Tag Archives: fantasy

Cover of City of Brass

The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty

I’m so glad to be wrong about a fantasy trilogy. By mistake, I started the Daevabad Trilogy at an awkward place—the beginning of the second book—because I mixed up City of Brass with Kingdom of Copper. At the start of Kingdom of Copper, the three main characters, Nahri, Ali, and Dara, are reeling from the events of the first book. I thought that they were flailing about with no motivation, and that the worldbuilding was too cute. Why was “grand vizier” spelled “grand wazir?” Why should I care what the abandoned hospital in Daevabad looks like? Couldn’t the zulfiqar just be called a magic sword? But about a hundred pages in, the three main characters choose new directions for themselves, and I got sucked in to rooting for them.

Nahri, an orphan teenager in Cairo, discovers she has magical ancestry. She’s not only djinn, but lost djinn royalty. She travels to Daevabad, the magical hidden city of the djinn, where she grapples with court intrigue and her birthright. This premise should be a pile of epic fantasy clichés, with djinn swapped in for elves, but S.A. Chakraborty is cleverer than that.

Chakraborty has a deep understanding of Middle Eastern history—scholar was her original career plan. She draws from Middle Easter folklore about djinn, ifrit, daevas, marids, and ghouls, and all of these peoples have roles in Daevastani society and fraught interactions. King Solomon, who commanded demons in Biblical and Quranic legend, plays an outsize role in their collective history. Disney-style genies, who are obedient and attached to a bottle? They’re real, all right, and the reason is horrifying.

Chakraborty herself is a Westerner, so she takes all that knowledge of Middle Eastern folklore and weds it to her knowledge of the Tolkien-style fantasy canon. The look of the trilogy will be familiar to fans of the genre. These books are doorstoppers with maps in the front and glossaries in the back. There are epic battle scenes and a lot of backpacking.

She knows exactly what she’s doing combining Middle Eastern folklore with high fantasy tropes, especially the trope about magical bloodlines. You know how Aragorn’s ancestors used to rule Númenor dozens of generations back, which makes him blessed with long life and also destined to be the king of Gondor? Or the Targaryens, who used to rule Westeros until another noble family deposed them. The survivors, with their fire magic, want their birthright back. Nahri’s royal family, the Nahids, resembles the Númenóreans and the Targaryens. The resolution of the Nahid situation is so satisfying that it gives me closure about my Targaryen anger.

Nahri, Ali, and Dara are all very human characters, even though they’re technically not. The plot is driven by their gray decisions, and conflict arises from okay people working at cross purposes to each other. They don’t drift, like I thought in the awkward middle of the trilogy.

The Daevabad trilogy has a slow build, but if you stick with it, you get a rip-roaring adventure across the lands of the djinn. Give the world time to soak in, and read the trilogy in the right order!

Cover of Wild Seed

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

They are the only two immortals in the word: Anyanwu, an Ibo woman who can repair her body at will, and Doro, a spirit who possesses bodies and devours souls. They hate each other with a passion; the loneliness of immortality makes them need each other.

I’ve kept hearing Octavia Butler’s stuff is really good. I only waited this long to read something of hers because I didn’t know where to start. Butler broke into print in 1976 with Patternmaster then wrote successive prequels to it. Wild Seed is the earliest in the sequence of events and regarded by John Pfeiffer as the best book she ever wrote.

The language of this book struck me right away. Check out this passage near the beginning:

Anyanwu looked away, spoke woodenly. ‘It is better to be a master than to be a slave.’ Her husband at the time of the migration had said that. He had seen himelf becoming a great man – master of a large household with many wives, children and slaves. Anyanwu, on the other hand, had been a slave twice in her life and had escaped only by changing her identity completely and finding a husband in a different town. She knew some people were masters and some were slaves. That was the way it had always been. But her own experience taught her to hate slavery. She had even found it difficult to be a good wife in her most recent years because of the way a woman must bow her head and be subject to her husband. It was better to be as she was – a priestess who spoke with the voice of a god and was feared and obeyed. But what was that? She had become a kind of master herself. ‘Sometimes, one must become a master to avoid being a slave,’ she said softly.

I think I count a dozen words in that entire paragraph with French or Latin origins. The rest of it is Ango-Saxon, emotional and gritty. She introduces complex ideas about slavery, gender, dominance and submission with deceptively simple language. And she keeps it up this way for an entire novel.

Wild Seed is also about game theory, since Anyanwu is trapped in a game with Doro she can’t win. And it’s about our relationship with our bodies, since Anyanwu’s super power is her body and Doro has no body at all. He’s fascinated with breeding human beings to each other because he’s impotent. The book is everything N. K. Jemisin was trying to cover with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but Octavia Butler is a master at it. The book will make you think. A lot of it you’ll wish you weren’t eating lunch while you were reading.

Wild Seed feels like an epic love story even though it’s a fairly short book. The ending was abrupt, especially for me, because my edition includes a big chunk of Mind of my Mind. I got three quarters of the way through the book, saw the end, and had to page backward looking for a climax.

