguishes the type and feeling of desire Soraya experiences between the genders of her partners while emphasizing that each is legitimate, something I suspect many bisexual readers will appreciate. It’s worth noting that while Soraya reaching for her desires does cause strife in the novel, the resolution also turns on fulfilling desire, except with more attention to other people. That’s a delicate balance to strike, one that allows for emotional complexity as well as struggle to determine what’s right and wrong for Soraya, whose life has been challenging from the start. While the initial conflict comes out of Soraya’s desire to fix herself, the conclusion involves her accepting herself in her whole monstrous glory—thorns and all.

Also, it must be said as clearly as possible: monster girls falling in love with each other is good business. I, in fact, love to see it.

On a more serious note, I’m pleased with this novel’s willingness to engage ethical complexity, the labor of atonement, and the damage well-meaning people do to one another. While this is a broad generalization, I have noticed a trend in recent queer young adult fiction toward a sort of moral puritanism, or surface-level absolutism: a flattened affect that comes across as at once performative (saying the right things from the checklist of approved Issues makes me the right sort of person) and shallow, failing to engage with real human conflict and the process of learning we all go through continually to be good to one another.

Bashardoust, in contrast, weaves a delicious tale of desire, mistakes, anger, violence, and growth. “Good” and “bad” are not absolute personality types that characters signal their membership in. Instead, individuals are allowed to fuck up and make right through serious labor… as well as understanding their own positions of power. Frankly, it’s messy, and I live for the mess. In real life, we’re all kind of messy and (hopefully) working to do the right thing despite it, as Soraya does. That process of wanting, having, and misusing power being explored via a queer young woman of color is just—everything.

Women don’t get to be this kind of messy often in fiction. Soraya has to invest significant labor into recognizing then correcting her mistakes while accepting their consequences. She also is not fully absolved for the harm she causes in self-interest… yet, importantly, the text does not castigate that self-interest as unreasonable selfishness. Bashardoust holds Tahmineh accountable for withholding the truth of Soraya’s curse from her, out of a desire to spare her pain but also to spare herself the shame of admitting her lie—while holding Soraya’s bare handful of potential companions responsible for their failure to acknowledge her isolation. No one is a pure villain; no one is a pure hero.

Soraya herself teeters between villain and hero, princess and monster—but she ultimately combines them as she becomes a woman covered in deadly thorns, able to protect her court and love her parik partner, member of yet individuated from her blood family. My queer heart absolutely beats for this layering, living half in one world and half in another, straddling the line of familial versus personal responsibilities. Soraya accepts her power, her desire, and her potential for violence as morally neutral. The good she might do is a choice, a labor, and that distinction matters. She chooses. Power is not the problem; the use power is put to is the problem—and so she chooses to do right, to make right, what she can.

Girl, Serpent, Thorn balances a raw, human core of emotion with a fast-moving, intriguing plot that draws fresh inspiration from Iranian culture past and present. Soraya is a fascinating protagonist whose approach to the world is always-engaging, even as her constant missteps drive the novel forward. I also want to reemphasize how significant it is to read a novel about a queer young woman in a Middle Eastern-inspired setting pursuing men as well as women—and ending up in a relationship with another monster-woman. For so many of us who grew up identifying with villains, challenged by the desire to get a little revenge (or a lot), Soraya provides a beautiful touchstone. She does wrong; she does right. She chooses.

Girl, Serpent, Thorn is available from Flatiron Books.
Read an excerpt here.

Lee Mandelo is a writer, critic, and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. They have two books out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling, and in the past have edited for publications like Strange Horizons Magazine. Other work has been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Ideomancer.

The post There Was and There Was Not: Girl, Serpent, Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust appeared first on Reactor.

“The House floated in and out of consciousness, waiting to die. It would no longer have to stomach wickedness, deviance, and injustice. It looked forward to Its demolition that would level and free It at long last.”

Francesca Momplaisir’s novel My Mother’s House tells the tale of a sentient home that burns itself to the ground in rage and despair at housing a terrible and abusive man. The dark and unsettling story follows Lucien, who flees his home country of Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to move to New York City’s South Ozone Park and seek a fresh start. The family then buys a run-down house that they name “La Kay,” or “My Mother’s house,” which becomes a place for fellow Haitian immigrants to find peace, food, and legal assistance. What the family doesn’t know, however, is that all the while the house is watching and passing judgment on all of its inhabitants and is particularly upset at Lucien’s cruel behavior. But after La Kay burns itself to the ground, Lucien’s true evil nature is revealed.

Momplaisir’s story is a challenging and complex one, but ultimately a success. Through an unflinching look at Lucien’s violence and emotional damage towards the other characters in the novel, the book does an incredible job at portraying the generational traumas that immigration and poverty can have on a family. My Mother’s House does not shy away from other sensitive and rarely heard narratives such as societal indifference to Black women’s pain and the ways that women are marginalized in social unrest and migration, and the responsibility of women and matriarchs to protect against violence that they are also subject to.

The novel tells the family’s story from multiple perspectives. Each character has several chapters devoted to understanding their role in the narrative, and La Kay’s perspective is also heard in the book. This narrative technique allows the reader to understand the full scope of horrors happening within the house’s walls and within each character’s mind. In chapters told by the children or Marie-Ange, we see first hand the impact that psychological abuse at the hand of a family member has on these women. Interestingly, the reader walks away with a much more intimate understanding of Lucien’s trauma than we do any of the women, as his chapters give us insight into his sad and tortured view on his family and life. By far, one of the author’s greatest strengths was her ability to weave the house into the narrative as not only an object, but a character, as the La Kay chapters reveal the house’s devastation at the horrors happening within Its walls, and Its frustration at not being able to stop it.

My Mother’s House is impossible to pigeonhole; though it’s marketed as a literary thriller, elements of the novel also qualify as horror, realistic fiction, and magical realism. The underlying narrative of the story which follows an immigrant family struggling to make lives for themselves embodies a grim realism, though the drama between family members also gives the book a touch of the supernatural. The tonal shifts between the chapters allow for some dark humor to live within the narrative, but the overall premise of a sentient house also suggests elements of magical realism. The heavy plot of the book, as well as the majority of the interactions between Lucien and his family, are inundated with thriller and horror. Many authors would not be able to pull off a novel that encapsulates so many genres and styles, but Momplaisir’s beautiful, poetic prose and impeccable narrative pacing melds each of these literary elements perfectly to create a satisfying, slow burning narrative and an unforgettable read that caters to a variety of interests.

Though thriller drives the plot forward, at times, the horrors of the book become almost too much to bear. Certain scenes in the novel are simply not for the faint of heart—torture, immense cruelty, violence, and a particular moment involving the abuse of a cat come to mind as making my stomach turn. Momplaisar’s prose, which effortlessly evokes strong emotions and creates vivid imagery in very few words, allows the reader to viscerally understand and experience each victim’s harm. Like La Kay, the reader is forced to watch the unspeakable horrors occurring in the house and desperately wish there was a way we could make them end.

My Mother’s House tackles some of our most pressing societal issues, including gentrification, racial injustice, and the psychological harm of migration, with rarely encountered grace and an unflinching eye. At its heart, the story forcefully explores how the great “American Dream” is only afforded to the rare individual provided a certain level of privilege.

Buy My Mother’s House From Underground Books

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Originally published in May 2020
My Mother’s House is available from Knopf.

Mary is a freelance writer covering culture, identity, sexual politics, and wellness. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, The Nation, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Bitch Media, Vice, Nylon, Allure, and other similar outlets. When she is not writing she can be found scheming, watching cartoons, or sending unnecessarily long emails. To see more of Mary’s work and adventures, follow her on Twitter.

The post Francesca Momplaisir’s My Mother’s House Confronts Generational Trauma Head-on appeared first on Reactor.

Ella and Kev are Black siblings raised, as many of us are, under systemic racial oppression. Kev was born the day the Rodney King riots exploded across Los Angeles. All he knows is police brutality and state sanctioned violence, but Ella, a few years older and with inexplicable superhuman abilities, sees the shift, sees what happens when the oppressed rise up and the oppressor pushes back down. Unable to control her powers and not yet understanding how she might use them to upend the system, Ella goes into self-imposed exile.

