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A review by siavahda
Night Shine by Tessa Gratton
5.0
Move over, Wizard Howl; there’s a new eater of hearts in town. And she’s far more swoon-worthy than you ever were.
A big chunk of fantasy readers about my age (and older, and younger, for that matter) will remember Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle. Others might know the story from the Studio Ghibli adaption of the book.
I sat up and paid attention way back when all we knew about Night Shine was its pitch: Howl’s Moving Castle, but queer. That was enough to sell me, and Night Shine was one of my most anticipated reads of the year.
It does not disappoint!
Nothing is a young woman who lives in the walls of the palace, an orphan who would have no place if she hadn’t the friendship and favour of Kirin Dark-Smile, the prince and heir. No one knows where she came from, and no one particularly cares, so long as she stays quiet and out of the way and lets people forget about her.
Instead, she does something spectacular, and has to go rescue the prince from a sorceress who only steals girls, not boys – and yet has taken Kirin.
Night Shine is simultaneously a beautifully simple and delightfully intricate novel. On one level, I could lay out the plot for you in a sentence or two, but to do so would be to cut the heart out of this story; you would miss so much! You would miss Gratton’s light, deft hand with her worldbuilding, the way she lets details fall just-so so that their ripples paint the shape of a world as big and real and vital as our own. You would miss all the cunning loopholes Nothing can slip through via gleeful worldplay; you would miss celestial unicorns and river-dragons and most of all – most of all you would miss the arc of a girl called Nothing becoming…Everything.
There’s just so much to love here, I don’t know where to start. Maybe the place to begin is with the way Gratton contrasts the relationships that make up the story: Kirin + Nothing, Kirin + Sky (Kirin’s bodyguard and secret lover), Sky + Nothing – and Nothing + the Sorceress Who Eats Girls. This is very much a book about love, but not the soft, starry-eyed kind; it’s about love as a feral, strange thing, eerie and beautiful, with sharp edges and feathers. Neither of the loves on offer to Nothing – as part of a polyamorous relationship with Kirin and Sky, or the love of the Sorceress – are conventional (to the reader – the set-up Kirin, Sky and Nothing have been planning to enter into for years is perfectly normal within their culture); but still, there’s a very stark (and, I think, deliberate) difference between the relationship of Nothing and Kirin, and Nothing and the Sorceress. It’s one that I found absolutely thrilling; on the one hand is a literal prince, Nothing’s childhood friend and benefactor, the person she has always believed would be her future. And on the other side is this powerful, frightening woman, who takes the hearts of young women for her dark magic.
I mean, it’s not even that most stories would make the decision between the two love interests obvious; in most stories, the sorceress wouldn’t even be an option, and not because she and Nothing happen to share a gender. She’s dark! Scary! She shapeshifts and she kills people and she deals with demons! (More on the demons later). This is not someone who’s supposed to be a love interest! This is someone who’s supposed to be the villain!
So it is just beyond amazing to me that Gratton takes all of that – everything the Sorceress is – and makes her a love interest anyway. Like – screw your ideas of traditional romance; monsters make awesome girlfriends.
(It’s so much more complicated than that. It’s so rich and vital and mutable, refusing to be pinned down and neatly labelled. There’s no box to neatly tuck this into. This isn’t a familiar trope, we don’t recognise this story-pattern, arc-pattern, when we encounter it. We have no map for this. This is uncharted territory, and it’s beautiful.)
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!
A big chunk of fantasy readers about my age (and older, and younger, for that matter) will remember Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle. Others might know the story from the Studio Ghibli adaption of the book.
I sat up and paid attention way back when all we knew about Night Shine was its pitch: Howl’s Moving Castle, but queer. That was enough to sell me, and Night Shine was one of my most anticipated reads of the year.
It does not disappoint!
Nothing is a young woman who lives in the walls of the palace, an orphan who would have no place if she hadn’t the friendship and favour of Kirin Dark-Smile, the prince and heir. No one knows where she came from, and no one particularly cares, so long as she stays quiet and out of the way and lets people forget about her.
Instead, she does something spectacular, and has to go rescue the prince from a sorceress who only steals girls, not boys – and yet has taken Kirin.
Night Shine is simultaneously a beautifully simple and delightfully intricate novel. On one level, I could lay out the plot for you in a sentence or two, but to do so would be to cut the heart out of this story; you would miss so much! You would miss Gratton’s light, deft hand with her worldbuilding, the way she lets details fall just-so so that their ripples paint the shape of a world as big and real and vital as our own. You would miss all the cunning loopholes Nothing can slip through via gleeful worldplay; you would miss celestial unicorns and river-dragons and most of all – most of all you would miss the arc of a girl called Nothing becoming…Everything.
There’s just so much to love here, I don’t know where to start. Maybe the place to begin is with the way Gratton contrasts the relationships that make up the story: Kirin + Nothing, Kirin + Sky (Kirin’s bodyguard and secret lover), Sky + Nothing – and Nothing + the Sorceress Who Eats Girls. This is very much a book about love, but not the soft, starry-eyed kind; it’s about love as a feral, strange thing, eerie and beautiful, with sharp edges and feathers. Neither of the loves on offer to Nothing – as part of a polyamorous relationship with Kirin and Sky, or the love of the Sorceress – are conventional (to the reader – the set-up Kirin, Sky and Nothing have been planning to enter into for years is perfectly normal within their culture); but still, there’s a very stark (and, I think, deliberate) difference between the relationship of Nothing and Kirin, and Nothing and the Sorceress. It’s one that I found absolutely thrilling; on the one hand is a literal prince, Nothing’s childhood friend and benefactor, the person she has always believed would be her future. And on the other side is this powerful, frightening woman, who takes the hearts of young women for her dark magic.
I mean, it’s not even that most stories would make the decision between the two love interests obvious; in most stories, the sorceress wouldn’t even be an option, and not because she and Nothing happen to share a gender. She’s dark! Scary! She shapeshifts and she kills people and she deals with demons! (More on the demons later). This is not someone who’s supposed to be a love interest! This is someone who’s supposed to be the villain!
So it is just beyond amazing to me that Gratton takes all of that – everything the Sorceress is – and makes her a love interest anyway. Like – screw your ideas of traditional romance; monsters make awesome girlfriends.
(It’s so much more complicated than that. It’s so rich and vital and mutable, refusing to be pinned down and neatly labelled. There’s no box to neatly tuck this into. This isn’t a familiar trope, we don’t recognise this story-pattern, arc-pattern, when we encounter it. We have no map for this. This is uncharted territory, and it’s beautiful.)
Read the rest at Every Book a Doorway!