Mahvesh Murad, Author at Reactor

Love, Lust and Reincarnation: The Emperor and the Endless Palace

Mahvesh Murad — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Book Recommendations book review

Love, Lust and Reincarnation: The Emperor and the Endless Palace

A review of Justinian Huang’s new queer romantic fantasy.

By Mahvesh Murad

Published on April 9, 2024

Folk Horror, Romance, and Suspense: Tori Bovalino’s My Throat an Open Grave

Mahvesh Murad — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 20:00:00 +0000

Book Recommendations book review

Folk Horror, Romance, and Suspense: Tori Bovalino’s My Throat an Open Grave

A review of Tori Bovalino’s new YA horror novel.

By Mahvesh Murad

Published on March 4, 2024

Lost Girls, Found Women: King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 19:00:00 +0000

Book Recommendations book review

Lost Girls, Found Women: King Nyx by Kirsten Bakis

A review of Kirsten Bakis’ long-awaited second novel.

By Mahvesh Murad

Published on February 28, 2024

Colonial Creatures: Somewhere in the Deep by Tanvi Berwah

Mahvesh Murad — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:58 +0000

Krescent Dune lives a tough life on a colonised island, a place where the native population has been reduced to certain specific roles, none of which benefit them or their community in any way. Her parents were miners, which much of the island’s population is forced to be, risking their lives for a mineral that makes the island of Kar Atish valuable to its powerful colonisers. But Krescent’s parents committed a crime that has haunted her for years since their death, so all she wants is to earn passage off this island. The only way she can achieve this (while avoiding the mining community who actively resent her for her parents’ crimes) is to fight all sorts of monsters and beasts in an underground gladiatorial fighting ring.

Set in the same world as Tanvi Berwah’s earlier novel, Monsters Born and Made, Somewhere in the Deep is a South Asian inspired standalone fantasy novel that takes place entirely on an island that is only mentioned in passing in the first book. It may expand on the world created in the first novel, but it holds its own as an independent story.

When Krescent kills one useful monster too many, she’s forced to accept a quest to act as protector for a team of people being sent off by the lead overlord known only as the Collector, on a search into the island’s deepest caverns, well below where any mining excavation has ever taken place, further along than any human has ever returned from.

The Collector leads the Landers—people from Sollonia, the biggest island of the archipelago that includes Krescent’s home Kar Atish. The Landers have simply taken over, as colonisers do. They are an “upper caste of rich, powerful people who seem to hold [Krescent’s] world in their fists,” and decided the inhabitants of Kar Atish needed “regulation, turning us all into prisoners in our own home.” It is the island’s underground store of zargunine that attracts the Landers, “an unknown substance mixed with gold… more valuable than the blood that flows in [our] veins.”

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Somewhere in the Deep

To control this substance, the Landers decide that everyone who was not one of them was “of a lower caste, a Renter, by birth.” Kar Atish’s people are forced to work for the Landers, in a feudal-style system that pushes an unending generational debt onto most, tears families and communities apart, and drives them to extreme labour for a very meagre and often dangerous existence on their own homeland, while the Landers’ live well, the rich getting richer. “Our island’s blood and stone builds their lands,” points out one of the characters, reminding us that this is a colonised capitalist world, near impossible to break free from. The Landers practice the classic divide and rule tactic of the British Raj, by providing some people with more resources than the rest, isolating them from their community but keeping them reliant on their work, so that their own people forget that the division itself was the point, “so they forget who the real monster is.” While groups of people do band together to protect each other as best they can, the entire system is set up to ensure the Renters will always be trapped under the Landers’ rule, for as long as they live on Kar Atish.

The island itself is host to endless terrors in the warrens; it is where the monsters Krescent fights emerge from. It is also the liminal space between the island’s colonised present existence and its mythic past, a place where earlier civilisations lived and possibly thrived, where perhaps a people known as the Children of the Shade still exist, free from the Landers’ rule. To venture into the depths is a dangerous, harrowing task, but Krescent is adamant about getting the job done, having her debts waived, and getting off Kar Atish to start a whole new, anonymous life (as she tells us, quite often). All this is made much more complicated by Rivan, Krescent’s childhood best (and only) friend (and potential love interest), misguidedly immersing himself in her quest, her two worst (human, but angry and violent) enemies joining the search party along with a crew of strangers who all have their own agendas, and an unending supply of terrifying creatures from the depths of the island just waiting for some action. It’s a brutal journey to the centre of Krescent’s world, full of violence and suspense and well… monsters and madness.

Somewhere in the Deep is well written, mostly well paced, and only repetitive at times (though that’s mostly caused by how often we hear Krescent’s inner dialogue on how desperate she is to get off Kar Atish, and how complicated her feelings for Rivan are). It does feel like it is written as a treatment for a Netflix TV show (this seems to be a trend for quite a lot of quest fantasy novels from India recently), but that can be fun. The writing is strong, visual and almost episodic, the many action scenes are set up well, the character reveals are neatly foreshadowed—well controlled and timely, if not particularly surprising.

The book’s strength lies not in any of this though, but in the background on which the plot rests, that of South Asia’s colonial history, feudal control and the divide and rule policy that make the world of Somewhere in the Deep a claustrophobic, heavy and dark one.

Somewhere in the Deep is published by Sourcebooks Fire.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

The post Colonial Creatures: Somewhere in the Deep by Tanvi Berwah appeared first on Reactor.

Don’t Look Back: The Future by Naomi Alderman

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:21 +0000

Three of the richest people in the world. Three of the most powerful, most influential in both the best and worst of ways; three of the smartest, future-savvy and most driven people in the world who are changing the course of humanity daily. It would take just the three of them to make immense, long lasting changes that slow down the doomsday clock, to tilt the earth away from certain end, but instead they plan to only save themselves.

Naomi Alderman’s follow up to her highly successful The Power is The Future, the story of what these three very powerful people don’t do. It is not the story of the apex predators winning—it’s of them planning to, in a way so selfish that it is bound to fail. Alderman has spoken about billionaires and their bunkers in a recent interview with NPR, saying that if “you believe that the rest of us could suffer, and you would still be OK… I would like to point out to you that that is incorrect—that there is no arc that you can get on and you can escape, and everybody else will die and you’ll be fine because, fundamentally, the living through that and deciding to do that—instead of using your billions and billions of dollars to help people—is what will ultimately destroy you.”

These three people are Lenk Sketlish, CEO of social network Fantail; Zimmri Nommik, owner of a massive online retailer and data collection agency called Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who is in charge of Medlar, the largest PC company in the world. Clearly thinly veiled (just enough to avoid lawsuits) versions of the people who run Facebook/Twitter, Amazon, and Apple/Microsoft, these are characters who aren’t particularly easy to connect with, even though they aren’t painted as outrightly evil—just selfish, rich, and lonely. Alderman gives us multiple diatribes against these megacorporations and how much damage they cause to society, the environment, the future of the human race. These three are in possession of some incredible technology, fully controlled by peak capitalism. It’s recognisably our world, just a little more advanced, a little more selfish and entirely believable.

So if the world’s most powerful don’t use their tools for good, who will? Alderman thinks the people closest to them have a chance to make that change. But is seems that if Sketlish’s right hand woman Martha genuinely wants to use the massive infrastructure he has built to help the world, she cannot do it with him on board. Nommik’s wife Selah gives away a lot of his money to charity, but she can’t do more with him around either. Neither can Bywater’s youngest child, Badger, who is openly critical of their mother’s company policies. Together, along with Albert, the ousted co-founder of Medlar, they may stand a chance at saving the world—if the world didn’t have the terrible toxic trio in it. We are told that “even if you do happen to be incredibly powerful, you can’t just walk away when things go bad. That’s not what your power is for. … If you’ve got power, use it to help.”

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The Future

This idea of Martha, Sehla, Badger and Albert coming to the world’s rescue is in itself is problematic. We all know power corrupts, so how can we believe the people closest to the most powerful, the ones who also benefit from this chokehold of capitalism and plutocracy on society, are going to be somehow inherently good, somehow safe from being corrupted by that same power, once they have it? It’s a hefty suspension of disbelief, to remove the absolute apex predator, put their next of kin in power, and then imagine a future of only good things. But to be fair to Alderman, she does have Martha tell us that a utopia isn’t probable—”You can’t fix everything forever, but you can try to trip things in the right direction.”

The most compelling character in this narrative, though, isn’t any of these characters at all. It is Lai Zehn, a “Top Fifty Creator on the Name the Day forum… ranked number one for expertise in technological survival” and a “Hong Kong Chinese slash British slash American lesbian.” She’s a young woman with whom Martha has a brief but intense affair, leaving Lai Zehn with a secret software that saves her life after an assassination attempt. In her search to find out who tried to kill her and why, Lai Zehn becomes enmeshed in Martha’s plans, and those of the toxic trio.

And so we have the story of the tech billionaires who have found a way to ride out the end of days safely. We have the story of Lai Zehn the survivalist influencer. Then there are excerpts from the Name The Day online survival site, where someone writes excessively long posts about the story of Lot, and how that is a metaphor for those who think they can hide away from the end of the world. We get a little backstory on Martha’s childhood as the daughter of the leader of a survivalist cult and what their philosophies were, particularly to do with hunter-gatherer versus agricultural societies. There’s also a lecture by a professor in Bucharest, who explains (with diagrams) that AI is just “stored thinking.” There is plenty of jumping around on the timeline from the perspective of multiple characters. There are a lot of Big Ideas, not too much character development or human interaction between the characters who are meant to matter the most to the overall arc. It isn’t hard to imagine this as a TV series, where perhaps the narrative would be a little more cleaned up, and leaner, tighter.

Many of the things that worked so well for Alderman’s exciting and truly readable thriller The Power don’t work out for The Future. The multi-POV narratives, for one, that made The Power so riveting make The Future feel a little uneven, jagged and a little hard to connect with. This is exacerbated by the frequent didacticism, and the vast range of topics we are given a lot of information about—it’s an impressive range, no doubt, but it does tend to push the reader away from the actual story.

Other than Lai Zhen, the other characters are quite thinly drawn. The tech billionaires are almost caricature versions of exactly which real life people you’d expect them to be based on. Their foils—Martha, Sehla, Badger and Albert—are a full spectrum diversity rainbow cast—we have one lesbian woman, one black woman, one nonbinary person, and a gay man—and it’s because they don’t feel fully fleshed out (except possibly Martha), that they come across as token.

There are some great ideas here, some really important ones that (in the right hands) would most definitely improve the state of the world in real life. Alderman reminds us that if “algorithms can make us more polarised, more angry and more hateful, surely they can do the opposite of that. There is no “neutral” anymore. There is no leaving things as they would have been before the invention of the internet. Our minds have already learned how to interact with the algorithms and we are part of it”—so why not use what we have more altruistically? Why not fix what we’ve broken? It’s all very well intentioned, perhaps so much so, as in that determined lean towards doing the right thing, The Future lacks the aggression and thrill that made The Power so much more arresting.

The Future is published by Simon & Schuster.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

The post Don’t Look Back: The Future by Naomi Alderman appeared first on Reactor.

A Tale as Old as Time: The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 23:00:27 +0000

A ring. A lamp. A storytelling bot that gathers all the narratives as they unspool. An idealist, her bitter mother, her monkey-bot brother. A not-Prince. A crime lord after world domination. A city that exists against all odds. And a story that refuses to die.

Samit Basu’s The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is a fun, exuberant romp that’s being pitched as Aladdin meets Murder-bot. Which is pretty much what it is. It’s smart, bursting with ideas and novel concepts; fun, full of snappy dialogue and humour; complicated, with plenty of political, post-colonial commentary. It is also chaotic, info-dumpy at times, tells a lot more than it shows, and can feel like a detailed TV series treatment, or elaborate RPG bible.

The titular Shanitport is a vibrant, chaotic city, falling apart but bustling, inventive but disastrous. Violent, loud and torn between rival political parties and megalomaniacs and oligarchs and thugs. The city is quite literally drowning. The rich live in palatial homes and the poor suffer in the mud; a huge economic disparity is accepted as the norm. Surveillance is rampant, and bots are commonplace yet mostly considered second-class citizens, even though many are sentient. Everyone says the world is ending, so those who can are jetting off to other lands while those who can’t are surviving as best they can until the inevitable complete decline. Shantiport may hold on to ancient stories and clans and alliances, and it is both the future, and the future apocalypse coexisting in a shared chaos.

Anyone from a major city in the Indian subcontinent will be familiar with this scenario; we’ve lived like this for years, in collapsing cities trapped between hungry, corrupt powers who “may have their own differences, but always somehow manage to work together in the end.” What these powers always overestimate though, is the sheer will of the citizens, and their desire to be more than the city allows them to be. And that’s where Lina comes in. A local tour guide, she carries the heart of the city in hers, with a great love for Shantiport and its people. Lina’s parents, both raised in opposing clans, were joined together not just in their love for each other but also for their city. As young idealists they hoped to create revolutionary ways to improve Shantiport, but when Lina’s father vanished suddenly, her parents’ plans were abruptly discarded. Now, though she has been raised to stay under the radar, Lina wants to bear their torch onwards and is in search of an artifact her father had left behind—tech that could help lead her to improving the lives of everyone in Shantiport.

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The Jinn Bot of Shantiport

Her monkey bot-brother Bador has delusions of Bollywood hero-style grandeur, and mainly wants to get off this rock so he can make his heroic fortune across the galaxy, but while he’s stuck here in Shantiport, he is helping Lina with her search. It is during one of his searches in the mud, muck and rubble of the city that he finds Moku, a floating sentient storybot who is actually the narrator of the whole novel. Moku is very much a character too, and grows into himself during the course of the book. It can be a little distancing to always only hear the story from the storybot’s perspective.

We don’t ever really get inside Lina or Bador’s heads, and are always in Moku’s, with his bot-thoughts and perspectives. And Lina tends to hold back from sharing too much with Bodor and with Moku; she’s secretive and has her reasons for this, but it does make her journey a little harder to connect with, though it’s easy enough to write off her motivations to a generic saving-the-world-before-bedtime idealism.

It can also mean that there is, again, a lot of telling going on. Moku’s the storybot who tells the story, which could be fun, if we didn’t end up having to hear him—literally—tell the story quite so often.

Conversations can get long, entire debates are presented as is (albeit about important topics; Basu isn’t going to shy away from heftier topics), and there is a lot of banter—fun, but also a little grating at times, as it takes on the pace and cadence of a snappy superhero movie a little too well, a little too fast. Same can be said for the plot—some quick inferences that are a little too convenient, many cinematic action sequences, huge scale bot fights and chase sequences, some dramatic sudden plot twists that are just aching to be a penultimate episode of a TV series.

There are so many things going on, all the time, at the same time, that it may feel as overwhelming as cities like Shanitport could be. There’s a leaner novel in here, or if fleshed out into multiple episodes, a very fun TV show. That does not take away, though, from the sheer aplomb with which Basu has built and explored this world of fables and ancient cultures and futuristic possibilities, its people and their desires.

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport is available now from Tordotcom Publishing.
Read an excerpt.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

The post A Tale as Old as Time: The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu appeared first on Reactor.

Goddesses and Madmen: Burn by Patrick Ness

Mahvesh Murad — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 18:30:33 +0000

Real world small town America in 1950s. A biracial teen girl, her Japanese American boyfriend. Her financially struggling farmer father. Cold War tensions. A Canadian teenager raised in a cult. Two detectives on the hunt. A prophecy. A goddess. And because this is Patrick Ness’ latest novel Burn—dragons.