Meanwhile Kev is arrested and tossed into Rikers to await trial. Days, weeks, months, years go by and he becomes one of the thousands trapped in the criminal justice system. His own powers are slighter than his sisters, or perhaps merely less developed, but they allow the two to secretly communicate. Ella dreams of shattering the whole system while Kev just wants to survive. But what if survival means destruction? What if the only way to move forward is to burn everything behind you to the ground?

To call Riot Baby “dystopian” is to undersell it. Yes, it depicts a not-too-distant future full of plausible yet preventable horrors inflicted on the masses by greedy oppressors. But dystopian fiction often features characters experiencing for the first time hardships that BIPOC in the real world have been surviving and fighting against for centuries. State sanctioned suppression of basic human rights? Check. Extreme exploitation of labor by business and industrial entities? Yup. Herding people in concentration camps and company towns and prisons? Oh yeah. Passing laws and empowering the already powerful to choke dissent and smother grassroots organization? You betcha. We’ve been there and done that and are still doing it and unless drastic change happens soon we will continue to indefinitely.

For BIPOC in a white supremacist society, the dystopia is past, present, and future. And that’s what makes Riot Baby so impressive. Onyebuchi shows a world that is frightening only if you’ve been exempt from mass oppression. For those of us dealing with it every moment of every day, Riot Baby isn’t so much of a warning about what might happen if we aren’t more vigilant and more of a thinkpiece about where we’re already headed.

Ella and Kev are threats to the state, but they suffer for it in different ways. For Ella, she is #BlackGirlMagic made literal and it is both a blessing and a curse. She is the living embodiment of power in a world that wants to make her feel powerless. Black women are expected to save us all but the moment we exert any authority over the majority we become a danger. We are the mammy and the enemy, the pet and the threat.

Her mother’s rejection of her powers isn’t so much about Ella as what happens to Black people with the power to topple white supremacy. Every time we have gathered together to instigate change, the status quo descends with tone policing and demands for civility and assassinations and imprisonment. That’s why the pastor she meets later advises her to work for peace instead of fight for change. Some progress, minuscule though it may be, is better than none, right? They say we should take what we can get—or what the majority is willing to give—and be thankful for it. So Ella holds her powers back and seals herself up in a metaphorical prison. She dreams and waits.

Ella passes through the world unseen and disregarded by the majority compared to Kev who isn’t just noticed by the majority but sought out by its enforcers. Kev is arrested for the crime of being a Black boy existing in a public space. He knows what white society thinks of him; after all, he was born the night Los Angeles’ brown and Black people took to the streets when white cops were acquitted after being videotaped beating and tasering a Black man. Jail was in Kev’s future just as being gunned down was in the future of the boy Ella met on the street. Whether in South Central or Harlem, both boys were doomed before they were born to be crushed under the heel of a society that sees them only as brutes and thugs. With lighter skin he might have been able to pursue his interest in technology and put his own powers to good use, but instead he becomes the next boy run through the New Jim Crow grinder.

Kev, too, dreams and waits. After so long in a cell, all he wants is freedom. What he gets is a simulation of it. The post-jail neighborhood in Watts—the site of the 1965 rebellion when African Americans fought back against racial discrimination and police brutality just like they did 27 years later—is little more than an open air prison. No visitors, a tracking monitor that can dictate his behavior, a job working for the same people imprisoning him that pays off the debt incurred by being imprisoned.

To bring it back around to MLK, Riot Baby stands “between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.” Stretching the comparison even further: Kev is the “Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom,” and Ella is the “something without has reminded him that it can be gained.” Onyebuchi could have ended the story on a note of desperation and cynicism; instead he opts for hope. Well, it’s hopeful if you’re BIPOC. Maybe not so much if you like being in power.

With an eviscerating and eloquent style, Tochi Onyebuchi tells a profound story about resistance. The narrative moves from South Central to Harlem to Rikers to Watts and jumps between Ella and Kev as they grow up. This allows Onyebuchi to tell two vast stories with the same concise theme. It’s a clever trick that manages to give this novella a novel-like breadth.

As much as I love his young adult fiction, I hope this is not Tochi Onyebuchi’s only excursion into adult fiction. Riot Baby left me gasping for air and ready to take to the streets.

Buy Riot Baby From Underground Books

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Originally published in January 2020
Riot Baby is available from Tordotcom Publishing
Read an excerpt here.

Alex Brown is a teen services librarian by day, local historian by night, author and writer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her on Twitter and Insta, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

The post Straight From the Underground: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi appeared first on Reactor.

The same, argues N. K. Jemisin’s latest, The City We Became, can be said of the metropolis. You can see the contours of a city’s soul in its skyline at dusk. You can hear its soul in the ambient chatter of its Chinatown, the musical haggling in its souq. You smell it on its buses and you hear it creak beneath your boots as you ascend the five flights of your walkup, arms burdened with grocery bags.

The way a city affects, attacks, adores you, all captured in the way you utter its name.

The City We Became is the first book in Jemisin’s Great Cities Trilogy. The City in question here: New York. The “We,” its six avatars, the flesh-and-blood-and-magic embodiments of its soul. When the novel begins, New York City has not yet been born. It has its skyscrapers and bodegas, its cops and its artistic directors, its three-piece-suit Wall St. hustlers and its East New York corner boy hustlers. It is a New York City recognizable to anyone alive in 2020. But at the book’s beginning, New York City, as much as history has dubbed it a megalopolis, is a collection of strangenesses, of people coming and going and leaving parts of themselves on their way through. That residue, mixed with the essence of the life still in those streets and apartments and jails and office buildings, forms a weight on the world and becomes connected to somewhere qualitatively Other. Its slums, its construction, its traffic, the music blasting from boomboxes, these begin to take on anthropomorphic shape. Listen closely enough to the stop-and-go of vehicles in the Holland Tunnel and hear a heartbeat.

But New York City’s birth is troubled. In fact, an attack on the city from a mysterious antagonist nearly results in a miscarriage. But the city’s midwife, a nameless Black urchin, beats back the menace, barely surviving the fight. After the city whisks its beaten hero, savior, and avatar to safety, the boy’s mentor, a protective, urbane, rough-edged man named Paulo, must seek out the other avatars, all of whom are enduring their own birth pangs.

***

In her latest novel, Jemisin literalizes many of the things we’ve associated with cities: their oppressiveness, their dynamism, their heartlessness, their comfort, their wrongness, their rightness, but also the idea that a city’s most fundamental components are the people in them. It is an ironic reification of the maxim that good worldbuilding is not so much about the world as it is about the people moving through it.

Each of the boroughs takes human form in surprising yet this-makes-sense fashion, and through these personifications, Jemisin explores the contradictions and complicated appeal of the city she calls home. Bronx’s attitude and attendant lack of trust of others, Queens’s status as a landing pad for refugees, Brooklyn’s marriage of hip hop and high politics, Staten Island’s resentment at being the forgotten borough and the racism that swims in its air, Manhattan’s tortured and complicated amalgamation of faces and races as well as its capitalistic impellent. Of course, having a single person embody the heterogeneity of an entire borough leads to broad generalizations. There are only so many characteristics that can be picked and assembled into a character before an author misshapes their creation into some chimera or Mr. Potato Head homunculus, a total less than the sum of its parts. Take a bunch of human souls, scale them up by the hundreds of thousands, the millions, and what appears on the page can only be incomplete. Still, Jemisin manages the impossible task with aplomb and a demanding, critical love. This is the trap we set for ourselves when we talk about the “character” of a place.

***

This conundrum—how to personify a city—vanishes with regard to the book’s antagonist. In our opposite number, we have the same: a “person” embodying a city. But two factors allow for Jemisin to avoid the risk of souls-collapsing. The first is that the antagonist adopts many “human” forms, takes many guises, casting themself as an ever-present and thus even more threatening villain. The second is that this villain, or at least a major aspect of them, already has an author.

