Category: Reviews

Book Review: The Theft of Sunlight

3/25/2021

I got an early look at Intisar Khanani's new fantasy release with HarperTeen! It officially launched this week, so if you're itching for more of her refreshingly unique take on high fantasy, you can jump right in!

Book Review:

Dauntless Path #1: The Theft of Sunlight

Intisar Khanani

HarperTeen, March 23rd, 2021

Grade: A

(I received an advance copy via Edelweiss)

The Basics:

Amraeya has lived her whole life under the unspoken terror of the Snatchers, knowing that the people she loves could disappear at any moment, and that if they do, no one will even dare look for them. Born with a clubfoot, Rae herself has enjoyed the dubious privilege of being considered an unappealing target, but even that won’t protect her if she starts asking too many questions.

When a child is taken from her village on the same day that she receives an invitation to attend the royal wedding, she decides to take a chance and petition for help from the highest power in the kingdom of Menaiya.

The Downside:

Without spilling any spoilers, The Theft of Sunlight ends on a pretty extreme cliffhanger. It still feels like the end of a complete installment in a bigger saga, not just an arbitrary stop in the middle of a story that hasn’t really gone anywhere yet, so it doesn’t bother me. Still, I know that’s something that a lot of readers prefer to be warned of in advance, so there it is.

The Upside:

Khanani leads us through Menaiya with her usual sharp confidence and vivid descriptions, using high fantasy convention to deepen the atmosphere but never being confined by it. Rae has to navigate courtly drama, street-level criminal syndicates, religious corruption, and culture clashes far more subtle and complicated than those so often explored among the standard Tolkienian fantasy beings, all in the course of a (sadly) timeless and grounded human trafficking investigation. Every detail is purposeful, never recycled unexamined from the genre’s stock motifs.

While the mystery adventure has its thrills, the real heart of the story is the friendship that develops between Rae and Princess Alyrra (the same princess from Thorn, which is advisable but not required pre-reading). At first, through Rae’s eyes, Alyrra is an impossibly distant and powerful figure whose support would solve all her problems, but as those who’ve read Thorn already know, Alyrra is an unwanted princess of a small outlying kingdom, now happily engaged to Menaiya’s prince but still as much of an outsider to its court as Rae herself. The two bond over their uncompromising passion for justice, learn to prop each other up, and challenge each other’s assumptions about their own power or lack thereof.

Recommended for anyone looking for interesting new high fantasy universes to explore.

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Book Review: The Deep

6/7/2020

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I realize I’ve fallen far behind in my reviews lately. In honor of Pride Month, and for other quite obvious reasons, I’m finally getting around to posting my review of Rivers Solomon’s amazing mermaid story, The Deep.

Book Review:

The Deep

Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes

November 2019, Gallery/Saga Press

A+

The Basics:

When pregnant African women were thrown overboard from slave ships to conserve dwindling supplies for their captors, the restorative magic of the deep allowed their babies to survive and transform into the first merpeople, the Wajinru.

Today, the Wajinru survive and live with the horror of their origins by placing all the memories of every Wajinru who ever lived in the mind of a single Historian. The Historian periodically shares the memories with the rest in a Remembering ceremony, guiding them through the story and satisfying their craving for identity and belonging, before allowing them to return to blissful ignorance.

Yetu is this generation’s Historian, and seeing through the eyes of every dead Wajinru, bearing the weight of tragedies that those around her are willfully unable to understand, has gradually erased her individually identity and ultimately her will to exist. In a desperate attempt to save her own life, she runs away in the middle of a Remembrance, leaving the other Wajinru floundering under knowledge they don’t remember how to bear, and strikes out to discover who she is beyond the suffocating role she’s been assigned.

The Downside:

At only 166 pages, The Deep is a quick read, but both the characters and the world have plenty of room for deeper exploration. Maybe a sequel will show us more. The story also arguably treads water (pun intended) toward the middle, but that’s certainly preferable to rushing Yetu’s overdue retreat of self-reflection, or the development of her first romance.

