I couldn't quite fathom how Clark managed to combine visceral physicality with metaphysical eroticism so effortlessly, but reading these poems has beeI couldn't quite fathom how Clark managed to combine visceral physicality with metaphysical eroticism so effortlessly, but reading these poems has been a tremendous experience.
Big thank you to NetGalley and Orbit Books for giving me an e-ARC of this book!
This is a tale of dark family histories and generational trauma, betrayBig thank you to NetGalley and Orbit Books for giving me an e-ARC of this book!
This is a tale of dark family histories and generational trauma, betrayal, revenge, and at its heart, like the shadow at the base of a flame, a story of connections broken and reforged, trust, love, and friendship. If it sounds like any other story in the world, it is, and yet its so much more. The power of the story lies in it's telling, and Abdullah has told this story in a fashion that us modern SFF readers have sort of grown unaccustomed to reading.
Layla Najima al-Nazari, going by the name Loulie al-Nazari or the Midnight Merchant in the present, was found, when she was a child and her tribe murdered by black-garbed assassins, by an enigmatic wandering jinn named Qadir. Qadir took her under his wing, and together, with Loulie as the businesswoman and Qadir her protector, they made a career out of searching out and selling on the black market of the city of Madinne magical relics. But their career is interrupted when the Sultan of Madinne forces Loulie and Qadir to go on a dangerous quest to the Sandsea, the historical site of the cities of the now-fallen jinn, to recover one of the most important relics known. Accompanying Loulie and Qadir on their new quest is Prince Omar, the oldest of the Sultan's sons and the leader of the infamous Forty Thieves — but no, it's secretly Prince Mazen, the youngest of the Sultan's sons, a sheltered royal who is frightened of killings, who would love nothing more than to be an anonymous, decidedly non-aristocratic storyteller in the souk. And accompanying Mazen is one of Omar's Forty Thieves, Aisha bint-Louas, a jinn hunter fuelled by a wish to avenge the murder of her village at the hands of jinn.
Thank you to Aliette de Bodard for granting me an ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Aliette de Bodard keeps raising the barRating: ✶✶✶½
Thank you to Aliette de Bodard for granting me an ARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.
Aliette de Bodard keeps raising the bar for the depiction of long-term queer relationships in fantasy. I’ve never read anyone before who portrays a gay marriage (what’s the term for m/m relationships like ‘sapphic’ is for w/w relationships? ‘Achillean’?) with the same kind of depth. I was rather stunned when I read Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murders by this level of on-page tenderness and honesty, shown through highly amusing and imaginative scenes that capture the comedy of the situation beautifully. Of Charms, Ghosts, and Grievances takes it one step further with the theme of fatherhood, finding the courage to love someone who is at once familiar and alien to oneself, and how that’s intimately bound with the process of loving oneself. Asian SFF, particularly Southeast Asian SFF, owes a great deal to de Bodard’s unique perspective; I don’t know where we’d be without her.
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
My father died in January 2020, weeks before the pandemic Rating: ✶✶✶✶½
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
My father died in January 2020, weeks before the pandemic entered India. My sister and I thank the powers that be for not keeping him around to witness the ensuing devastation. Nevertheless, I dream of women trying to resurrect father figures, powerful men, and reignite their living legacy, be it for better or for worse. I dream of women because my father raised me as a woman, although I turned out to be different. I dream of dead men because I knew my father to be a man first, before I realised he could’ve been something different, too. Possibly like me.
Age of Ash (Kithamar #1) is a high fantasy novel centred around an unusually sincere and grounded perspective on mourning. The novel is about other things, too, such as crime, guilt, loyalty, class solidarity, sorcery and the nature of evil. But there are other fantasy books that deal with those themes. Terry Pratchett, for instance, had a character argue that evil begins when people start treating other people like things. Daniel Abraham himself, as James S. A. Corey, wrote The Expanse series of science fiction novels, a significant part of which is about crime and the nexuses which undergird the different strata of society in the present as well as the far future. No, the reason why Age of Ash struck a chord with me is because it’s so real about mourning people one loves, and sometimes loses to life before death. I don’t mean the kind of mourning where someone moves mountains in honour of the memory of the one lost. I mean the kind of mourning where one refuses, makes a mess, clings to unrealities, and gives up.
