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tachyondecay's reviews
2030 reviews
The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Three years ago I read The Jasmine Throne, gave it three stars, and said I might read the sequel. Then that sequel, The Oleander Sword, got a four-star rating and an even better review. Now the conclusion, The Lotus Empire is out, and … y’all, this is top-shelf fantasy. Like, we’re talking one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read this year, and a stunning conclusion to The Burning Kingdoms trilogy. Tasha Suri has outdone herself. Thank you to Orbit and NetGalley for an eARC.
No spoilers for this book but spoilers for the first two!
Malini is now the empress of Parijatdvipa, but at what cost? The stability of her throne is tenuous. From within, the priesthood threatens to withdraw their support if she doesn’t cast herself on the pyre to burn for the nameless god. From without, the now-ascendant yaksa have isolated Ahiranya and, through Priya, are orchestrating the return of their mother Mani Ara to usher in a new Age of Flowers. Enemies to lovers to enemies again, Malini and Priya each fight for the survival of their people despite being unable to rely on the power they have accrued in the past year or so.
The world Suri has created here is so lush and fascinating. As I ruminated in my review of The Burning God, I think mainstream fantasy’s Eurocentrism has been to the genre’s detriment. What Suri has done here feels extremely fresh not just because she is drawing from a slightly different mythological inspiration but because she’s also challenging more colonial ideas about storytelling. You still have empires and war and conquest. But we don’t have the same obsession with heroes and villains. Suri complicates our understanding of what it means to be a protagonist in a very satisfying way. Wow.
Picking up where The Oleander Sword left off, The Lotus Empire pits Priya and Malini against one another. I was so hesitant to say good things about their romance in the first two books because it just isn’t my thing. For some reason, however, this book has sold me on their love story. Their tragic, doomed, star-crossed love story. I am obsessed. Suri managed to touch this aromantic gal’s heart, and I want these two to live happily ever after even though I knew, as the story unfolded, how unlikely such an ending would be. Every scene with the two of them—and all the scenes where they are apart—drips with alluring chemistry and burning desire in a way that does not disappoint. Wow.
Similarly, Suri spins a compelling story of competing deities and the price of power. Malini and Priya (and don’t forget Bhumika!) have sacrificed so much for the power they wield. They sacrifice even more in this book. I remarked in my review of The Jasmine Throne on the presence of the female characters in this series, how they are not only high-profile but how many there are in positions of power, and that is doubly true here. Suri exemplifies how you can have “strong” female characters whose strength manifests in diverse ways. Some are warriors, some are leaders, some are sages, some are … just existing. Just grandmothers and people trying to survive in this war-torn country. Wow.
The yaksa suck, the nameless god seems to suck—there is this underlying sinister aura that surrounds the deities who seem to populate the void behind this world. Inhuman yet powerful creatures are no one’s friend, but if you are willing to pay the price, you can harness their power to your ends. That’s the message here. Pay to play and beware what you reap. Having thrown her lot in with the yaksa out of fear of reprisal against Malini, Priya now comes to rue her hollowing out at the hands of Mani Ara. Her crisis of faith is such a great parallel to Malini’s complete lack of faith.
The trajectory of this trilogy has always been one of two women coming together, travelling in parallel, and then realizing they are indeed on opposite sides of an immense conflict. How could they possibly reconcile when they are fighting for the opposite outcome? I could see there was a third path coming from at least the middle of the book, but I really had no idea how Suri could achieve it in a way that didn’t feel cheap. I don’t want to spoil anything, so all I am going to say is that Tasha Suri pulls it off. Seriously, this is one of the most intense and satisfying endings to a trilogy I’ve seen in a while. I love it.
I loved this book. I just want to make this clear, want to sing its praises, for a few reasons. First, authors of colour don’t get enough support. Second, my opinion of this trilogy has steadily improved from the first book. Indeed, I recently read Suri’s debut novel, Empire of Sand, and it’s stunning to see the arc of her skills as a storyteller grow from that book to this one. Third, I struggled at first to get back into this series (it had been two years since I read the last book). If you had asked me for my prediction when I first started The Lotus Empire, I probably would have said the book would get three or four stars, that I was reading it to complete the trilogy. Not so now.
This book is the perfect blending of romance and tragedy and epic fantasy. Although it could stand on its own, it’s worth your time to go read the first two books so you get the maximum emotional payoff (and devastation) when you read this one. The Lotus Empire does not come to play, and it has cemented Suri in my personal canon of fantasy authors to watch.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
No spoilers for this book but spoilers for the first two!
Malini is now the empress of Parijatdvipa, but at what cost? The stability of her throne is tenuous. From within, the priesthood threatens to withdraw their support if she doesn’t cast herself on the pyre to burn for the nameless god. From without, the now-ascendant yaksa have isolated Ahiranya and, through Priya, are orchestrating the return of their mother Mani Ara to usher in a new Age of Flowers. Enemies to lovers to enemies again, Malini and Priya each fight for the survival of their people despite being unable to rely on the power they have accrued in the past year or so.
The world Suri has created here is so lush and fascinating. As I ruminated in my review of The Burning God, I think mainstream fantasy’s Eurocentrism has been to the genre’s detriment. What Suri has done here feels extremely fresh not just because she is drawing from a slightly different mythological inspiration but because she’s also challenging more colonial ideas about storytelling. You still have empires and war and conquest. But we don’t have the same obsession with heroes and villains. Suri complicates our understanding of what it means to be a protagonist in a very satisfying way. Wow.
Picking up where The Oleander Sword left off, The Lotus Empire pits Priya and Malini against one another. I was so hesitant to say good things about their romance in the first two books because it just isn’t my thing. For some reason, however, this book has sold me on their love story. Their tragic, doomed, star-crossed love story. I am obsessed. Suri managed to touch this aromantic gal’s heart, and I want these two to live happily ever after even though I knew, as the story unfolded, how unlikely such an ending would be. Every scene with the two of them—and all the scenes where they are apart—drips with alluring chemistry and burning desire in a way that does not disappoint. Wow.
Similarly, Suri spins a compelling story of competing deities and the price of power. Malini and Priya (and don’t forget Bhumika!) have sacrificed so much for the power they wield. They sacrifice even more in this book. I remarked in my review of The Jasmine Throne on the presence of the female characters in this series, how they are not only high-profile but how many there are in positions of power, and that is doubly true here. Suri exemplifies how you can have “strong” female characters whose strength manifests in diverse ways. Some are warriors, some are leaders, some are sages, some are … just existing. Just grandmothers and people trying to survive in this war-torn country. Wow.
The yaksa suck, the nameless god seems to suck—there is this underlying sinister aura that surrounds the deities who seem to populate the void behind this world. Inhuman yet powerful creatures are no one’s friend, but if you are willing to pay the price, you can harness their power to your ends. That’s the message here. Pay to play and beware what you reap. Having thrown her lot in with the yaksa out of fear of reprisal against Malini, Priya now comes to rue her hollowing out at the hands of Mani Ara. Her crisis of faith is such a great parallel to Malini’s complete lack of faith.
The trajectory of this trilogy has always been one of two women coming together, travelling in parallel, and then realizing they are indeed on opposite sides of an immense conflict. How could they possibly reconcile when they are fighting for the opposite outcome? I could see there was a third path coming from at least the middle of the book, but I really had no idea how Suri could achieve it in a way that didn’t feel cheap. I don’t want to spoil anything, so all I am going to say is that Tasha Suri pulls it off. Seriously, this is one of the most intense and satisfying endings to a trilogy I’ve seen in a while. I love it.
I loved this book. I just want to make this clear, want to sing its praises, for a few reasons. First, authors of colour don’t get enough support. Second, my opinion of this trilogy has steadily improved from the first book. Indeed, I recently read Suri’s debut novel, Empire of Sand, and it’s stunning to see the arc of her skills as a storyteller grow from that book to this one. Third, I struggled at first to get back into this series (it had been two years since I read the last book). If you had asked me for my prediction when I first started The Lotus Empire, I probably would have said the book would get three or four stars, that I was reading it to complete the trilogy. Not so now.
This book is the perfect blending of romance and tragedy and epic fantasy. Although it could stand on its own, it’s worth your time to go read the first two books so you get the maximum emotional payoff (and devastation) when you read this one. The Lotus Empire does not come to play, and it has cemented Suri in my personal canon of fantasy authors to watch.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Lifers by Keith McWalter
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and mortality lately. I’m only thirty-five, but as I head into this next phase of my life and ponder what I want from it, I find myself focusing a lot on what life will be like when I am much older. Lifers is a thought experiment asking us to imagine what would happen if we suddenly had even more time. In a world where the richest are obsessed with not aging, this book is an interesting what-if story. Keith G. McWalter has put a lot of time into exploring one possible vision of what our world might be like if life extension becomes widespread. I received a copy in exchange for a review.
In the mid-twenty-first century, old people stop dying. Governments eventually figure out this “Methuselah plague” is contagious, a gene therapy packaged in a retrovirus that improves our cellular repair mechanisms. The ultra-aged—people near or over the centenarian mark—are pejoratively called Lifers by some. If you live in a country with an aging population, like here in Canada, you can probably see where this is going: as countries start to have millions of people who have outlived their retirement funds, the population pyramid practically collapses from how top-heavy it is. The story follows a small, interwoven cast of characters, most of them Lifers, as they adjust to and try to build the new world.