The Upside:

The entire premise of The Deep forces a bitter conflict between the duty to self and duty to community. That’s an important, universal theme that Yetu’s predicament captures well, but it’s not a rare one for fiction to tackle. What sets The Deep apart is the simultaneous, connected, equally bitter conflict between the need for truth, and the need to avoid drowning in the ugliness of that truth. To save herself, and the people and planet she loves, Yetu must confront head on a set of catch-22s that many people will spend a lifetime trying to reconcile or ignore.

Meanwhile, Yetu’s also discovering the joy and terror of first love with a human woman, who’s wrestling with identity and belonging issues of her own. Wajinru are hermaphroditic and choose their own gender identities if they wish, but refreshingly, this is not among the things that Yetu finds confusing about her world or herself. There’s a beautifully frank scene in which Yetu and her prospective love interest ask each other honest questions about how sexuality works for them, and give honest answers as best they can. It’s an unfortunately special moment to see fictional love interests communicate so openly and functionally about anything, let alone something so personal and sensitive.

The Deep is insightful, beautiful, and intensely human on multiple levels, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for an extremely different take on a classic fantasy character type.

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Book Review: The Wolf Queen

4/2/2020

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Book Review:

The Wolf Queen (The Hope of Aferi #1)

Cerece Rennie Murphy

LionSky Publishing, 2018

A-

The Basics:

A powerful group of sorcerer women called the Amasiti once lived in the Land of Yet, helping the people around them with their healing, life-giving magic. That was long ago, but just as the Land of Yet is on the brink of civil war between a power-mad Hir and the people he has long abused and neglected, a reclusive young woman named Ameenah discovers that the legacy her mother left her may be older and more important than she ever imagined.

The Downside:

The plot of The Wolf Queen is slow to start, which is okay, given the richness of the opening worldbuilding, but it’s also fairly slight when it arrives. Even when Ameenah is given what seems to be an impossible task, she completes it almost immediately with luck rather than any steps of problem-solving. There are also the standard fantasy themes of the past being an ideal to return to, and of a person’s blood and gender and foretold destiny determining their potential, rather than their choices and efforts.

The Upside:

In spite of how little actually happens in it, The Wolf Queen is an engaging read from start to finish. Ameenah is coolly steadfast in her innate knowledge of her possession of herself, in the face of an entire country’s gaslighting insistence that she owes herself to the Hir, to the resistance, or to the false fairytale that both have spun around her. The setting stands out from the usual medieval-Europe fantasy backdrop, featuring magical creatures based on gazelles and secondary characters who’ve escaped from the nightmare of diamond mines. While traditional in some places, the themes also touch on the range of different kinds of power, and how those that are less violent, more constructive, and easier for the unscrupulous to co-opt and take advantage of aren’t necessarily weaker or less admirable.

Altogether a unique escape into a magical world that comes alive almost from the first page.

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Book Review: I Am Magical (magnifiqueNOIR #1)

12/23/2019

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Book Review

I Am Magical (magnifiqueNOIR #1)

Briana Lawrence

Sewn Together Reflections, 2017

Grade: A

The Basics:

In a city besieged by mysterious giant monsters, a group of magical girls begins to rise, one by one, to meet the challenge. But between fending off attacks using their exploding cupcakes and sparkling pixels, they have to figure out how to live together, make it to their classes on time, and talk to their families about what they do and who they are.

The Downside:

The action can be a bit repetitive and low-stakes, with each monster inevitably succumbing to having enough magic thrown at it. That's okay; a bit of lighthearted monster-smashing is rarely a bad thing, but the informed nature of the danger makes it all the more grating to see the girls constantly scolded for just about everything they do. (How dare they not build their whole lives around never worrying anyone?) Lawrence is obviously on the girls' side, and this undermining that they face is a real-world problem thoroughly worthy of depiction and criticism, but its pervasiveness throughout each girl’s storyline does become tiresome. Between the different dynamics of three different magical girls’ home lives, it would have been nice to see at least one example of someone wholeheartedly supporting one of them, without a perpetually underlying tone of, “Well, I understand that this is what you need to do, and you have a right to do it, but I still really wish you wouldn’t, so you totally owe me for not trying to stop you.”