H. P. Lovecraft looms large in this novel. References, explicit and implicit, abound.

In August of 1925, Lovecraft wrote the story “The Horror at Red Hook”. More a screed than a narrative, “Horror” follows an Irish detective named Malone as he investigates a sinister cult led by the recluse Robert Suydam. Malone’s investigation brings him in contact with what Lovecraft characterizes as New York’s seedy, squalid underbelly, a hell-on-earth that serves as a portal to an actual Hell, a place of “nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness.” The Red Hook of Lovecraft’s story is a “maze of hybrid squalor,” and description of its denizens is nothing more than a register of slurs. To call the epithets and xenophobic portraits captured in this catalog evidence of the author’s omnidirectional prejudices would be to indulge in criminal understatement.

Lovecraft looked at the non-Whites of the Brooklyn where he lived at the time and had visions of the demonic. The racial admixture of the New York City that has, throughout its history, been the engine of so much of the city’s charm and dynamism maddened Lovecraft.

A common dramatic device in Lovecraft’s work is to associate virtue, intellect, elevated class position, civilization, and rationality with white Anglo-Saxons, often posing it in contrast to the corrupt, intellectually inferior, uncivilized and irrational, which he associated with people he characterized as being of lower class, impure racial “stock” and/or non European ethnicity and dark skin complexion who were often the villains in his writings.

Lovecraft’s wife, Sonia Greene, a Ukranian woman of Jewish extraction, was not exempt from his bigoted pique. “Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York,” she wrote after divorcing Lovecraft, “Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.”

Similar to Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, The City We Became is a reclaiming of the New York that Lovecraft vilified. In perhaps the greatest fuck-you to the man behind the Cthulhu mythos that has had such widespread influence on speculative fiction, Jemisin gives voice and human-ness to the objects of Lovecraft’s hatred. The center is moved, the periphery now the mainstream, the despised now the heroes. The City We Became is a praise song for all the things he despised.

The very first line of the book is “I sing the city.”

***

Lovecraft, the Ur-Villain, lurks in the novel’s shadows. So does another bigoted imp-made-flesh hover over the city, a man who dwarfs even Lovecraft’s capacity for enacting his prejudices in apocalyptic fashion on those not like him: Robert Moses.

As much as we may think of cities as organic things thrumming with life, they are manufactured entities. The Roman Empire’s aqueducts and Forum Romanum, the construction and organization of madrasas in Askia Mohamed I’s Timbuktu, the brutal Opium War-fueled forging of the Kowloon Peninsula into Hong Kong. Capitalism has bludgeoned many of the aforementioned and others like them into what we see now, and its deleterious effects are not absent from Jemisin’s novel. In fact, one of the most stunning features of this book is its positioning of capital waging war against the human beings of a place as a sort of Cthulhu. Gargantuan claws that rake expressways through neighborhoods, multifold human forms insinuating themselves piecemeal as the proprietors of new coffeeshops or as real estate developers or as disembodied city agencies expropriating land for condos. The source of mankind’s constant, subconscious anxiety, commanding perhaps the largest cult in the world.

Few people have done more to bludgeon New York City into a place where skyscrapers have essentially placed a price point on the sun than Robert Moses. Moses was President of the Long Island Parks Commission from 1924 to 1963, Chairman of the NY State Council of Parks from 1924 to 1963, Commissioner of the NYC Department of Parks from 1934 to 1960, Chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (predecessor to the Metropolitan Transit Authority) from 1934 to 1968, and NYC Planning Commissioner from 1942 to 1960. Among other things. At one point, he held enough titles simultaneously to shame Daenerys Targaryen. All without once being elected to public office.

As detailed in Robert Caro’s Moses biography, The Power Broker, Moses used a budget surplus from toll revenue to place himself at the center of a vast web of patronage, creating public authorities that snuck him out from under the auspices of elected officials and the general public. Thus, autonomous, he built 16 expressways, as many parkways, and 7 bridges within New York City alone. He disdained public transit and believed in the primacy of the automobile. The Belt Parkway on the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront separates residents from New York Bay and Jamaica Bay. The Henry Hudson Parkway sits like an asphalt gash between the riverfront and the rest of the island. Overpasses on Long Island were built just low enough to keep buses filled with non-white residents from beachfront state parks. Knowing this, it can be difficult to look at the Cross Bronx Expressway and not see traces of the animus that powered its rampage through the communities that dared to stand in its path.

Also part of his legacy are Central Park’s gaudy, expensive Tavern-On-the-Green and a highly-publicized effort to end one of the city’s most hallowed traditions: Shakespeare in the Park.

A New York City under siege from capital and the ghoulish whims of little men with outsized power is a New York City under the threat of forces dimensionally Other. It is also a New York City uniquely equipped to fight back.

In The City We Became, as in real life, fight back it does.

***

Nobody-makes-fun-of-my-family-but-me energy thrums through the novel. When a city’s constituent parts are made into flesh-and-blood-and-magic people, the term “character defect” takes on new meaning. The novel doesn’t posit that, absent all those elements of the city that make life difficult (racist police, luxury condos, rising subway fare, etc.), New York would turn into paradise on Earth. It is not Shangri-La. It is not Eden. It is New York.

It has withstood Robert Moses. It has withstood other countless attempts to undermine or destroy its structural integrity. The bodega persists. The local arts center almost wholly dependent on outside grants, that persists. The crush of bodies in a subway car, that persists. The gridlock on the FDR, that persists. The reggaeton blasting from boomboxes, that persists. Hip Hop persists, dollar slices persist, the idea of New York City as home, as that place where, in the words of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, all your attempts to escape cease, that persists.

Cthulhu has tried innumerable times to destroy New York City. It has taken many forms. And yet, New York City persists.

The New York outside the novel is leaden with horrors. Income inequality manifests in empty apartment buildings and a titanic homelessness problem. A creaking subway system grows more onerous and odious with each passing year. Attend any number of local town halls on public education in the city and witness some of the Brobdingnagian resistance New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has had to face in his efforts to desegregate public schools. Gentrification and the city’s privatization, coupled with all of the ways racism infects its public and private institutions, all come together to present a bleak future for The City With Bloodshot Eyes.

But Jemisin is at work unveiling a new future. In The City We Became, readers are shown a New York beyond the tunnels and bridges and roads named after men who no longer exist. She shows a New York, not of unmade communities, but of remade ones, the scar tissue stronger than unbroken skin.

New York City may be perpetually under attack. But it is always fighting back.

Hear its heartbeat.

Buy The City We Became From Underground Books

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Originally published in March 2020.
The City We Became is available from Orbit Books. The novel is an expansion of Jemisin’s short story “The City Born Great”, available here.

Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the young adult novel Beasts Made of Night, which won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel by an African, its sequel, Crown of Thunder, and War Girls. He holds a B.A. from Yale, a M.F.A. in screenwriting from the Tisch School fo the Arts, a Master’s degree in droit économique from Sciences Po, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. His fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, Omenana Magazine, Uncanny, and Lightspeed. His non-fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. Riot Baby is his adult fiction debut.

The post The Soul of a City: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin appeared first on Reactor.

Dead. I’m dead. I have died. It is so good it killed me. Murdered by my own ARC. Please bury me in my To Read pile.

The basic story is this: a man known only as Tracker, and several of his acquaintances and enemies, are hired to find a boy. The boy is missing (or not) and may be dead (or not). Of the hired group, there are those wish to find the boy, those who plan to kill him, and those who want him to remain missing. Some are human, some witches, some mercenaries, and some are magical beings. Who is the boy? What happened to him? What was really going on? Is Tracker lying? What if he’s really telling the truth?

But the plot isn’t really the plot. Finding the boy provides the skeleton, but the muscles, blood, and heat come from everything that happens along the way. This is no stroll through a dreamland of fairies and pixie dust. James drags us through a nightmare world of shapeshifters, witches, mermaids, mad scientists, cannibals, vampires, giants, sadistic slavers, selfish monarchs, and a sentient buffalo.