16 year old Sarah’s father has hired a Russian blue dragon to help clear some fields, but only because he is desperate. He doesn’t trust the dragon, Kazimir, who seems to know much more than he should, and has taken an interest in Sarah’s safety. Sarah is a ‘pivot’ in a grand plan and without her, Kazimir is certain the world will end. Blue dragons, known for their scholarly ways believe in a prophecy that (while exasperatingly confusing) has lead Kazimir to Sarah’s farm. Sarah herself, as Kazimir tells her, is not special in any way—she is just someone in the right place, at the right time. It’s ‘not you in particular’, says Kazimir, ‘…but this time. This place.[…] This exact time. This exact place. And a girl.’ And so Kazimir is interested in Sarah from the very start, something she does not understand at first, as grateful as she is for his protection on a number of occasions.

She isn’t meant to talk to the dragon though; isn’t meant to engage with him, or even tell him her name, as per her father’s strict instructions. It is said that dragons don’t have a soul. It is said they aren’t to be trusted. But then all sorts of things are said about Sarah and about Jason, too.

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Burn

Sarah’s father is white, and her late mother was black. Jason’s mother, too, has died, but in a camp in Idaho, where his parents (both US citizens) had been sent to as potential enemy collaborators by sheer dint of their Japanese heritage. Both Sarah and Jason ‘effectively invisible’ at school, existing on the peripheries. But they’ve both experienced enough racism to know what small town mentality is like, particularly from the town’s deputy sheriff. Deputy Kelby is a right nasty piece of work, and stands for everything wrong in America back then (but also everything wrong in America now). Xenophobic, racist, sexist and bigoted, he doesn’t hold back from making Sarah and Jason’s lives miserable. His interactions with Kazimir are funny, though, not in the least because he insists on treating the dragon as if he is subordinate. Kazimir, of course, rises well above the nonsense of human classifications. ‘You a Communist, claw?’ asks Kelby, to which Kazimir only replies, ‘I am a dragon’.

Dragons exist, just as Chevron gas stations exist, just as diners and farming and Russian satellites and the World Wars exits. But while dragons mostly stay away from human wars, keeping themselves out of politics and violence, they do on occasion hire their services out, where their brute strength and fire power help them do things like clear fields in record time. They are both incredibly magical, and also an accepted part of reality:

‘How could such a creature even really exist? How could they not just be a magical fantasy? If they hadn’t always been there, no one would have believed in them.’

Some humans believe more than others, though, including a cult simply called the Believers, that began two hundred years ago in BC and Alberta to ‘worship dragons’. It is ‘insular and so surprisingly antihuman—despite being exclusively human in membership.’ Dragons themselves have nothing to do with the Believers, and keep largely to themselves, and that is the ‘great joke of it all …—even when Believers were committing crimes on their behalf—the dragons seemed to ignore them as much as they ignored everyone else these days, which was to say, almost completely.’

It is in this cult that young Malcom is raised in, his faith in its methods and prophecies utterly unshakable…until he befriends and then falls for a young Guatemalan Canadian man called Nelson who has run away from home, and so for Nelson, feels a love greater than what he’s known in his life spent worshiping dragons. With Malcom, Nelson too becomes caught up in the race to fulfil the prophecy, as two FBI agents chase them down.

Sarah, Jason, Malcom, Nelson. When the lives of these young people collide with Kazimir’s, everything changes—not just for them, and not just for the world they know.

Multiple award winning writer Patrick Ness always delivers, and never, ever holds back in doing what he wants—like throwing dragons into a mix. Burn, is a fast paced thriller with a complex plot and filmic visuals that never loses sway over the reader. His characters may be in the ’in the hands of goddesses & madmen,’ but his readers are in for a deftly written and (as always), thought provoking ride.

Burn is available from Quill Tree Books.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and appropriately lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories and interviews writers for the Tor.com podcast Midnight in Karachi when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

The post Goddesses and Madmen: Burn by Patrick Ness appeared first on Reactor.

Unfavourable Odds: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 18:30:22 +0000

The Hunger Games trilogy sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Its lead antagonist, the fascist sociopathic President Snow was a formidable opponent for the beloved hero Katniss, and a great personification of everything the Capitol represented. But sixty-odd years before Katniss enters the Games, Snow was an ambitious eighteen year old with a lot to hide, a lot to prove and a whole lot more to win. Suzanne Collins’ latest book is awkwardly titled The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and while it was well known that this would be a prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy and that it would be about Snow, it was unclear as to whether it was really something that was needed to flesh out the world of the earlier three novels.

The title isn’t the only thing awkward about Ballad. Coriolanus himself, the plot, the pacing, the lack of narrative drive and even some of the writing itself is awkward, stilted and just baffling at times. This is besides the fact that we are faced with an unlikable protagonist—an antihero, if you will. This will throw off a great many fans, but appeal to just as many others (and there are a lot of fans waiting for this book) interested to see how the great villain became who they know him to be. Sadly, the book doesn’t quite deliver even with its 500+ pages, leaving us with a strange final act that seems almost tacked on to either leave much to the reader’s imagination or leave room for a potential sequel.

May the odds be ever in our favour.

So much about young Coriolanus in Ballad is a lie, and we are complicit to it. The previously grand Snow family have lost everything after the war, other than their penthouse apartment which is now empty of everything but Grandmother Snow’s roses, after years of them selling things off to survive. They live off Coriolanus’ cousin Tigris’ tiny income as an apprentice to a fashion designer, eating boiled cabbage endlessly as they try to maintain their social status by remaining in a property they soon will not be able to afford the taxes on. Coriolanus will do anything to keep up appearances of being part of a wealthy Capitol family, including actively avoiding thinking about what lengths Tigris may have had to go to in order to ensure he is well dressed at his final attempt at scoring a scholarship for University.

Coriolanus’ facade is so perfect that even we are almost sucked in to believing he really is this charming, smooth talking, well-meaning Capitol teen with a bright future. What he really is though, is smarmy and fraudulent and incredibly selfish. All of this is evident very early in the book, as Coriolanus charms his peers into believing he is a friend, that he is just like them in every way. Collins ensures that we are only aligned with Snow by choosing to write in close third person, so that we never witness or experience anything that he does not. This is an uncomfortable place to be, because he is clearly a complicated, Machiavellian person, and there are times when we find ourselves wondering if his perspective is even true to reality. How much of who President Snow is was Coriolanus’ nature, and how much it is the Capitol’s nurturing? It seems to be a clear matter of even distribution here, as we see him rarely struggle when it comes to choosing his own self over anyone else. Altruism, it seems, was never inherent in Snow.

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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

This book isn’t just about Coriolanus’ evolution into the man who becomes President Snow. It’s also about the evolution of the Games themselves—we see the gamemakers and the first ever mentors discuss the virtues of the system, the potential it has to help the Capitol keep control over Panem, as the Capitol moves away from post-war restrictions towards the culture of excess we know it to have. It is this control that appeals to Coriolanus; as one of the Academy’s best and brightest students, he is attached to a tribute as her mentor in an attempt to make the games a ‘more meaningful experience’. The Capitol’s teenagers see nothing in common with the tributes, though they are of the same generation, all having been children when the war ended. ‘Surely you’re not comparing our children to theirs?’ asks one of them, ‘One look tells you ours are a superior breed.’ It is chilling to see how fast the privileged teenagers remove the humanity of the tributes, othering them, managing them in the arena as if they were nothing more than characters in a video game. It is Coriolanus who suggests introducing gambling to the Games, and in commercialising the survival odds of the tributes, he removes any remaining empathy anyone in the Capitol may have for them as fellow human beings, othering them to the point of no return.

Readers, too are distanced from the truth by being put into the position of voyeurs, desensitised to the suffering of the tributes by only ever watching them alongside the mentors and never suffering with them in the Games; the Capitol sets up concession stands outside the arena where citizens come to watch on large screens, waiting for children to kill each other as they casually eat their way through more food than most in the districts have seen in days, luxuries they would never have experienced.

Collins never shows us the Games from the perspective of the tributes, as she does in the Hunger Games trilogy—we see them via camera, as Snow does, as the other mentors and organisers of the game do. We are forced to witness the violence of their deaths and their breakdown from a farther distance, and because we are only ever in the viewers gallery, we become implicit in the Capitol’s voyeurism.

The Games, in Ballad, are not the slickly produced virtually enhanced visual spectacle we saw them to be in the trilogy. The are a bit of a ramshackle affair, happening in an old broken-down, bombed out stadium, where most of the tributes spend a fair bit of time hiding from each other in the stands. One of these tributes is singer and entertainer Lucy Grey from District 12, assigned to Coriolanus; he begins to feel something more for her, in what could be the most uncomfortable romance YA has seen for a while. Lucy Grey stands out right away when she slips a snake to the daughter of her District’s Mayor, and sings a song on stage as soon as she is called out, causing Coriolanus to ask himself, ‘”How to wrangle some success from a dress, a snake, a song?” It turns out it’s not all that hard—but we already knew that from our time with Katniss.

Is it a District 12 girl who breaks Coriolanus’ heart and sets him on the path to becoming President Snow? No spoilers here, but no, it’s not. But it may well be a District 12 girl with a penchant for song, a certain unique dress sense and a love for Mockingjays that causes him to hate Katniss quite so much. It is unnerving that Coriolanus, while seemingly falling for Lucy Grey (whom he knows to be an unlikely victor), is also perfectly capable of suggesting ways to make the Games more of a spectacle, of finding ways to make her more of a precious commodity in the arena. Lucy Grey herself never quite becomes believable, just as her relationship with Coriolanus doesn’t.

In the final third of the book, Coriolanus is faced with flocks of Mockingjays, birds that have now ran amok in Panem woods, after the original Capitol-engineered Jabberjays that fathered them are removed. ‘This elimination of the Capitol birds from the equation deeply disturbed him. Here [the Mockingjays] were, multiplying like rabbits, completely unchecked. Unauthorised. Co-opting Capitol technology. He didn’t like it one bit.” Any disturbance to the power balance that Coriolanus considered necessary to continue his privileged existence in the Capitol bothers him immensely, just as anyone stepping out of line in the Districts does. “It frightened and infuriated him. This breaking of the contract. This invitation to chaos and all that could follow. Didn’t these people understand that the whole system would collapse without the Capitol’s control?” It is this control that Coriolanus is desperate to hold on to—it’s the only thing that differentiates him from the tributes, and the citizens of the Districts. It jars him to hear Dr Gaul, the lead Gamemaker, say that anyone in the arena would act with the same bestial violence, that survival mechanisms are the same for all humans: “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed…How quickly civilisation disappears. All your fine manners, education, family background, everything you pride yourself on, stripped away in the blink of an eye, revealing everything you actually are.” Corioalnus never wants to reveal who he is—perhaps because he does not know yet, or because he is aware he isn’t ‘good.’

It is always a gamble to write a book that aligns the reader only with a deeply unlikeable protagonist, one with whom it is extremely difficult to empathise. Readers are meant to feel for Coriolanus’ cabbage soup poverty, but it is difficult when we see how mercenary he is, how ruthlessly ambitious and dissembling his personality is. His self-serving, egocentric narcissism is so constant that it offers no reprieve—not to the reader or to the character. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is an ambitious attempt at including readers in the growth and evolution of both an enemy and a society, but falls short of that, since it is only the society that we see grow (and that too, for the worst, as expected). Collins is once again able to set frightening scenes that ask valid questions, but Coriolanus sadly remains just as flat as he started out, and far less interesting as a teen than he is as President. If anything, the insight we are given into his youth, his family, and his past help to make President Snow more interesting, not The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is available from Scholastic.

The post Unfavourable Odds: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins appeared first on Reactor.

Witches and Whales: The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Mahvesh Murad — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 18:30:00 +0000

On Christmas Eve 1617, in the tiny fishing village of Vardo, Finnmark, a sudden storm wipes out almost the entire male population. Forty of the grown men who had set out in their boats, much as they often did, are killed by a freak storm that defies logic, and the women of Vardo are left to fend for themselves, even as they grieve for the loss of their loved ones.

In Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s first adult novel, The Mercies, the “storm comes like a finger snap […] then the sea rises up and the sky swings down and greenish lightning slings itself across everything, flashing the black into an instantaneous, terrible brightness,” as the women are perhaps “screaming but here is no sound save the sea and the sky and all the boat lights swallowed and the boats flashing and the boats spinning, the boats flying, turning, gone.”

For three years the women live on their own, many still deeply grieving over the loss of their husbands, sons, brothers, and lovers, but many others are managing the work that was traditionally done in the past by these men. The women now head out to sea to fish, herd the reindeer, and plant whatever little can be grown during the summer months; they are self sufficient, even as they may remain emotionally wrecked. The local pastor does not believe their new roles are proper, but can not tell them to simply give up what it takes to survive in that landscape. Instead, he encourages them to stay with the Lutheran ways and not be swayed by what he considers to be the pagan beliefs of the Sami people, who are indigenous to the tribal north, but the people of Vardo have always been open to help from the Sami—some runes for protection, charms to help the fishing haul, or for a favourable wind to set sail at. Most of the women see no harm in using the ancient religious ways to help their grief and their new life, and never have. One of the young men of the village had even married a Sami girl, and though there is some mistrust towards her among the more pious women of the village, as a whole there seems to be no great divide between the tiny population, the pastor, or the tribal north.

That is, until word of a village full of self-sufficient women reaches the men who rule the land. A village full of women who fish, who hunt, who herd, plant, harvest, live as if they have no need for men at all? It is shocking. One woman is even seen wearing trousers—surely a mark of the devil? And so a Commissioner is dispatched to Vardo, a Scotsman by the name of Absalom Cornet, who is experienced in the matters of rooting out witches, and the evil that lurks in the hearts of women gone wild in this way. Along his travels to Vardo, he picks himself up a young Norwegian wife, the daughter of a ship owner who has had some bad investments of late and can no longer afford to take care of his daughters in the fashion they were accustomed to. Ursa is quite literally shipped off with her husband to Vardo, with nothing but the most basic information. She knows nothing about her husband beyond that he is commissioned to be in Vardo, and she knows nothing of Vardo beyond that her husband is to be Commissioner there and that she is to accompany him. She does not get to know him any better en route to Vardo, and simply submits to his desires and his lack of interest in her beyond her traditional “duties” as his wife.

When they reach Vardo, Ursa is shocked to see how little she has to manage with and how brutal it all is. They are given a very humble home, as well as reindeer carcasses for food, and otherwise left to their own devices. Absalom trudges off daily to find out what exactly his commission will involve; Ursa is left behind. Lonely, cold and miserable, she does not know how to do what is expected of her—keeping house, making bread, washing clothes—let alone how to cut a reindeer carcass down into edible portions. She’s entirely lost, but somehow drawn to one young local woman, Maren, whom she hires to help her learn how to manage her home.

Three years ago, Maren lost her father, her brother, and the young man she was to marry to the storm; since then has lived with her depressed mother and her increasingly reticent and withdrawn Sami sister in law, whose toddler was born after the death of his father. In their home, Maren is the only one who has attempted in some way to move on, though she is constantly plagued by nightmares. She joins some of the other Vardo women in their fishing expeditions, as they are led by Kirsten, one of the more outspoken women who has also taken responsibility for the village’s reindeer herd. Maren and Kirsten both befriend Ursa, and help her socialise with the Vardo women, though even as some of the women start to trust Ursa, many others are uncertain of her because of her status as the Commissioner’s wife.

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The Mercies

The Commissioner himself is a godly man, as we are often told. His interest seems to lie entirely in rooting out what he considers to be witchcraft amongst the village women. So begins a frightening witch hunt, one that Hargrave has taken from historical fact. There were indeed many women (and some Indigenous men) tried for witchcraft during this time in Norway’s history, and Hargrave’s version of this incredibly misogynistic, violent piece of history is a very well written, contained and evocative story about how independent women can (and do) threaten men in power, and how easily ancient cultures can be painted to be a threat to society and organised religion (the Church, in this case). While Absalom is busy investigating absurd accusations against some of the women in Vardo, Ursa and Maren are growing closer every day. Maren feels for Ursa something she can not name and is uncertain how to act on. That she feels it, though, can not be denied.