So, while I could go on about the book’s many excellent qualities, such as it’s vivid, cinematic, and very effective opening paragraph, it’s atmosphere, with a neo-Victorian eye on social corruption deepening the low fantasy vibes reminiscent of George R. R. Martin at his best, the interesting world-building, with the illustration of Kithamar on the cover and the map of the city showing a blend of Gondor, London, and King’s Landing, it’s about this kind of mourning, and memory, that I keep thinking of this book. It’s this focus on mourning and memory that invites comparison to Arkady Martine’s recent Teixcalaan duology, particularly A Memory Called Empire.
This is why the story really comes into its own with its Part Two: Winter. Winter is the season when old people are most in danger from dying of unsuspected cardiac arrest or brain stroke. Winter is the season when memory brings hopelessness before it brings any sort of redemption. Part Two begins with a section where Alys, one of the protagonists of the novel, reflects on her memories of childhood and her dead older brother, Darro, that shines a different light on what life in poverty looks like for people who live and love in it, for whom winter has been and will always be much more dangerous than anyone else. Part Two has Sammish, the other protagonist of the novel, slowly pull herself together against her hopeless infatuation with Alys, and the inexorable wreckage of her dreams of escaping poverty and her home in Longhill, the story’s main slum/ghetto. It’s where she begins to turn into the hero of the story. Part Two has some of the best and most methodically paced characterisation I have come across in recent SFF, with Alys and Sammish turning to two different paths of mourning in the aftermath of Darro’s death: Alys transforms herself into her imago of her lost brother, the person she cared about most in her life, and therefore into a refined archetype of her own individualist self-image. Sammish, on the other hand, picks up the loser’s way, sort of losing herself in a network of dead, dying, or missing people, chasing clues for a woman who’s largely out of her reach, before she can pick up her own way again.
Part Two is also where the chief antagonist of the novel, and possibly the trilogy, makes its first appearance. Its called the Thread of Kithamar, but, really, its memory. Its a symbol of the continued perpetration of a violent dominant ideology founded on concepts of racial and genetic purity, that exploits and subjugates the bodies of other races. It is a consuming memory that reproduces a stagnant, unequal culture based on dynastic politics. It appropriates genderqueerness in a larger context of power, and weaponises a sensualist hunger against the inevitability of death and ruin. It raises the question of how much of our own toxic culture(s) IRL is a poisonous memory that refuses to fade into history, how much we cling to things long past because of shadowy motives, and how the re-producer(s) of cultural memory exploit these hungers in consumers that refuse to be sated. It raises the suspicion that, alongside the popular thought that there are ghosts amid us, perhaps we are turning into ghosts of our real selves. Perhaps this current world order reproduces only ghosts, an inevitable side effect of a life that finds itself in making a killing.
Is it a surprise, then, that the Thread of Kithamar is associated with the aristocracy, with the ruling elite, while Alys and Sammish, the protagonists, are both Inlisc, a subjugated race in the story?
What Age of Ash accomplishes is a dark look at the exploitation of memory, and the weaponisation and simultaneous neglect of mourning as a natural process, in the current scenario of power politics. It questions the public spectacle of mourning and the interests it serves, and makes a more authentic depiction of grief and humanity in poverty than is usually found in contemporary SFF. The depiction of royalty and aristocracy in the story is deliberately less vivid than the slums and the business districts of the fictional city, which makes for a welcome change from the routine fetishisation of royalty in our culture and in high fantasy. On the other hand, it offers a genuine look at crime, particularly theft, and how it reflects our modern gig economy through a decidedly late feudalistic-early capitalist lens.
Mourning is slow work, and this book is best read slow. I will be putting this book down with the quiet but strong hope that anyone else reading this book, and this review, will be encouraged to pick up whatever parts of their life they have been grieving, the parts that stuck in their memory, and turn them around so that time is changed, and the winter of our world turns to spring.