But it’s even more than curious creatures and double-crossing ex-boyfriends. Rage and lust, life and death, kindly monsters and monstrous men, horrific violence and blossoming romance, betrayal and abandonment and unimaginable loss. Black Leopard, Red Wolf muses on the meaning of life itself. Tracker undergoes the worst of the worst of the worst as his mercenary job turns into a journey of revenge and punishment.

As much as I love fantasy, epic fantasy isn’t really my cup of tea. Or, more accurately, old school style epic fantasy. I’ve tried reading Lord of the Rings half a dozen times over the years and never managed to make it past the first 20 pages or so. The A Song of Ice and Fire series holds so little interest for me that I genuinely keep forgetting it exists until someone whinges about George R. R. Martin’s writing pace. Epic fantasy is overloaded with novels about cishet white dudes battling each other over land and women. When a woman does appear, she tends to be a Strong Female Character, not to mention the only one who isn’t a sex fiend, prude, or crone. Queer and/or POC hardly exist at all. That doesn’t mean epic fantasy can’t be enjoyed if laden with tropes—what is fiction if not a collection of tropes?—just that those particular tropes don’t entice me.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is set in a fantasy version of Africa that is, as James described it, “a little bit Dark Ages in Europe… sort of after the fall of Rome, but before the rise of Florence.” In the real world, while Europe was struggling to survive, the African continent was awash with expansive empires and wealthy kingdoms. For epic fantasy to focus almost exclusively on Western Europe and the British Isles means ignoring a treasure trove of storytelling opportunities—opportunities James eagerly takes on. If you know even a little about the history of the African continent, you’ll recognize a lot of elements. Just as Game of Thrones is a mirror world version of the British Isles, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is one of sub-Saharan Africa.

In most indigenous folktales, death and violence are a way of life. So too are bizarre magic and fantastical adventures. African mythologies permeate Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Anansi the Spider doesn’t appear, but the feel, tone, and implications of his stories do. This isn’t just an African twist on Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. This is a mythology of surrealism and brutality. It’s even told in a folktale-ish way. The story opens with Tracker already in prison for killing a child. His responses to his interrogator form the bulk of the book. We aren’t reading about what happened to Tracker, we’re hearing his own story as he chooses to tell it. It’s written like it’s spoken, making it closer to epic poetry and ancient oral traditions than Tolkien and Martin. We may as well be in the room alongside Tracker and the interrogator. On top of all that, James has to be one of the best dialogue writers working today. Every single line was perfection, an exercise in double entendres colliding with doublespeak and sarcasm masquerading as the truth.

Clearly James is more enamored with epic fantasy than I am, a love that bursts through every page of Black Leopard, Red Wolf. In an interview, he talked about how part of his inspiration for the Dark Star trilogy came from the lack of diversity in The Hobbit:

“It made me realize that there was this huge universe of African history and mythology and crazy stories, these fantastic beasts and so on, that was just waiting there. And I’m a big sci-fi geek—I love my Lord of the Rings, I love my Angela Carter and my Dragonslayer. I think the argument ended with me saying, “You know what? Keep your d— Hobbit.”

With that he hits the nail on the head of what is missing for me in most epic fantasy: representation and inclusion. Why do we have to keep writing about cishet white men when there’s a whole world out there of new and diverse stories to tell?

Fantasy has exploded with diversity in recent years, especially in Young Adult fiction. With epic fantasy, the tide is turning more slowly, but QPOC authors are turning the stodgy old subgenre inside out. If Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro series opened the door to new ways of telling epic fantasy, and N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy leapt over the threshold, then Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf just ripped the whole damn door off its hinges.

Buy Black Leopard, Red Wolf From Underground Books

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Originally published in November 2018.

Alex Brown is a YA librarian by day, local historian by night, pop culture critic/reviewer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her every move on Twitter, check out her endless barrage of cute rat pics on Instagram, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

The post Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf Is a Miracle, a Gift appeared first on Reactor.

Scarlet Odyssey is told through the eyes of five characters: Musalodi the fledgling mystic; Ilapara the mercenary; Isa the new ruler of the Saire; the Maidservant who reluctantly furthers her master’s plans for a bloody conquest; and the Enchantress who has her own mysterious plans for Umadiland. After the Maidservant attacks his village, Salo awakens his magic against the wishes of his people. His queen sends him on a quest across Umadiland, and along the way he collects Ilapara, who had been working as an underpaid bodyguard, and Tuk, a mechanical man from the lands across the sea.

Meanwhile after Isa’s family is slaughtered in an attack on the Saire palace, she is crowned king and thrust into the middle of a complicated and messy battle for control of her kingdom. Lurking around the edges and causing chaos are the Enchantress, a powerful mystic who seems to delight in destabilizing local politics, and the Dark Sun, who sends the Maidservant and her fellow lieutenants out to terrorize the citizenry before conquering them.

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Raised in Swaziland and Zimbabwe but now residing in South Africa, C.T. Rwizi is a remarkable new talent. He deftly juggles five very different protagonists, establishes a vast yet intricate new magical system unlike anything else I’ve ever seen, and unfolds stories scattered across the distant past, the chaotic present, and in entirely different planes of existence. It doesn’t always work—the story doesn’t really get going until about halfway through, several storylines are unnecessary to the plot, and the book doesn’t so much end as simply stop at a convenient point in the narrative—but it is nevertheless impressive.

The language is as rich and dense as a jungle. Rwizi revels in vivid descriptions and long, flowing sentences that will delight hardcore epic fantasy fans and will take a bit of getting used to for dabblers and newbies:

In an ancient temple at the heart of a continent, in a chamber awash with the torpid light of glowing rubies, before an audience of temple votaries, Jasiri guardians, clanspeople, young Sentinels, and a high mystic, a king wears the mask-crown for the first time…The mask-crown is a heavy thing, a moongold artifact enchanted to give its wearer the head of a four-tusked elephant with a lofty crown of spikes…

Contrast that with the sharp action sequences that pack a punch. The battles are bloody and intense. Rwizi’s choice to write in present-tense really pays off in these scenes as it immediately immerses the reader in the fray:

A bolt of red lightning arcs along the blade as it makes contact and cuts him, instantly blackening his flesh. He convulses as he falls, electrocuted by the weapon’s live charm of Storm craft. But this is just the beginning. A militiaman with a long scar on his right cheek steps over him and rushes her with a sword; she holds her spear like a staff, parries two blows, sidesteps a third, lowers her spear, and strikes.

I can see a lot of readers comparing Scarlet Odyssey to Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones. Certainly, the book is epic fantasy with a huge cast of characters. There’s a quest for a powerful magical item, court intrigue, political backstabbing, ancient civilizations, fantastical beasts, and battles pitting mortals against supernatural monsters and mages. Rwizi is playing in a very old sandbox, but what he’s created is something wholly new and exciting. Scarlet Odyssey is epic fantasy infused with and reshaped by African mythologies. It feels closer to Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf or Charles R. Saunders’ Imaro series than any Eurocentric epics written by white authors.

Frankly, the story’s Medieval African-ness is what made me want to read it in the first place. I don’t generally care for epic fantasy that isn’t young adult fiction. The sprawling narrative, endless quests, and overpopulated and predominantly white cast of characters bring little enjoyment. When I read the description for Scarlet Odyssey, I knew I had to make an exception to my “no adult epic fantasy” rule. And I’m so glad I did. While I wish there were more openly queer characters, a deeper exploration of disability, and fewer fatphobic comments, it was wonderful to sink into a story that acknowledges the diversity of the people inhabiting the continent of Africa. It was brutal and beautiful and bold and Black in every way.

Fans of epic fantasy could hardly go wrong with Scarlet Odyssey. It hits the high marks of the common tropes and avoids the biggest pitfalls. It is thrillingly refreshing, a propulsive story built around a fascinating cast of characters. C.T. Rwizi has built a solid foundation with plenty of room to grow as the series continues. I, for one, can’t wait to see where he takes readers next.

Scarlet Odyssey is available from 47North.