How does same sex desire play out between two young people who have no way to express what they are feeling, when there is no vocabulary for this, no other narrative for them than the conservative one they have been born into—the narrative that tells them that what they feel is wrong, that their only role is to be married to a man, agreeable to a man, in total submission to a man? In this extreme climate, where everything is cold and hard and unforgiving—the landscape, the society, the rules, the life—anything that may generate softness, heat, or joy feels like a crime.

The Mercies is a beautifully written, disturbing and stressful read. The sheer powerlessness of women in the face of abusive male authority is frightening, especially when we see how they have picked up their lives post-men and carried on, filling in all the traditionally male roles left behind, making sure none of them starves or freezes. We see them pull the men’s bodies from the freezing sea, store the bodies until the earth can be dug into, bury their men, and choose to carry on living as best they can. And yet, with the arrival of one man who has been given power over them, they are no longer able to live as they were. Of course, regardless of this story being actual historical fact, it is easy to draw modern day parallels, which just makes the sparse, taut narrative so much more suffocating.

The Mercies is available from Little, Brown and Company.

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A Familiar Fantasy: Sisters of Shadow and Light by Sara B Larson

Mahvesh Murad — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 19:30:27 +0000

Inara and Zuhra have been raised by their cold, unfeeling mother, trapped inside the Citadel of the Paladin’s, surrounded by a sentient hedge that won’t let them out—or anyone in. They don’t know much about who they are or why they’re there, though Zuhra has figured out that their father was a magical Paladin who abandoned his family the night Inara—with her obviously Paladin power filled bright blue glowing eyes—was born. The history of the Paladins, or why the local villagers fear and hate them, is not fully understood by the girls, though they live in what was once an active Paladin fortress, filled with remnants of a reign that has mysteriously vanished into what was once a connected world. Things plod along with the sisters, but when a stranger comes to town and the hedge lets him in, Zuhra can’t help but wonder if this young man is there to save them—with information and knowledge, if nothing else.

Sara B Larson’s new novel Sisters of Shadow and Light wants to be so much more than it ultimately—unfortunately—manages to be. It wants to be a story about the bond between sisters, about their loyalty and fierce defence of each other, about their shared traumas and anxieties, and about how they help each other heal and move forward. But the story itself is fairly formulaic, as is the setting, which seems quite standard for a medieval Eurocentric fantasy—there are inns, a village with a midwife, very Aryan magical beings of various powers, that citadel surrounded by a wall-like hedge (keeping people out or keeping residents of the citadel in?); the female characters dress in skirts and blouses or lace edged dresses, and everyone appears to be fair skinned and blue or green eyed, if not blonde. It’s all just rather…familiar.

But the two lead female characters are called Zuhra and Inara—both common Arabic origin names currently still used in Islamic countries, but with no explanation why those names would be chosen in what is ostensibly some sort of medieval fantasy world. The girls’ father is part of a people called the Paladin—conventionally Eurocentric knights, fine, but the monsters they fight are called rakasa, which is much too close to the Hindu rakshasa to sit comfortable in this context. Is it simply a matter of random, ‘diverse’ naming conventions with no substance behind the use of ‘diverse’ sounding names? Is it a matter of mixed up mythologies that don’t traditionally intersect? Each of these discrepancies act as roadblocks in the narrative, slamming a reader up against a wall each time they appear.

Even within fantasy narratives there are histories and fixed timelines in those histories, but no matter—some willing readers may suspend disbelief for all this with ease (or possibly not know better), while other more discerning ones will not be as forgiving.

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Sisters of Shadow and Light

The sisters themselves, as much as Larson wants them each to be unique, sound very similar, and are just not terribly interesting or well developed—the one thing that defines each is her huge love for the other. They’ve grown up alone, with no one around them for fifteen years, other than their cold mother and the midwife from the village who came to help at the birth of the second daughter and never really left (she has her own emotional baggage also to do with her own sister—it seems like quite a few characters do, actually) , so it’s understandable that Zuhra and Inara are so co-dependent—they are literally all they have ever known. But this does make them a little less interesting, since we don’t really get a sense of much else about them, especially Inara, who is consumed by the Paladin power she was born with, so much so that it is a constant ‘roar’ inside her mind, reducing her to large spates of uncontrollable physical jerking, repetitive nonsensical speech and an inability to communicate. She has only brief moments of lucidity when she manages to leak some power away into helping her plants grow, so she can only explain what is happening to her during those brief moments, and is entirely dependant on Zuhra to keep her safe at all other times, even within the Citadel walls.

For two young women who have had to depend solely on each other and have never so much as met someone of the opposite gender before (their father having vanished at Inara’s birth, when Zuhra was three), they seem to have very little suspicion for the first man they do meet. It really isn’t clear how much the girls know of the world outside, or why they don’t know more, or what their level of exposure has been (via their mother or Mahsami the midwife turned housekeeper, both of whim lived half their lives outside the Citadel), but Zuhra finds herself unable to not admire the physical attributes of every young man she encounters, which seems a little odd, not to mention unnecessary to the story or plot. Perhaps this can be explained away by her Mother’s attitude of trying to prepare her for some sort of traditional marriage (though why her mother thinks marriage to a suitable young man is inevitable from within the confines of a poison hedge barricaded fortress is yet another mystery, even to Zuhra). There are quite a few melodramatic damsel in distress moments too, far too many to be out weighed by the brief moments when the female characters have agency.

Perhaps some readers in the lower end of the ages 12 and up category will be less discerning about the confusions that plod around in Sisters of Shadow and Light. Perhaps even 12 year olds from parts of the world where names like Zuhra and Inara are recognisable, where rakasa will be easily assumed to be the more familiar rakshasas will wonder why these mythological crossovers exist—or what they mean, if they are conscious decisions. Sisters of Shadow and Light could be so much more if, like it’s two lead characters, it could just figure out who it really was.

Sisters of Shadow and Light is available from Tor Teen.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction & appropriately lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories & interviews writers the Tor.com podcast Midnight in Karachi when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

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Of Bees & Books: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Mahvesh Murad — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 17:00:15 +0000

Teenage Zachary Ezra Rawlins finds a door painted in a wall that looks like it may be a portal into another land. He doesn’t open it. Many years later, he finds a book in his university library that tells a strange story about a boy who doesn’t open a door, a secret world of stories protected by guardians and acolytes, and of star crossed lovers. The book was clearly written much before Zachary’s birth, so how does it know what it does? How is it telling his story, the story of the path he didn’t take, the call he refused? He wonders ‘how, exactly, he is supposed to continue a story he didn’t know he was in’, when he finds the book, but later realises ‘he was never at the beginning of this story. This story is much, much older than he is, and so begins his quest.

In Erin Morgenstern’s much awaited second novel, The Starless Sea, we are inundated with mystery and magic.

Zachary is, too, as he embarks on a quest to figure out this story, to find the starless sea and the harbour beside it. He meets Mirabel who always, always seems to know more than she lets on, especially about the world beyond the painted doors (but insists she’s not the creator of this story: ‘ I gave you doors. You chose whether or not you opened them. I don’t write the story, I only nudge it in different directions’), Dorian, whose alliances may not be clear but is attractive for many reasons, and Allegra, who seems to be on a dedicated, ruthless mission to destroy any portal that may exist—any where, any time, any place. But it’s not quite as simple as that—a story of lovers adrift in time and space intersects with Zachary’s quest, and it’s a good long while before the various narratives Morgenstern is playing with start to untangle from the opening knot of the novel.

The Starless Sea sets up multiple esoteric ideas about stories and storytelling, right from the very start. Heavy with symbolism, loaded with metaphor and drowned in backstories for many characters (who do hold their own, so that helps), the plot of the novel is fairly obtuse for the first 100 pages or so, beautiful though it may be. Morgenstern recently told Publishers Weekly that writing plot is like ‘pulling teeth’ for her, and while one can empathise, there are times it does indeed take some searching to find the plot of The Starless Sea. One of the characters, Kat, describes it meta-perfectly:

I got to thinking this might be a halfway decent game if it were a game. Part spy movie, part fairy tale, part choose your own adventure. Epic branching story that doesn’t stick to a singe genre or one set path and turns into different stores but it’s all the same story.

…

A book is made of paper but a story is a tree.

You meet someone in a bar. You follow them or you don’t.

You open a door. Or you don’t.

Unfortunately the gorgeous little details can feel a bit precious at times. Character’s unique cocktails, their cutesy little quirks of bunny ears, edible stories, and the constant cats wandering through the narrative can be a little twee at times because while they are all lovely details to the mis en scene, they’re not really moving anything forward in terms of plot. Are they symbols? Metaphors? Morgenstern is right in assuming that many readers will attempt to decipher them and happily suspend disbelief regardless of fairy tale logic (because there are certain rules we all assume for even fantasy lands), because these elements will be much loved by many fans, of course, but will make others wonder what a leaner version of the book would’ve read like. The Starless Sea often reads like a high-end goth-hipster pastiche, which can obviously be quite divisive.

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The Starless Sea

But this is very much a book about books, a story about stories. Morgenstern has rooted her narrative in a myth that she has made up—there is no reference for the world she’s created, no way to figure out where the Owl King came from for example, other than from inside her head. There ‘are gods with lost myths, writing themselves new ones’, and that’s wonderfully original and captivating. One of the lead characters is reborn, in different bodies, through time and space, again and again the way a video game character would be. Entire world’s are imagined and accessed through doorways and every door chosen leads to a different world at a different time. Nothing is static, nothing can be assumed and everything is being made up as we go along. In The Starless Sea, books are a portable magic, yes, but also sacred because they may hold the answer to the universe, or the story that leads someone to their fate of saving the world (Which world? Why the one that’s been made up, of course!). Every bibliophile knows that a good story can save your life—that the right story can save your life, and in the world of The Starless Sea, that may just be quite literal. And what would you sacrifice to protect the stories you loved? What would you give up to save an entire world of them?

The Starless Sea is a love story, an epic love letter to the art of storytelling and to the power of stories. It’s a complex ode to unfamiliar mythic narratives that spills out in many directions because ‘the stories of a place are not easily contained’. Towards the end the threads come together beautifully so, with all the rising emotion and hope and grandeur a reader could want.

The Starless Sea is available from Doubleday.
Read an excerpt here.

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More Than Human: Frankissstein: A Love Story By Jeanette Winterson

Mahvesh Murad — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:00:08 +0000

There are two starting points in the new Booker longlisted novel from Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein—one, the day in 1816 when Mary Shelley went for a walk along the wet shores of Lake Geneva and saw something that lead her to write the seminal novel Frankenstein, and two, a robotics expo in present day Memphis, where a trans doctor named Ry Shelley is interviewing the king of a potential sexbot empire, Ron Lord. Winterson jumps back and forth between the two times, in a staccato parallel narrative that explores duality and creation, and is as jarring as it is entertaining—jarring because we never know where the next chapter will take us, and entertaining because the voices of both sets of characters are just very alive, as varied as they are.

Winterson uses the names of the original group gathered in Villa Diodati during the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as inspiration for her present day characters, and it isn’t too much of a stretch to connect the two, though of course, it’s not necessary either. Lord Byron, John Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont spent a very rainy summer along the shores of Lake Geneva, and in boredom challenged each other to write scary stories. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was of course the one brilliant outcome of this exercise, and while certain facts about it’s writing are now literary legend, Winterson does take some liberties with exploring what Mary Shelley’s internal thought process had been—not just about the book she wrote, but about politics, science, society and of course, motherhood. When Polidori & Byron wax on about how ‘the life-spark is male’, ‘not the soil, not the bedding, not the container; the life-spark’, Mary points out that ‘no living man has yet given birth to anything living…it is you, sir, who are made from us, sir.’ But the men laugh at her, and she acknowledges that ‘they respect [her], up to a point, but we have arrived at that point’. Winterson’s Mary is self aware, not just about how she is seen by men, but also about her own needs, as a wife, lover, mother, writer.

200 years later, Ry Shelley and Victor Stein talk about mitochondria, and how men can not pass it on, ‘only the mother passes it on, right back to the mother of us all.’ Victor Stein is a professor interested in cryogenics and reanimating human brains in order to digitise them, thus bringing them back to ‘life’. Ry Shelley is a trans doctor who supplies body parts to Victor for experimentation. Ry is love with Victor, does not fully trust him, yet is unable to deny him help—the two share a complicated relationship that often leaves Ry wondering if they (the character’s preferred pronoun) are being used for their ability to supply Victor with what he needs to get closer to his dream of creating a post-human future. Victor, meanwhile, feels immense appreciation for Ry as ‘future-early’—for what he sees in Ry as a move towards a future in which every person can inhabit a body of their choice with ease. But he believes humans will want to be more than human, more than transhuman too, perhaps. Stein does not believe in binaries: ‘once out of the body you will be able to choose any form you like, and change it as often as you like. Animal, vegetable, mineral. The gods appeared in human form and animal form, and they changed others into trees or birds. Those were stories about the future. We have always known that we are not limited to the shape we inhabit.’

Ry explains themselves as ‘two people [I] recognise.’… I am what I am, but what I am is not one thing, not one gender. I live with doubleness… I am fully female. I am also partly male. That’s how it is for me.’ The present day Ry Shelley and the Mary Shelley of 1816 have both chosen their personal narrative—both are more than just one thing, both feel (and fear) ambivalence from their lovers, and both are judged for being who they are. And they both provide their own Victor Franken/Stein with parts to create a new life, a new future narrative that could destroy them.

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Franissstein

While Winterson is sensitive in handling the more complex parts of Frankissstein, she makes sure to stay away from the didactic by use of humour, and satire. The character of Ron Lord, a recent divorced Welshman who has moved back in with his mum who is helping him his ‘XX-bot’ business, is hilarious. Almost a caricature, Ron is offensive but funny, absurd but surprisingly astute. He has tonnes of money, and not much sensitivity—but then, as he would say, he’s making sexbots, not raising emotional empathetic human companions (but he makes sure his sex-bots ask how your day was). The question then becomes—where do the two merge? When Ron and Victor meet, do they find anything in common, or are they at odds with their visions of the future? Throw in a religious woman called Claire who wants a Christian Companion doll that will help believers live ever after, a Vanity Fair reporter called Polly D who tells Ry being trans is ‘a good look’ for them, and an underground bunker facility where the dead lay in wait for another life, and you’ve got a clever, wicked—even gothic!—very contemporary story about what it means to be human.

Jeanette Winterson has never held back from writing whatever the hell it is that she wants to. From her hugely lauded memoirs Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Why Be Happy When You Can be Normal?, to historical fiction, to even a cookbook and a book on women’s fitness back in the 80s, she has always had an exuberance in the stylistic diversity of her work; taking joy in whatever she has chosen to write. And now she has chosen to create a frankenbook, and amalgam of two very different stylistic narratives, told in a range of vastly different but believable voices. Frankenssstein is a smart, funny look at the state of AI right now, and where it could easily be headed. It’s also a thoughtful exploration of what Mary Shelley’s life as a writer must’ve been like—young, afraid, dependent on her husband but smarter and more attuned to the world than the men around her gave her credit for. Frankenstein is about monstrous motherhood and loss, about having no control over what you have created, about learning that nothing is ever going to be just the one thing you expect of it, about the cruelty of humanity. Humans, Winterson is telling us, may be smart enough to create AI that surpasses us in intelligence, but to think that this AI will remain under our control simply because we gave it birth is probably a dangerous assumption. Mary Shelley wrote, ‘we destroy out of hatred. We destroy out of love’, but what happens when you create a creature that is more than human? We can teach empathy, but is that enough? Winterson reminds us of Shelley’s thought, that ‘suffering is ‘the mark of the soul [but] Machines do not suffer.’

Frankissstein is available from Grove Press.

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A Hook Into an Eye: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Mahvesh Murad — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 15:00:18 +0000

Almost 35 years after Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was published and nominated for a slew of awards including the Booker Prize and the Arthur C Clarke award (which it won in 1987), its follow up novel The Testaments has made it to the Booker shortlist even before its actual release day. Heavily anticipated, heavily embargoed, even more heavily promoted, The Testaments takes us back to Gilead not to tell us what has happened to just Offred, but to Gilead itself.