At first I could not get into Lifers. The chapters bounced around from character to character, subplot to subplot. McWalter’s writing style at first was very dull and obvious, and there were some typical “men writing women” discrepancies in how he described male versus female characters…. His perspective, too, is a very American one—the book is mostly set in the US and focuses on the American politics around the Lifer issue, with a heavy focus on a libertarian, pioneer-style answer to the problem. And most of these issues don’t really disappear as the book goes on.
But it did, to my surprise, start to win me over.
As the narrative coalesces around a couple of characters, particularly the married Lifer couple Dan and Marion, I began to get drawn into the emotional stakes of the political conflict at the heart of the plot. Because McWalter is absolutely right about one thing: in our current society, which already treats elderly people and poor people very poorly, a Lifer situation would be horrific and intractable. But what do you do? For all my complaints about style, McWalter really does outline the problem and show some scarily realistic possible responses to it.
The ending of the book is really poignant. I won’t spoil anything, but I really loved seeing the dynamic between Dan and Marion. I was a little dissatisfied with what happens with Claire, simply because McWalter spends so much time earlier in the novel establishing her deep-seated philosophical perspective on the Lifer issue. Her apparent change of heart is just never addressed; I guess we are supposed to infer it’s a consequence of what happens to her near the climax of the book, but it still feels odd the book never acknowledges her complete one-eighty?
Alas, in the grand scheme, Lifers still very much has that too-clean feel of someone dipping their toes into speculative fiction without fully embracing what science fiction as a genre has to offer. McWalter’s narration is dry and matter-of-fact, and despite Dan and Marion growing on me by the end, overall the characters are all kind of cardboardy and allegorical. They exist to be author avatars, to have debates and help McWalter spool out the thought experiment. In this respect it reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson’s work, especially his more recent stuff. It’s not bad per se, but it isn’t the kind of science fiction into which I like to sink my teeth.
Lifers is a story with an interesting premise and some endearing moments. While I won’t get excited about it, I’m also happy to have read it, to have been pushed to think about this a little more. Deeply saturated science-fiction fans like me probably won’t see much going on here, but people who prefer lighter spec-fic fare will probably find a lot more here to enjoy.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
In the mid-twenty-first century, old people stop dying. Governments eventually figure out this “Methuselah plague” is contagious, a gene therapy packaged in a retrovirus that improves our cellular repair mechanisms. The ultra-aged—people near or over the centenarian mark—are pejoratively called Lifers by some. If you live in a country with an aging population, like here in Canada, you can probably see where this is going: as countries start to have millions of people who have outlived their retirement funds, the population pyramid practically collapses from how top-heavy it is. The story follows a small, interwoven cast of characters, most of them Lifers, as they adjust to and try to build the new world.
At first I could not get into Lifers. The chapters bounced around from character to character, subplot to subplot. McWalter’s writing style at first was very dull and obvious, and there were some typical “men writing women” discrepancies in how he described male versus female characters…. His perspective, too, is a very American one—the book is mostly set in the US and focuses on the American politics around the Lifer issue, with a heavy focus on a libertarian, pioneer-style answer to the problem. And most of these issues don’t really disappear as the book goes on.
But it did, to my surprise, start to win me over.
As the narrative coalesces around a couple of characters, particularly the married Lifer couple Dan and Marion, I began to get drawn into the emotional stakes of the political conflict at the heart of the plot. Because McWalter is absolutely right about one thing: in our current society, which already treats elderly people and poor people very poorly, a Lifer situation would be horrific and intractable. But what do you do? For all my complaints about style, McWalter really does outline the problem and show some scarily realistic possible responses to it.
The ending of the book is really poignant. I won’t spoil anything, but I really loved seeing the dynamic between Dan and Marion. I was a little dissatisfied with what happens with Claire, simply because McWalter spends so much time earlier in the novel establishing her deep-seated philosophical perspective on the Lifer issue. Her apparent change of heart is just never addressed; I guess we are supposed to infer it’s a consequence of what happens to her near the climax of the book, but it still feels odd the book never acknowledges her complete one-eighty?
Alas, in the grand scheme, Lifers still very much has that too-clean feel of someone dipping their toes into speculative fiction without fully embracing what science fiction as a genre has to offer. McWalter’s narration is dry and matter-of-fact, and despite Dan and Marion growing on me by the end, overall the characters are all kind of cardboardy and allegorical. They exist to be author avatars, to have debates and help McWalter spool out the thought experiment. In this respect it reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson’s work, especially his more recent stuff. It’s not bad per se, but it isn’t the kind of science fiction into which I like to sink my teeth.
Lifers is a story with an interesting premise and some endearing moments. While I won’t get excited about it, I’m also happy to have read it, to have been pushed to think about this a little more. Deeply saturated science-fiction fans like me probably won’t see much going on here, but people who prefer lighter spec-fic fare will probably find a lot more here to enjoy.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love, and Sex by Cody Daigle-Orians
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
Last year I reviewed the internet’s favourite ace dad’s book I Am Ace: Advice on Living Your Best Asexual Life. Now, Cody Daigle-Orians is back with The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide: Making It Work in Friendship, Love, and Sex. While both books are aimed at aspec readers, this latter is a more focused and broader exploration of the nature of relationships—of all kinds—as an acespec or arospec person. Jessica Kingsley Publishers has been killing it putting out so many awesome books about being asexual and aromantic—check out my asexuality bookshelf for more. I received an eARC in exchange for a review, and I read this book during Ace Week!
As many of you already know, I am both asexual and aromantic. I’ve known this about myself for a long time and found both labels at different points in my twenties. Personally, my experience with discovering and navigating my sexuality has not been traumatic. Aside from a few awkward attempts at asking people out in high school, romance and sex just never happened for me, and I have always been happy with that. In fact, when I was initially offered a copy of this book, I debated whether to read it. My first impression was that this book is aimed at ace people who want to find a romantic partner, or vice versa, aro people looking for a committed relationship without the romance angle. Neither of those things describe me—I learned from this book that I am nonamorous, i.e., I don’t desire a single, central relationship in my life and instead find fulfillment through a decentralized network of various relationships.
So I couldn’t have been more wrong: this is a book for all aspec people. Whether you are aroace like me, alloromantic asexual, allosexual aromantic, or some form of demi or grey or whatever other labels work for you, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide has got you covered.
And let’s talk about labels for a moment. This always seems to come up when we start discussing any type of queer identity beyond the basic Neapolitan ice cream flavours of gay or straight. Yeah, there a lot of labels and microlabels out there, and look, I get it—it can feel overwhelming. And yeah, I was a little bored during parts of this book because Daigle-Orians covers labels and ideas that are familiar to me, as an extremely online queer person. I know all about sex-favourable vs sex-averse (me) versus sex-repulsed. But hey, maybe someone—especially younger someones in their teens and twenties, who are the primary target here—needs to learn those terms. Like I said earlier, I learned about nonamory from this book and that it applies to me, and that is pretty damn cool.
Indeed, if I have a criticism of this book, it’s that it reads more like a serial of wiki entries than an actual “guide” of sorts. I don’t know what the print version looks like, but the ebook would benefit from a lot of hyperlinking, and I’d love to see a print version with callout bubbles saying, “For more on this, go to page….” The content here is perhaps more suited to a nonlinear form, like a wiki, rather than a book. Yet here we are.
On the bright side, the book’s organization is logical and extremely helpful. It’s divided into two broad parts: “The Relationship Toolkit” and “The Relationship Workshop.” Daigle-Orians constructs a framework around the idea of an “ANKOP relationship” (“a new kind of perfect”) where we redefine our expectations of the conditions required for a relationship to be valid, healthy, and loving. That is, their thesis here is that relationships need neither sex nor romance to be valid. In the first part, they explore the tools we need to be successful in any relationship: an understanding of boundaries and consent, communication, trust, etc. In the second part, each chapter applies these ideas to a different kind of relationship: platonic, sexual, romantic, etc. Daigle-Orians also does their best to acknowledge how the lines between these kinds of relationships blur, how some relationships don’t fit neatly into boxes, etc.
Like many a more reference-oriented work, this organization lets you dip in and out—it’s not meant to be read linearly like I stubbornly do with all books of this type. So you could pick up this guide just for a couple of chapters. But if you read it all the way through, of course, you also get to see the themes Daigle-Orians develops and the connections made throughout the chapters.
To be frank and vulnerable, this was kind of a healing book for me. Although I haven’t experienced much direct trauma as a result of being aroace, I experience the erasure, the amatonormative pressure, the compulsory sexuality that our society constantly directs at all of us. I nearly broke down playing The Outer Worlds this week because its ace NPC, Parvati, was coming out to me, and the game includes dialogue options that not just allow me to sympathize but actually say, “I am ace too, and I am also aro,” and that was so powerful. Just to be seen and recognized like that, both in terms of Parvati sharing her lived experience but then also getting to assert my own through my player character. Wow.
In the same way, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide carefully and compassionately acknowledges the hurt and pain that often comes from being aspec in an allonormative, amatonormative world. Perhaps more significantly, it does this in a constructive way. The ANKOP framework is here to say, “Look, it doesn’t have to be this way.” And while this book really gets more into the weeds than an allo reader might need, this is the kind of learning allosexual and alloromantic people need to do as well.