Alex Brown is a teen services librarian by day, local historian by night, author and writer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her on Twitter and Insta, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

The post An Old Story Made New: C.T. Rwizi’s Scarlet Odyssey appeared first on Reactor.

On paper, Brooks’s followup has more than a few things in common with World War Z. Like its predecessor, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre is presented as a found document. Like its predecessor, it involves humans coming into conflict with something uncanny. And, like its predecessor, its structure offers plenty of foreshadowing of discomfiting events. But Devolution differs from World War Z in a few substantial ways as well, which ultimately make it a more intimate book than its predecessor—and a far stranger one.

The bulk of the narrative comes from the journal of one Kate Holland, with additional interviews and annotations by an unnamed writer. From the early pages, Brooks offers a broad outline of what’s to come. Holland was one of the residents of an “isolated, high-end, high-tech eco-community of Greenloop.” We’re told that Mount Rainier erupts, leading to chaos in the Pacific Northwest—for humans and non-humans alike. The introduction alludes to “a troop of hungry, apelike creatures” who would soon attack Greenloop.

All of that information gives the narrative the sort of doomed intensity of the best disaster movies. Greenloop itself, designed to be isolated in nature but also easy for its affluent residents to access Seattle, plays out like a lightly satirical take on Elon Musk-style futurism. Once the eruption hits and the community’s members find themselves isolated in ways they never expected, Brooks balances the more satirical elements of the situation with keen attention to the unique methods such a community would use to survive.

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Being cut off from civilization is but one struggle that the residents of Greenloop must face. Kate’s journal includes allusions to strange sounds heard at night, and massive shadowy figures seen in the distance. The reader knows what’s coming, which means that the plot has more than a little horror movie in its DNA. We’re introduced to a disparate group with their own rivalries and shifting dynamics; as anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows, we’re about to see most of these people meet terrible fates.

Interspersed with the Kate Holland narrative are interviews conducted with experts in the field and people with ties to Greenloop’s residents. It’s here that Brooks offers a glimpse into Devolution’s larger worldbuilding: namely, the idea that the sasquatches (or Bigfoots? Bigfeet?) that attacked Greenloop represent a species that evolved concurrently to humanity, and which have developed a keen ability to hide themselves away from human civilization.

The novel’s title, then, comes from the notion that the extreme circumstances of the volcanic eruption pushed the sasquatches to adopt more violent behavior—effectively devolving into a more base state. As the plot develops, the human characters find themselves relying less and less on technology and using more and more brutal tactics—meaning, essentially, that devolution works both ways.

In showing humans pitted against a close evolutionary relative in a desperate attempt at survival, Brooks offers a bleak view of the world. It’s telling that neither side—human or sasquatch—suggests cooperating to save both communities. Throughout the book, Brooks makes allusions to areas around the globe where neighboring populations have gone to war, including a passing reference to the Balkans in the 1990s and another character looking back on their time in the IDF.

But Brooks’s ambitious take on human (and primate) nature sometimes balances unsteadily with the smaller details of life in Greenloop, including a few odd pop culture references. When Devolution shows a wider canvas—even a secret history of the world—it works brilliantly, and the scenes of two species each fighting for their life abound with harrowing moments. But there are times where the intimate scale of this novel feels at odds with some of Brooks’s larger thematic points. As compelling as it is, you might find yourself wishing he’d opted to tell this story using a larger canvas.

Devolution is available from Del Rey.

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).

The post When Futurism Meets With Disaster: Max Brooks’ Devolution appeared first on Reactor.

At the center of O’Neill’s novel is a couple: Jeremy Jordan and Alexandra Chen. Alexandra works in image management and consulting; Jeremy used to work in intelligence, and is still haunted by the work he did in Northern Ireland. The novel opens in 2005, and moves gradually towards the present day; running alongside the relationship of Alexandra and Jeremy is the presence of a social network called Cathexis. In a recent interview with BOMB, O’Neill described it as “basically the Facebook of the novel.”

But even before Quotients addresses of surveillance and public presentation in its plot, O’Neill has dipped into the metaphors of social media and online interaction. The novel’s first chapter begins with the neatly disconcerting sentence, “Alexandra Chen saw that they looked at her in search.” And if the sense of that refracted gaze, of looking at someone looking at you through a medium with its own concerns, sounds both dizzying and alienating—that’s the mood that O’Neill taps into across the duration of this novel.

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The novel’s plot unfolds elliptically. As Alexandra and Jeremy’s relationship deepens, they ponder marriage and parenthood, and wrestle with their own pasts—Jeremy’s via his intelligence work, and Alexandra’s via her fraught relationship with her brother. Lurking in the background are more unnerving global events, from the bombings in London on July 7, 2005 to the rise of surveillance from both governments and private industry.

O’Neill presents the different sides of her characters to the reader in dramatic ways. Sometimes we see Jeremy as he is to his former colleagues: an ex-spy whose ties to the intelligence community still exist. Sometimes we see him in a very different context: as a social worker seeking to help Tyrell, a young man navigating a difficult home life.

One brief scene involving Tyrell at home serves as a kind of miniature of O’Neill’s concerns. His aunt has brought a guest over—a strange man he’s never met before. He turns out to be his aunt’s new boyfriend; they met online. “Before I was talking to Eddie, I was talking to his persona,” she says—and that divide neatly summarizes so much of what’s taking place in this novel.

In blending meditations on technology with a profound sense of alienation, O’Neill also recalls Don DeLillo’s short story “Human Moments in World War III.” The scenes that occur within Quotients follow familiar trajectories: two people ponder their careers, a reporter ponders their work, a student converses with a social worker. What makes this novel click is the way O’Neill uses language to make familiar events turn into something strange and mysterious:

“The stories from Washington were the stories from Iran or Afghanistan, and they were in their living room, and these days, she told him she felt as though she was always behind, even when she’d arrived. Alexandra was haggarded by stories. She told the stories of vegetable juices and pens that didn’t drag ink; goal: accrue them in the aura of hitting Cathexis Milestones. It was a time when that mattered, hitting Milestones.”

In an interview published in Bookforum, O’Neill discussed the technological elements of the book. “There are moments when smartphones distract from the real possibilities for togetherness, and there are those in which social media offers comfort when a character’s intimates do not,” she observed. What O’Neill has done with Quotients involves finding a new way to write about modern technology, and how its changed people’s ability to perceive the world. It might not sound like science fiction at first, but once you’ve spent some time immersed in the novel’s particular metier, it’s hard to think of it as anything else.

Quotients is available from Soho Press.

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).

The post We Are the Panopticon: Tracy O’Neill’s Quotients appeared first on Reactor.

The novel, like this time period, is epic in scope, and Parry does an exemplary job portraying these world-changing upheavals in Europe and Haiti through the book’s (and, in most cases, history’s) major players. Two of the points-of-view in the novel, for example, are Maximilien Robespierre and William Pitt, who history buffs will respectively recognize as a leader of the French Revolution and as the Prime Minister of Britain. Other key characters include William Wilberforce, a real-life historical figure who strongly pushed for the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire, and Fina, a young West African woman who British slave traders captured and shipped to what is now the island of Jamaica.

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians isn’t just historical fiction, however, even though it appears to stay mostly true to the known occurrences of the time. Interwoven between the events outlined in our school textbooks is Parry’s creation of a magical system that seamlessly plays an integral part in the political and social movements of the time. In this fantastical timeline, magical capabilities are a hereditary trait that can show up across family lines no matter what social class one may have. In Europe, however, the right to actually practice magic is kept to the aristocracy; those commoners identified by the Knights Templar as having magical powers at birth are shackled with a bracelet that limits their magical abilities, and any commoner found guilty of using magic—even to save the life of a loved one—is sentenced to jail or even death.

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This means that the Marie Antoinette in this world is a powerful fire mage, and that the charismatic Robespierre has some latent magical tendencies toward mesmerism and an even rarer magical bloodline. The impact of magic is also seen in the practice of slavery, where slave traders force-feed captured Africans a magical brew that makes them living zombies, unable to move or even speak on their own volition.