The world Atwood created for The Handmaid’s Tale may well ring truer to many more now in than it did in 1985, but it was always based in historical fact. The Testaments, too, is set in a recognisable world, though this story holds much more humour and much more hope than its predecessor. It is also wise—Atwood is, after all, much older and wiser now than she was 35 years ago—which is a long time to go back to a story, though The Testaments takes place about 15 or 16 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, with some flashbacks to the founding year of the state of Gilead. Three female voices are employed to tell the narrative, the most vital one being that of Aunt Lydia, the frightening, formidable controller of all women’s matters in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Who was Aunt Lydia before she became the monstrous woman we met, the one woman who never seemed to doubt the patriarchal theocracy of Gilead, who employed all sorts of horrific, cruel methods to subjugate other women? Who is she now? Do we really know her, or understand her? Atwood tells Aunt Lydia’s story almost as one would in an espionage novel, and we see why Aunt Lydia chose to join the oppressors, rather than be one of the oppressed; that she understood exactly what it meant to be complicit in the reduction of women to nothing but chattel. “Better to hurl rocks than to have them hurled at you” says Aunt Lydia. And while it may not have been the ‘right’ moral decision, it was much more likely to allow her to live, to infiltrate the system, to gather information needed in order to both survive, and to have an eventual impact.

The immediate question of course is, did Aunt Lydia join hands with the Commanders just in order to survive? It’s important to remember that Atwood’s women have never settled for mere survival, though of course in Gilead, oftentimes that is enough. Aunt Lydia suffers no fools, nor wastes time rethinking whether she made the right choice when Gilead was first formed. “Such regrets are of no practical use” she says, “I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse, is not among them.” Via Aunt Lydia, we get an insiders perspective on Gilead which we didn’t have before: the rot that is spreading from within the state, the corruption and abuse that exists within the ranks of the Commanders, who are considered the highest powers in the state and forgiven any cruelty or abuse; but also the small, clever ways the aunts are able to save some of the young girls from forced situations, even within a system with such limited choices for women. As with any espionage, information is power, and “the Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.”

Aunt Lydia holds the reins of this story, but The Testaments is also told from the perspective of two younger narrators, Daisy and Agnes, each providing two different visions of Gilead. Agnes is a child of Gilead, a progeny of the very system Aunt Lydia helped set up, and she accepts her world for what it is, and attempts to make the best of her life within it. She has been told that “Men must make sacrifices in war, and women must make sacrifices in other ways. That is how things are divided” and that “Having faith is hard work sometimes.” But Agnes realises as a teenager that she doesn’t want the life designated to her. She wants more, but has no idea what more could mean, in a world where that just isn’t possible, even though “some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”

Daisy, a teenager raised across the border in Canada has been allowed to grow up with ease, and like other Canadians, she knows very well that Gilead is something to protest against, that it is not a utopia, no matter what the missionary Pearl Girls convincing fertile women to come to Gilead may say. Atwood has often used the north/Canada to represent a safe haven, a destination worth fighting to get to. This is evident in The Handmaid’s Tale, and now is just as much in The Testaments, with Canada being both the ultimate final destination for a safe life but also where potential salvation may come from. At the end of Handmaid’s Tale Offred thinks she is pregnant, and in the TV series, we see her have the baby and smuggle her into Canada. Atwood weaves in this strand from the TV show (but nothing else, not really), and Baby Nicole becomes the symbol for what Gilead’s Commanders fear, and what Gilead’s rebels desire: an escape, a possibility.

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The Testaments

The Testaments is clever and astute and funny and tender. It is defiantly feminist. It tells you that ultimately a true sisterhood is all that matters, all that can be counted on to save the world. A true sisterhood regardless of blood bonds, one that is true in longevity, faith and even sacrifice for the greater good. Atwood of course has never claimed to be a feminist writer, because of her refusal to be labelled any one thing without deeper explanation of the label itself. She’s gone as far as saying that The Handmaid’s Tale is not a feminist novel, if that describes “an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimised they are incapable of moral choice’. But all that means is that Atwood’s female characters are not always ‘good’, they are not always in need of rescue, they are not above making immoral choices—at least, not necessarily in the traditional sense. What they are, though, always and as seen in The Testaments, is complex, varied and very, very human. As, of course, any character worth investing time and emotion in should be.

Atwood has always been interested in women as monsters. She has also always been interested in women as victims of monstrous other women, not just men. Aunt Lydia was one such monster in The Handmaid’s Tale, so an exploration of her character and history in The Testaments is both intriguing and welcome. She continues to do things that appear monstrous, but we now understand her motivation behind it—and it’s not as simple or as weak as the backstory the TV show gave her. Aunt Lydia in The Testaments is a fascinating, complicated and intriguing woman, and if there’s one thing Atwood does well, it’s giving her readers a new perspective on an old idea. “How easily a hand becomes a fist,” says Aunt Lydia.

The Handmaid’s Tale was about oppressive regimes, crimes against women and patriarchal sexual economics of women’s bodies in a claustrophobic theocracy. The Testaments furthers those elements without repetition and without bludgeoning readers with moralistic pedantic diatribes. Atwood is sharp and deft in her writing—she maintains her stance on the subjugation of women, on the importance of female bonds and on the sheer determination and intelligence of women to challenge what seems like an airtight hierarchy without ever repeating the patterns or even motifs of the Handmaid’s Tale. Gilead may have been created 35 years ago and has not changed in essence, but Atwood adds new elements to it now, just enough to give her plot room to grow; just enough for her characters to figure out who they are, what they want and how far they’ll go to make their world change. There are nods to aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale here, but Atwood has moved on from there, regardless of the recent resurgence in interest in the book following the TV show’s popularity. The Testaments explores how women can make changes even within a tyrannical regime that refuses them any agency at all: with cunning, perseverance, a complete conviction to the cause and so, so much patience. It’s fine to be playing the long game, Atwood seems to be saying, just as long as we don’t forget that we are.

The Testaments is available from Knopf Doubleday.

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Of Skin and the Sea: The Blue Salt Road by Joanne Harris

Mahvesh Murad — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 17:30:43 +0000

Selkie stories are usually about an entrapped wife—the grey seal who can take off her skin and shift into human form, caught by a human male and kept subservient and loyal by force because her skin, her true nature, is locked away. She forgets who she is, and a spends a lifetime as wife and mother and caregiver to humans, generally living a life of mundane domesticity that is nothing like her previous wild, adventurous joyous sea life, and is always wondering why she feels like she’s missing a vital part of her, why the sea calls out to her, but unless she finds her sealskin, she is never able to go back to who she was, or where she belongs.

But in The Blue Salt Road, Joanne Harris’ latest retelling of Scottish folk tales (with illustrations by Bonnie Hawkins), it is a young woman who is the captor, an island girl who wants more than the boys she has grown up around, and so decides only a selkie prince will do for her.

Beautiful, determined Flora is a girl who knows what she wants: “I will catch myself a prince, and bear a pretty princeling, and all the girls of the island shall envy my good fortune”, she tells her mother, who simply reminds her that after 25 she will be considered past her prime, and no longer of marriageable age. Her father, a whaling ships gunnerman, wants to spend most of his time at sea, and isn’t much for opinions but loves his child dearly. The island is small, with everyone’s roles socially predetermined and set—the women stay home and nest; the men go to sea and fend for their families. Flora wants more than the average girl her age, but even so does not really step outside her societal binds. She is true to her word, and throwing all caution (and clothing) to the wind one night, she approaches a selkie prince who has been wandering the island in his human form out of sheer curiosity, ignoring the warnings of his people.

Very soon Flora and the selkie’s relationship becomes more than just physical, with both professing love for each other, but the selkie does not understand the concept of marriage or monogamy, not even when Flora finds herself pregnant and insists the selkie stay on land to take care of his new family. She’s determined to keep him at her side, and using what she’s learnt from her grandmother’s stories of the selkie, she steals away his seal skin one night, hiding it in a cedar chest locked with a silver key. The selkie immediately loses all memory, and is completely vulnerable to Flora’s manipulations and suggestions as to who he may be or what he should do. She takes him home and introduces him to her parents as the man she plans to marry, the father of her unborn child. In the book’s first truly horrific moment, she also lovingly feeds him the flesh of seals, knowing what he truly is.

What follows for the selkie is sad, and frightening. Flora’s father repeatedly brings up the importance of family loyalty, and of providing for those for whom you are traditionally meant to take care of. He takes great pride in fulfilling his role, and encourages his new son in law to immerse himself in his new life as fast as possible, even if that means fighting his instincts when it comes to hunting whales and seals. The selkie, of course, does not know just why is he so horrified, and tries as much as he can to be the man his new family expect him to be. But the brutal killing of animals is especially horrific as the selkie has to watch (and then participate in) the gruesome, violent murder of his own kind, as well as the other peaceful sea creatures he once lived among.

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The Blue Salt Road

The Folk’s survival is based entirely on the death of the selkie’s people’s. The humans on the island make their living off hunting sea creatures; their lamps are lit with the oil of whales or seals, their meals are the flesh of seals, even their ceremonial clothes are made from sealskin. To have entrapped him, the way Flora has, with no memory of who is he or who is people are, is bad enough, but then to knowingly push him to assimilate into a society that survives and glorifies the killing of his people makes Flora appear incredibly cruel, especially when we see that once the selkie has lost his ‘wildness’ and individuality along with his memory—once he has been ‘tamed’—Flora loses interest in him both romantically and sexually. Once she is pregnant all her focus turns to her unborn child. She has caught herself a prince like she said she would, but now that she has one entirely under her thumb (or under the bind of a stolen skin), she doesn’t know quite what to do with him. What follows is a sad story about determined desire—to posses an other, to be better than most, to force control – and its consequences.

The Blue Salt Road can be a frightening book. It’s also thought provoking and evocative, with Bonnie Hawkins’ rich illustrations adding to the stormy sea moodiness of the language and imagery of the text. It is also a sad little story, one with no moral judgment, though Harris makes certain that her characters understand that they must all live with the consequences of their actions, no matter what they may be. She offers some redemption for them, some softening of their cruelty once they understand that they have been wrong, but she does not offer them any sudden salvation—cruelty, human or otherwise, comes at its own cost, and karma will have its way.

The Blue Salt Road is available from Gollancz.

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Hugo Spotlight: Unweaving Rumpelstiltskin in Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 16:00:20 +0000

In the lead-up to the 2019 Hugo Awards, we’re taking time to appreciate this year’s novel and short fiction Finalists, and what makes each of them great.

Miryem is the daughter of small town Jewish moneylender who isn’t very good at his job. Her father, while “terrible with money,” is “endlessly warm and gentle, and tried to make up for his failings: he spent nearly all of every day out in the cold woods hunting for food and firewood, and when he was indoors where was nothing he wouldn’t do to help.” But living as they do in a tiny town, “unwalled and half nameless,” where “the cold kept creeping out of the woods earlier and earlier,” where the townspeople look down upon them as pariahs, Miryem’s family is pushed to the edge of poverty, as her father eventually lends out all his wife’s dowry and is incapable of bringing any back. While Miryem’s family are on the verge of starvation, and her mother increasingly unwell, the rest of the town fares well on their borrowed coin.

But in Naomi Novik’s standalone novel Spinning Silver, “a moneylender’s daughter, even a bad moneylender’s daughter, learns her numbers,” and on seeing her mother take ill and weaken, Miryem steps up to lay claim to what is owed to her family.

“I was ready to be as merciless with our neighbours as they’d been with my father,” she says, as she hardens herself to the task she has taken upon herself, remaining unflinchingly on doorsteps until returns are made. Not everyone is able to pay back the coins they had borrowed or the interest owed, but Miryem is enterprising, and finds ways that those who owe her father money can pay her back in kind. Whether it is food or medicine for her mother, or warm furs, Miryem finds a way to recover her father’s loans from each person who owes him—and there are many. “Wrapped in [her] coldness,” she refuses to accept excuses from a man who has drunk away the money he’s borrowed, and instead arranges for his daughter Wanda to work as a housekeeper to pay off the debt. But Miryem, for all her coldness, is not unfair. Wanda is not charged with anything she is incapable of doing, is fed far better than she is at home, and finds that the prospect of a four-year stint spending days away from her violent father in the company of Miryem’s family makes her heart “glad as birds.” Wanda becomes an imperative part of Miryem’s family, and to the narrative at large.

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Spinning Silver

Miryem, it is soon clear, is an excellent money collector. Not just that—she’s able to “turn” silver coins into gold. Her grandfather gives her a small amount of money that she is cleverly able to use to buy things she can resell for profit, and even her far more experienced moneylender grandfather is impressed by her knack for quick, high yield investments. She begins by buying two dresses for silver and selling them for gold, and this ability to “spin” silver into gold brings a much feared mysterious Staryk stranger to her doorstep.

The Staryk are the frightening, powerful beings from a sort of parallel world to Miryem’s, a world where it is always winter. There are some physical overlaps between their world and the Russian inspired reality of Miryem’s—an actual road leads from the Staryk world into Miryem’s, which can only be opened by the king. It is the king, fascinated by gold, and greedy for the coins Miryem can earn, who shows up at Miryem’s home and demands that she turn his Staryk silver into gold three times over, or he will turn her into ice. He also makes (a possibly facetious) promise to make her his queen if she delivers the increasingly larger quantities of gold he demands, which leads to a series of events that surprise even him, though of course he is bound to keep his word. Because it seems that once she is physically in the Staryk’s world, Miryem’s abilities to change silver to gold are no longer via her business acumen but actual intrinsic magic. No need for Rumplestilskin here—the young girl herself is the one with the power to spin silver to gold.

While the story of Rumplestilskin is indeed used as a basic premise, Novik unweaves the original story, using threads of it to inspire different characters. Miryem doesn’t need someone else’s magic to prove herself worthy of a king. She isn’t the helpless young woman given away by her father to a greedy lord, the girl who doesn’t keep up her end of the bargain—she is far from helpless, and when in positions of impotency, she is quick to address the issue and attempt to take control in whatever way she can.

Novik employs multiple narrative voices in Spinning Silver, a number of perspectives making up this deftly woven and highly immersive fairy tale, with all threads connecting eventually in a satisfying way. The primary voices are of three young women—Miryem, Wanda, and Irina—each with her own fate to rewrite. Irina is the daughter of a duke, a girl whose father is constantly disappointed that she is not beautiful and may not make a good match, yet Irina finds herself somehow marrying the tsar himself, a strange young man whose cruelty she has witnessed when they were children. The tsar, however, is not an ordinary young man—not even an ordinary spoilt young noble. He has his own demons to bear, and Irina must find a way to not just save herself from him but also her people from his rule. Her story and Miryem’s and Wanda’s all tie together, as the three young women must use all their intuition and smarts to find ways out of the situations they are trapped in, as well as save many others from.

“I didn’t have a country to do it for. I only had people,” says Miryem, reminding us that this is very much also a story about Lithuanian Jews. There is plenty of anti-semitism against Miryem and her family, and while she understands that the townspeople “didn’t have a right to hate [her] but they would anyway” because she “was their monster … the one they could see and understand and imagine tearing down.”

2015’s Uprooted and Spinning Silver are not connected stories. Their similarities lie in their fairy tale impossibilities made possible, their focus on female characters with agency and the relationships they form when relying on each other. In this very atmospheric, sprawling yet so well crafted fairy tale, Novik reminds us that all we can do when faced with what seems to be inevitable doom, is to hold the ones we love close, and fight against the despair, because that “is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.”

This article was originally published in July 2018.