So, to sum up: this is a book that made me feel seen and valid as an aroace woman. It introduced me to some new terminology. Even though I feel like I am largely successfully applying the ANKOP ideas in my life already (humblebrag), I got stuff from this book. For a younger reader, for someone just figuring out their sexuality, for people trying to put into words their feelings or desires around connection … yeah, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide is invaluable. Highly, highly recommend.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
As many of you already know, I am both asexual and aromantic. I’ve known this about myself for a long time and found both labels at different points in my twenties. Personally, my experience with discovering and navigating my sexuality has not been traumatic. Aside from a few awkward attempts at asking people out in high school, romance and sex just never happened for me, and I have always been happy with that. In fact, when I was initially offered a copy of this book, I debated whether to read it. My first impression was that this book is aimed at ace people who want to find a romantic partner, or vice versa, aro people looking for a committed relationship without the romance angle. Neither of those things describe me—I learned from this book that I am nonamorous, i.e., I don’t desire a single, central relationship in my life and instead find fulfillment through a decentralized network of various relationships.
So I couldn’t have been more wrong: this is a book for all aspec people. Whether you are aroace like me, alloromantic asexual, allosexual aromantic, or some form of demi or grey or whatever other labels work for you, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide has got you covered.
And let’s talk about labels for a moment. This always seems to come up when we start discussing any type of queer identity beyond the basic Neapolitan ice cream flavours of gay or straight. Yeah, there a lot of labels and microlabels out there, and look, I get it—it can feel overwhelming. And yeah, I was a little bored during parts of this book because Daigle-Orians covers labels and ideas that are familiar to me, as an extremely online queer person. I know all about sex-favourable vs sex-averse (me) versus sex-repulsed. But hey, maybe someone—especially younger someones in their teens and twenties, who are the primary target here—needs to learn those terms. Like I said earlier, I learned about nonamory from this book and that it applies to me, and that is pretty damn cool.
Indeed, if I have a criticism of this book, it’s that it reads more like a serial of wiki entries than an actual “guide” of sorts. I don’t know what the print version looks like, but the ebook would benefit from a lot of hyperlinking, and I’d love to see a print version with callout bubbles saying, “For more on this, go to page….” The content here is perhaps more suited to a nonlinear form, like a wiki, rather than a book. Yet here we are.
On the bright side, the book’s organization is logical and extremely helpful. It’s divided into two broad parts: “The Relationship Toolkit” and “The Relationship Workshop.” Daigle-Orians constructs a framework around the idea of an “ANKOP relationship” (“a new kind of perfect”) where we redefine our expectations of the conditions required for a relationship to be valid, healthy, and loving. That is, their thesis here is that relationships need neither sex nor romance to be valid. In the first part, they explore the tools we need to be successful in any relationship: an understanding of boundaries and consent, communication, trust, etc. In the second part, each chapter applies these ideas to a different kind of relationship: platonic, sexual, romantic, etc. Daigle-Orians also does their best to acknowledge how the lines between these kinds of relationships blur, how some relationships don’t fit neatly into boxes, etc.
Like many a more reference-oriented work, this organization lets you dip in and out—it’s not meant to be read linearly like I stubbornly do with all books of this type. So you could pick up this guide just for a couple of chapters. But if you read it all the way through, of course, you also get to see the themes Daigle-Orians develops and the connections made throughout the chapters.
To be frank and vulnerable, this was kind of a healing book for me. Although I haven’t experienced much direct trauma as a result of being aroace, I experience the erasure, the amatonormative pressure, the compulsory sexuality that our society constantly directs at all of us. I nearly broke down playing The Outer Worlds this week because its ace NPC, Parvati, was coming out to me, and the game includes dialogue options that not just allow me to sympathize but actually say, “I am ace too, and I am also aro,” and that was so powerful. Just to be seen and recognized like that, both in terms of Parvati sharing her lived experience but then also getting to assert my own through my player character. Wow.
In the same way, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide carefully and compassionately acknowledges the hurt and pain that often comes from being aspec in an allonormative, amatonormative world. Perhaps more significantly, it does this in a constructive way. The ANKOP framework is here to say, “Look, it doesn’t have to be this way.” And while this book really gets more into the weeds than an allo reader might need, this is the kind of learning allosexual and alloromantic people need to do as well.
So, to sum up: this is a book that made me feel seen and valid as an aroace woman. It introduced me to some new terminology. Even though I feel like I am largely successfully applying the ANKOP ideas in my life already (humblebrag), I got stuff from this book. For a younger reader, for someone just figuring out their sexuality, for people trying to put into words their feelings or desires around connection … yeah, The Ace and Aro Relationship Guide is invaluable. Highly, highly recommend.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
The Burning God by R.F. Kuang
dark
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Finishing a whole trilogy in less than five months? Must be a new record for me. The Burning God is a hell of an epic conclusion to R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War saga. All I have to say is: George R.R. Martin, eat your fucking heart out. The Red Wedding? Bah. None of the gruesome acts in A Song of Ice and Fire come close to the mayhem and misery inflicted here. This book is dark, we’re talking Frank Miller Batman dark and then some…. It’s only after I finished reading this book that I realized it has been a long time since I had truly read tragic fantasy.
Spoilers for the first two books but not for this one.
Disillusioned by the shattered promises of the Dragon Republic, Rin finds herself fighting once again for a different master: the Southern Coalition. Anchored spiritually by Kitay, Rin now has all the powers of the Phoenix at her command. Yet she still chafes at serving beneath men (and they are always men) who seek to use her while also despising her. Rin soon finds the tables turning, again and again, as power changes hands: she’s up, she’s down, she’s allying herself with former enemies and fighting back against gods and monsters alike. Meanwhile, Nikan burns, and where it isn’t burning, it’s starving.
You know, fantasy fiction is often bloodless.
Seriously. Look at Lord of the Rings. Yes, it features epic battle sequences—against armies of orcs. And while many heroes fall, in the end those who remain get to go back to their quiet families, back to the Shire, or west over the ocean … and they live happily ever after. Or at least for a time. Good triumphs over evil. Right wins the day.
Kuang woke up and chose violence. Literally. This trilogy is the literal rejection of bloodless, clean, fairytale epic fantasy. As I quipped at the top of this review, however, it is also subverts the so-called grimdark tropes of fantasy as written by authors like GRRM. Whereas GRRM would say he writes suffering because it’s “realistic,” the suffering of most of his characters is more sensational and pornographic than it is a consequence of their situations and the world. In contrast, the characters in The Burning God suffer because … well … their lives suck. They’re living under an invasion and a rebellion at the same time, as well as a resurgence of shamanic powers. Every semblance of order and an ordinary life, such as it was even for the peasants, is gone.
I’m reading this book as, in the background of my privileged Canadian life, I bear witness to the genocide in Gaza. So much senseless violence and killing and dispossession of Indigenous land. So many excuses thrown about in our so-called civil discourse to obfuscate these simple facts. The parallels are stark and obvious. The Burning God is the climax of a story about genocide (multiple genocides, in fact) and colonialism. The Hesperians are inspired by Europe and the US, an imperalist and moralistic, missionary-obsessed nation convinced it knows it all. What makes Rin’s war so fantastically hard to prosecute is that she isn’t just fighting a physical army: she’s fighting on multiple fronts, some of them spiritual and geopolitical. And despite her minimal Sinegard training and having Kitay’s super-strategy brain on her side, she just … can’t. She can’t win.
The sheer pressure of the enormity of events, the cruelty at scale and the individual ignominy, is tolerable only because Rin is such a pathetic protagonist. She is so unlikeable, so bitter and prone to lashing out at everything and everyone. (Though, to be fair, almost everyone around her treats her terribly.) It’s not that she’s a bad person; she isn’t evil or villainous. She’s just heinously, almost cartoonishly inept and certainly shouldn’t be the heroine. You know that saying, “Not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed”? Yeah. Rin is neither of those.
Maybe everyone else realizes this from the first line of the first book, but it took me until now to realize Kuang is writing tragedy. Sorry for being so slow on the uptake. Like I said, I think I’ve been conditioned to see all my fantasy series as epic battles between good and evil where it will look bad for the good guys for a long while but good eventually prevails. I had forgotten—or maybe deliberately avoided—the whole tragic form. But in a way, despite her propensity for genre hopping, Kuang can’t seem to avoid writing tragedy, whether it’s postcolonial AUs or contemporary takedowns of literary fiction and publishing or fantastical reimaginings of twentieth-century China. Kuang seems quite fixated on losing conditions.
And I’m here for it. I’m here for it in a way I didn’t expect to be, because honestly I don’t really enjoy tragedies. I am a comedies gal. Here I am, though, finding pathos in the tragic figure of Fang Runin at the very end of this book because of course it ends exactly the way it should, Kuang giving us the perfect, most heartbreaking, only logical ending we could possibly get. It’s annoying, is what it is, her being this good at writing and choosing to tell us sad stories instead of happy ones. Goddamn her.
I’m getting emotional because an emotional response is the only correct response to The Burning God. This is an emotional, irrational book. It’s about the worst that humans can bring to bear on each other, the absolute failure mode of humanity. That the final moments of the book represent hope—a forlorn, distant, unimaginably bleak form of hope—is less ironic than it is a desperate plea to make all of this chaos and suffering mean something. But that is, in essence, the human condition, is it not? While I won’t go full Hobbes, I can’t help but look around me at the present state of affairs and conclude that a great amount of human experience is suffering at the hands of other humans, yet we keep building, keep talking, keep … going.