Other issues include that you can tell it’s a prequel. Many aspects of the psychic humans are really only in there because of the psychics later in the series. And Doro’s breeding program has a surprising lack of Asian people considering that a) most people in the world are Asian and b) Doro’s willing to take advantage of all the genetic material he can get. But these are quibbles. This is a beautiful, thought-provoking, challenging book.

Cover of Kushiel's Dart

Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey

Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey isn’t for everyone. Be forewarned that the main character is a prostitute, BDSM is her specialty, and there are lots of explicit sex scenes. That didn’t bother me, but it can be pretty divisive.

In an alternate history Europe, Mary Magdalene and Christ have a child by magic. Their son Elua wanders the earth with some fallen angel disciples, preaching free love, and eventually settles in alternate France. The religions of this Europe are a mishmash of free-love-utopia, paganism, and regular Christianity, whose followers live in the “Yeshuite Quarter” of the city and are mistrusted at best.

Phèdre, a holy prostitute in training, gets the opportunity one day to also become a spy. Clients talk when they let their guards down. This book is her bildungsroman.

It takes a long time to get going. I recommend you muscle through the first few dozen pages or so until Phèdre starts plying her trade for real. It gets better.

The book’s at its best when Carey examines what a free-love-utopia might actually look like. She handles the touchy subject of prostitution with subtletly. The practice isn’t glorified or vilified. It’s a career, with all the day-to-day gripes that go with it.

Carey has the fortitude to poke her notion of utopia full of holes, too. Do the characters really “love as they wilt,” as Elua commands them to? How willingly taken is the vow of sacred prostitution when the prostitutes are sold into the temple’s service at a very young age? What about the nobility, who have to marry for political reasons? What happens if people with incompatible sexualities fall in love with each other?

The sex didn’t shock me. It did send my eyes rolling sometimes. No, they wouldn’t have been able to do that. Not that many times in one evening! Other characters get pregnant by accident, but not Phèdre for some reason, and STDs are mysteriously nowhere to be seen.

The alternate history aspect of the novel was a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, a magical being controls the English Channel and doesn’t let most people through. An alternate Britain that never had a Norman Conquest is pretty cool. You’re thrown into a world that’s halfway between Beowulf and the Mabinogion yet strong enough to be an (almost) equal partner to alternate France.

But alternate Germany didn’t make any sense. That region of Europe in our world has been alternately impressing or terrifying its neighbors with technology since the Renaissance. It brought us the printing press, modern chemistry, and rocket science and in Phèdre’s world they’ve been reduced to Orcs. The only reason they present any threat at all to France is they found a leader with two brain cells to rub together and there are a lot of them. The changes to Britain make sense because of the isolation, but there’s no explanation given for the Germans.

Worse, the book can tread into some pretty unfortunate territory. The D’angeline (French) people are inherently more awesome than their neighbors because of their ethnic background, which contains angel blood. It gets to the point where the German savages are awestruck by Phèdre and her companion just by looking at them. Phèdre describes non-D’angeline people as “like children” on two separate occasions.

Should you read this book? If it’s your thing, sure. If it’s not, don’t worry about it.

Cover of The Woman Who Loved Reindeer

The Woman Who Loved Reindeer by Meredith Ann Pierce

Uncomfortable love story, really cool setting.

I loved Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Trilogy when I was a kid. Hoping for more awesomeness, I’ve read a few of her other works over the years. Each time, I’m unhappy to find out that she seems to have pulled a Shyamalan: she’s good at one specific thing, which made The Darkangel so special, but when she tries to do the same thing in other books it doesn’t work. Her literary career seems to have petered out in 2004.

The same applies to The Woman Who Loved Reindeer.

A girl named Caribou is orphaned in her teens and the villagers refuse to take her in because she’s a seer and they’re a little afraid of her. She gets by living alone outside of town. One day Caribou’s sister-in-law Branja shows up. Branja has been charmed and impregnated by a trangl, a kind of were-deer in his human form. Branja managed to hide the pregnancy from her husband over a long hunting trip, but now she needs to get rid of the baby. Caribou reluctantly takes the baby in and names him Reindeer.

Part of what follows is a really cool adventure story. Volcanoes are taking over Caribou and Reindeer’s homeland, so Caribou uses her witch-powers and Reindeer uses his were-deer-powers to lead their people to safety. Lots of explodiness and epic crossing country scenes. There’s also a romance plot that I don’t like. It’s between Caribou and Reindeer.

Here are just a few of the problems I have with that:

  • Caribou is legally Reindeer’s aunt,
  • She raised him like a son, including breastfeeding him,
  • She’s twenty-eight years old and he is fifteen when they start having sex,
  • Caribou ate Reindeer’s father. (She thought he was an ordinary deer at the time, but still, she eventually figures it out.)

There’s also no earthly explanation why they love each other that way. Shared interests? Tender moments? Not really, Caribou just panics whenever she thinks Reindeer is going to leave her.