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In Her Skin: Sealed by Naomi Booth

Mahvesh Murad — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 16:00:39 +0000

Climate change is no longer something that can be denied by anyone at all. In Naomi Booth’s sharp, savvy second novel Sealed, the world has become hotter, and there’s a strange new disease that seems to be making people grow new skin over different orifices, eventually killing them by sealing them up inside their own epidermis.

Cutis, it’s called, and while the authorities claim it’s just one more thing to add to the nonchalant list of worries that people already have, from polluted fruit to smog to wildfires, pregnant Alice fears the worst. She’s obsessed with Cutis, and starts collection information not just about it, but also about what she thinks may be it, or what may have started the outbreak. She’s certain her mother died of it, she’s certain numerous people have died of it, far more than the authorities are admitting to, particularly those housed in relocation camps set up by the government for those who have been chased out of their homes by the effects of climate change—massive heatwaves, forest fires and the like. Climate change refugees, if you will.

Alice is heavily pregnant, and perhaps somewhat paranoid. Whether those two things are linked or not, or if it’s sexist to even think so or not, is entirely up to the reader to decide, but Alice’s partner Pete is certain that that’s all it is—a paranoia. He’s adamant that their move to a small town will be good for Alice and for the baby. Away from the city’s pollutants (and information), Pete thinks they’ll be able to live a peaceful, less stressful life. But Alice isn’t certain. The town itself is tiny, only partly occupied, its occupants not entirely friendly and openly surprised that anyone would choose to come here from the city. Alice’s paranoia grows, even as Pete (and a couple of his odd new friends) insist that she’s nothing but a pregnant, hormonally hysterical woman.

Is it paranoia? Is it the justified fears of an expectant mother about a collapsing world thanks to environmental damage, fears for what sort of world she’s will expose her child to as soon as it is born? Alice’s experience of being pregnant itself is an anxious, horrified one. There’s no denying that both pregnancy and childbirth can be frightening and violent, and Booth taps into these ideas effectively and evocatively:

‘Is it this choking feeling she remembers from being pregnant? The feeling that the world is full of dangerous things that might at any moment suffocate you? Or the physical sensation of being pushed around from the inside, every bit of your body newly tender and terrible? The feeling of a fist in your rectum, a foot against your bladder? Just this after noon, I saw something new rise up under the skin—not the baby, no, it was worse than that. It was some stranger triangular edge of my uterus flexing, when I tried to get up off the couch. A fin of cartilage under my own skin, hiding there, prehistoric, inside me. Is it this feeling she remembers, of being terrified of her body, of what it might be about to do, of what it has already done? Or is she remembering the best time of her bloody life?’

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Sealed

From an entirely scientific perspective (and also an editorial one), Booth isn’t quite able to make Cutis a believable disease. As horrifying as it is, it does require a great deal of suspension of disbelief to not question why people don’t realise what’s happening to them when their skin starts to seal over their orifices. Or does it happen overnight, in their sleep? If hospitals claim to simply be able cure people by cauterising their excess skin, is Cutis any worse than say, a wart? Perhaps this is all to make the reader doubt Alice’s fears—which one does, often. Her fears about climate change are valid, so perhaps she is right to wonder if Cutis the human body’s way of protecting itself from a poisonous environment.

Sealed is constantly stressful, terrifyingly believable most of the time, and horrific in many ways. There’s a feeling of impending doom from the very start—the very premise is enough to set make a reader feel anxious: heavily pregnant woman runs away to a small mountain village to escape a creepy disease in the city, only to find that there are strange things afoot there, too. Xenophobia is not the only thing to contend with in this odd little town, and anxiety levels build steadily and fast for both Alice and the reader. Booth is deftly adept at creating a near future, believable almost-dystopia, and at weaving together body horror, eco-horror and frightening real world situations. Because Alice is heavily pregnant though the entire novel, it’s no spoiler to say that Sealed peaks with one of the most visceral, intense, and raw childbirth scenes you’ll encounter in a long time.

This is an astute, worrying little novel, heavy with mood and thick with fears of the future of our planet, our bodies, our babies. And rightfully so.

Sealed is available from Titan Books.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction & appropriately lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories & interviews writers for the Tor.com podcast Midnight in Karachi when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

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Earnest Voices: New Suns, edited by Nisi Shawl

Mahvesh Murad — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 17:00:48 +0000

Though New Suns is simply presented as an anthology of short fiction by people of colour, without any over arching theme, a great many of the stories in the collection focus on what it means to be the other—or become the other. But of course they do. This comes as no surprise, though some readers may be slightly disappointed when many of the stories don’t quite push at this enough, holding back just that little bit that stops from deeper exploration of their narrative.

For some, it is that the short story format isn’t quite long enough to explore what they’re thinking (and so some of the stories come across as excerpts, which isn’t necessarily a negative aspect). For some it’s just a matter of undeveloped skill at addressing heavier, more complicated themes in equally complicated settings. Regardless, New Suns is an earnest compilation of voices from many ethnicities and backgrounds, making it a nice little package for those looking to read the narratives of writers exploring their experiences as people of colour, and as marginalised people .

The idea of being the other, or experiencing the other, or even othering the other (as it were) may not have been declared an existing theme in New Suns, but is hard to escape, as just as ideas about imperialism can not be escaped. The anthology begins with a quick, fun story by Tobias S. Buckell, “Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex,” in which Earth is a (bit of a cheap and crappy) tourist destination for beings from all over the universe, who travel there looking to consume human culture. One such being dies in a tourist jaunt in a New York City taxi, and the cab driver in whose car this being falls from must contend with what this means for the species. It’s one New York minute that may change the thinking and future of an entire alien race.

On a more introspective and deeply emotional note, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister” is a lovely, sad, frightening piece of writing, about a young woman’s ghosts; ‘some ghosts are woven into walls and others are woven into skin with an unbreakable, invisible thread.’ Moreno-Garcia’s writing is (as always) poetic and evocative and a joy to read, as she explores a young woman’s darkest demons and memories of her baby brother, and ‘a love that keeps secrets’ of the other within her skin.

“Harvest” by Rebecca Roanhorse is another genuinely moving, melancholic and lonely story about the the longterm impact of Europe’s colonisation of Native Americans, with the protagonist herself a Native woman, falling for a ‘deer woman…wild and without reason’. But this deer woman does have reason to ask for what she does, and her lover can not refuse. Is it love that makes her act this way? Or is that her lover has no soul, that her eyes are ‘mirrors’, showing the protagonist only what her own heart desires?

Equally well written is Indrapramit Das’ “The Shadow We Cast Through Time,” a complex, lushly told story of a colonised planet that has lost all contact with ‘Farhome’ and it’s population that must now survive independently, learning to deal with their own planetary ‘demons’, and how these creatures may not be so different from them after all. Das’ language is beautiful, and the world building intriguing; the short story format just barely enough to contain what he wants to achieve here.

Vastly different but much needed in this anthology is the surge of dark humour in Steve Barnes’ “Come Home to Atropos,” which is presented as the script of an infomercial for a Caribbean island known to be a tourist destination for those desiring assisted suicide. The island of Atropos, we slowly realise, is poverty struck and desperate for this tourism from the west. This is revealed quite slyly in the narrative, as the infomercial attempts to convince potential tourists that Atropos really is similar to the heaven they’re hoping to get to. ‘Do not be alarmed’, says the narrator, ‘by the lack of water and power…our people are resourceful, and although your leaders felt it would be best for us to rely upon our own resources, our people feel only welcoming toward you’. The politics of global economy and those who control it come into play, too, with passing mention of ‘closed factories due to American embargoes and power outages’. It’s terrible to laugh at some of the things Barnes writes, and perhaps only someone from a colonised background would find some of what he writes amusing. For example, a note in the infomercial script to the art department that reads, ‘we need a variety of images of the beautiful people of Atropos, and the hospitality they provide. Certainly we can find some who don’t look hungry? And no amputees, please’. It’s caustic satire, of course, but with great pitch.

Some of the stories that fall just that little bit shorter still maintain interest. Hiromi Goto’s “One Easy Trick,” an odd little story about a woman’s belly fat falling off and running away, is just that—odd. It could’ve been more of something, but it wasn’t. “Dumb House,” by Andrea Hairston, about a couple of sales people trying to convince a woman who makes tech to upgrade her house to a ‘smart’ model also feels like it could be something more, yet it isn’t.

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New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color

A deal with a djinn is challenged in “The Fine Print” by Chinelo Onwualu, a new take on the old be careful what you wish for adage, with a little postcolonial slant in there, when we are told that the djinn who only demands a child now and then, having saved the town from it’s abusive ‘masters’. Anil Menon’s “The Robots of Eden” is another story that falls just a tiny bit short of being truly moving, as clever as it is in premise. Set in a near posthuman future Mumbai, it explores what may happen to human emotion once people are ‘enhanced’. If all our emotions are curated safely to make sure we are never truly bothered by anything, are we superior to those who are controlled instead by their emotions? Which of us is more human?

Standard reviews of short fiction anthologies will tell you that there is a story here for everyone, and that not everyone will appreciate each story. This is a cliche, and like most cliche’s, it’s true. It pretty much applies to every anthology, and hardly bears repeating. Still, any effort in collecting or commissioning original stories by writers of colour must be applauded and appreciated regardless, though one hopes that writers of colour are featured more often in anthologies in general, so that even those who are not purposefully searching them out will experience their work. No one should have to look hard to hear these voices, or any that aren’t able to shout.

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color is available from Solaris.

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I Tell You True: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Mahvesh Murad — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 18:30:10 +0000

Until recently, Jamaican born writer Marlon James was known best for wining the Man Booker prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, but his latest novel, the sprawling epic fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf, is going to very much take place of what the writer is most associated with—there is no doubt.

“I wanted to reclaim all the stuff I like—court intrigue, monsters, magic,” James told The New Yorker last month, “I wanted black pageantry.” And that’s exactly what he’s achieved with this story of Tracker, an angry young protagonist who is known for his nose, and uses this power (alongside his ability to not be harmed by anything ‘born of metal’), to find what no one else can. Tracker, similar to the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, has a most powerful sense of smell—he can smell below the surface to detect emotion; he can smell into distance and even time, and so has developed quite a reputation as the man who can find anything or anyone at all, and one who is willing to go anywhere it takes to search.

Joining Tracker are a number of characters with equally strange abilities, including the titular Leopard, a shapeshifter with whom Tracker shares a complicated past (the constant tension between the two of them features a deep love and a hatred too) but then, it seems Tracker shares a complicated past with quite a few characters. The crew have been hired to find a boy who has been missing for some years, and no one is quite certain who he is or why he’s missing—was he kidnapped? By whom? No one knows, and if anyone does, they aren’t telling the characters or the reader. The boy has something to do with the King, his leadership and the kingdom, and Tracker’s frustration at not knowing everything is second only to the readers’.

“There have been three who hired me to find this child. A slaver, a river spirit, and a witch. Between them, they have told me five stories so far of who this child is.”

“Five lies to find him or save him?”

“Both. Neither.”

Other than for clear cut profit, why is (or was, since we are being told about a search that has ended) Tracker determined to find this child? It’s because this book itself, of course, is a quest fantasy, a hero’s journey. But it’s a complicated, restlessly twisting, spiralling story that begins by telling its readers/listeners that it is a futile quest since ‘the child is dead. There is nothing left to know’. And yet …apparently there is plenty to know, because Tracker is narrating this lengthy story to an ‘inquisitor…[a] fetish priest’ who has him captive. Is the story then really about finding this boy, or more so about the journey that leads to Tracker confirming the child’s death? Or is the story about Tracker finding himself? Classically, quest fantasies are essentially about the hero finding himself or his own shadow self; understanding who and why he is who and how he is. Which in Tracker’s case is sensitive, angry, lonely and a lot more lost than those he has spent years finding.

A lot of Black Leopard, Red Wolf is gloriously rich, beautiful writing: visceral and muscular. James flexes often, and it’s always easy to appreciate, by the eye on the page and by the ear if you read out loud. The rhythms of the writing are very resonant of oral storytelling, which of course is the point. The narrative is bursting with stories even within that of Tracker’s quest—each character has a backstory of their own, each place they travel through has a history that must be told, each kingdom it’s own politics. All of these smaller stories branch off from the main arc, so it can be overwhelming at times, as fun and clever as it is, to not feel strongly tethered to one plot. But perhaps that is the point—this is a quest fantasy, after all—you may not need everything you find each time you stray off the path, but it all does make the journey more interesting. The paths here wander through an alternate Africa, a mythological place of magic and monsters and Rashomon-style varied truths laying uncomfortably against each other at every point of action.

In fact each part of the Dark Star trilogy will be this same story told from a different character’s perspective, examining how individual points of view can change the story being told, how there is no absolute ‘true story’, only individual truths for each person in a shared context. Certain aspects of this idea for the trilogy are exciting—there are many moments in Tracker’s story that could do with an alternate perspective to settle some confusion or validate a readers’ theories, for example. The worry is, will readers remember everything in each book well enough to note where the fine details change when the perspective does? Even within Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the truth isn’t concrete and changes frequently, as Tracker himself points out, ‘truth [changes] between one man saying the same thing twice.’

There are a number of occasions in the narrative when what is ‘real’ can easily be conflated with what is a surreal vision or hallucination Tracker is experiencing. It’s hard to tell whom to trust, especially since Tracker himself trusts no one and nothing, and we’re inclined to believe he has reason to be this suspicious. Tracker is told by his uncle, ‘You will be one always on the line between the two. You will always walk two roads at the same time. You will always feel the strength of one and the pain of the other’, and though this is directed at his sexuality, it is true for a great deal of what he experiences. Tracker, for all his anger and bitterness, is constantly drawn to the weak, the outcast and the maligned and so when he tells us he is honest, and that he does not change truth to appease anyone even if he’s shot as the messenger, we are automatically empathetic towards him.

‘I hear there is a queen in a kingdom far south who kills the man who brings her bad news. So do you wish for a story where the child is less dead? Truth changes shape just as the crocodile eats away the moon, and yet my story is the same today as it was three days past, and will be tomorrow, so fuck the gods and your questions.’

Some of Black Leopard, Red Wolf is outright frightening. It’s bloody and gory and vicious. Its pulpy, cinematic and sensuous landscapes shift fluidly, bodies change; the borders between life and death, between chaos and order, between seen and unseen worlds are nebulous and constantly ebbing. Nothing is completely linear or binary in this book—not the plot, not the characters, not the mythologies the narratives leans on. Everything is in flux and that’s what makes it fun, what makes it interesting—and complex, that there are many, many ‘fantastic beasts [with] fantastic urges’. The fact that the narrative is this intense for over 600 pages is what gets overwhelming, along with the fact that James has zero intentions of telling his readers what the ‘truth’ really is. As Tracker is told, Black Leopard, Red Wolf can be ‘such a puzzle … the more you tell me, the less I know’.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is available from Riverhead Books.

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Strange Lands: The Kingdom of Copper By S.A. Chakraborty

Mahvesh Murad — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 19:00:41 +0000

We leap in to The Kingdom of Copper right where we left off with The City of Brass (if we can recall just where we left off), and then quickly jump to five years later, when Nahri and Muntadhir are married and living under his father King Ghassan’s rule: Muntadhir keeping up with his harems, following in his father’s methods, and Nahri working as the only Nahid, the healer for the djinn. Alizayd is in a village far away, helping irrigate the dessert with his new abilities of ‘finding’ springs, and Dara is with the original Nahid, training an army to take back Daevabad. Each character is caught up in their own plot, each plot is built up and interwoven with the others as the narrative progresses.

Chakraborty seems to be continuing her exploration of the ideas of colonisation, genocide, and the racial and ethnic biases that fueled The City of Brass. Nahri continues to be sympathetic towards the shafit—the half human, half djinn of Daevabad, who are considered its second-class citizens or even, at some level, unwanted refugees trying to find their djinn relatives. This is an interesting aspect of the djinn world Chakraborty has created, with most djinn being vehemently against the shafit and not bearing any sympathies towards them. Nahri is often told that they are simply not the djinn’s problem, though as she points out, “we’re not supposed to …creep through the human world, seducing virgins and starting wars,” and yet that is exactly what many djinn have done, resulting in the birth of so many shafit who then try to make their way to where their ancestors or djinn parent came from, only to be rejected by the ‘pure bloods’ who created them. It’s colonisation at its supernatural best/worst, and it doesn’t take much to see how it reflects the current world.