The Upside:

While the fights themselves can be a noisy blur of powers and punching, the monsters are nicely memorable in that they hide in plain sight, always as that person in the crowd. The creep stalking younger girls at bus stops. The crude provocateur harassing women at the gym. Even the diva who expects the whole store to wait while she demands the manager’s attention. Each one represents a piece of toxicity or hostility that most women — and sometimes most people — can relate to coming up against in public spaces, which makes them quite satisfying to see obliterated in magical girl fashion.

Indeed, it’s the social, human, non-magical aspects of I Am Magical where most of the storytelling magic actually happens. For starters, the audacity of the team makeup is a thing of beauty unto itself. Every single member of magnifiqueNOIR is female, black, and somewhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

All of them.

They’re all in their own phases of asserting their identities and dealing with their own related challenges, and most importantly, they’re all distinct, complex people who cannot be summed up simply by checking boxes on a questionnaire.

Without ever forcing a pedantic, on-the-nose discussion of the matter, magnifiqueNOIR flatly rejects the old tendency to introduce more representation into existing structures in timid, measured, token doses, celebrating the tiniest victories and carefully never asking for too much. Instead, it seems to ask, so what if it’s statistically improbable for there to be this many LGBTQ+ black women all in one place, coincidentally brought together by something other than having those things in common? It’s still far more probable than anyone being able to generate exploding cupcakes out of thin air, so why not? Why not go all in and make up some ground in a media stream that so often offers far less than statistically accurate representation of all of these things?

The girls also all have different relationships with traditional femininity, both aesthetically and in the activities they pursue, and with how that meshes with their staggering cosmic powers and the nontraditional aspects of their private lives. Bree is a gamer girl and all-around geek who’s conventionally attractive and loves it, especially when she’s cosplaying for her YouTube channel. Marianna is a fashionable plus-sized baker who can conquer the day in heels. Lonnie is a muscular kickboxer who lives in unisex comfortwear. None of them are wrong, and no authentic expression of gender is ever at odds with the state of being a capable, complete human being.

For anyone who loves reading about magical girls kicking butt, this is a new series not to be missed, brimming with positivity and geekery in equal measures.

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Book Review: Dark Fairy Tale Queens

10/8/2019

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Book Review:

Dark Fairy Tale Queens 1-3

Anita Valle

2015-2017

Grade: A

I’m going to mess with the format a little for this one. Usually I break my reviews up into a summary, what I liked, and what I didn’t like, but because this is a novella collection, I’m just going to go one installment at a time.

The Dark Fairy Tale Queens series starts out with a pretty simple concept. What if Cinderella were the villain of her own story? That’s not to say that this story has a hero; the wicked stepmother and stepsisters are just about as wicked as ever, and the idea seems to be that abuse is cyclical and breeds more of itself.

That’s a fascinating yet intuitive take on the Cinderella story that I’m amazed I’ve never seen done before — even as a kid, Cinderella’s goodness always struck me as improbable under the circumstances — but dwelling on the themes makes this version sound quite a bit more serious than it actually is. The actual experience of reading it is, in a word, wicked. There’s simply no better way to describe it.

It takes a very special story to make me follow a truly unlikeable protagonist, let alone a whole unlikeable cast, and I’m not normally a fangirl for evil queens who are actually evil. In a world where women are so casually vilified for things like wielding power, having informed opinions, and challenging the status quo, I tend to prefer reimaginings that treat traditionally evil female characters as misunderstood or at least morally gray. In Valle’s hands, however, Cinderella’s shallow, vindictive, manipulative self-indulgence is more readably fun than I ever would have thought possible.

This book is like what would happen if Cinderella were a Telltale Game, and after playing through it a few times with the intuitive good decisions, you decided to pick all the options that make everyone behave as badly as possible just to see what would happen. The story turns out substantively pretty much the same, of course, but the tone and the details are night and day. That’s where Sinful Cinderella is at its most deliciously clever, the way it tours through every essential cosmetic beat of the fairy tale, from pumpkin to ball to slipper, but with a completely different set of motivations that actually make more sense than the original.

Possible downsides: some of the dialogue outlining the themes of love and hate and evil feels a bit on-the-nose, and there’s an assault that can be read as retribution for Cinderella simply daring to go to a party looking killer (hardly one of her actual “sins”), but if you squint just right it kind of blends into the gloriously chaotic train wreck of how much everyone in this universe sucks.