But gosh, the world Pierce has created is so cool. Caribou belongs to a hunting and farming community who live on a volcanically active polar continent. It’s got two fertile regions separated from each other by the pole itself, which is partially underwater. The book contains beautiful descriptions of the terrain and the adaptations of the people’s culture and lifestyle. I wanted to see lots more of that, but unfortunately it’s not the focus of the book.

I think The Woman Who Loved Reindeer would have been improved if told as a regular mother and son story. Reindeer has to grow up and run with the reindeer herd and Caribou has to learn to let him go. It would also have been better if Pierce had not tried so hard to make this into a fairy tale, because it isn’t, it’s an adventure story.

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear

It’s traditional high fantasy, reimagined in Central Asia.12109372

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear follows the story of two characters through what looks to be a sweeping saga about the collapse of an empire. The first is Re Temur, a young man who’s distant in the line of succession to the Great Khagan and never expects to hold much power. But the death of the great Khagan and the resulting civil war thrust him into the limelight. The second main character is Samarkar, disgraced ex-princess of Rasa. To save herself from getting executed by her brother, she goes into training as a wizard. When she is ordered by the head of the wizards to investigate a Rasan city that’s been destroyed by the civil war, Sarmarkar’s and Temur’s lives intersect.

What I liked best about the story was the setting. Bear introduces us to a world that’s deep and rich, and even goes so far as to explain how people’s clothes are tied on. (Isn’t that something you always wonder about fantasy princesses?) But even given that, she lays on the Fantasy Counterpart Culture a bit thick. So far to the east, further east than where any of the characters live, there’s this empire called Song – I see what you did there, that’s totally China but named after a different dynasty. Far to the west, there’s a city called Kyav where the people are as pale as mushrooms and grow beets. Could that possibly be Kiev?

I’m not sure why Bear decided to split the difference – why she didn’t give the societies in her book their familiar modern names or come up with entirely new societies. Are the changed names an excuse to add fantasy creatures to the story? Maybe Bear plans to change the course of history, and Temur is totally not going to turn out to be Kublai Khan?

One thing she did with her really-guys-this-isn’t-Asia is she reimagined Islam as form of goddess worship. Women don’t catch a break, though. In this world, they’re forced to stay in seclusion because they’re incarnations of the One True Goddess. This is very interesting and I can’t wait to see where she goes with it.

At first I thought Temur was a blithering idiot, but I developed a grudging respect for him over the course of the book. This mirrored Samarkar’s own feelings about him, so it might have been intentional. (But how long is it going to take him to figure out his horse is magical?) Samarkar was far and away the more interesting co-main character. I loved her complex feelings about taking the wizard’s path and the interplay between the wizarding community and the seat of the government. In fact, I would have been happy to read a book set entirely in Tsarepheth that was all about the political intrigues of the wizards. But this is like me complaining that I wanted ravioli when somebody serves me chicken.

In my opinion, the plot was the weakest part of the book. I prefer first books of trilogies to stand on their own as books. Range of Ghosts is a grand tour of places and people we’ll need to know for the rest of the trilogy, which is great as a beginning, but not as a book. And by the end of the book, I kid you not, we have a wizard, a fighter, an ex-cleric and a monk traveling around together. It is a testament to Bear’s writing skill that she makes this look good, but I am waiting to see when she will pull the plot out of Dungeons and Dragons territory.

The Golem and the Jinni

15819028I don’t know about this one. There was a lot that I liked, but there was also a lot that I didn’t like.

The Golem and the Jinni takes place in New York city from the summer of 1899 to summer 1900. As immigrants from all over the world stream through Ellis Island, a couple of supernatural beings drift into the city and there they form a bond. That’s all you really need to know. Sure, there’s some business about an evil wizard, but he doesn’t take up that much of the plot. The book is a series of portraits of people, human and non, who are getting used to life in a strange new country. It would have worked better as a set of loosely connected short stories, which makes me wonder if Wecker’s editor forced her to make it into a novel.

The characters are delightful and I have a lot of respect for someone who can wrangle an omniscient narrator as well as Helene Wecker does, but the book sags in the middle. It relies on a lot of coincidences. (The way the golem and the jinni meet each other is glaring. New York City is how big and they just happen to bump into each other the one night the golem goes out walking?) The book is nearly five hundred pages long, but it doesn’t give the feeling of sweeping epicness that would justify its weight.

This may sound strange, but I found the body count oddly satisfying. People die in this book and they stay dead. No Disney resurrections here. Yet whenever a character dies, there’s a reason it happened and it means something to the other characters. Wecker does a great job of making the book dark, but not too dark.

The blurb on the cover said this was Wecker’s first novel and I don’t believe it for a moment. She has too much of a command of the English language for this to be her first attempt. There’s a lot more manuscripts sitting in Wecker’s desk drawer, and I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Free Review Copy of Cannon Fodder

Are you on Goodreads? Do you want a free copy of Cannon Fodder? For the next few weeks, I’m giving away free copies of Cannon Fodder on Goodreads in exchange for an honest review. If you’ve been on the fence about picking up a copy, and you like being opinionated about books, here’s your chance.

Check it out here on Goodreads.