But this takes second place in The Kingdom of Copper, as Chakraborty navigates the large cast and further develops her characters and their relationships. Watching Alizayd with his new crew, one may completely forget that he was formerly a bit of an extremist who had been fuelling insurgents in Daevabad, for example. Some characters now act in ways that seem contradictory to what we recall of them from the first book, but Nahri remains her stubborn self; she wants desperately to open up an old hospital her ancestors once ran, so that she can work alongside a shafit doctor and help every citizen of Daevabad, regardless of their race. Such a thing is unheard of, but since Nahri has nothing else going for her (her marriage is empty, her only friend has vanished after killing her lover, she is trapped into service), she struggles to make the hospital a reality. What she doesn’t know is that there is a great deal of action unfolding around her; plans in which she isn’t the centre of focus. As much as the first book was Nahri’s story, this second one is not—narrative perspectives change at every chapter, and narrative voices shift, as does the readers’s empathy towards the characters.

The djinns in Chakraborty’s story are divided into tribes—they are different sorts of djinns, different families, speaking different languages, hailing from different regions. This is worldbuilding, of course, but it can be confusing, especially when you start to wonder how the demons of Zoroastrian lore, Daevas, end up in what’s ostensibly a world based on Middle Eastern Islamic legend of the djinn—or why all djinn are Daeva…until they’re not? For that matter, how does the Avestan Anahita connect to this timeline? But all ancient religious deities from a region can be traced backwards and connected at some level—and this is fiction after all, not written for someone who would necessarily know any of this lore, so this confusion here depends on a reader’s ability to keep up with the various names derived from ancient religions for djinn tribes and their alliances or enmities. This is something that is a common factor in all complex epic fantasy, to some extent, and was a factor of the first book in the trilogy as well. Unlike the first book though, The Kingdom of Copper doesn’t read quite as smoothly. Is it because there is too much going on that is a set up for more to come? Too many palace conspiracies? Too many new alliances? Too many new characters? Subplots? Backstories? Exotic Middle Eastern textures? It’s a bit of a tangled web.

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The KIngdom of Copper

It would be so easy to like this book. It would be so easy to say yes, this writer has touched on all the right notes. It would be much too easy to give in to reading this from a Western gaze, to let a colonial hangover cloud vision, and ignore the aspects of Orientalist fantasy woven through this.

Can you write deftly about a culture that you have adopted? Of course you can. Can you own it the way someone born into it can? I remain uncertain, and Chakraborty has not convinced me just yet, as much as she has indeed done all of the right things—she’s done her research, she’s immersed herself in the religious mythology (as a convert to Islam, much more so than most writers, certainly!), she’s earnest and safe. Possibly a little too safe, because she has to be. But as with The City of Brass, I can’t help but feel that this narrative just plays a little too much to the gallery, and into the cliché of an exotic Eastern fantasy, to make it palatable for an audience looking to diversify their fantasy reading repertoire. Diversity is, of course, currently a key term for publishing and among much of the actively engaged readership of SF/F.

Of course, the onus of deeply, thoughtfully engaging with the narrative, as always, lies with each individual reader. What experience and baggage is the reader bringing to the text? Is the reader actively engaging with the narrative on more than a surface level? Not that each reader needs to do so in order to enjoy a good story, of course—but for readers whose approach is more active than passive , it’s impossible for a writer to control what they’ll take away from it. For some readers, the phrase “khanjar dagger” is necessary to understand the kind of object is being referred to. For other readers who aren’t strangers to the language or culture in question, it’s akin to “chai tea” or “naan bread”—redundant and absurd. I’m one of those readers, so clearly this series isn’t catering to me, as much as I want to like it, and as much as it will be enjoyed by most Western readers (a quick scan through the star ratings on Goodreads shows just how much most readers love this book). Ultimately though, it’s almost impossible for a writer coming from what’s essentially a colonial background to break entirely free of an orientalist gaze, no matter how good a writer’s intent or how involved and detailed their personal background may be.

So if you’re coming from a place where classic djinns of flame and fury are a novel, unique, and exotic element in fantasy, The Kingdom of Copper is highly enjoyable. If you’re coming from a place where djinns are as common as the mundane mangoes and pomegranates and persimmons sold on a cart pushed by a man with a thousand djinn stories of his own—stories that he’d be happy to tell each time you stop him—you’re not going to be quite so entertained. This is a story for strangers in a strange land, but not every reader will find the land strange.

The Kingdom of Copper is available from Harper Voyager.
Read an excerpt here.

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Wishes as Curses: The Curses by Laure Eve

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 19:00:26 +0000

Picking up soon after the events of The Graces, The Curses follows the Grace siblings and their two closest “friends” as they try to recover from the strange events that have occurred (events that will remain vague for the purposes of avoiding spoilers for those who have not read the earlier novel). Laure Eve now changes perspective to that of Summer, the youngest of the Graces and the first to have befriended River, the unreliable narrator of the first novel. Summer’s understanding of previous events and her recollection of them sets her up right away as an honest, straightforward narrator—more so, as one who is determined to get to the truth of many matters, especially that behind the curse that plagues the magical family.

“Truth was not a cure, but it was a damn good start,” Summer tells us. “Something fundamental had been broken, collapsing the fine webbing of secrets and denial that had caught us all like flies. But walls can be rebuilt, and truth is something you constantly had to work at. Luckily, as I kept pointing out just in case no one noticed, I was really, really into the truth. I meant to be a pest about it.” And she is, though she’s an endearing narrator, with a voice vastly different from River’s slippery, strange, but equally interesting one. Wolf, the Grace’s childhood friend and Fenrin’s romantic interest, is “back,” but something isn’t quite right with him. Even so, he and Fenrin have picked up their relationship again, but something isn’t quite right there either. Wolf has an edge to him that he didn’t before, and Fenrin seems more and more exhausted, the more time he spends with him. Everyone seems to have something to hide: “Most people are more screwed up than anyone could possibly imagine. The really normal ones can be the worst—they look normal because they’re no much better at hiding pain than the rest of us…[but] hiding is like a poison…it turns you grim on the inside.”

Meanwhile, Summer stumbles upon a family secret, and when she and Thalia investigate the mysterious death of a family member, they find that there is more to their parents’ version of the story, and to the curse that frightens those of magical abilities away from love with those who have none. As much as The Curses is about the Graces wanting to figure out their family’s past, it’s also about them trying to figure out where things stand with River, with Wolf, and, with a wider lens, with the small community of their coastal town. Something is afoot, and if they’re not responsible for the oddly magical but ominous things happening to the community, then who is? And more importantly, why are these things happening? People have been leaving their wishes in a clearing, and they seem to be answered by someone who can work magic, but the wishes don’t pan out well, and bear negative consequences. Is River the one responsible for them all, as she assumes herself to be? Eve plays with the idea of wishes as curses throughout the novel, not just with River, who, sometimes, “[…] just wants someone to shut up, or go away, and then it happens, but it really happens, in a way that’s totally out of control… with her, a wish can become a curse.”

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The Curses

With this second novel, we see the Graces from the inside: We see how they are with each other, the loyalty the siblings have for each other, the strength they gain from each other and can share with others they allow into their family. River, who left us so startled at the end of the first book, is now seen from Summer’s perspective, which paints her afresh, and allows her empathy, too. River and Summer’s dynamic has to now be reconsidered entirely by readers of the first novel, which is interesting in itself. The element of mystery in this narrative goes beyond just that surrounding one character—River was the magnet that held the narrative of the first novel together, and while The Curses is told only from Summer’s perspective, it treats us to more from the other Grace siblings, and a larger, tricksy plot that forces the young witches to come together in an unexpected way.

The Graces was a very readable, entertaining book. The Curses is no less. It’s a strong follow up, and it develops further the ideas of what it means to forgive, accept and let go of people we love and call family. Honesty, trust and communication are key to any relationship, as the witches come to realise, no matter what magic is used to bind people to each other.

The Curses is available from Amulet Books.

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Under Neon and Starlight: Revealing the Table of Contents for The Outcast Hours

Mahvesh Murad — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 14:00:50 +0000

The Outcast Hours is only our second anthology, but it is fair to say we already have a bit of a shtick: we like diverse thinking on universal themes.

With The Djinn Falls in Love, it was, well—djinn. One of the few truly global ‘creatures’ of lore. With The Outcast Hours, we wanted something that was equally relevant: something that every culture experiences. Rather than raid the bestiary again, we went higher concept—not to a particular myth, but to the source of myths. Something that everyone, everywhere, shares: the night. We all experience it; it affects everyone, everywhere, in every culture.

So that’s half the shtick: the universal theme.

The other half is where the real work comes in. To us, there’s no point in reading the same story two dozen times. The joy of something universal is that everyone approaches it from a different angle. To capture the breadth, the depth, the vastness that is the ‘night’, we needed wildly different perspectives. The Table of Contents represents our best efforts to capture this range.

The Outcast Hours’ authors come from over a dozen different countries; writers with award-winning careers that span fantasy, science fiction, literary fiction, crime and romance. It also contains short stories from journalists, film-makers, comedians, comic book writers, poets, and artists. Everyone is united in a single challenge—trying to capture the experience of life after dark—but each contributor tackles it in their own unique way.

The results are as wide-ranging as you might expect. The Outcast Hours contains monsters and mobsters, of course. But also pop stars and puppies, runaways and DJs, bartenders, ghosts, lovers, serial killers, and even the Tooth Fairy. If it goes bump in the night—or simply takes the night bus—it lurks somewhere in this volume.

As with any anthology, not every story will be for everyone. The dark side (excuse the pun) of our shtick is that our approach is especially high-risk / high-reward. There’s no sameness; no certainty. In The Outcast Hours, we have gambled on the unexpected: there are no cozy evenings inside. Instead, we want every reader to find a story or two that they can be deeply passionately about—to experience the night of their lives.

(Just to note, although only our second book, we’ve been working together for years, including our lengthy war against the Dragon Highlords!)

Table of Contents

Introduction, Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin
This Book Will Find You, Sam Beckbessinger, Lauren Beukes and Dale Halvorsen
It Was a Different Time, Will Hill
Ambulance Service, Sami Shah
Blind Eye, Frances Hardinge
Sleep Walker, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Bag Man, Lavie Tidhar
Gatsby, Maha Khan Phillips
Swipe Left, Daniel Polansky
MiDNIghT MaRAuDERS, M. Suddain
Everyone Knows That They’re Dead. Do You? Genevieve Valentine
The Collector, Sally Partridge
The Patron Saint of Night Puppers, Indrapramit Das
Tilt, Karen Onojaife
In the Blink of a Light, Amira Salah-Ahmed
The Dental Gig, S. L. Grey
One Gram, Leah Moore
This Place of Thorns, Marina Warner
Not Just Ivy, Celeste Baker
Dark Matters, Cecilia Ekbäck
Above the Light, Jesse Bullington
Welcome to the Haunted House, Yukimi Ogawa
Rain, Streaming, Omar Robert Hamilton
Lock-In, William Boyle
The Night Mountain, Jeffrey Alan Love
A Partial Beginner’s Guide to The Lucy Temerlin Home for Broken Shapeshifters, Kuzhali Manickavel
And also including 9 microstories by China Miéville

The Outcast Hours publishes with Rebellion in February 2019. You can pre-order from the publisher here, or from the retailers below!

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The Outcast Hours

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The Voices in Our Heads: Someone Like Me by M.R. Carey

Mahvesh Murad — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 19:00:00 +0000

In M.R. Carey’s latest thriller, Someone Like Me, we first meet sweet, docile single mother Liz, as she tries to assert herself yet again to her aggressive ex-husband. After years of enduring an abusive marriage, Liz was finally able to divorce her husband and keep her children safe from what she feared would be potential danger to them, too. But the shared custody of the two children still causes much friction, with Liz’s ex Marc often pushing boundaries.

(Warning: the novel [and review] include scenes of domestic violence.)

On one such night, when he brings the children home much too late and Liz complains, he lashes out at her physically once again, with more aggression than before. But this time, unlike all the other incidences Liz had submissively borne, she feels something within herself break free, something stronger and more violent, and she is able to defend herself against Marc with equal brutality, slashing his face with a broken glass bottle as he chokes her. Liz herself is shocked, and worried as to what has come over her but grateful to be alive after the altercation.

Later, upon seeing a psychologist to discuss what happened to her in that moment, she is told it was probably a ‘dissociative episode’ brought on by trauma and fear. Liz tries to make sense of the single angry voice in her head that seems to be getting louder, and louder, and finds that she isn’t alone, and doesn’t seem to be imagining things. Eventually she gives in to Beth, the voice in her head, and it feels like something ‘rose as she fell. Spread itself like wings through her and above her and around her. A funnelled force like a gale hit her full on, snatched her up and hurled her headfirst into a blistering, unbearable cold.’

Meanwhile, not too far from where Liz lies dreaming of the voice in her head, 16 year old Fran is dealing with the deep psychological scars of having been abducted at age six by a highly disturbed young man who insisted she was some sort of demon. Though physically unharmed after the kidnapping, Fran has never managed to fully process and move on from her childhood trauma, and continues to have nightmares, memory loss and hallucinations. Most interestingly, she is in the constant company of a magical fox called Lady Jinx, who is her best friend, protector and not at all real.

Fran understands Jinx to be her an imaginary friend created by her subconscious soon after her abduction made her a well known but incredibly lonely and often teased child. Something shifted in Fran the day she was stolen away to a hotel room and held for hours: she has strange layered memories of the day—all horrific—but Jinx is the one positive remnant of the incident. But there are things about Jinx that don’t quite add up to this theory, and while Jinx is determined to keep Fran away from the trauma, grief and sadness of her past, Fran is equally determined to figure out why she isn’t able to make progress with her mental health, even after a decade of professional help and medications, both.

Connecting Fran and Liz is Zak, Liz’s 16 year old son and Fran’s classmate. He is the one who introduces the two women, unknowingly setting off a sequence of events that will change all their lives. Fran, upon meeting Liz, is able to see something strange in the older woman, a blurring of sorts, as if there are two of her within one space. Fran doesn’t understand what she is seeing, and though she has no idea that Liz has just had her first ‘dissociative episode’, she has seen enough in Liz to know when something changes in the older woman a few weeks later. It is enough to make Fran wonder further about her own ‘hallucinations’ and what really happened to her during her abduction that has caused this shift in her vision, and if it is at all connected to what is happening to Liz.

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Someone Like Me

Liz and Beth. Fran and Jinx. Liz and Fran. Beth and Jinx.

All four are unique identities, all four share traumas and overlapping lives through time and space—or do they? Are they each simply an aspect of the others’ own personality, subconscious? One an id to the other’s ego? Carey is good at making his readers question this, with plenty of well timed reveals adding to the constant tension in this twisty yet controlled narrative. The perspective shifts between Liz and Fran, until Beth comes into the mix and we hear from her, too. Carey does a great job at creating empathetic characters who are not necessarily likeable—Beth, in particular, is straight up unsavoury. And yet, it is easy to feel her pain just as much as it is Liz’s, who is, quite simply, a nice woman It’s a small cast of clear, true voices at play in Someone Like Me, and Carey is just as skilful at creating a deeply satisfying narrative that comes full circle here as he was with brilliantly plotted The Girl With All The Gifts.