In this continuation of Dark Fairy Tale Queens, Snow White is making plans to run away with her boyfriend, Hunter, to escape her stepmother, the wicked queen Cinderella. But she won’t be satisfied with just making good her escape; first she wants revenge on Cinderella for killing her father (never mind that he was a monster, it’s the principle of the thing), and she wants a love apple to share with Hunter, a spell that will keep their love strong and fresh for the rest of their lives, no matter what.

She’s going to need it, because unlike everyone else in the Dark Fairy Tale Queens universe, Hunter is decent, right through to the core. As much fun as this series’ heroines’ twisted minds can be, Hunter is a breath of fresh air, not to mention an ever-tightening reel of tension, as his childhood sweetheart love for Snow grapples with his dawning understanding of just how venomous she is.

When Snow makes Hunter promise to kill the pregnant Cinderella for her, she finally drives just enough of a wedge between them to set in motion a phenomenally awkward love triangle between stepmother, stepdaughter, and the sweetest man in the kingdom.

Meanwhile, Cinderella’s magic mirror has shifted its seductive attentions to the new fairest woman in the land, calling Snow’s worst nature even closer to the surface, and Cinderella’s fairy godmother ties the series closer together with a reappearance as a peddler of magic apples.

Possible downsides: Because Sneaky Snow White deviates more from the structure of its source fairytale, the pacing is a bit unconventional and treads water in a few places. Snow White also rather uncomfortably describes one member of the Dwarves (a rape gang that had previously chased her through the forest) as “a bad apple, but loveable.” Then again, she’s comparing him to herself while planning to cut open her stepmother and steal her unborn baby, so her judgement on what makes a person lovable can be assumed to be as fractured as the fairy tale she inhabits. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize this may be a deliberate comment on how only male characters usually get to fill the “loveable asshole” archetype, often while being assholes far beyond the point where they should qualify as loveable. Complaint retracted.

This is a story about what Rapunzel would be like if her narrow education at the hands of an evil witch and total lack of social awareness had taken her in a rather less princess-like direction. Raised in a tower by the previous book’s Snow White, this Rapunzel is an especially bratty teenager who’s determined not only to see the world but to claim her birthright and crown herself queen. At the same time, she’s compellingly pitiable, desperate to have a “friend” with no concept of what that means, and unlikely ever to find out given the universe she was born into.

This installment is also so much more than a Rapunzel revisiting. While Sneaky Snow White’s deviation from its main fairy tale inspiration and incorporation of multiple tales caused some growing pains for the series, it pays off big time in Rotten Rapunzel. The story mash-ups accelerate around an original plotline with a will of its own, switching up roles and taking advantage of repeating fairy tale tropes to distill a non-repetitive dose of the most iconic bits. This novella alone contains threads of Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella, The Snow Queen, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and possibly some foreshadowing for Jack and the Beanstalk. I might even have missed some, and they’re all working together as if they were meant to all along.

If you love Into the Woods but wish it had a bit more Game of Thrones mixed in (the meanness and scheming, not the R rating), you’re going to adore Dark Fairy Tale Queens.

Possible downsides: There’s what seems to be a classic Fake Nice Guy character here whose arc feels underserved and unresolved. He spends the story doing bad and ill-advised things to impress a girl, who’s made it abundantly clear she’s not interested, and whining about how she won’t give him a chance. Rapunzel even falls into the trap of telling this girl how horrible she is for “tormenting” him (the girl is incidentally horrible, like everyone in this series, but not for saying no when she means it). Of course, Rapunzel is also a socially stunted megalomaniac who’s planning to magically roofie said Fake Nice Guy for her own use, so her opinions on this don’t count for much. Still, I wish the plot had dealt with him in a more conclusive way, even if only by letting him win and unmasking him in the process. On the other hand, letting him flounder pathetically in the background without ever being all that important arguably has its own sort of justice to it, and there might be more resolution coming down the road. I guess we’ll just have to wait for Bad Beauty to find out!

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Book Review: Who's Afraid of Amy Sinclair?

9/2/2019

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Book Review:

Hopefuls #2: Who’s Afraid of Amy Sinclair?