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
And I’ll be honest: I’d asked for this ARC because I’d antiRating: ✶✶✶½
I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
And I’ll be honest: I’d asked for this ARC because I’d anticipated the ambivalent relationship between Sir Konrad Vonvalt and Helena Sedanka, the two main characters of The Justice of Kings. This had been the key factor for me, the thing that I was most excited about in this book. Yes, folks, it wasn’t the depiction of law and the question of ethics of modern SFF for me, or the veneer of epic fantasy over a television courtroom drama or police procedural that the novel’s description on NetGalley conveyed. I’d wanted to read about a girl who’s in such a close, yet guarded relationship with a powerful, charismatic man that she’d be forced to interrogate herself almost constantly about the nature of her feelings for that man. I’d wanted to see that theme done well. And in this matter, the book didn’t disappoint me. But, for the longest time, I’ve been as ambivalent about this book as I’ve always been ambivalent about the subject of law. I couldn’t decide if I really liked this book or if it left me cold, even though I was assured that the writing is really, really good.
And it’s plain to see how good the writing is. From the get-go, the very first chapter, the sheer atmosphere of the setting caught me. There was the lawless, muddy, freezing countryside with that northern European bleak charm, and there was the travelling party of law people, determined to bring the rule of universal morality into this dark terrain. There was the fact that I was reading a story set in a fantasy German Empire-esque world, which was such a startlingly refreshing choice. There was also the fact that the story takes place from the POV of Helena Sedanka, a not-so-usual narrative choice that other readers have commented on as well. There was plenty of space for yassification; but I’m not just glad that Swan stuck to a realistic, grounded frame of character for Helena, I also admire how that stylistic choice let the character reflect upon her motivations and thoughts in a way modern SFF protagonists rarely do. The aged Helena in control of the narrative has the power of hindsight, and this allows her to imbue her narrative with a sense of irony and awe, while also approaching the young-adult component of the story from a novel perspective. For instance, there’s a teenage sex scene that's quite lovely for my asexual eyes — funny and warm, without being too… naked.
What didn’t appeal to me so much about the book is the characters’ good faith in the law. Coming from a Third World country, it’s difficult for me to muster the same good faith in a system of law that’s frequently colonial, patriarchal, ableist, and given to guarding the interests of the ruling elite. My natural apathy towards the core tenet of The Justice of Kings comes from the fact that I cannot connect with the idea of a system of law that’s said to be completely fair and equitably distributed, and reading it in today’s global scenario. I’m sorry, it just seems too unrealistic. I understand that’s the entire point of a fantasy, but I simply cannot relate. With this kind of perspective, Vonvalt’s naivete seemed all too apparent, and Helena’s hindsight in this regard didn’t help. Even Helena’s growing wariness of Vonvalt’s loosening moral compass towards the end of the story seemed simple to me, too predictable. To put it bluntly, without intending any offence, the novel came across as too White to my constantly evolving tastes.
The redeeming factor in all this is Swan's obvious skill as a fantasy writer, and the tremendous job the editors and beta-readers seem to have done on this book. Without getting too spoilery, the pacing picks up from a steady plod to a marching song about two-thirds of the book in, exactly the right time for the speed to be picking up in an otherwise kinda slow-burn development. But it doesn't feel too apparent beforehand, and I presume it must've been easy to err with the plot details around that area while drafting. Instead, the book controls the plot development smoothly, and the twist before the climax was a welcome change in what would've otherwise become really boring. It's the details such as this that makes this book a pleasant read, and makes me optimistic for the latter instalments in the trilogy. And I hope we'll see Helena having a more intimate and conflicted relationship with her own social status and political power.
A quietly beautiful work, a tender study of balancing a low fantasy look at space opera (literally!) with a focus on gentle vibes centred around healiA quietly beautiful work, a tender study of balancing a low fantasy look at space opera (literally!) with a focus on gentle vibes centred around healing.
I got a copy of this self-published book from NetGalley. This is also my first review on NetGalley.
There are good things in this story and not-so-goodI got a copy of this self-published book from NetGalley. This is also my first review on NetGalley.
There are good things in this story and not-so-good things, too. The good things are: firstly, the story has a way of making quite straightforward, even a little milquetoast, characters seem inviting and humorous. The worldbuilding is, sadly, derivative, but still manages to be interesting with a cup of coffee and a free half-hour in hand. The action is actually good. The plot manages to be there. I had to make a dash to finish reading because I had other reading to do; but this book is, in it's own way, a charming little diversion. I probably would've enjoyed this a lot in other conditions, but let's say it works. In a way. Let's say this is good enough. That's all....more
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