But this isn’t just a thriller—it’s also a sensitive and smart commentary on domestic abuse and it’s traumatic aftermath, not just on the victim herself but on the family as a whole; on childhood trauma, compartmentalisation, defence and coping mechanisms. It’s an exploration of how love can drive us to do strengths we’d never expect, but so can hate and fear. It’s about the demons that exist within us, and the angels too, and how it’s never quite certain which aspects of our secret selves are supporting us or harming us. Sure, it’s also about metaphysical slipstreams in time and space—or are those just slipstreams between our conscious and subconscious minds? Carey is clever, and so he leaves the answers to his readers.

Someone Like Me is available from Orbit.

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Of Epic Girl Gangs: The Boneless Mercies by April Genevieve Tucholke

Mahvesh Murad — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 15:00:44 +0000

Set in an alternate Scandinavia, The Boneless Mercies has been touted as a gender-swapped quest fantasy loosely based on Beowulf. But given it’s a loose reinterpretation and the original may not be familiar to many YA readers, let’s leave that aside, because The Boneless Mercies exists very much as its own unique narrative, set in its own unique world and with its own intriguing cast of female characters. Beowulf was very much a man’s story—its female characters were either monsters or trophies. But here, Tucholke ensures that her female characters are everything: heroes, killers, witches, leaders, lovers, warriors. And yes, even beasts.

Young women who belong nowhere else band together to form the Boneless Mercies, a group who are hired for mercy killing—whether it be for a terminally ill loved one, or an abusive partner, or even, at times, an assisted suicide. The women travel across Vorseland, living off whatever little they can make, often sleeping rough and never a part of mainstream society. But they are a tightly knit, supportive group, who fall asleep together in heaps like puppies, share whatever food they have, divide their work equally, easily. It’s a strange life, and it’s the one they know but not the one they want anymore.

The story is told in the first person by Frey, the leader and most ambitious of the Mercies. She often makes references to the heroic Vorse sagas of her childhood, stories she’s heard and is enamoured by. It’s clear that she desires to be more than a mercy killer, is bored of the lives the Mercies lead, and aspires to more adventure, more action, more life than the death trade offers. Though her mentor had insisted “only fools want to be great. Only fools seek glory,” Frey cannot settle for the sad, slow nomadic life of the Mercies, proclaiming that though she maybe just another nameless Mercy girl, her “blood [sings] of glory.” She admits that she enjoys dealing out death to those who deserve it most, though the young women are not meant to enjoy the mercy killings they commit: “but the daughter-beaters, the wife-beaters, the ones who were cruel to animals, the ones who were brutal and selfish and hard … I liked killing them. I took pleasure in it.”

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The Boneless Mercies

And so the Mercies, driven by Frey, decide to set aside their death trade and hunt out the monster of Blue Vee, a massive fearsome beast that has been ravaging the area, so that they may earn the reward offered and use it to live whatever new lives they want to now lead. On their way to the valley where the Blue Vee beast has almost entirely destroyed a jarldom, the Mercies must navigate a few other obstacles, arm themselves with weapons greater than their small mercy daggers, and gather as much information as they can to help their hunt. From being silent death dealers upon request, they must become the aggressive warriors and hunters they never have been before. In doing so, they also find out who they are, and what they truly want.

What slows down this story on occasion is the fact that many parts of the plot feel like a set up for a bigger arc, something to be taken up again in another book. That, of course, is how epic multi-book fantasies work, but in this case it just feels a little stilted. One subplot that requires the Mercies to complete a smaller quest before they can attempt to hunt down the Blue Vee beast is clearly part of a larger story that exists outside of this book but comes across here as entirely unsatisfying. It feels rushed, much too easily accomplished and vaguely unsatisfactory. It does, however, leave the reader wanting to know more, which is probably the point. A subplot including a cult like coven lead by a child queen who self flagellates to garner her magic is a terrifying idea, and one that may have deserved a little more page time.

Frey’s voice is steady and lyrical, as befitting a Norse epic. It can be a little too stoic at times, which is surprising for a 17-year-old (though perhaps not a “Vorse” teen who confesses that she is not a crier?), but then again, these young women are wise beyond their years. The Boneless Mercies has a strong microcosmos at play, the world building is succinct and earthy, not so vast or sprawling that a reader may lose sight of the landscape entirely. This is a lovingly written epic with heart, one that does not remove the human element from the heroic. Frey and her girl gang are fierce, ambitious and know that to have purpose is everything. They know that “nothing is simple … Not quests, not heroes, not beasts, not glory,” but that won’t stop them.

The Boneless Mercies is available from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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Rewrite the Book: Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 03 Oct 2018 18:30:27 +0000

Sixteen- year-old Marion arrives at Sawkill Island with her mother and her elder sister, all three of them still in shock and traumatised after the death of Marion’s father. Marion became the de facto rock of their little family, tethering their mother and Charlotte together. But Sawkill, which was meant to be a sanctum for them, turns out to be everything but. Sawkill Island is “like this thing, perched out there on the water. A beetle. A monster. Some magical lost place.” The magic, however, isn’t the fun kind.

Marion’s mother has been hired as housekeeper for a large estate, Kingshead, which is ruled over a steady line of Mortimer women over generations, who raise prize winning horses and somehow never have any significant men in their lives—no husbands, lovers, sons, brothers. The Mortimer women are magnetic, as Marion soon finds out, when the teen daughter of the house Val adopts Charlotte into her fold. But Charlotte vanishes in the middle of the night soon after her family’s arrival on the island, like so many young women have on Sawkill over the years, and Marion starts to realise that the buzzing in her head and the rattling in her bones may be an indication is something is very, very wrong on the island, and not just with her. She’s had a physical reaction to the island almost upon arrival: a noise inside that will not recede: “it was in her bones, working its way out from the inside. It vibrated in her marrow as though her entire self teemed with tiny burrowing bugs. Like Sumer cicadas buzzing in the trees as dusk, the cry droned, Escalated. One cicada. Four. Fourteen. Four hundred. Fourteen thousand.”

Meanwhile Zoey, a local Sawkill girl whose best friend recently vanished as well, is certain that Val Mortimer has something to do with the disappearances. She and her best friend Grayson are trying to piece together rumour, legend, and bits of information gleaned from her police chief father’s strange little secret diary to find out what’s been happening to the island’s girls over the years. When Zoey meets Marion, they form a bond of the grief of having lost loved ones, and attempt to figure out what the island seems to be trying to tell them. For Marion, “the cry remained—a rattling in her bones, a vibration of wings and crawling tiny feet, a resonance of crunching teeth and a distance relentless turning, like the black water surrounding Sawkill. And something else, something amid the cicadas ad the rattling and the grinding that she couldn’t put her finger on. A pull, she thought, In all the noise, there was a pull.”

Marion, Zoey, and Val are not friends. Theirs is a complicated alliance eventually, but before that it is a strained, tense connection that the girls themselves don’t quite understand. Zoey’s anger and hatred of Val appears to be firm at first, but Marion finds herself attracted to Val, and Val to Marion, which complicates matters when the girls find out about Val’s part to play in the disappearances of their loved ones. But Val isn’t the enemy, as the girls slowly come to see. Val herself is trapped, intrinsically (and magically) linked to the island’s own personal bogeyman, known in local urban legend as The Collector. A desperate, visceral bond exists between Val and her personal demon, inherited from generations of Mortimer women who have all been used by this evil.

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Sawkill Girls

Living at Kingshead, only ever bearing their mother’s name, “they miscarried boys until they birthed a girl. They were vigourous and vital and so lolly they made people cry for wanting them, and they would have been long-lived, if he had allowed them that. They never got sick, and they never broke bones. The blood in their veins wasn’t entirely their own, and that gave them power over the unwashed masses, made others sit up and listen, too afraid to interrupt. There was a magnetism to the Mortimer women, and they knew it, this witchery; they’d given up their souls for it. So they grew up on the island, there enslaved goddesses, and taught their daughters how to keep him happy. How to serve him and feed him, how to guide his blind and fumbling self to the kill and lure in the catch, because it was that much sweeter to him, when his meals came willingly. A Mortimer woman, taught her her daughter how to keep him solid and strong in this world, how to never question his orders, how to remain in peak physical function so he could upon her energy when he needed to and fortify himself.”

Legrand does so well by her characters, her brilliant, flawed, complicated and beautiful Sawkill girls. She handles with great aplomb an asexual character’s attempts at balancing a romance that is now a friendship, a burgeoning queer teen relationship, a toxic, abusive mother-daughter relationship, just as well as she handles the evil monster that systematically attacks the island’s teenage girls to gain strength. It’s quite a feat to be able to handle the fraught, delicate balances of teenage female friendship as well as the violence and stress of an actual inhuman monster.

Sawkill Girls is a fast-paced thriller with real horror elements, some supernatural twists, quickly developing relationships, and constant, palpable tension. The narrative steadily provides Stephen King-style chills, mixed in with some Pretty Little Liars, in the best way possible. Stephen King never managed teen girls as well as this, and Pretty Little Liars never managed real feminist horror as well as this. Because that’s what this book is: a feminist horror story about what it means to grow up as a teenage girl burdened with generations of toxic, abusive patriarchal demons. It’s about what it means to form bonds with other girls, to empathise with them in ways you never thought possible, to draw strength from each other instead of destroying each other in ways that a sexist system would benefit from. Because while Sawkill Girls does indeed feature a real, actual monster, Legrand makes no bones about the fact that the real monsters are the men who would use women for their benefit, turning them against each other in the process. But here are a set of young girls willing to do what it takes to change the narrative. As Val says, “Screw that book […] It was written by men […] We’re rewriting it.”

Sawkill Girls is available from Katherine Tegen Books.

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The War on Women: Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls

Mahvesh Murad — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 18:00:44 +0000

Briseis of Lyrnessus is the teenage queen taken as Achilles’ trophy when his army destroys her town on their way to Troy, after he murders every male in her family—her husband, her father, her brothers, all brutally murdered in front of her. Every women is taken by the army and later distributed amongst the soldiers as spoils of war, with Briseis being given to Achilles, to whom she is expected to submit in every way. Later, there is an argument between Agamemnon and Achilles, which ends with Briseis being taken by Agamemnon as part of his winnings. Women, Pat Barker makes it clear in her new novel The Silence of the Girls, are nothing more than things men use to wield their power.

There have recently been a couple of books about Ancient Greek history written from a female point of view—Madeline Miller’s Circe, and now Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. Circe, which chronicles the life of its titular character, is very much about the gods and their egos. The Silence of the Girls, however, is very much about humans, their egos and their wars—both personal and political. The dirt and filth and disease and sheer brutal physicality of the Greek army marauding everything that stands in their way to Troy is very much Barker’s concern—there’s no magic here to ease the pain and trauma of rape or murder or even to help exact revenge. And while Achilles’ divine mother makes an appearance, and Apollo is beckoned by Briseis to bring about a plague, the gods remain on the peripheries of this story. There is no god in the machine to sort out situations with a thunderbolt here. There are only mortals, with all their flaws and ferocity and foolishness.

Mortal women in the Greek tales were rarely more than a wailing chorus or a beautiful body to be stolen away or fought over. The ones who survived were barely given a voice at all—something Pat Barker decides to challenge entirely in her take on The Iliad. We hear the women’s voices as they grieve, as they struggle, as they strive to live in whatever circumstances this war of men has forced upon them. Briseis and the other women the Greek army has collected are used as sex slaves, nurses, cleaners, cooks—it almost doesn’t matter what as, just that they are used endlessly by the very men who destroyed their families and homes, and that there is no way out for them. They are told repeatedly to remain silent, to submit to whatever comes their way because fighting against the inevitable rape and violence is futile. “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do,” Briseis says, “I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”

Not just are these women the trophies of war, their bodies traded back and forth, nothing more than economics, but they are also sometimes named as the causes of wars and arguments. Helen, secreted away as Troy falls to pieces, is said to be the cause for this great war—but is she really? Briseis, with no agency of her own, who becomes the cause for Achilles to refuse Agamemnon’s help and almost lose the war—she isn’t to blame for what the men around her use her to prove. Men’s egos are the cause for war; women are simply an excuse, maybe a catalyst at the most, but only one that is used by men to assuage their own fragile sense of masculinity and heroism.

Heroic behaviour, something the greatest of the Greeks are known for, isn’t anything admirable when viewed from the lens of the women they abuse. The “butcher” is what the women called Achilles, known by his men and historians as the great, the brilliant, the godlike. Even Patroclus, Achilles’ closest friend and right hand man in the war, who is the best of the men and may treat the women (especially Briseis) better than the other men do, cannot challenge the existing system—he’s just as much enmeshed in the terribly violent patriarchal culture of his time as the rest.

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The Silence of the Girls

While most of the narrative is told from Briseis’ point of view, Barker switches to Achilles as the story hurtles towards the end of the Trojan war. The great hero himself has moments where we see him not just as the butcher, but as a poet, a musician, a lover, a friend—for all his brutality, he too is a man broken by war, unable to find a way to live otherwise. In his relationship with Patroclus, in his treatment of Priam who comes to beg for his son’s body back, in his desperate need for and fears of abandonment regarding his mother, in the bravado he puts on for his men, we see him to be a complicated man torn asunder by two very different parts of his nature: perhaps whom he is intrinsically, and the hero he is mean to be. Toxic masculinity, Barker shows us, has always, always existed.

This is as much The Iliad from a female lens as it is a story reminding us of the patriarchal nature of all of history—it isn’t just written by the conquerers, it is written by men. But Barker is adamant that this must change. When Briseis is told to forget her past life, she immediately knows it is exactly what she must not, can not do: “So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as bowl of water: Remember.” She knows no one will want to record the reality of what went on during the war: “they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps?” But even so, Briseis, for all that she must bear, understands eventually that the women will leave behind a legacy, though not in the same vocal, violent way the men will.

“We’re going to survive,” she says, “our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Tory is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.”

The Silence of the Girls is available from Doubleday.

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Hunting a Legend: And The Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:30:40 +0000

In an upside down, topsy turvy yet familiar world in the depths of the ocean, a war has been raging for generations between two species who have always, it seems, hunted one another. Bathsheba the whale is part of the formidable Captain Alexandra’s pod, part of this endless hunt. But the Captain bears a violent obsession against one particular enemy: the mighty Toby Wick, a man, a monster, a myth and quite possibly the devil himself. Wick has killed countless pods, and has never been found, but Captain Alexandra is certain that she is the one who will end him.

Patrick Ness’ new illustrated novel And the Ocean Was Our Sky is a gorgeous, richly imaginative take on Moby-Dick, with the narrative focus shifting to the perspective of whales hunting humans. “Call me Bathsheba,” begins the story, immediately echoing one of the best known opening lines in literature. But even to those unfamiliar with Moby-Dick, And the Ocean Was Our Sky will be a haunting and powerful story.

Bathsheba and her pod come across a ruined human ship, destroyed entirely and with its crew killed—all but one man named Demetrius, who appears to have been left alive with the sole purpose of passing on a message about (and possibly from?) Toby Wick. Captain Alexandra isn’t keen on keeping the human as a live captive, but he has information she needs, and so Bathsheba is tasked with gaining this information from a man who starts to slowly gain her empathy. Bathsheba isn’t naturally a hunter—she’s had to learn to become one, learn to love the hunt, “not merely for itself, but for its history, for its part in [her] identity.” The hunts for humans and their vessels have always taken place, and “…what more reason did a young whale need than the fact that men had hunted us for time immemorial and hunting men was what we did in return? It was a whale’s duty, if so prophesied, and I embraced it.”