Jenn Gott

2019

Grade: A

(Also check out my review of Hopefuls #1: The Private Life of Jane Maxwell)

The Basics:

After dying in a car wreck in her ordinary home universe, Amy Sinclair (“Clair” to her friends) has been resurrected in the body of her comic book universe doppelganger and reunited with her wife, Jane. Now she’s a mind-reading superhero on a team that Jane runs, and the two of them are surrounded by versions of people and places that are almost like the ones they remember, but not quite.

It’s all a lot better than being dead, but as Clair works to reconcile two sets of memories, as well as adjust to her invasive new superpowers, she begins having visions of her alternate self and wonders just how “back” her real self actually is.

Meanwhile, the team’s traitorous ex-member, Cal, has resurfaced as a political candidate running on an anti-superhero platform, and Clair’s erased doppleganger’s supervillainous ex-lover is back in force and bent on revenge.

The Downside:

Before delving into nitty-gritty analysis, I want to stress how much I continue to love this series, including the amount of analysis it invites. Unfortunately, this is the seemingly obligatory installment in a superhero series where the necessity, ethics, and legalities of superheroes are called into question, and as usual, the internal logic of the universe suffers for it.

Given how thoughtfully and incisively Gott handles Jane and Clair’s romance, and the challenges they face simply being themselves in the world, I think it’s a safe bet that her intentions are very different from those behind the best-known stories about the debatable need for superheroes, like Civil War (a vehicle for an anti-gun control message in its original comics form) or The Incredibles (a Randian rant against accountability for the rich and powerful). In fact, one of the oft-repeated messages of Who’s Afraid of Amy Sinclair? is one of responsibility and nonviolence. Killing isn’t the answer. Never escalate. Find another way. Yet one of the key scenes that ought to drive this point home only leaves the reader (or at least this reader) distractedly wondering how one of these no-kill superheroes made it this far in her career with a pair of twin pistols as her signature weapons in the first place, without ever having to grapple with the moral and emotional ramifications of pulling the trigger before this one defining moment.

Everything to do with the election plotline and its vigilante controversies feels adrift in this twilight zone of being too connected and yet not connected enough with reality, with rule-of-cool comic book concepts buckling under real world weights they aren’t cut out to bear. As a character, Cal’s portrayal is so spectacularly, uncomfortably realistic, particularly in his methods of exerting social control, that it’s hard not to look for timely parallels in everything remotely connected with him, yet his anti-superhero agenda seems to be a simple betrayal of his friends, our heroes, rather than any kind of cohesive metaphor.

Bottom line, it’s just really, really hard to craft a story around this theoretical comics-universe issue without getting bogged down in the reality that — as much as we may love fantasizing about having awesome abilities that would allow us to help people and solve problems single-handedly without having to deal with slow, flawed, official systems — superheroes do wield ridiculous amounts of power with no qualifications, often irresponsibly, and bystanders in their worlds have fair reason to be nervous. It’s a big ask, and I’ve yet to see any version of this story that 100% works.

The Upside:

This installment is, first and foremost, the story of Clair's rebirth, and in that respect, it's a complete and resounding success.

Like Jane in the first book, Clair has been dropped into a world where her life turned out very differently for the version of her who grew up there. Unlike Jane, if Clair digs deep enough, she has access to the memories and feelings that will allow her to piece together how exactly that happened. But does she even want to understand her alternate self? The Amy Sinclair of this world is a much darker and more complicated figure than the glimpse Jane got of her in book one. The thought that Clair could just as easily have been this other woman, that this other woman in fact has a stronger claim on her life than she does herself, is terrifying. Yet as painful as it is, Clair is compelled to look, to acknowledge her dark potential and all the strokes of luck that gave her the life she knows.

This is also the obligatory sequel to a romantic series opener in which the couple are required to fight a lot, but their conflict is much better realized than many. While some of the instigating moments that push Jane and Clair apart don’t feel quite as well motivated as they could be, once the distance begins to grow between them, Gott does an achingly fantastic job of capturing the snowballing misery of two people who love each other, but whose lines of communication have failed. That distance doesn’t feel like drama for the sake of drama either, clumsily extending a courtship story that’s already finished. It’s an integral part of Clair’s war with, and struggle to understand, herself.