This is not a nice book. It has no happy ending. There is no triumph to be had here, only the bitter taste of ashes and defeat. This is a book about annihilation, about how conquest will happen either at the point of a sword (or butt of a gun) or through the arrival of famine-ending grain. But it will happen. The good guys don’t always win. Sometimes there aren’t any good guys; sometimes everyone sucks, but the people who suck slightly more still win. Sometimes your rebel with a cause and her pyromaniac Phoenix aren’t enough.
If you have read the first two books, you deserve to read this one. You owe it to yourself, and you have also brought it upon yourself. I’m not sorry. If you haven’t read the first two books, read them first. Just be prepared for it to get worse, in the best possible sense.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Spoilers for the first two books but not for this one.
Disillusioned by the shattered promises of the Dragon Republic, Rin finds herself fighting once again for a different master: the Southern Coalition. Anchored spiritually by Kitay, Rin now has all the powers of the Phoenix at her command. Yet she still chafes at serving beneath men (and they are always men) who seek to use her while also despising her. Rin soon finds the tables turning, again and again, as power changes hands: she’s up, she’s down, she’s allying herself with former enemies and fighting back against gods and monsters alike. Meanwhile, Nikan burns, and where it isn’t burning, it’s starving.
You know, fantasy fiction is often bloodless.
Seriously. Look at Lord of the Rings. Yes, it features epic battle sequences—against armies of orcs. And while many heroes fall, in the end those who remain get to go back to their quiet families, back to the Shire, or west over the ocean … and they live happily ever after. Or at least for a time. Good triumphs over evil. Right wins the day.
Kuang woke up and chose violence. Literally. This trilogy is the literal rejection of bloodless, clean, fairytale epic fantasy. As I quipped at the top of this review, however, it is also subverts the so-called grimdark tropes of fantasy as written by authors like GRRM. Whereas GRRM would say he writes suffering because it’s “realistic,” the suffering of most of his characters is more sensational and pornographic than it is a consequence of their situations and the world. In contrast, the characters in The Burning God suffer because … well … their lives suck. They’re living under an invasion and a rebellion at the same time, as well as a resurgence of shamanic powers. Every semblance of order and an ordinary life, such as it was even for the peasants, is gone.
I’m reading this book as, in the background of my privileged Canadian life, I bear witness to the genocide in Gaza. So much senseless violence and killing and dispossession of Indigenous land. So many excuses thrown about in our so-called civil discourse to obfuscate these simple facts. The parallels are stark and obvious. The Burning God is the climax of a story about genocide (multiple genocides, in fact) and colonialism. The Hesperians are inspired by Europe and the US, an imperalist and moralistic, missionary-obsessed nation convinced it knows it all. What makes Rin’s war so fantastically hard to prosecute is that she isn’t just fighting a physical army: she’s fighting on multiple fronts, some of them spiritual and geopolitical. And despite her minimal Sinegard training and having Kitay’s super-strategy brain on her side, she just … can’t. She can’t win.
The sheer pressure of the enormity of events, the cruelty at scale and the individual ignominy, is tolerable only because Rin is such a pathetic protagonist. She is so unlikeable, so bitter and prone to lashing out at everything and everyone. (Though, to be fair, almost everyone around her treats her terribly.) It’s not that she’s a bad person; she isn’t evil or villainous. She’s just heinously, almost cartoonishly inept and certainly shouldn’t be the heroine. You know that saying, “Not the hero we deserved, but the hero we needed”? Yeah. Rin is neither of those.
Maybe everyone else realizes this from the first line of the first book, but it took me until now to realize Kuang is writing tragedy. Sorry for being so slow on the uptake. Like I said, I think I’ve been conditioned to see all my fantasy series as epic battles between good and evil where it will look bad for the good guys for a long while but good eventually prevails. I had forgotten—or maybe deliberately avoided—the whole tragic form. But in a way, despite her propensity for genre hopping, Kuang can’t seem to avoid writing tragedy, whether it’s postcolonial AUs or contemporary takedowns of literary fiction and publishing or fantastical reimaginings of twentieth-century China. Kuang seems quite fixated on losing conditions.
And I’m here for it. I’m here for it in a way I didn’t expect to be, because honestly I don’t really enjoy tragedies. I am a comedies gal. Here I am, though, finding pathos in the tragic figure of Fang Runin at the very end of this book because of course it ends exactly the way it should, Kuang giving us the perfect, most heartbreaking, only logical ending we could possibly get. It’s annoying, is what it is, her being this good at writing and choosing to tell us sad stories instead of happy ones. Goddamn her.
I’m getting emotional because an emotional response is the only correct response to The Burning God. This is an emotional, irrational book. It’s about the worst that humans can bring to bear on each other, the absolute failure mode of humanity. That the final moments of the book represent hope—a forlorn, distant, unimaginably bleak form of hope—is less ironic than it is a desperate plea to make all of this chaos and suffering mean something. But that is, in essence, the human condition, is it not? While I won’t go full Hobbes, I can’t help but look around me at the present state of affairs and conclude that a great amount of human experience is suffering at the hands of other humans, yet we keep building, keep talking, keep … going.
This is not a nice book. It has no happy ending. There is no triumph to be had here, only the bitter taste of ashes and defeat. This is a book about annihilation, about how conquest will happen either at the point of a sword (or butt of a gun) or through the arrival of famine-ending grain. But it will happen. The good guys don’t always win. Sometimes there aren’t any good guys; sometimes everyone sucks, but the people who suck slightly more still win. Sometimes your rebel with a cause and her pyromaniac Phoenix aren’t enough.
If you have read the first two books, you deserve to read this one. You owe it to yourself, and you have also brought it upon yourself. I’m not sorry. If you haven’t read the first two books, read them first. Just be prepared for it to get worse, in the best possible sense.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
The Lost Portal: Mirror Realm Series, Book II by Lenore Borja
adventurous
dark
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
Gods and monsters and nightmares, oh my! The Lost Portal, a sequel to The Last Huntress, promises to be an epic quest. Lenore Borja returns us to the quartet of fierce huntresses: Alice, Soxie, Olivia, and Hadley. Amid affirmations of female friendship and explorations of family ties, these four women are all that stands between the Greek pantheon’s attempt to return to the world—or remake it in the process. The stakes are high—however, much like the first book, my reaction was more yawn than yay. I received a review copy of this book.
Spoilers for the first book but not for this one.
The Lost Portal follows Hadley this time, giving us a glimpse into her backstory: a grandfather and brother deep into a life of crime, a father who throws her brother out of the house, and a widening rift between brother and sister. Hadley has been determined to find sisterhood in her friends instead (a feeling I know all too well). Meanwhile, the gods won’t leave the huntresses alone. With the Mirror Realm destroyed, they have no way back into this world—but they can still plague the huntresses’ dreams. And they promise to do so forever unless the huntresses find for them the eponymous misplaced portal.
Look, I’m going to rip the Band-Aid off on this one: The Lost Portal does nothing to remedy my problems with The Last Huntress and indeed lacks much of the mythological charm that made the first book tolerable.
The switch in perspective from Alice to Hadley is a welcome change. However, it reminded me that we never really get to know the other huntresses all that much. Alice is fairly fleshed out having been the first book’s protagonist, though in this book her character is largely “sad girl vibes for David/Citheraeon, unsure about my mirror powers.” Hadley gets the protagonist treatment here and benefits. Olivia and Soxie? I dunno. Olivia likes animals and Soxie is … rich. Really, rich. Did you know Soxie has a lot of money? If you forget, the book will remind you every few paragraphs. That and she loves stiletto heels. Suffice it to say, these supposedly main characters are not as three-dimensional as I’d like.
The same goes, unfortunately, for the stakes and story in this book! I will give Borja some credit for changing up the setting and mixing in some actual history of Egypt. But even that is pretty thin and superficial. While the first book has a rich, multilayered approach to Greek mythology, this book has … a couple more Greek gods, and a tangential connection to Egypt, and that’s about it. There’s nothing here beneath the surface, and that’s disappointing.
Moreover, the little mythology carried over from the first book feels incredibly arbitrary now. The rules, such as they are, feel designed to facilitate the plot. Any narrative consistency around the nature of the Mirror Realm, the gods, Philautia’s dagger, etc., feels sacrificed in favour of the rule of cool—or at least the rule of convenience. While I love books that attempt to be creative with mythology and even play fast and loose with it—as the first book did, to its benefit—I need the worldbuilding to feel solid and, if not predictable per se, then logical. I need foreshadowing, not deus ex machinae. I need to feel like, when I get to the end of the book, everything was already there, just turned ninety degrees so I couldn’t see it until now. Not so with The Lost Portal, where it almost feels like Borja was making it up as she goes along, a DM barely ahead of the players.
Lastly, let’s talk about Hadley and the subplot with her brother. I really wanted to be onboard for the themes of reconciliation here. However, that shallow characterization strikes again: Caleb feels more like a caricature of a criminal element sibling than an actual, you know, person with complex feelings and motives. His dialogue feels cringey and cliché, and his behaviour is entirely motivated by plot. What should be one of this book’s most powerful features fizzles instead.
The Lost Portal tries to be intense and epic and thrilling but is really only a pale imitation, an echo of the elements someone thinks makes a book intense and epic and thrilling. This book is, unfortunately, an exercise in how intention and imagination alone cannot make for good storytelling.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Spoilers for the first book but not for this one.
