I'm a simple gay. I see LESBIANISM and RIVALRY and THEATER in relation to the same book and I go immediately UNHINGEDI'm a simple gay. I see LESBIANISM and RIVALRY and THEATER in relation to the same book and I go immediately UNHINGED...more
"Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed "Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts."
I have been most reliably informed that this book is gay and that it slaps, and I'm excited to read it!...more
Summer Sons seduced me with its promise of spooky times and long stretches of repressed miserable queer longings and subsequently hooked me—line and sSummer Sons seduced me with its promise of spooky times and long stretches of repressed miserable queer longings and subsequently hooked me—line and sinker—with the clarity of its prose, the gorgeous character work, and the musings on vampiric love and inheritance and masculinity and all the bleak many-faceted enormities of grief. I felt, moreover, compelled by the delicious and increasingly fraught tensions crisscrossing the cast of characters. The slow-burn is real, and I lived for it.
More important, this book hugely impressed me with its deliberate indictment of the racism baked into academic structures, an aspect that is too-often conveniently omitted by writers dabbling in the "dark academia" sub-genre. Mandelo doesn't flinch away from pointing out how their (white) characters thoughtlessly perpetuate the problem, through horrifically powerful gullibility or just callous apathy. There's a particular thematic note in this book that still has my stomach roiling with angry acids: as a queer person of color, you really cannot rely on your white queer peers to understand the shape of your chafing and grappling against institutionalized racism, no matter how well-intentioned they are/claim to be. Being queer does not make our experiences navigating the wide world similar or even equal. I've had interactions with white queers to whom this concept remains utterly ungraspable, and this book validates that helpless frustration. West's story got into me in a way that very few things ever have. I mean, you KNOW a book has struck deep chords in you when the words burst out of you in a faintly coherent voice note sent to a dear friend because you are angry and you want to be angry with someone who will understand, in a marrow-deep way, the shape of your anger.
That said, I found the mystery a bit predictable and the plot, which involves a lot of dangling threads and dead ends, plods along for the first half of the book and the pace soon lapses into a repetitive, episodic rhythm. In hindsight, this aimlessness is somewhat justified—Andrew, our protagonist, is devastatingly, explosively lost. Grief, formless and rampant, is pounding at him at every turn until he can hardly feel his own edges, and that protracted process of grieving is central to the novel. It takes some work to get used to, but it's worth it. If you're more keen on character-driven stories, like I am, rest assured that this will not put a permanent dent in your enjoyment of this book.
All in all, Summer Sons is a lovely book and an impressive debut from an author I'm definitely keeping an eye on!...more
If the high concept of “a wayward, scandal-magnet prince and a serious, duty-bound scholar are drafted into a political marriage and forced to work toIf the high concept of “a wayward, scandal-magnet prince and a serious, duty-bound scholar are drafted into a political marriage and forced to work together in order to prevent an interplanetary war” appeals to you, this book is probably for you.
That summary, however, does not do the story complete justice. Winter’s Orbit represents what I like best about the genre:
☑ an extraordinarily imaginative world with varied forces forming a tremulous web of fraught coexistence ☑ complicated political machinations ☑ that racy adventurous feel of a mystery left unsolved ☑ deftly rendered characters that drive straight to your heart ☑ an ineffably tender romance with high stakes
All of it woven through a superbly assured prose to create the kind of storytelling that wells up to pull you into a thrilling reading experience. Winter’s Orbit also has several rewarding emotional layers. To talk about them, I'll have to spoil a few things about the story. So, spoilers ahead!
*** Jainan’s chapters are absolutely painful to read. From the outset, Jainan carries himself with the flinching weariness of a man with memories that require iron cages, kept still and captive so they do not devour him whole. This comes with a sense of foreboding, a whisper of wrongness. We do not immediately understand why Jainan moves so timidly through the narrative, always guarded, always careful, like he is waiting for a blow. Why he often has to realign his whole world around a single act of kindness. Why everything he thinks and does tends towards an all-pervasive self-loathing. Most chilling is the sense that Jainan’s private, repeated mantras carry the echo of someone else’s voice. The full picture soon begins to bloom like a stain across the paper: the full arc of Jainan’s traumatic relationship with his abusive ex-husband, who, for five years, used his position as an imperial prince to etch the knowledge of powerlessness directly into Jainan’s mind, cutting all Jainan’s tethers—his family, his friends, his dreams—and making sure Jainan had no ally but his abuser, which is to say, that he had no ally at all.
Through Jainan’s character, the novel plumbs the cavernous depths of domestic abuse, tracing the interwoven strands of shame, anger, guilt, and sometimes even grief, that cling to survivors after they’re freed from their abusers. It’s a devastating topic, but the author handles it with so much care. Abuse, the novel hauntingly illustrates, carves a wound so deep and so hidden it takes a very long time to find it and address it. It casts a vast, horrible shadow over your relationships and leaves you unmoored. There are so few literary accounts of domestic abuse in queer relationships (something I read a while ago about it still haunts me: “when your love is taboo, so are its violences.”) so stories like Winter’s Orbit are crucial in expanding the scope of the queer experience.