The points of divergence between Clair and her counterpart are closely linked with the different versions of Jane each one had in her life, and how they made her sexual orientation and identity easier or harder to embrace. Alternate Jane, aside from being a supervillain, is cold, closed-off, and mired in deep denial about herself that manifests as callous homophobia. Instead of coming out alongside her version of Amy Sinclair in high school, alternate Jane pushed her away, deeper into the closet, and ultimately into the arms of emotionally unavailable women she could more easily keep separate from her “real” life.

Even the different names of the two versions of Amy Sinclair are emblematic of the crucial departure between them. Clair, our heroine, renamed herself early in life by shortening her last name, because she didn’t click with her given name. Amy, her erased comics universe doppelganger, tried to do the same but was eventually browbeaten into calling herself Amy again, cramming herself into the confining box she’d been assigned to, after those around her (led by Jane) refused to accept her gesture of self-definition.

Under all the masks and car chases and superpowered punch fights (which are still great fun and as awesomely cinematic as ever), this is a story about conquering everything from gender expectations to moral crises to imposter syndrome, in order to truly know yourself. It’s a worthy continuation of the Hopefuls series, and I look forward to seeing where these heroes are headed next.

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Book Review: The Private Life of Jane Maxwell

8/11/2019

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Book Review:

Hopefuls #1: The Private Life of Jane Maxwell

Jenn Gott

2017

Grade: A+

The Basics:

Jane Maxwell, a comics artist and writer recently fired from her job in the wake of a social media firestorm kicked up by bigoted fans, finds herself dragged into a parallel universe where her hit superhero series is reality. Mostly. This world’s alternate versions of her high school friends really are the superheroes she based on them for her comics, with one exception. Instead of the male headliner Jane’s publisher demanded, the real heroes’ leader is Jane’s own counterpart. And she’s missing.

The team needs Jane to pose as her alternate self to draw out a diabolical new villain who’s wreaking havoc on their city. Jane wants to refuse, much more comfortable living on the safer side of the page, but there’s one other important difference in this alternate reality: Jane’s late wife, Clair, is still alive.

The Downside:

There are a few little errors and some awkward transitions between past and present tense. About half of the superhero team is pretty undeveloped, but that’s okay. Having a full team is necessary to the concept and setting, and they take an understandable back seat to the main characters’ story.

There’s also some slight muddying of the themes, in the nature of Clair’s superpowers and place on the team. Jane has often had misgivings about giving Clair’s character something as passive as empathy, which keeps her out of most of the action, but then finds out it’s because that’s just the way she is in the alternate universe — the same alternate universe where the sexism of her publisher generally doesn’t apply. That said, Clair’s powers are pretty essential to the plot, and she’s much more interesting than the average mind-powered love interest (*coughJeanGreycough*).

The Upside:

The Private Life of Jane Maxwell is an absolute must for any prose-reading comics fan, written with evident understanding and love for both media. Thoughtful internal monologue, too detailed to be contained in little square text boxes, is interspersed with visual descriptions so bright and vivid they’re like having the lovingly composed pages of a comic book beamed directly into your mind, all wrapped around a story that embraces both the colorful, silly melodrama and the complex emotional speculation that comics universes are capable of.

For all the lush, immersive description, not a word is wasted without pulling the reader deeper into the story and the hopes and fears of its characters. Within a few short chapters of being introduced to Jane, seeing her thrown into a room with her dead wife’s doppelganger has the kind of impact so many superhero TV shows can only dream of pulling off with the help of five or six seasons of familiarity and context.

This is a story that contains flamboyant costumes, evil twins, and a guy called Doctor Demolition. It’s also a story that delves deeply into what it would feel like to learn that your life is just one possible version of itself, and to meet another version of your lost love, who isn’t lost and was never your love, at least not yet. Where so many writers would only get as far as recognizing that this is awkward and painful, Gott pushes through to what comes after that, what the strange nature of their relationship is, and how that shakes their understanding not only of relationships but of their own identities.

The result is a unique adventure and love story, plus an introduction to a compelling new superhero title with the potential to be as iconic as the best of them.