The Lost Portal follows Hadley this time, giving us a glimpse into her backstory: a grandfather and brother deep into a life of crime, a father who throws her brother out of the house, and a widening rift between brother and sister. Hadley has been determined to find sisterhood in her friends instead (a feeling I know all too well). Meanwhile, the gods won’t leave the huntresses alone. With the Mirror Realm destroyed, they have no way back into this world—but they can still plague the huntresses’ dreams. And they promise to do so forever unless the huntresses find for them the eponymous misplaced portal.
Look, I’m going to rip the Band-Aid off on this one: The Lost Portal does nothing to remedy my problems with The Last Huntress and indeed lacks much of the mythological charm that made the first book tolerable.
The switch in perspective from Alice to Hadley is a welcome change. However, it reminded me that we never really get to know the other huntresses all that much. Alice is fairly fleshed out having been the first book’s protagonist, though in this book her character is largely “sad girl vibes for David/Citheraeon, unsure about my mirror powers.” Hadley gets the protagonist treatment here and benefits. Olivia and Soxie? I dunno. Olivia likes animals and Soxie is … rich. Really, rich. Did you know Soxie has a lot of money? If you forget, the book will remind you every few paragraphs. That and she loves stiletto heels. Suffice it to say, these supposedly main characters are not as three-dimensional as I’d like.
The same goes, unfortunately, for the stakes and story in this book! I will give Borja some credit for changing up the setting and mixing in some actual history of Egypt. But even that is pretty thin and superficial. While the first book has a rich, multilayered approach to Greek mythology, this book has … a couple more Greek gods, and a tangential connection to Egypt, and that’s about it. There’s nothing here beneath the surface, and that’s disappointing.
Moreover, the little mythology carried over from the first book feels incredibly arbitrary now. The rules, such as they are, feel designed to facilitate the plot. Any narrative consistency around the nature of the Mirror Realm, the gods, Philautia’s dagger, etc., feels sacrificed in favour of the rule of cool—or at least the rule of convenience. While I love books that attempt to be creative with mythology and even play fast and loose with it—as the first book did, to its benefit—I need the worldbuilding to feel solid and, if not predictable per se, then logical. I need foreshadowing, not deus ex machinae. I need to feel like, when I get to the end of the book, everything was already there, just turned ninety degrees so I couldn’t see it until now. Not so with The Lost Portal, where it almost feels like Borja was making it up as she goes along, a DM barely ahead of the players.
Lastly, let’s talk about Hadley and the subplot with her brother. I really wanted to be onboard for the themes of reconciliation here. However, that shallow characterization strikes again: Caleb feels more like a caricature of a criminal element sibling than an actual, you know, person with complex feelings and motives. His dialogue feels cringey and cliché, and his behaviour is entirely motivated by plot. What should be one of this book’s most powerful features fizzles instead.
The Lost Portal tries to be intense and epic and thrilling but is really only a pale imitation, an echo of the elements someone thinks makes a book intense and epic and thrilling. This book is, unfortunately, an exercise in how intention and imagination alone cannot make for good storytelling.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
The Sea Spirit Festival by Claudie Arseneault
adventurous
funny
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
How do we choose who we are? Or are we simply born to be something, our fate fixed from the start? The Sea Spirit Festival tackles weighty questions for such a brief novella. Claudie Arseneault continues The Chronicles of Nerezia with a high-stakes, dramatic story that centres Aliyah even Horace continues to grow into the hero e hopes to be. I received an eARC in exchange for a review.
Our intrepid adventurers have made it to Alleaze, a coastal city just starting its eponymous festival. At this time, for an indeterminate number of days, the citizens of this town celebrate and feast—and then allow the sea spirit to determine what their new jobs will be. To book passage across the ocean, our heroes play for tokens in the festival in the hopes that their contact will still be a sailor after its conclusion. But as the festival winds down, it turns out they have a larger role to play—one that will change the course of Alleaze’s history forever.
It’s so interesting what Arseneault is doing with this journey across Nerezia. Horace has led a relatively sheltered life, and with each new stop, e must confront eir preconceptions about life and society. Eir reaction to Alleaze’s culture, particularly the way in which everyone surrenders oneself to the will of the Sea Spirit, is so fascinating. E has a hard time understanding it because it’s so different from eir own experience being born into a clan. In both cases, we have a culture that’s quite different from what most readers would be used to. I love how Arseneault challenges Horace (and by extension, the reader) to become more culturally responsive and respectful.
As with the first two books, there is a great deal of emphasis on Horace’s growth as a warrior, protector, and hero. In the last book, Horace started training in earnest. This book features Horace making split-second decisions to save eir friend and protect the city. Horace’s good heart is the moral centre of this series, and it’s wonderful.
It was also fascinating to see Aliyah in a more active role. Last time we say them using their powers, it was more instinctual, accidental, than anything else. This time Aliyah steps up—less so out of an eagerness to help, like Horace, and more out of a sense that they have a role to play when it comes to corralling and dealing with the Fragments. The slow burn on this mythology is both frustrating and satisfying, but the selfish part of me that wants to stuff my mouth full of cookies hopes we get more in the next book.
The Sea Spirit Festival ably continues the episodic story of these adventurers. It’s cute and cozy yet also contains drama and danger. Arseneault balances these qualities with a practised hand, and the result is another finely crafted novella.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Our intrepid adventurers have made it to Alleaze, a coastal city just starting its eponymous festival. At this time, for an indeterminate number of days, the citizens of this town celebrate and feast—and then allow the sea spirit to determine what their new jobs will be. To book passage across the ocean, our heroes play for tokens in the festival in the hopes that their contact will still be a sailor after its conclusion. But as the festival winds down, it turns out they have a larger role to play—one that will change the course of Alleaze’s history forever.
It’s so interesting what Arseneault is doing with this journey across Nerezia. Horace has led a relatively sheltered life, and with each new stop, e must confront eir preconceptions about life and society. Eir reaction to Alleaze’s culture, particularly the way in which everyone surrenders oneself to the will of the Sea Spirit, is so fascinating. E has a hard time understanding it because it’s so different from eir own experience being born into a clan. In both cases, we have a culture that’s quite different from what most readers would be used to. I love how Arseneault challenges Horace (and by extension, the reader) to become more culturally responsive and respectful.
As with the first two books, there is a great deal of emphasis on Horace’s growth as a warrior, protector, and hero. In the last book, Horace started training in earnest. This book features Horace making split-second decisions to save eir friend and protect the city. Horace’s good heart is the moral centre of this series, and it’s wonderful.
It was also fascinating to see Aliyah in a more active role. Last time we say them using their powers, it was more instinctual, accidental, than anything else. This time Aliyah steps up—less so out of an eagerness to help, like Horace, and more out of a sense that they have a role to play when it comes to corralling and dealing with the Fragments. The slow burn on this mythology is both frustrating and satisfying, but the selfish part of me that wants to stuff my mouth full of cookies hopes we get more in the next book.
The Sea Spirit Festival ably continues the episodic story of these adventurers. It’s cute and cozy yet also contains drama and danger. Arseneault balances these qualities with a practised hand, and the result is another finely crafted novella.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Fang Fiction by Kate Stayman-London
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
What’s better than a book about vampires? How about a book about a book series about vampires—that might turn out to be real? Kate Stayman-London combines fanfic with spicy vampire sex and no small amount of peril in Fang Fiction. I received an eARC via NetGalley thanks to being a host of Prophecy Girls podcast.
Tess drops out of grad school after someone else in her program sexually assaults her. She takes solace in her favourite fantasy series, Blood Feud. Tess doesn’t think much of the fan conspiracy theory that the vampires from the books are real. Then Octavia Yoo, one such vampire, shows up at the hotel where Tess works. She finds herself drafted to seek out Octavia’s brother, Callum, who is as dangerous as he is hot. Meanwhile, Octavia reluctantly teams up with Tess’s former roommate and best friend. Across two separate places, these women must solve the mystery of how Octavia escaped the Isle, who August Lirio is, and how they can reunite the Yoo siblings.
Fang Fiction didn’t land for me at first. Stayman-London’s characterization is sharp and lacks much subtlety. Tess and Joni gush over Blood Feud; the vampire characters, like Octavia and Callum, are melodramatic AF. Everything is cranked up to eleven, but nothing feels real. It feels flimsy, goofy, like I’m watching season 1 Buffy all over again.
Slowly but surely, however, the book won me over. First and foremost is Stayman-London’s depiction of Tess’s trauma following her rape. For a book that is otherwise tongue-in-cheek to the point of distraction, Fang Fiction deals with rape with incredible grace and sensitivity. Tess’s spiral, which is where we basically meet her after the book’s prologue, and her reluctance to talk to Joni about her rape feels so real and poignant. Stayman-London does an excellent job of showing why a survivor might withdraw from the world and from her friends. She succeeds in showing the ongoing harm that persists despite the actual event being over. For a book that otherwise seems to land firmly in the romantasy genre, this darker thread adds pathos.
The romantic parts, of course, didn’t do much for me. More invested romantasy readers might enjoy it, though this is a slow burn romance that takes a long time to get to the spicy parts. The wrong Prophecy Girl might have read this book, though—when I typed out and sent Steph a lengthy, steamy passage from later in the book, her ears metaphorically perked up. For what it’s worth, I can understand, intellectually, the heat in these pages.