Prince Kiem offers a really good counterpart to Jainan's character. Prince Kiem has carefully constructed his reputation as the evanescently charming, scandal-prone prince who leads an unfettered life, the way one might erect a brick façade or drape armor around their body. One of the novel’s most rewarding moments is seeing Kiem with his defenses lowered, his shields abandoned on the ground, all the barricades abraded. Behind the charming façade is someone who is insecure and self-effacing, so tragically concerned with other people’s unfavorable opinions of him, so lonely and so desperate not to be. Someone who can also be naive sometimes: by his own admission, Prince Kiem did not care for the intricacies of war and politics and did his best to banish from his thoughts all of the Empire and its tumultuous affairs. Slowly lifting the fog of complacency and ignorance around Kiem, the novel forces him to confront several uncomfortable truths, and when it does, Kiem throws himself headlong into unearthing the secrets lodged under the Empire’s skin, holding them into the light and calling for wrongs to be set aright. All of it in a beautiful display of character-development.
Obviously, Jainan and Kiem cannot be any more different. Where Kiem is loud and chaotic and draws all eyes like a flare, Jainan is a world unto himself, with a shadow’s talent for passing unremarked. For long stretches of the novel, both Jainan and Kiem keep an invisible barbed wire between them. I loved how Kiem fell in love with Jainan in one swift motion, clear and unmistakable, and how slowly he eased open Jainan’s heart like a book, mindful of the places, still tender and aching, where the past left its bruises. I loved how Jainan stood firmly by Kiem’s side, slowly learning to let go and trust that Kiem’s embrace will break his fall. This novel is about the yearning, honey. The will-they-won’t-they back and forth drove me to the brink of INSANITY, and I wanted to scream at both of them to “PLEASE JUST KISS”.
All in all, Winter’s Orbit is a smart, tender, and deeply rewarding gem of space opera. I could have gladly spent twice as long with Jainan and Kiem, and still longed for more by the end....more
This novella is a quiet, queer, and unexpected little thing that affected me deeply. Told in intensely lyrical prose, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters is This novella is a quiet, queer, and unexpected little thing that affected me deeply. Told in intensely lyrical prose, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters is a brilliantly imaginative reworking of The Little Mermaid that reads like a half-remembered fairytale suddenly being played in full. Ogden breathes exhilarating new life into an age-old myth by crafting a world of spaceships, gene-modification technology, and alien species, and animating her storytelling with a melancholy beauty and a strain of something like hope.
The author moves through the story as smoothly as a ribbon being pulled through a bonnet, taking the reader on a deep journey into the mists of Atuale’s life, a woman who was “born in the sea and remade for the land.” The cage doors of Atuale’s captive terrors slide wide open when a deadly disease sweeps through the land-dwellers of Vo—her husband’s people. Now with her beloved standing at death’s front door, Atuale clings to the only crumb of hope she has in her pocket: she must go back to the sea and beg for help from the World-Witch Yanja, her former lover whom she left behind, and hope her leap of faith wouldn’t turn into a fall into darkness.
Longing runs through the quiet lines of this novella like a torrent, and it set everything inside me aflame with an unreasoning sorrow, edged with joy. Ogden writes dazzlingly and devastatingly about the howling cold of unbelonging, and hearts caught in two places, unable to put down roots and too weary to pull anymore. She writes about well-forgotten dreams, regrets rubbed soft as rose petals, and the harsh, defiant wistfulness of pushing open doors you have never dared try before. Along the way, she traces the soft, gossamer webs of first love, and what it means to love someone so feverishly and with a touch of tragedy, and leaves you with questions that will settle inside you like dregs in a cup, long after you turn the last page:
Will home always be a thing that crumbles into fragments the moment you reach for it? How much of yourself are you willing to offer as sacrifice for love, or for a glimpse of a grander world? Will you spend forever searching the faces of those you loved for traces of the dreams you had lost, you heart heavy with the weight of goodbyes and words left unsaid, or will you finally, gently close off the past to embrace the horizon and its unsung stories?
“An anchor’s a burden for those who have a destination to make.” “But it’s a blessing in a storm.”
If your thing is “morally grey lesbians who long to set an empire ablaze and are set ablaze by their longing for each other/washing each other’s hair/If your thing is “morally grey lesbians who long to set an empire ablaze and are set ablaze by their longing for each other/washing each other’s hair/holding sharp-edged knives to each other’s ribs/kissing beneath a waterfall” you should definitely pre-order this book!