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Book Review: Catalyst Moon #2: Breach

6/2/2019

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Book Review:

Catalyst Moon #2: Breach

Lauren L. Garcia

2017

Grade: A-

(You can read my review of Catalyst Moon #1: Incursion here)

The Basics:

With the completion of Stonewall’s mission to escort Kali to her new home-slash-prison in Whitewater City, the sentinel and mage have little excuse to have anything more to do with each other, but the feelings that bloomed between them on the road refuse to fade, pulling the two of them into a treacherous double life.

Meanwhile, the Thralls, victims of a spreading epidemic of demonic possession, are not only threatening the physical safety of the kingdom but turning its people against the mages, whom many suspect of being the cause. As for the mages, an escape plot is stirring within the bastion among Kali’s more rebellious friends, giving her only a few short weeks to decide where to place her loyalty, and her hopes for her future.

The Downside:

I may be the only person in the world who actually prefers the first Catalyst Moon book to the second. This is probably because I'm exceptionally picky about my love stories, and the romance is even more of a focal point in this one, in spite of Stonewall and Kali spending more time apart in it.

I’m still rooting for these two; they’re so genuinely sweet and serious about each other that it’s hard not to, but given how thoughtfully subversive the series is in so many ways, I was disappointed by the forced drama of them failing to communicate vital information for inadequately motivated reasons. It’s far from the most toxic of standard romance tropes, and not a disqualifying one on my shelf when I like enough other elements, but still one of my literary pet peeves just for being lazy and tired.

The Upside:

Breach’s deeper exploration of the world and people of Catalyst Moon, on the other hand, takes some of the most fascinating details of the first book and brings them to the next level.

The status quo of the kingdom, from its commodification of magic users, to its caste system, to its assumption that the monsters of its children’s stories are nothing more than stories, is clearly fraying at the seams, waiting for someone to apply the right pressure in just the right place. Well, not just someone. Therein lies the difficulty. It’s going to take a lot of someones to break the old system and build a new one, and much of Breach is about the difficulty of getting enough someones pulling in the same direction. There are plenty of people with every reason to be dissatisfied, certainly, separated to all corners and entrenched in their own coping mechanisms. Many have convinced themselves that the way things are is the right way or the only way. Others fight ardently for their own interests while clinging to their irrational prejudices against each other.

The political side of the story makes for a frustrating read, but in a much better way than this installment’s romantic misunderstandings. The state of the world of Catalyst Moon is integrated much more smoothly into the story than is the case in many comparable fantasy epics, presented through the subplots of a sensibly sized cast of characters, all of them organically introduced and then cinched together in new ways. Breach comes together like a cat’s cradle, weaving together threads from Incursion so efficiently that the process can almost go unnoticed until the interlocking pattern surprises with its elegant intricacy.

Once the forestory at the bastion takes off, it happens quickly, culminating in a tense finale that pulls insistently into book three — a pull I have not resisted.

More on that soon.

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Book Review: Catalyst Moon: Incursion

5/16/2019

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Book Review:

Catalyst Moon: Incursion

Lauren L. Garcia

2016

Grade: A

The Basics:

Kali is a mage, born with the power to sense and manipulate the magical particles of the universe. Imprisoned for life for her poorly understood abilities, Kali’s highest hope for herself is to be reunited with her childhood friend and fellow mage, Eris, who claims to know someone who can heal the chronic pain in her leg.

Stonewall is a sentinel, sworn to protect the outside world from the dangers of mage powers, and addicted to a substance that makes him immune to the effects of magic. During a routine mission escorting Kali on her long-awaited transfer, an attack by possessed bandits leaves the two of them adrift from the rest of Stonewall’s squad and dependent on each other for survival.

The Downside:

Apart from a minor sprinkling of typos and some bland or lacking visual descriptions, Incursion’s only real drawback is the episodic slightness of Kali and Stonewall’s plot. They travel toward their destination and find themselves faced with a problem that must be solved by one of their skillsets or the other. Then they travel some more, and another, often similar problem springs up.

The journey nevertheless serves its purpose of bonding the two characters, to the point where the end of the road becomes a swelling source of dread. That, combined with Eris’s more urgent subplot of escape attempts, makes any plot weakness on Kali’s side easy to ignore.