The magic system Parry creates here is a rich one, and it’s clear that the author put a lot of thought into how the societies and institutions of the time would react to and try to control hereditary elemental magic among the populace. The presence of magic also allows Parry to create a sinister magical mastermind who is pulling the strings behind the horrors of the time. It is this secret malevolent force—who they may be what and what they may want—that drives much of the plot of the novel. And while the whodunit provides some propulsion to the story, it’s hard, especially in our current times, to gloss over the fact that humanity doesn’t need the excuse of a malicious supernatural being to explain why so many unjust and evil elements existed and continue to exist in society.

This is most obvious in Fina’s storyline, which regrettably doesn’t get as much page time as the other characters. Given this is the first in a duology, however, I anticipate Fina and her part in the Haitian Revolution to get more attention in the second book. In A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, however, Fina realizes she is able to overcome the zombifying brew and regain autonomy, which ultimately lets her escape to Haiti where the slave uprising there is in full swing.

In Haiti, she’s allowed to cultivate her magical capabilities instead of suppressing them (unsurprisingly, the British and the French would summarily kill any enslaved person found to have magical powers), and she ends up aiding the real-life historical leader of the uprising, Toussaint Louverture, who in this alternative history also has some minimal magic ability to control the weather. In Haiti, Fina also becomes more confident—clearer on who she is and what ends she thinks may justify the means. Where her journey takes her remains to be seen, but it is her journey I’m most interested in learning more about in the second book.

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger, though I suppose those who know history already know at least the broad strokes of the second book’s plot. But the main thing that will have me picking up the net installment in this duology isn’t the retelling of how that time period plays out—it’s the characters Parry has beautifully brought to life in this magical alternative timeline. As I mentioned earlier, I’m particularly interested in spending more time with Fina, but I also care about Pitt and Wilberforce, two real-life figures that Parry crafts into three-dimensional individuals, recognizable from our history texts but different in this magic-touched world. It’s Parry’s deft crafting of these characters’ personal struggles that make the larger events around them have more poignancy, and it’s Parry’s detailed and expansive worldbuilding that make A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians an immersive read and a world I look forward to revisiting when the second novel comes out.

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians is available from Redhook.

Vanessa Armstrong is a writer with bylines at The LA Times, SYFY WIRE, StarTrek.com and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Penny and her husband Jon, and she loves books more than most things. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her on Twitter @vfarmstrong.

The post History and Magic Combine in A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians by H.G. Parry appeared first on Reactor.

In this story, we meet Sirscha Ashwyn: an orphan obsessed with rising above her status as a houseless reject and becoming the Queen’s Shadow—a Master Spy answerable to only to Queen Meilyr herself. To reach her goal, Sirscha becomes the apprentice to the current Shadow, a woman named Kendara. And at Kendara’s behest, she joins the Queen’s Company, the royal army academy where she is bullied and degraded due to her orphan status. However, she endures these things because of her friendship with a high-born girl named Saengo and the prospect of winning the coveted spot as Shadow over the other apprentices.

Because she is one of a number of apprentices, Sirscha’s ascension is not guaranteed. When she learns one of her most hated rivals is another apprentice, she disobeys the commands of the Company to intercept a task set before him where shamans attack her, the only people in Evewyn more lowly than her. Shamans are a hated race, hunted, imprisoned, and executed because of an accident that killed the previous King and Queen, Queen Meilyr’s parents. During the attack, Sirscha’s rival almost dies, Saengo actually dies, Sirscha resurrects Saengo and discovers she is a shaman herself. The two friends also become known as deserters and are hunted by the Company.

Now an outlaw and scared of what she has become, Sirscha seeks out Ronin the Spider King, the most powerful shaman in the realm. He has kept the peace among humans, shamans, and the shadowborn for centuries. She reaches Ronin with the help of an unexpected ally, Prince Meilek—the Queen’s brother. He gives Sirscha safe passage to the edge of the forbidden zone of the Dead Wood, where Ronin lives and where trees rip flesh and capture souls.

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Sirscha meets Ronin, and he tells her about her power. She is a not only a lightrender shaman but the rarest kind: a Soulguide. Her destiny is to destroy the expanding Dead Wood that threatens all people and bring peace to the realm. His proof? Sirscha used her power to resurrect her best friend and accidentally made the girl her familiar—mystical beasts that channels a shaman’s power. There’s never been a human familiar before, and Soulguides are the only ones who can resurrect the dead. It all sounds like a great destiny, but Sirscha rejects this. She doesn’t trust Ronin, she trusts magic even less, and the whole Soulguide business gets in the way of her real goals: becoming the Queen’s Shadow and saving her best friend from being a familiar. In service to those goals, Sirscha makes a series of decisions that have devastating and broad-reaching personal and political consequences that upends her personal world and brings the outer world to the brink of war and annihilation from an indestructible force.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The story is rich and ripe with multiple intriguing conflicts that would make for compelling storytelling. Lee does well at weaving dense worldbuilding and context into the fabric of the tale at appropriate times. The story is satisfying, yet leaves many questions that need answers. It does end on kind of a cliffhanger, but the implication of the cliffhanger is clear. So instead of feeling frustrated at the ending, I felt anticipatory and cannot wait to read the second book.

Though the book is plot-heavy, it seems more character-driven to me. It reminds me of Game of Thrones, where individual passions and pursuits can have a broad sociological impact. And though Sirscha appears to have the trappings of a “Chosen One” narrative, the action is not driven by who she is but by what she does. One of her core personality traits: single-mindedness drives much of the plot. Her need to “prove herself” and her single-mindedness in this regard drives much of the actions and leads to both hopeful and heart-rending circumstances to different groups of people she encounters through the tale. I found myself alternating between wanting to smack Sirscha upside the head and rooting for her.

I met several characters I came to love and am already shipping with Sirscha, though I’d be perfectly content if she ended up with no one. I appreciate that the “love” that this story focuses on is that of friendship and the drive that provides. There are also several mysterious characters we never meet, but their actions are a huge part of the plot, namely, Queen Meilyr. Though a significant antagonist, we only “see” the Queen through the eyes of others and her actions on the page. We have yet to meet her but know there is more to her story and that of Kendara. These are deft strokes by Lee.

Forest of Souls is an immersive read that I highly recommend. The storytelling is rich and authentic, and it’s just the kind of voice we need right now.

Forest of Souls is available from Page Street Kids.

Genine Tyson is an African-American writer who traveled East to West to settle in California for the last several years. Since obtaining her creative writing degree, she has done nothing with it except get a job and write on weekends, but things changed. Embracing her love of monsters, magic, and machines, she is working on two novels at once -because writing one isn’t hard enough—apparently. To connect, find Genine on Twitter @geninet or on her blog.

The post Destiny and Discovery in Lori M. Lee’s Forest of Souls appeared first on Reactor.

Zen Cho’s novella The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is a small-scale story on the crest of an enormous wave of war. The fight bleeds in in unexpected places. Cho crafts a different sort of intimacy within the story: we as readers don’t get very close to any one character, and so we can’t necessarily trust any of their perspectives. In this way, it feels almost like we’re one of their crew along for the journey, unearthing the rules of the world and their relationships from each of them in turn.

When Guet Imm invites herself along to join the group, the men take to her readily enough, but they don’t take her seriously. She had been in pious seclusion for over a decade as part of her devotion to the Pure Moon Order, and now she must learn to navigate a war-torn world. Meanwhile, the ragtag group of bandits have found themselves on a mission steeped in secrecy and danger. They soon discover there is more to each other than any of them expected. Their histories intersect, and so, perhaps, will their futures.

The joy of this novella is in the unfurling. Cho subverts expectations to surprising and delightful effect. Order works a specific alchemy, crafting a precious, tantalizing window into a scoping world within its brief page-count. Guet Imm and Tet Sang aren’t warriors or kings, and by rights a story of this setting wouldn’t anticipate them as the stars. And yet, this is how nations change, in the small movements of underestimated people. How the universe is remade, and how fate can realign. Fate, indeed, is as mutable as identity, and within Order, characters remake themselves to survive. An ongoing process of working towards being truer to themselves, as the circumstances of their world uproot and turn to riot.