The somewhat meta “fan fiction” idea is intriguing but fizzles, in my opinion, amidst the chaos of the climax. The actual Big Bad proves predictable, and the confrontation itself is underwhelming. This book doesn’t really do much when it comes to exploring the nature of vampires or their mythos beyond the bits and pieces Stayman-London needs for the story.
Fang Fiction is enjoyable, hot even if that is your thing. Romantasy readers, Buffy fans, are the right target audience, and I don’t want to damn this with faint praise: this book is full of charm and wit and intense moments that are going to satisfy. That being said, whether it’s Stayman-London’s characterization style or her plotting, this book never quite achieved its full potential in my eyes.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Tess drops out of grad school after someone else in her program sexually assaults her. She takes solace in her favourite fantasy series, Blood Feud. Tess doesn’t think much of the fan conspiracy theory that the vampires from the books are real. Then Octavia Yoo, one such vampire, shows up at the hotel where Tess works. She finds herself drafted to seek out Octavia’s brother, Callum, who is as dangerous as he is hot. Meanwhile, Octavia reluctantly teams up with Tess’s former roommate and best friend. Across two separate places, these women must solve the mystery of how Octavia escaped the Isle, who August Lirio is, and how they can reunite the Yoo siblings.
Fang Fiction didn’t land for me at first. Stayman-London’s characterization is sharp and lacks much subtlety. Tess and Joni gush over Blood Feud; the vampire characters, like Octavia and Callum, are melodramatic AF. Everything is cranked up to eleven, but nothing feels real. It feels flimsy, goofy, like I’m watching season 1 Buffy all over again.
Slowly but surely, however, the book won me over. First and foremost is Stayman-London’s depiction of Tess’s trauma following her rape. For a book that is otherwise tongue-in-cheek to the point of distraction, Fang Fiction deals with rape with incredible grace and sensitivity. Tess’s spiral, which is where we basically meet her after the book’s prologue, and her reluctance to talk to Joni about her rape feels so real and poignant. Stayman-London does an excellent job of showing why a survivor might withdraw from the world and from her friends. She succeeds in showing the ongoing harm that persists despite the actual event being over. For a book that otherwise seems to land firmly in the romantasy genre, this darker thread adds pathos.
The romantic parts, of course, didn’t do much for me. More invested romantasy readers might enjoy it, though this is a slow burn romance that takes a long time to get to the spicy parts. The wrong Prophecy Girl might have read this book, though—when I typed out and sent Steph a lengthy, steamy passage from later in the book, her ears metaphorically perked up. For what it’s worth, I can understand, intellectually, the heat in these pages.
The somewhat meta “fan fiction” idea is intriguing but fizzles, in my opinion, amidst the chaos of the climax. The actual Big Bad proves predictable, and the confrontation itself is underwhelming. This book doesn’t really do much when it comes to exploring the nature of vampires or their mythos beyond the bits and pieces Stayman-London needs for the story.
Fang Fiction is enjoyable, hot even if that is your thing. Romantasy readers, Buffy fans, are the right target audience, and I don’t want to damn this with faint praise: this book is full of charm and wit and intense moments that are going to satisfy. That being said, whether it’s Stayman-London’s characterization style or her plotting, this book never quite achieved its full potential in my eyes.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
It Gets Better . . . Except When It Gets Worse: And Other Unsolicited Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me by Nicole Maines
challenging
emotional
funny
fast-paced
4.0
Nicole Maines as Nia Nal/Dreamer in Supergirl was a revelation in more ways than one, and I have loved following her on Twitter even as that site slides deeper into the abyss. So when I heard she had a memoir, It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse, coming out, of course I needed to read it. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Dial Press for the eARC.
As the introduction establishes, this is Maines’s story, on her terms and in her (ghostwritten) words. Her story had previously been told by Amy Ellis Nutt in Becoming Nicole, which I haven’t read. Maines doesn’t criticize Nutt or that book too much, simply remarking—correctly—that its perspective is different from her own. It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse is raw and unvarnished. In sharing her life up to this point, her ambivalence about being thrust into activism amid pursuing her acting, Maines also takes aim at the expectations we (fans, especially queer fans) put on actors and high-profile activists. In a world where we are eternally expecting inspiration porn, Maines steadfastly refuses to give us our fix. Respect.
The first few chapters are achingly familiar to anyone who has read other trans memoirs: Maines realizing she is a girl at a very young age, her parents grappling with this understanding and its implications not only for her but for her twin brother and their entire family. Fortunately, her parents (particularly her mom, from the beginning) are supportive, fighting for Maines’s rights at school—her first brush with fame was as a plaintiff in a case against a Maine school board over bathroom rights—and even moving to send her to a more inclusive school. The fact that Maines’s childhood experience of transition was so tumultuous in spite of continual parental support only serves to highlight how truly awful it must be for trans kids with less supportive families.
Maines came of age in an interesting time for trans rights, as she herself notes in these chapters. In the beginning her mom really has to search even for the vocabulary to describe what Maines is going through, but by the time Maines is graduating high school, transgender has become a household term. It feels like in the last ten years we’ve gone through this whirlwind of rising awareness, tentative acceptance, and now pernicious backlash, and you feel it reading this book. After fighting for her rights in childhood, Maines’s frustration being right back at square one in her adulthood comes across so strongly here.
The most interesting parts of the book for me were towards the end, as Maines discusses breaking into acting and eventually being cast in Supergirl. I didn’t really know much about how she got into acting. She just showed up one day on my TV, a trans actor playing a trans character, and stole my heart. Nia Nal’s evolution on screen, including the trans rights storylines the show played out, were pivotal in helping me understand and accept I am trans; I literally named myself Kara after the show’s main character (I was well chuffed to learn from this book that Maines did something similar in naming herself after a Zoey 101 character).
It isn’t surprising to hear, in her own words, that Maines struggled with imposter syndrome, etc., while she started acting on the show. I applaud her for being honest about it—there are echoes here of what I read in Anna Kendrick’s memoir this summer. Acting is a far more demanding and destabilizing profession than we often know, and social media and celebrity culture has warped our understanding of what the life of the average actor is like. And this is where It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse truly gets interesting.
Maines minces no words in her criticism of the toxic segments of Supergirl fandom: specifically, some shippers who take their OTPs way too seriously. She doesn’t play favourites—from Karamel to Supercorp (the latter being my ship, if I have to pick one, but I am actually kind of happy Kara is alone at the end of the series), each ship has a small but vocal contingent who attacked the cast and crew any time the show didn’t seem to be going their way. I remember this well, even if I was always on the outskirts because I don’t venture places like AO3. The Supergirl hashtags were a good place for community for me on Twitter back in those days, especially around conversation about queerness and queer representation—so it sucks that some fans took things way too far.
But Maines goes even further. On the topic of Dreamer, the original character designed for her, whom she has ported over into the comics and been writing for the past few years, Maines confesses to some frustration with how Dreamer was developed on the show. She wanted a darker, edgier character—and is realizing this in her comic stories (which I haven’t and probably won’t read). For example, there is a notable episode where Dreamer has to take on an anti-trans villain. She nearly kills him, which would be against Supergirl’s code, of course. Maines is like, “Dreamer should have killed him! It makes sense.” And, like, I won’t pretend to agree with that because I happen to like the squeaky-clean approach to justice the CW Supergirl took, in contrast to something like Arrow.
But I love it for Nicole. I love that she sat down to write this book and said (not a direct quote), “Fuck being the good girl, the politic one, the nice trans woman. Fuck being inspirational, feel-good, or positive. Things suck right now, and I want to tell everyone why they suck, and I don’t want to pretend I don’t want to be out for blood.” Maines makes it clear: she wants the freedom to be messy. Some of y’all (especially white cis people) might not realize how subversive this is, but anyone belonging to an underrepresented group in media gets it: the pressure to be well behaved, to be “good,” can be overwhelming at times.
I respect this. We want to lionize people, call them trailblazers, simply for existing—or fighting for the barest sliver of human dignity. I want to call Maines inspirational. I feel an affinity for her, even though I’m older and my experience with transition is incredibly different and I am ace whereas she is incredibly horny on main (and I am here for it). Somehow, her attitude and her outlook resonate with me; this book is no exception. Out of respect to her wishes, however, I’m trying my best not to put her on that pedestal.
So instead I want to say this: It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse is a messy book. It refuses to be the feel-good memoir you hope for from a young actor or a trans celebrity. While the ingredients are there—the sad, low moments, and the triumphant ones—Maines doesn’t want to assemble them into a satisfying meal. She wants you to feel unbalanced. She does say she wants trans readers to feel seen (and I do), but she is also exhausted by the political upheaval of the last five years, and she will not hold back. I admire this, and I really appreciate this attempt to short-circuit the narratives around actors and activists like herself.
At various points in reading this, I felt entertained, uplifted, triggered, saddened, shocked, and impressed. In that sense, this is a very human book. Nicole Maines is a trans woman, and a lot of this book is about that—but she’s also a young woman in her twenties, at the start of her adult life and her career, shouting into the void, and this book is also about that. There’s more here than just her thoughts on trans rights and trans life, just as there is more to Maines than Dreamer or being trans or being mouthy on Twitter. I love memoirs that contain multitudes.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
As the introduction establishes, this is Maines’s story, on her terms and in her (ghostwritten) words. Her story had previously been told by Amy Ellis Nutt in Becoming Nicole, which I haven’t read. Maines doesn’t criticize Nutt or that book too much, simply remarking—correctly—that its perspective is different from her own. It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse is raw and unvarnished. In sharing her life up to this point, her ambivalence about being thrust into activism amid pursuing her acting, Maines also takes aim at the expectations we (fans, especially queer fans) put on actors and high-profile activists. In a world where we are eternally expecting inspiration porn, Maines steadfastly refuses to give us our fix. Respect.