The Upside:

In its extensive depiction of powerful women, Incursion is a remarkable blend of incisive commentary and freedom from old patterns. When deciding how women are treated in a fictional universe, female authors typically have to choose between writing what we know or writing what we wish for. Both strategies have their place, but rarely does an author manage to combine the two as effectively as Garcia.

There is no sexual inequality or stigma within the Catalyst Moon universe (as far as we know in this installment). Mages are female as often as male. Sentinels are female as often as male. Random bandit warriors are female as often as male. Characters in positions of authority are female as often as male. Some characters have relationship hangups, but no one seems to be afraid of sex or think of it as a weapon. This is all so normal that no one even feels the need to mention it.

And yet, the story is about a mage who happens to be female, and a sentinel who happens to be male.

Mages are hated for being born in a way they didn’t choose, excluded from participating in society, ridiculed for being enigmatic but discouraged from learning or teaching anything about themselves, resented for being necessary, required to use their abilities on demand, distrusted for using them at all, and often told how lucky they are to be taken care of.

Sentinels are raised on rhetoric of duty, honor, tradition, and emotional repression. They’re taught that their role is divinely ordained, that mage magic is evil and scary and theirs to control, that they’re doing the world a grand service in their custodianship of the mages, and that abusing their own bodies and minds into an early grave is a small price to pay for being able to pass as beacons of strength.

I sense a metaphor — a metaphor that carries over strikingly into the challenges the pair faces, as they struggle to forge a meaningful understanding between them.

As a social critique, as a forbidden romance of opposites, as an intriguing fantasy world, as an introduction to an epic to come, and as everything else it sets out to be, Catalyst Moon: Incursion is a page-turning delight that has me already digging into its sequel.

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Book Review: Memories of Ash

3/18/2019

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Book Review:

Memories of Ash (The Sunbolt Chronicles #2)

By Intisar Khanani

Purple Monkey Press, 2016

Grade: A

(See also my review of The Sunbolt Chronicles #1)

The Basics:

With most of her memories scorched away by the sunbolt she cast to save her friend Val, Hitomi is slowly working to rebuild her life with the help of her magical mentor, Stormwind. When Stormwind is summoned before the High Council of Mages on what Hitomi can only imagine to be trumped-up charges, she has to summon every trick she knows, from both her old life and her new one, to attempt a bold prison break.

The Downside:

Much like the first book, Memories of Ash is oddly structured, leading from one place to another as much as it follows the dramatic arc at hand. The experience of reading it is more like watching a Netflix season than reading an installment in a series of novels. Characters come and go, their significance seeming as flexible as if there were actors’ contracts to consider. Major plot threads are introduced, not just hinted at but explored for major sections of the book, and then left for a later entry without even temporary resolution.

The Upside:

Though the unconventional rhythm is frustrating in places, I personally didn’t mind too much, because each step in the story’s meandering course is engrossing in its own way.

The heist/prison break/courtroom drama at the center of this installment is especially hard to put down, mingling Hitomi’s criminal tricks, her varied collection of allegiances, and the unique mechanics of magic in her world into a tensely compelling thrillride.

The appearances of Hitomi’s lost mother are haunting, understated, and complicated. There may be more yet to come in her story and in their relationship, but if she never surfaces again, their encounter in this book would be perfect even in its gaping incompleteness.

Above all, I can never praise enough Khanani’s successful creation and maintaining of a fascinating pacifist hero. Hitomi’s refusal to take life under any circumstances would normally be a phase a hero goes through before returning to normal, or a nearly irrelevant quirk that comes up sporadically between scene upon scene of action that easily could kill unfortunate bad guys and bystanders but conveniently never does. Hitomi’s personal moral code is an ever-present core element of who she is, and it makes the solutions she comes up with all the more creative and interesting.

I do I hope to see some of the hanging plot threads resolved in future books, but I’m thoroughly on board to find out.

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<<Previous

Book Review: The Theft of Sunlight

Book Review: The Deep

Book Review: The Wolf Queen

Book Review: I Am Magical (magnifiqueNOIR #1)

Book Review: Dark Fairy Tale Queens

Book Review: Who's Afraid of Amy Sinclair?

Book Review: The Private Life of Jane Maxwell

Book Review: Catalyst Moon #2: Breach

Book Review: Catalyst Moon: Incursion

Book Review: Memories of Ash

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