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Don’t expect an action-packed wuxia drama. Cho herself tweeted it’s not necessarily explicitly wuxia, more along the lines of fic of a wuxia. It’s a queerer, lyrical take: bringing subtext to forefront. She queers the expectations by centering primarily on the emotional dynamics of an entirely queer cast. There’s violence and magic, but they’re used in quietly powerful, surprising ways that serve to complicate not only our understanding of the worldbuilding, but that of the characters, many of whom find what they know of their world, their journey, and their companions to be something else entirely.

Romance threads through the journey, but Cho queers this too. It’s central but it doesn’t take up separate space, woven into the plot, emerging for us as it does for the characters, and upon reckoning it was there all along. Like the overarching narrative itself, it’s subtle and unassuming until it’s very much not, and the sweet intensity of the build sprawls in its glory.

Like its name, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water shimmers with great power, scoping realities of war and faith refracted in the manifestations of its characters and their dynamics. Cho gives us a glimpse, a prismatic window, into a profound and complex world, and its story is made all the richer by its close, intimate telling.

As the war does bleed in, it illuminates with stark clarity how all of them are where they are because of it. They live in a landscape near undone by tyranny and poverty, thrown together to try and survive. Cho never lets it become weighty with darkness, balancing it, as she does so well, with purposeful humor and levity that shifts from crude to tender. It makes for a cheeky romp, but one in which Cho also interrogates what it is to be a “bandit” in wartime, and the potency of faith. So much of the charm of this novella lies within the found family dynamic, especially because Cho writes it so sweetly queernormative. She plays with gender expectations with multiple characters throughout the entire novella.

Cho’s writing is satisfyingly defiant, on a sentence level and story level alike. She constantly subverts expectations within the world she’s laid out. Order is tautly woven and innovative, written with a spare, deft hand. It delivers an understated, brilliantly crafted adventure of transmutation, soft men and cutthroat women, and a journey that takes them apart and pieces them back together, not quite as they were.

Lithe and literary, this is a jewel of a novella, resonating with Cho’s smart, specific magic.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water is available from Tordotcom Publishing.

Maya Gittelman is a queer Pilipinx-Jewish diaspora writer and poet. Their cultural criticism has been published on The Body is Not An Apology and The Dot and Line. Formerly the events and special projects manager at a Manhattan branch of Barnes & Noble, she now works in independent publishing, and is currently at work on a novel.

The post The Smart, Specific Magic of Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water appeared first on Reactor.

Yes, Katherine Addison’s new novel, The Angel of the Crows, is supernatural Sherlock fanfiction (wingfic, to be precise). She’s not hiding it either—it’s right there in the author’s note, and undeniably written into every other character name, easter egg, and case file. And the sooner you embrace this sincerely dorky premise, the sooner you can get to all the fun.

Set in an alternate 1880s London, The Angel of the Crows follows Crow—our Sherlock stand-in—and Doyle—our dear Watson—as they solve a series of oddball mysteries about town. Fans will recognize stories like “A Study in Scarlet” and The Hound of the Baskervilles, as well as characters like Moriarty (he’s a vampire now) and Lestrade (still a lesser mortal) in its pages. The catch is not only the novel’s supernatural entities and phenomena, but also the ways that these distortions change the once-familiar stories into something new. How, after all, will Hound of Baskervilles be changed by the quite literal existence of hellhounds? What fun is there in a mystery that can be solved by a psychic or a soothsayer? These aren’t simple deus ex machina (a ghost did it!) but a set of new rules to be applied in Crow’s deductive reasoning, a toolkit of lore, esoteric cultural knowledge, and occult psychology. You may know the outcomes of these stories in a general sense—but you’ve also never read stories quite like them. Add to this the uniting narrative of the Ripper case, and you’ve got yourself a Victorian mystery remix the likes of which I haven’t seen since steampunk’s heyday.

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The existence of angels and werewolves and etc. are not the only revisions at play in the novel. I should say, first, that I have described it as fanfic of Sherlock of late BBC fame rather than Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes stories because it draws clear story beats and charming allusions from and to its episodes. These subversions delighted me almost as much as the spooks and creatures. Crow tells Doyle that he values his opinion and intellect, for instance, and treats him as a partner rather than a hanger-on. This allows for a much different kind of relationship to develop, not to mention the growth it lends to each of their character arcs. As someone that was ultimately disappointed in BBC’s Sherlock (and here’s why), it was a pleasure to read a kinder, more developed version of these characters that didn’t sacrifice the thrill of deduction and a protagonist much smarter than his readers.

Note: Spoilers below!

Of course any review of Angel of the Crows would be incomplete without acknowledging its subversion of gender as well. Not only do we have a trans Watson/Doyle and an ambiguously gendered Holmes/Crow, but we have these delectable things without them mattering a single lick to the plot itself! No melodramatic outing, no overwrought transition backstory, just awkward transmasc energy for days. Their treatment of Doyle’s identity as a surprise/reveal may turn some readers off—which, fair enough—but as a trans reader myself, I loved being fooled into misinterpreting Doyle’s transness as a wolf/hound transformation (trans guys are werewolves; don’t ask me to explain myself), and I loved that there was no real “reason” for the reveal, it was for its own sake. It’s nice to have a story featuring a trans character that doesn’t focus on their transition or their pain.

All of that being said, there’s quite a lot in Angel of the Crows that exists for its own sake and that did ultimately leave me feeling less in love than I otherwise might have been. There are moments where the fourth wall is—maybe not broken, but certainly questioned—and where canonical material is referenced in a rather leading way, and I often felt as if these moments were going to build into some kind of meta-commentary or universe-bending reveal—something otherwise bigger than the mystery stories in-and-of themselves. But the novel just… never goes there. It is very much just itself. You get what you paid for.

And I like what I paid for. The novel is utterly bizarre, for one thing. The stories are amusing and thrilling, and they fully function as the pastiches of Victorian story-telling that they aspire to. The heroes are the best sort of charmingly-flawed outcasts, and I could go on for days about what a sweetheart this interpretation of Sherlock is. But—especially as a novel, not as a collection of disparate stories—there could have been more meat to it, more substance, more to say. Besides not doing anything to break the form, timeline, or narrative, there aren’t any real themes so much as motifs—various instances of the harm of gender roles and imperialism, but no throughline of commentary. It bothered me less in the heat of the reading process, and more in hindsight and in the final 20 pages or so, which was when I expected the motifs to be brought together somehow. The resolution of the Jack the Ripper case certainly didn’t prove enough of a unifier, however riveting its final scene may be.

Perhaps it’s a problem of form. If this had been presented to me as a collection of stories, I might not have had the same concerns. And—I’ll be honest—if I’d read it on AO3, I probably wouldn’t either. But regardless of what form it might take, I’d absolutely read a sequel to The Angel of the Crows (Addison certainly leaves room for one). There’s a reason these characters and stories are so enduring, after all, and these reimaginings only add to the delight.

The Angel of the Crows is available from Tor Books.

Em Nordling reads and writes in Louisville, KY.

The post Sherlock, but Make Him Likable and Also an Angel: The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison appeared first on Reactor.

I had thought, as I figure most readers of Harrison’s Hollows series did, that 2014’s The Witch With No Name was the final novel: the main couple get together, the family unit feels secure, magic is recreated, demons are freed from their elf-arranged servitude and must find their way in the real world. Imagine my surprise, then, when American Demon was announced! Worlds as thoroughly fleshed-out but narrow in scope as Harrison’s are the easiest kind to slip into though, and despite the six-year gap, picking up where we last left off was no challenge.

The Hollows novels are light-hearted fare: urban (science-)fantasy where each book stands as an independent action-mystery episode building on the world as a whole. American Demon opens with a prologue in the form of Rachel’s I.S. file running through her alliances, the threat she might pose, and the various factions at play in the world, intended to either refresh our memories or give new readers a foothold, though it didn’t accomplish much on that score. Diving back in without doing an ounce of re-reading wasn’t a problem: Harrison sprinkles enough reflection and summation of prior events throughout to bring a familiar reader up to speed.