The first few chapters are achingly familiar to anyone who has read other trans memoirs: Maines realizing she is a girl at a very young age, her parents grappling with this understanding and its implications not only for her but for her twin brother and their entire family. Fortunately, her parents (particularly her mom, from the beginning) are supportive, fighting for Maines’s rights at school—her first brush with fame was as a plaintiff in a case against a Maine school board over bathroom rights—and even moving to send her to a more inclusive school. The fact that Maines’s childhood experience of transition was so tumultuous in spite of continual parental support only serves to highlight how truly awful it must be for trans kids with less supportive families.
Maines came of age in an interesting time for trans rights, as she herself notes in these chapters. In the beginning her mom really has to search even for the vocabulary to describe what Maines is going through, but by the time Maines is graduating high school, transgender has become a household term. It feels like in the last ten years we’ve gone through this whirlwind of rising awareness, tentative acceptance, and now pernicious backlash, and you feel it reading this book. After fighting for her rights in childhood, Maines’s frustration being right back at square one in her adulthood comes across so strongly here.
The most interesting parts of the book for me were towards the end, as Maines discusses breaking into acting and eventually being cast in Supergirl. I didn’t really know much about how she got into acting. She just showed up one day on my TV, a trans actor playing a trans character, and stole my heart. Nia Nal’s evolution on screen, including the trans rights storylines the show played out, were pivotal in helping me understand and accept I am trans; I literally named myself Kara after the show’s main character (I was well chuffed to learn from this book that Maines did something similar in naming herself after a Zoey 101 character).
It isn’t surprising to hear, in her own words, that Maines struggled with imposter syndrome, etc., while she started acting on the show. I applaud her for being honest about it—there are echoes here of what I read in Anna Kendrick’s memoir this summer. Acting is a far more demanding and destabilizing profession than we often know, and social media and celebrity culture has warped our understanding of what the life of the average actor is like. And this is where It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse truly gets interesting.
Maines minces no words in her criticism of the toxic segments of Supergirl fandom: specifically, some shippers who take their OTPs way too seriously. She doesn’t play favourites—from Karamel to Supercorp (the latter being my ship, if I have to pick one, but I am actually kind of happy Kara is alone at the end of the series), each ship has a small but vocal contingent who attacked the cast and crew any time the show didn’t seem to be going their way. I remember this well, even if I was always on the outskirts because I don’t venture places like AO3. The Supergirl hashtags were a good place for community for me on Twitter back in those days, especially around conversation about queerness and queer representation—so it sucks that some fans took things way too far.
But Maines goes even further. On the topic of Dreamer, the original character designed for her, whom she has ported over into the comics and been writing for the past few years, Maines confesses to some frustration with how Dreamer was developed on the show. She wanted a darker, edgier character—and is realizing this in her comic stories (which I haven’t and probably won’t read). For example, there is a notable episode where Dreamer has to take on an anti-trans villain. She nearly kills him, which would be against Supergirl’s code, of course. Maines is like, “Dreamer should have killed him! It makes sense.” And, like, I won’t pretend to agree with that because I happen to like the squeaky-clean approach to justice the CW Supergirl took, in contrast to something like Arrow.
But I love it for Nicole. I love that she sat down to write this book and said (not a direct quote), “Fuck being the good girl, the politic one, the nice trans woman. Fuck being inspirational, feel-good, or positive. Things suck right now, and I want to tell everyone why they suck, and I don’t want to pretend I don’t want to be out for blood.” Maines makes it clear: she wants the freedom to be messy. Some of y’all (especially white cis people) might not realize how subversive this is, but anyone belonging to an underrepresented group in media gets it: the pressure to be well behaved, to be “good,” can be overwhelming at times.
I respect this. We want to lionize people, call them trailblazers, simply for existing—or fighting for the barest sliver of human dignity. I want to call Maines inspirational. I feel an affinity for her, even though I’m older and my experience with transition is incredibly different and I am ace whereas she is incredibly horny on main (and I am here for it). Somehow, her attitude and her outlook resonate with me; this book is no exception. Out of respect to her wishes, however, I’m trying my best not to put her on that pedestal.
So instead I want to say this: It Gets Better … Except When It Gets Worse is a messy book. It refuses to be the feel-good memoir you hope for from a young actor or a trans celebrity. While the ingredients are there—the sad, low moments, and the triumphant ones—Maines doesn’t want to assemble them into a satisfying meal. She wants you to feel unbalanced. She does say she wants trans readers to feel seen (and I do), but she is also exhausted by the political upheaval of the last five years, and she will not hold back. I admire this, and I really appreciate this attempt to short-circuit the narratives around actors and activists like herself.
At various points in reading this, I felt entertained, uplifted, triggered, saddened, shocked, and impressed. In that sense, this is a very human book. Nicole Maines is a trans woman, and a lot of this book is about that—but she’s also a young woman in her twenties, at the start of her adult life and her career, shouting into the void, and this book is also about that. There’s more here than just her thoughts on trans rights and trans life, just as there is more to Maines than Dreamer or being trans or being mouthy on Twitter. I love memoirs that contain multitudes.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
The Unbroken by C.L. Clark
adventurous
challenging
emotional
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
This book has fucked me up in subtle ways I might spend months if not years untangling. C.L. Clark has written a kind of book I have always wanted to write, a fantasy novel speaking to the present day even as its secondary world setting remains a colonial, nineteenth-century one. With unlikeable protagonists and unenviable no-win scenarios, The Unbroken is a deliberate hot mess. I didn’t love it. I didn’t even want to like it.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Touraine is a lieutenant in the Balladairan colonial army. Kidnapped from her home country of Qazāl as a small child, she is part of the Sands, a unit comprised of her fellow foreign conscripts. Now the Sands have returned “home,” their unit accompanying Balladaire’s bloodiest general and Crown Princess Luca, eager to make her mark as a leader so that she can finally unseat her regent uncle and accede to Balladaire’s throne. Circumstances lead to Touraine and Luca starting as allies before becoming enemies and then allies (frenemies?) again. And then enemies. And then … look, you get the idea.
Let’s start with just how many notes The Unbroken hits perfectly. It’s a queernorm fantasy that’s nevertheless full of discrimination, conflict, and hatred. It’s a postcolonial fantasy that has a sympathetic monarch main character even as it critiques that entire institution without an ounce of clemency. It’s a story of never coming home, finally coming home, wishing you hadn’t come home, and fucking everything up trying to come home.
Purely by chance, I read this immediately following Empire of Sand. I’ll repeat what I said in my review of that book: we are in renaissance of fantasy. And I’ll add: that renaissance is largely driven by authors of colour, who have been hard at work reshaping mainstream fantasy from a fluffy, sanitized version of Europe into something with teeth. From N.K. Jemisin to Tracey Deonn, and now Tasha Suri and C.L. Clark—fantasy proliferates now with incredibly diverse voices that aren’t afraid to break down the status quo of the genre.
When I was younger, I had this whole idea for a fantasy novel—I won’t explain it here, mostly because one day I still might write it, but suffice it to say it included the protagonist plotting revolution against a queen who happened to be her best friend because, you know, democracy. At seventeen, I understood it was weird my favourite genre could tell beautiful stories about Good triumphing over Evil, yet they still always ended with a feudal society full of class divisions and ruled by a monarch. So it shouldn’t be a surprise I am loving postcolonial fantasy and how it gives zero fucks about pretending a functioning monarchy is a good place to live.
In this way, Luca is a difficult character to like in The Unbroken. As Touraine quite rightly says to her face at one point, she is the epitome of privilege in this world. Her complaint is that her power-hungry uncle isn’t giving power to her, basically. Clark expertly portrays her as a kind of well-meaning white saviour: she thinks she can “help” the people of Qazāl, but only within the framework of empire; her worldview doesn’t let her imagine anything different.
Touraine, then, becomes the perfect foil. A survivor of colonial abduction, deprogramming herself in her homeland even as her own people treat her with suspicion, Touraine seems like a natural candidate for heroine as well as protagonist. Except she sucks just as bad as Luca! To be fair, her flaws are probably more personal than political, but her role in the story means her personal flaws have massive political consequences, so it all comes out the same, basically.
It has been a long time since I have yelled at a book as much as I yelled at Touraine every single time she was at a fork in the road and took the worst possible path down each. Every. Time. She is the Jon Snow of this world, and like Jon Snow, she knows nothing. Also like Jon, she fails upward.
So with two unlikeable protagonists who mess everything up, why is The Unbroken so good? Because Clark clearly means it to be a mess. I’m sure there’s some readers who will ship Touraine and Luca as a disaster couple, but honestly, I don’t think we are supposed to read them that way. They are just disasters, full stop, individually and together. This is a fantasy novel that truly embraces just how chaotic the disintegration of empire is while at the same time telling a coherent story, and it works really well.
