A review by lezreadalot
Stone and Steel by Eboni J. Dunbar

3.0

“Odessa is the Queen. I am her sword.”

“Gods forbid you should be your own sword.”

 
Super interesting novella about a general who returns from a war and finds her country and queen (who is also her lover) very much changed, and not in the ways she wanted to expected. Great concept, and there were glimmers in the writing that reminded me of what I love best about Kai Ashante Wilson's work: afro-fantasy and dialect. I liked the world-building; I loved the characters. Out of everything else, what this novella does really well is give us a great sense of the history and deep bonds between the characters, and everything that happened to bring them to the place they're at. There's something very satisfying about a good dysfunctional relationship. But still... I needed way more detail and build-up. It was ambitious to try to tell this story in just a novella, and I don't think it worked all that well. We needed to spend way more time with these characters, and so many aspects of the story could have been better fleshed out. On a simpler note, this desperately needed better editing. Lots of typos, and this has the very annoying quirk of having different lines of dialogue from different characters in the same paragraph, so I was often confused about who was speaking. All the mistakes and the breakneck speed at which we moved through the story made this seem like a rush job.

Some great ideas here, but I didn't like this as much as I wanted to.