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As the title implies, the focus here remains on the conflict between demons and elves while the rest of the world stands watching in anger, motivated by a standing distrust of demons (which almost led to Rachel’s public murder last time around, when her heritage as the first surviving witch-born demon came out). Trent is embattled in his political position while Landon attempts to discredit him publicly… and, as we find out in the first third, has simultaneously sicced an ancient energy monster Rachel accidentally freed on him. The baku cannot be contained through traditional means, and knowing who and what has set it upon them, Rachel and Trent’s main concern is discovering how to stop it rather than discovering a perpetrator. Plus, in the meantime, familial and social conflicts chug on unabated.

American Demon, not unlike other series-pivot books in urban fantasy universes, has some mild pacing issues. The extended scenes of magical research and interpersonal drama are a big part of the readers’ investment, but at the same time sprawl to an extent that bogs down the plot, particularly given that the book takes place over a handful of days wherein the characters mostly aren’t allowed to sleep. That isn’t to suggest that I wasn’t hooked to see where all of that tension went—particularly as the magical and interpersonal sections are far more important to the series as a whole. It’s just that the balance between novel’s individual plot and series’ larger plot was wobbly in this hefty installment while Harrison sketched out the narrative pivot heading further into the reinvigorated series. And reading some fun action and intrigue isn’t the sole reason folks return to these long-running series: let’s be honest, we’re here for the characters and their relationships.

Which brings me to an aside that I might not have noticed at a different point in time: the police forces in the Hollows series, both FIB and I.S., maintain an antagonistic, often-corrupt role… even while Rachel maintains friendships with or takes on jobs for them on an individual level. Questions of bigotry and abuse of power hover in the foreground. As we’re all considering our relationship to procedural novels, that little tidbit of Hollows worldbuilding stood out to me. Rachel’s goal is to form coalitions, protect the innocent, and solve disputes, as much as she’s also-often solving crimes. Something implicit to chew over, at least.

As for other characters, there’s one addition to the big ol’ cast whom I latched onto quick: Hodin, the tetchy, academically-minded demon who seems to be a relation of Al’s—and who has been imprisoned for centuries for the crime of working elf-Goddess magic in combination with his demon magic. His role as a potential teacher (and friend) for Rachel seems to signal the direction future books will head toward: combining demon and elf magic to its original unsplit state, which more or less no one remembers or has record of in the current time given centuries of conflict between the two species. Probably no one is surprised that I, like Rachel, found the grumpy shapeshifting demon immediately, delightfully compelling. He’s got a tragic backstory, of course, and reminds Rachel of herself; watching their friendship blossom over argumentative spelling research was quite fun. (More of him, please.)

Though speaking of friends… at the same time, Ivy and Nina are sliding off the stage—a source of pain for the Morgan family unit throughout the novel, as their previously secure life together seems to be dissolving now that Ivy is, well, more or less married. While Rachel had envisioned their living arrangements continuing as they always had once the church was repaired, Ivy’s relationship and job are pulling her further apart from their domestic space. At the same time, Rachel has the offer to move in with Trent, thought that’s a big step she’s unsure of. How do mature adults handle these inevitable shifts in domestic arrangements and individual emotional needs?

I continue to find the ongoing, understated queer struggle of sprawling domestic units in these books comfortingly familiar. Rachel and Trent are figuring out how to handle Ellasbeth—will they be a three-party parenting unit to the toddlers, will she move into the house?—and if they’re going to basically adopt Zack-the-teenage-runaway as their kid. Ivy and Nina must figure out how to maintain their friendships when life drags them in another direction, Quen struggles with the decades-gone loss of Trent’s mother (with whom he may or may not have had an affair), Jenks learns to live as a widower, and so on. The Hollows books have some on-screen romance, but the main emotional arc is actually… the intimacies of chosen-familial bonds and friendships for people without blood families to return to. I dig that here too, as I always have.

American Demon will be a pleasant diversion for familiar fans of the Hollows, who had perhaps accepted the series’ end in 2014 as final. While I don’t recommend it as a starting point—the books are far from episodic enough to allow that—I had a good time reading it, and when it comes to these big universes, that’s all I’m asking for. Rachel continues to be a thoughtful, silly, fun protagonist; watching her big familial unit evolve and grow is as engaging as seeing her fight with elf religious leaders and knock people out with prank curses.

American Demon is available from Ace Books.

Lee Mandelo is a writer, critic, and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. They have two books out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling, and in the past have edited for publications like Strange Horizons Magazine. Other work has been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Ideomancer.

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Illi Basbowen is approximately a decade younger than the protagonists of The Perfect Assassin and The Impossible Contract. Seven years have passed since the events of The Impossible Contract, and Ghadid has begun to rebuild from its Siege. But the scars remain: a lot of people died, and grief remains strong. Especially for Illi, whose post-traumatic stress reaction to losing her parents and witnessing the deaths of large numbers of her neighbours has manifested as a burning determination to be able to protect her city and a reluctance to form lasting relationships outside of the handful she already has. Illi trains relentlessly, and restricts herself to short-term sexual liaisons with caravan guards who’re only visiting Ghadid for a little while—and who can perhaps teach her some new tricks for fighting with.

The latest of these temporary liaisons is Canthem, a nonbinary elite guard (part of the “Guul Guard” from the kingdom of Hathage) who has come to Ghadid accompanying an ambitious general, Merrabel Barca. Barca has come to track down Heru Sametket and compel him to hand over everything he has that’s linked to the sajaami (an incorporeal being of great power which readers will remember as an important part of The Impossible Contract).

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The Unconquered City

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Heru, for all his arrogance and self-absorption, is one of the handful of people that Illi counts as a friend. She trusts him, mostly—though she’s horrified when she learns that he might have put Ghadid in danger and considers it a betrayal. When disaster strikes his workshop, she trusts him enough to let him bind the sajaami into her body rather than let its power be unleashed, but this isn’t a real solution. Eventually the power will burn Illi up, and Heru doesn’t know how to prevent it—and besides, he’s just been exiled from Ghadid. Answers may lie in Hathage, but the journey is one of many dangers, betrayals, self-discovery and growth: and for Illi, the awkwardness of sharing lengthy close quarters with someone she’d thought of basically as a one-night stand and for whom she might actually be developing feelings.

Illi’s growth as a person is closely tied to what she encounters on her journey, and what she learns about herself. The Unconquered City is partly a story about undead camels, necromancy, angry spirits, batshit magic, negotiating with mentor figures (including some who betray you), murder, really dangerous ancient spirits, and visiting fascinating new places where some people may want to kill you, but it’s also the story of a prickly, defensive young woman who is afraid of allowing people to risk themselves for her as she learns to actually let other people close to her, and to let herself rely on other people to support her—and learns which people she can or should trust to do that. She has three mentor figures, one in Heru Sametket, one in Merrabel Barca, and one in Thana Basbowen. All of these mentors let her down in some fashion, but she learns from all of them—and some of them come through for her, in the end.

Speaking of letting people in: Illi’s relationship with Canthem and their back-and-forth is delightfully rendered: a love story from rocky beginnings that feels deep and authentic and—at appropriate points—really fucking awkward. Canthem is in themself a compelling character, one who doesn’t put up with Illi’s bullshit, and an excellent foil for Illi. And after the events of The Impossible Contract, I didn’t expect to see Heru with a heroic arc, but his growth and choices proved to be very satisfying laid alongside Illi’s youthful journey of self-discovery.

Fast-paced, well-characterised, and set in a fascinating world, The Unconquered City stands alone well while also being a very satisfying capstone to the whole series. I recommend it, and I can’t wait to see what K.A. Doore does next.

The Unconquered City is available from Tor Books.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

The post Undead Camels, Angry Spirits, and Prickly Protagonists: The Unconquered City by K.A. Doore appeared first on Reactor.