Like all whales, she hates all men, “and with good reason: their bloody killings, their sloppy, wasteful harvesting proving that they killed as much for sport as for need.” But the whales themselves appear to do no less than the humans do—they too “harvest” the men whose ships they smash to bits, selling their teeth as fake digestive aids, breaking down bodies to commodify. It’s quid pro quo, all the way, always and seemingly forever—there is nothing, no cruelty or violence that one species carries out against the other that is not equally mirrored by the second. This mutual hatred and all its ensuing death and destruction makes for a troubling, dark narrative, particularly since neither Bathsheba not Demetrius have any romantic notions about the war, though each is deeply enmeshed in the fight against the other. As she tells us, “there are those who romance the hunt the way they romance the war; in their safety, they imagine heroism, they imagine a place in history, an invisible pride that wont feed their children but will raise them above their neighbours; they never imagine the despair; they never imagine the blood and suffering; they never image how your heart dies and dies again.” And so the hunts continue, as Bathsheba, a self-professed “thinker” who grew up refusing to believe in the existence of the devil is forced to accept that perhaps there really is more to Toby Wick than just a frightening legend.

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And the Ocean Was Our Sky

Bathsheba’s conversations with Demetrius explore the consequences of these endless hunts and this constant search for the devil, how this affects both species, and the biases that this hatred has been based on. Their worlds are opposites, their struggle in each other’s environment equal, but both are need the other’s world just as much—the whales must breathe when they can; the humans of course need water equally. How they tell the stories of each other though, is what can not be reconciled: “…men lived upside down from us, that for them the ocean was below, the Abyss above, our gravities only meeting at the surface. I knew, too, that our writers speculated about worlds where whales also lived this way around, rising to meet men rather than swimming down to them, but to us, this was nearly blasphemy, a fantasy of men pretending to a dominance they’d never have.” And the Ocean Was Our Sky is very much only concerned with the water world of the whales, though, with very little happening above the ocean. As if Ness’ language isn’t convincing enough, Rovina Cai’s gorgeous atmospheric illustrations are very much a part of And the Ocean Was Our Sky’s underwater narrative, too. Lush, dark washes, strong lines and perfectly placed colour bleeds across the pages, drawing the reader fast into the turbulent, murky world of the whale hunts.

This is a book about prejudices that lead to generations of hate and death; about who monsters are, and what makes them so; about loyalty and single minded, determined violent obsessions that can never end well for most, but make a great story for the ones who survive to tell.

And the Ocean Was Our Sky is available from HarperTeen.

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Unweaving a Fairy Tale: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Mahvesh Murad — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 18:00:54 +0000

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Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver is available from Del Rey.

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Of Djinns & Things: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:00:03 +0000

A young hustler on the streets of 18th Century Cairo, Nahri lives by her wits and has always done so alone, using certain special abilities that help her get by. She can, most of the time, tell if someone is sick, or what ails them. She has “yet to come upon a language she didn’t immediately understand,” can sometimes help those who are unwell, and seems to be able to heal quickly herself. Nahri uses her strange abilities to take what she can from whom she can, trying to build up a little store of cash so she may one day train to be a real healer.

But one ordinary day, what should be a run of the mill fake exorcism ends up going horribly wrong when the young girl Nahri is pretending to help turns out to be actually possessed by a djinn—an ifrit who recognises something special in Nahri.

In attempting her daily hustle, Nahri manages to spike the interest of the evil ifrit, and also calls forth another ancient djinn, the great Afshin warrior Dara, protector to some, scourge to others. Dara is entirely uncertain how Nahri has managed to call him, but immediately sees that she is no ordinary girl—half djinn, perhaps, but not an average djinn-human either. In an attempt to keep Nahri safe from the ifrit who are hunting her in Cairo, Dara insists she come with him to the great djinn city of Daevabad, where she may be safe though he himself may not be welcomed.

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The City of Brass: A Novel (The Daevabad Trilogy)

Upon reaching the city, Nahri finds out that she is the last in the line of Nahids, the great healers of the djinn races and previous rulers of the City of Brass. She is suddenly propelled into complicated djinn politics, having to learn to manipulate the court and the king, as he attempts to manipulate her and her potential powers. As an outsider, no matter what her lineage may be, Nahri remains the reader’s point of view into this alternate parallel world. From her perspective we see the complicated djinn universe, its otherness and its injustices and glories. She is quick to point out the ways in which Daevabad is lacking, the ways in which it could be better, and to appreciate all its amazements, but she is still to learn of the long and turbulent history of the djinn tribes.

Daevabad and its surroundings are home to a variety of djinn races, which can get a bit confusing if you don’t firmly place in your head who is from what family and/or race. The worldbuilding is decent and the narrative is plotted deftly enough for it to be just very readable regardless of whether a reader is completely certain which clan someone’s mother was from, or what their historical allegiances were. The names given to various sorts of djinn are used freely (there’s a glossary in the back for those who want to double-check), and it can be hard to recall relationships between the various tribes, though not enough to hamper the sheer enjoyable readability of the writing.

Ottoman court politics are an inspiration for a narrative deeply rooted in Islamic mythology in the Middle East. The story of Sulaiman’s seal, and the power it had over djinns is central to The City of Brass. The forced slavery of djinns and all that came with enslaving an entire race to carry out the abhorrent crimes of their masters are inherent to who Dara is, and so casts a shadow over his relationship with Nahri and indeed, over his presence in Daevabad itself. In turn, Nahri, as the sole heir apparent of a powerful race of djinn healers, must contend with having to acquiesce to a king who is the descendant of those who took control of the city from her ancestors.

Chakarborty doesn’t shy away from the usual sorts of djinn cliches—there is plenty of conjuring of fire, a flying carpet, legendary flaming double bladed swords, fierce creatures belonging to every element, harems of beautiful female djinns dancing as they make flowers bloom in air, and even objects that hold the souls of djinn (think rings, if not lamps). But there’s also the strange, tense slave-master dynamic very much present in Daevabad, even though Sulaiman has been long gone. Genocide, racial discrimination, religious extremism, violence against the half-djinn, half-humans is all rife in Daevabad, and has been for centuries in some form or the other. Not so different from the human world, after all.

The story is told from Nahri’s perspective and from prince Alizayd’s: one the apparent descendant of a race that no longer exists yet was vital at one point to djinns, the other the second son of the current king, the prince who will never inherit the throne but wants desperately to make amends to those he thinks his people have wronged, without being disloyal to his family. Ancient tribal conflicts simmer just below the surface in Daevabad, with Alizayd’s father, the current king, attempting to manage a balance of sorts between the races as rebellions and insurgencies are brewing. Alizayd, however, appears to be fuelling some of the insurgents in their more violent attempts to improve their lives, though of course he does not know to what extent he is helping them at first. Nahri’s entry into his world throws him for a loop, when he is placed by his father to keep an eye on her.

Named for one of the stories in the Arabian Nights, The City of Brass is a well paced, entertaining and solidly researched (but never boring) historical fantasy that shifts the centre away from western folklore, with a strong denouement and a craftily set up epilogue that should segue well into the next installment of the trilogy. To most (western?) readers whose only experience of the djinn is Disney, The City of Brass is going to be a lush, entertaining fable inspired by Middle Eastern and Islamic folklore that has just enough familiar elements to not be considering worrying alien, and yet is exotic enough to thrill and entice and tick off diversity boxes in the right way. Within the dynamics of the various djinn tribes, though, are nestled valid socioeconomic politics for those who wish to read a little further past the surface of the narrative. To those readers familiar with the stories of Sulaiman and the djinn, with the Middle East and indeed with just that little bit of world history, it will be these politics that are intriguing, more so than the idea of creatures of fire living alongside us or the powers they possess and the adventures they have. This is actually a really clever approach—it’s not “other” enough to frighten more conservative readers (or publishers), and yet different enough to widen the scope of current popular fantasy.

The City of Brass is available from Harper Voyager.
Read an excerpt from the novel here.

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Improper Magic: The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mahvesh Murad — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 17:30:27 +0000

The Beautiful Ones is entirely different beast than Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s last book, the narco-vampire thriller Certain Dark Things. The Beautiful Ones is a historical romance set in a world inspired by the Belle Epoque, and is a story of longing, love and loss, and what betrayal can do to drive a person to becoming fully who they are.

Antonina (Nina) arrives in Loisail for her first Grand Season, where she is to debut as a young socialite with a fortune in search of a suitable husband. Unlike the other girls of Loisail, Nina has been brought up in the country and isn’t as interested in the societal proprieties of the city as she should be, according to her far more socially elevated and beautiful cousin-in-law, with whom she is staying. Valerie was once the belle of each ball, and made a fortunate match with Nina’s well-off and well-connected cousin, and though their marriage may lack affection, Valerie plays the game high society requires of a woman of her position exceptionally well.

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The Beautiful Ones

Having given up a great deal to find a husband who could help raise her family’s socioeconomic stature, Valerie has very little patience with those who do not fall into place as required. She is brittle and cannot be anyone other than whom she had become to make her place in a society with very strict lines and dedicated pigeonholes for everyone, and though she may want “to weep for that proud girl who had broken her own heart and tossed it to the dogs, and she wanted to weep for the older woman who had been left behind with a gaping hole in her soul,” she knows that “if she could do it again… she’d still retrace her steps. She was not Antonia Beaulieu, who offered herself like a sacrificial lamb, who gave everything of herself to the world of the world to devour. She was Valerie Veries. She hated herself sometimes for it, but she was Valerie Veries.”

Nina is not just less concerned with all the things Valerie thinks a young girl should prioritise in her first Season—she is also telekinetic, something that isn’t unheard of in this world, but definitely not something a lady is expected to publicise or dare to flaunt in any way. Nina isn’t always in control of her powers, either, and has had some unfortunate events in the past when she’s lost control of them. She doesn’t know how to go about honing her skills, partly because it’s unheard of for a lady to even want to. She is, however, very interested in the telekinetic performer Hector Auvray, who, unbeknownst to her, has a secret shared history with Valerie.

Nina’s telekinetic powers are not at par with Hector’s in terms of control or panache, but she seems to have just as much power as he does, and she is eager and quick to learn how to use her abilities to perform the fantastic theatrical tricks that have been Hector’s livelihood, even though society considers women doing what men of the same abilities can do extremely vulgar. Hector, in return, does not think anything untoward about helping Nina learn more about how to use her telekinesis, and the two grow close, with Nina (and her family) assuming that Hector’s interest in her is more than just platonic. How their relationship plays out, and how it affects Valerie’s interest in Nina and her future, is what the narrative explores in an extremely readable, elegant period fantasy.

Admittedly, the fantasy elements in The Beautiful Ones are restricted to Hector and Nina’s telekinetic abilities, but the development of these in tandem to how the characters get to know each other are well played out as an aspect of their relationship. Hector is indeed the more experienced, albeit sober and controlled one. Nina, the younger, livelier one, “a half-formed being, a creature with no edges,” helps bring him a sense of adventure he hasn’t had for a long time, as he helps her gain control over her abilities.

The true strength of the novel of course lies in its characters and its depiction of an era when wealth and its correct show is all that matters. Valerie has made the brutal, unhappy choices she has made for money. Nina is wanted more for her inheritance than for her personality by some. Hector has pushed himself to be the famous performer he is so he could attain a certain economic stature and only now can choose to do what his heart wants instead of what society dictates. As Hector’s friend Etienne points out, “Nothing matters more than money to [this society], the proper people who walk down these city streets in pristine gloves and silk-lined garments. You can give yourself the luxury of love because you are not one of us. That is why you are my friend: because despite everything, at heart you remain an innocent.”

Whether Hector is an innocent or not is debatable. Many of Moreno-Garcia’s characters do terrible, despicable things to hurt each other and profit personally in this book, but that’s what keeps them and the narrative interesting. It’s a slow-burn, stately novel about the magic of what it means to love, and love truly.

The Beautiful Ones is available now from St. Martin’s Press.

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The Gods of War: Tool of War by Paolo Bacigalupi

Mahvesh Murad — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 19:00:04 +0000

Paolo Bacigalupi’s Tool of War, the third book in the Ship Breaker trilogy, following Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, follows the augmented soldier Tool in his attempt to find and fight his creators. Tool’s journey has been a violent, angry one, and in this final book, we meet him as he is leading an army of child soldiers win the war in the semi-submerged cities along the Atlantic coast. Tool’s new pack have been helping him take control of the area, crushing the other warlords with just as much violence as they’ve inflicted over the years. Tool is suddenly faced with something he’s never known—relative peace, and a need for his leadership in rebuilding the drowned cities.

But Tool’s plans to create something new from the ruins are barely more than a thought when his creators make a massive, excessively violent attempt to neutralise him. The gods of war aren’t the ones Tool’s soldiers have been fighting on the ground; they are the ones who made weapons like him, the ones who sit safely far, far away but can still send down thunderbolts at will to destroy what they have already decided is not worth anything but death. Tool is almost killed, but his will to fight back is stronger than any weapon General Caroa and the corporation that made and owned Tool can hurl at him, and so begins a brutal fight to the finish between two forces that will never back down.

As he attempts to find his makers, Tool crosses paths again with friends from his past: Mahlia and her rag tag gang of “war maggots” from The Drowned Cities are back, as are Nailer and Nita from Ship Breaker, tying the narrative of Tool of War neatly to the previous two books. It’s a fun element to this third book—seeing characters previously enjoyed return as stronger, older and more developed people. The people who have mattered in Tool’s life are brought back to help him reach his own personal vendetta, and in doing so, attempt to change the world, if only just a little, if only for just a while. The narrative switches perspective between the characters, which allows the reader to see Tool’s story from a different perspective, and to question who or what he is—half human, half beast, warlord or soldier, weapon or protector.

Bacigalupi has been on point with choosing the half-man, half-monster augmented solider Tool as the one character to tether the Ship Breaker trilogy to, because as much as the young adult characters of this series have been engaging, Tool has been the most complicated and so the most interesting. He isn’t the easiest to like, of course, but easy to empathise with, which makes him all the more provocative. Bacigalupi hasn’t bothered to make his characters likeable—that’s not necessary when they are as raw as Tool, who is violent without fail, vicious and even unkind at times. Even to Nailer and Mahlia, who think of him as a friend, Tool has grown into something more, something frightening and volatile: “Now he seemed something else entirely. Not friend or ally. Something primal and unnerving. A nightmare out of humanity’s primeval past, a monster of old, a creature re-emerged from the darkest myths of protohumans, when jungles had never been razed, and when apes still cowered from darkness and struggled to master fire. A monster with its won interests and agenda.”

In Tool of War, we are dealing with a different Tool than before, one who is starting to fight those instincts that have so far held him from destroying those who created him as a weapon of unstoppable death and destruction. He is now fighting his urger to be submissive when faced with employees of the Mercier Corporation—something absolutely unthinkable to his owners. Can you fight your genes and take back the power that was never ever allowed to you, the agency that you were deemed unfit to have? To find who he truly is within the twisted system in which he exists, Tool must find a way to fight his gods, instead of fighting for them. “Are we salves to do our masters’ bidding?” asks Tool of his pack. “Whose wars do we fight?

Tool was genetically modified, raised and trained to never fight the submission impulses built into him. He is rendered incapable of biting the hands that fed him, as it were, just as Emiko, the titular character of The Windup Girl, is incapable of fighting the sexual reactions built into her. Both are then forced to deal with their own self hatred, their disgust at their inability to fight their “nature.” It is a complicated morality Bacigalupi attempts to explore, as always, and as before, he forces his readers to think about uncomfortable situations and ideas.

The Ship Breaker series is a dark, brutal set of stories. Set in a world utterly torn apart by climate change, it’s either kill or be killed, whether by gang warfare or corporate greed or politically and economically controlled violence. These stories are violent, bloody and vicious—both physically as well as emotionally. The characters struggle not just with their environments, but also with who they are, what they are. Of course the main reason these stories are so harsh is because they’re the truth—there’s sadly nothing far fetched about child soldiers or child labour, nothing too unbelievable about genetic modification or augmented strength or drone controlled death from above or what certain governments easily write off as “collateral damage.” A great many valid issues are raised in this book—slavery, oppression, determinism, corporate greed, and the ultimate cost of war—not all of them are explored deeply or sorted, because ultimately it isn’t the writer’s job to provide readers with answers, but to ask the important questions that begin a conversation and a deeper thought process. That Bacigalupi does with aplomb.

Tool of War is available now from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

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