I don’t want to read the next book. But I also can’t look away. That’s what I am trying to say here: The Unbroken seared itself on my soul because it does so much right that even as I want to plug my ears and say, “Nope, not interested, give me the cozy fantasy again please,” I can’t help myself. I’m part of the revolution now. Let’s go.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Touraine is a lieutenant in the Balladairan colonial army. Kidnapped from her home country of Qazāl as a small child, she is part of the Sands, a unit comprised of her fellow foreign conscripts. Now the Sands have returned “home,” their unit accompanying Balladaire’s bloodiest general and Crown Princess Luca, eager to make her mark as a leader so that she can finally unseat her regent uncle and accede to Balladaire’s throne. Circumstances lead to Touraine and Luca starting as allies before becoming enemies and then allies (frenemies?) again. And then enemies. And then … look, you get the idea.
Let’s start with just how many notes The Unbroken hits perfectly. It’s a queernorm fantasy that’s nevertheless full of discrimination, conflict, and hatred. It’s a postcolonial fantasy that has a sympathetic monarch main character even as it critiques that entire institution without an ounce of clemency. It’s a story of never coming home, finally coming home, wishing you hadn’t come home, and fucking everything up trying to come home.
Purely by chance, I read this immediately following Empire of Sand. I’ll repeat what I said in my review of that book: we are in renaissance of fantasy. And I’ll add: that renaissance is largely driven by authors of colour, who have been hard at work reshaping mainstream fantasy from a fluffy, sanitized version of Europe into something with teeth. From N.K. Jemisin to Tracey Deonn, and now Tasha Suri and C.L. Clark—fantasy proliferates now with incredibly diverse voices that aren’t afraid to break down the status quo of the genre.
When I was younger, I had this whole idea for a fantasy novel—I won’t explain it here, mostly because one day I still might write it, but suffice it to say it included the protagonist plotting revolution against a queen who happened to be her best friend because, you know, democracy. At seventeen, I understood it was weird my favourite genre could tell beautiful stories about Good triumphing over Evil, yet they still always ended with a feudal society full of class divisions and ruled by a monarch. So it shouldn’t be a surprise I am loving postcolonial fantasy and how it gives zero fucks about pretending a functioning monarchy is a good place to live.
In this way, Luca is a difficult character to like in The Unbroken. As Touraine quite rightly says to her face at one point, she is the epitome of privilege in this world. Her complaint is that her power-hungry uncle isn’t giving power to her, basically. Clark expertly portrays her as a kind of well-meaning white saviour: she thinks she can “help” the people of Qazāl, but only within the framework of empire; her worldview doesn’t let her imagine anything different.
Touraine, then, becomes the perfect foil. A survivor of colonial abduction, deprogramming herself in her homeland even as her own people treat her with suspicion, Touraine seems like a natural candidate for heroine as well as protagonist. Except she sucks just as bad as Luca! To be fair, her flaws are probably more personal than political, but her role in the story means her personal flaws have massive political consequences, so it all comes out the same, basically.
It has been a long time since I have yelled at a book as much as I yelled at Touraine every single time she was at a fork in the road and took the worst possible path down each. Every. Time. She is the Jon Snow of this world, and like Jon Snow, she knows nothing. Also like Jon, she fails upward.
So with two unlikeable protagonists who mess everything up, why is The Unbroken so good? Because Clark clearly means it to be a mess. I’m sure there’s some readers who will ship Touraine and Luca as a disaster couple, but honestly, I don’t think we are supposed to read them that way. They are just disasters, full stop, individually and together. This is a fantasy novel that truly embraces just how chaotic the disintegration of empire is while at the same time telling a coherent story, and it works really well.
I don’t want to read the next book. But I also can’t look away. That’s what I am trying to say here: The Unbroken seared itself on my soul because it does so much right that even as I want to plug my ears and say, “Nope, not interested, give me the cozy fantasy again please,” I can’t help myself. I’m part of the revolution now. Let’s go.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri
adventurous
dark
emotional
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
A while back I had the opportunity to read The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri and was thrilled to discover she had more titles to her name. We are truly living in a renaissance of high fantasy, and in particular, there is something special happening with the main character energy. Empire of Sand is no exception.
Mehr is the illegitimate daughter of an Ambhan governor. She has done her best to remember what her mother could pass down of Amrithi teachings, yet she knows she doesn’t belong in either world. Maneuvered into a political marriage so that the supreme religious leader of the Ambhan Empire can use her Amrithi magic to stay in power, Mehr seemingly has no choice, no agency. She has to fight and claw and scrabble, metaphorically and literally, her way to freedom—from men, from religion, from cultural oppression, from everything and everyone who would define her and shape her for their own ends.
Mehr reminds me a lot of Malini from The Jasmine Throne, albeit with far less power despite similar levels of privilege. She is such a fascinating character. I found her sympathetic yet not particularly likeable; indeed, she’s a bit boring. Yet this leads to such a careful, complex characterization. Mehr’s heritage and social status means she wields almost no power herself, yet she is sheltered from the hardships other Amrithi, and lower-class Ambhan women, experience on a daily basis. This much is made clear early in the book, especially through her encounter with a servant she ill-uses—the theme of “using” people for one’s own ends becomes particularly poignant as the story goes on.
In this way, Suri belies the usual, simplistic narratives about discrimination and power. Surface-level depictions of discrimination often flatten someone’s identities and the axes along which they experience oppression. But real life is so much more complicated. I’m trans and experience oppression as a result, yet I am also white, which makes me less marginalized; like Mehr, I have one type of privilege (several, actually, but let’s not brag) that insulates me from some of the oppression experienced by people with whom I share marginalized identities. It’s tough to write stories like this, and I love how Suri moves through the layers of Mehr’s identity.
Mehr’s relationship with Amun was less interesting to me. If you are more into romantasy, of course, this might be exactly your vibe: reluctant marriage to someone you don’t particularly like, etc. I get what Suri is trying to do here (I think), and I don’t want to pan it just because it isn’t for me. Amun is just such a moody mopey guy. If you like that, pick up the book already.
I was more interested in the power dynamic between Mehr and the Maha. There’s so much more to this world than Suri allows us to see from the narrator’s very limited perspective perched on Mehr’s shoulder—and honestly, that’s fine. But I love what Suri has set up here: an ancient leader who has perverted the magic of a people not his own in order to literally reshape the world to suit him and his imperial progeny. It’s just the right balance of epic and twisted, ambitious and odious.
Mehr is just the right person to come along and screw it all up.
Empire of Sand is very much a debut novel, with Suri’s more recent works a clear improvement in terms of skill. Yet the echoes of this book reverberate in those newer novels. I wasn’t initially going to read the sequel (like I said, I don’t actually like Mehr all that much), but I’m kind of intrigued to see what her sister, Arwa, gets up to as the main character.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.
Mehr is the illegitimate daughter of an Ambhan governor. She has done her best to remember what her mother could pass down of Amrithi teachings, yet she knows she doesn’t belong in either world. Maneuvered into a political marriage so that the supreme religious leader of the Ambhan Empire can use her Amrithi magic to stay in power, Mehr seemingly has no choice, no agency. She has to fight and claw and scrabble, metaphorically and literally, her way to freedom—from men, from religion, from cultural oppression, from everything and everyone who would define her and shape her for their own ends.
Mehr reminds me a lot of Malini from The Jasmine Throne, albeit with far less power despite similar levels of privilege. She is such a fascinating character. I found her sympathetic yet not particularly likeable; indeed, she’s a bit boring. Yet this leads to such a careful, complex characterization. Mehr’s heritage and social status means she wields almost no power herself, yet she is sheltered from the hardships other Amrithi, and lower-class Ambhan women, experience on a daily basis. This much is made clear early in the book, especially through her encounter with a servant she ill-uses—the theme of “using” people for one’s own ends becomes particularly poignant as the story goes on.
In this way, Suri belies the usual, simplistic narratives about discrimination and power. Surface-level depictions of discrimination often flatten someone’s identities and the axes along which they experience oppression. But real life is so much more complicated. I’m trans and experience oppression as a result, yet I am also white, which makes me less marginalized; like Mehr, I have one type of privilege (several, actually, but let’s not brag) that insulates me from some of the oppression experienced by people with whom I share marginalized identities. It’s tough to write stories like this, and I love how Suri moves through the layers of Mehr’s identity.
Mehr’s relationship with Amun was less interesting to me. If you are more into romantasy, of course, this might be exactly your vibe: reluctant marriage to someone you don’t particularly like, etc. I get what Suri is trying to do here (I think), and I don’t want to pan it just because it isn’t for me. Amun is just such a moody mopey guy. If you like that, pick up the book already.
I was more interested in the power dynamic between Mehr and the Maha. There’s so much more to this world than Suri allows us to see from the narrator’s very limited perspective perched on Mehr’s shoulder—and honestly, that’s fine. But I love what Suri has set up here: an ancient leader who has perverted the magic of a people not his own in order to literally reshape the world to suit him and his imperial progeny. It’s just the right balance of epic and twisted, ambitious and odious.
Mehr is just the right person to come along and screw it all up.
Empire of Sand is very much a debut novel, with Suri’s more recent works a clear improvement in terms of skill. Yet the echoes of this book reverberate in those newer novels. I wasn’t initially going to read the sequel (like I said, I don’t actually like Mehr all that much), but I’m kind of intrigued to see what her sister, Arwa, gets up to as the main character.
Originally posted at Kara.Reviews.