Oh, this book built such beautiful, ruinous, indelible images in my mind. The IMAGERY this book conjures. Still today, when I think back on the experiOh, this book built such beautiful, ruinous, indelible images in my mind. The IMAGERY this book conjures. Still today, when I think back on the experience of reading it, I see freshly pressed silk slipping over skin and fingers sliding through hair and delicate cords of bright pearls shimmering on bare throats like sunrise on water. And a glimmer of something else too, something sharp and treacherous beneath the smooth surface: shards from a mirror that tipped off a shelf and shattered and rivulets of molten blood and faint scratches from a single nail painted slick black.
“Death doesn't come to Gatsby's,” went the rumor, and it might even have been true. Certainly ugliness didn't, and neither did morning or hangovers or hungers that could not be sated. Those things waited for us outside the gates, so whoever wanted to go home?
Nghi Vo reimagines The Great Gatsby with sensuality, queerness, and a glass-sharp beauty. For those of you who read and loved the original Great Gatsby, it will be like returning to a love-worn poem that had melted away into half-remembered snatches and finding that it contained a new meaning. Everything is new, and everything is familiar, all at once.
But Fitzgerald never managed writing as ravishingly beautiful as this. Vo's prose, with its luxuriance and precise command of tone, has a meticulous quality to it, as if every word were a jewel laid out very carefully on a tray. And I absolutely gnawed over it, read several passages out loud, rolled them out around my head, found out how they moved on my tongue, until it felt like I was absorbing them or they were absorbing me. Until there was no room in me for anything else. The things Vo does to and with language... goddamn.
The Chosen and the Beautiful is truly a remarkable achievement of craft. The plot of moves forward with languid grace, dropping like petals from a blown rose. I liked how the novel unwinds itself in its own way and in its own time, unfolding its clever complicated machinations with wicked skill; how it hoards its secrets like a miser their stash of gold and reveals its answers slowly, patiently. It is also a skillful feat of reinvention. The places where old memories meet new, new money meets old gods, and the beautiful mundane is interrupted by papercut magic—the places where the two stories crisscross, mash, and fight where they intersect—the novel’s own beautiful tense dance with its source material—constitute the novel’s most rewarding experiment.
The Chosen and the Beautiful knifes through the canon from which it sprung, sinks its jaws down to the bone, devours what’s rotten about it, and delicately chews it into a vivid evocation of the immigrant experience, a very deliberate indictment of white supremacy, and most winningly, a sharp, clear-eyed, and deep-diving delineation of the human nature, in all its complicated glory.
Much like Jordan Baker’s magic allows her to feel the spark in all paper and nurse it forth to make it grow into flame, Vo digs up characters we think we already know and shows us that they can be far more complicated and interesting than we ever dreamed.
Jordan Baker, the original, is a minor character in someone else’s play, required to stay in the story no matter how hard she resisted. But in Vo’s hands, she is rendered glaringly alive and impressive. Nghi Vo’s Jordan Baker is a dazzling, cruel rendition of the original: she is a beautiful, mordant socialite who sharpened herself into the kind of girl who wasn’t easy to shatter. She is a queer orphaned immigrant—plucked as a child from the soil of Tonkin by a white missionary woman and brought to America, where she snagged halfway between “a charming oddity and a foreign conspiracy”—who taught herself how to slip, like a silken ribbon, through predominantly rich, white, and cishet spaces. She is a magician learning how to lay more than just secret furtive claims to her heritage, as though it were a sun-warmed stone that is too hot for the touch.
Though Jordan draws the reader's attention like a beacon, Vo pours just as much care into her other characters. She lets Daisy slip her moorings—Daisy who is only true when she breaks, when all that was sweet in her withers and falls away, like a new apple splitting its rind to reveal a core crawling with maggots. And she draws as much fire from Nick’s character—Nick who had severed the strands of his past like stray threads before they could tie knots in his heart only to bind it in Gatsby’s coils. And, of course, there is Gatsby, with his elegant cruelty, his tender malevolence, and his eyes which pulled like the tide, no matter how hard you swam against it. Gatsby who had risen so far in the world by bartering away his soul, and had the whole city dancing to his tune, glittering in his halls, stumbling drunk, stupid with freedom, and crammed with demoniac. Gatsby who was unburdened by everything except desire, destroying himself in longing for magic, for money, for Daisy, for belonging, until the price was paid, and it was too late to claim it back.
Through her glittering and terrible characters, Vo tells a violently stunning story about existing half in one world, half in another, disdained and desired by both, and unable to decide where you belong, about the clenched fist of hunger in your belly that wants to seek, to be seen, to belong, and about the dreams that look like plumage but sit on your shoulders like a cloak lined with lead, threatening to press you, boneless, to the ground.
When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren't screaming.
I really loved this book. Like. You know that deep terrible wound of loving a story that does not love you back? There is something like sweet syrupy catharsis, like a salve, about Vo’s reimagining of The Great Gatsby that still washes over me in waves: how it folds back the curtains on what’s missing and fills in the gaps, how it invites questioning, interrogating, and lights up the dark shadows our monuments casts. How it feels edged, like a challenge: we will carve out a space in the stories that refuse to make rooms for us, and we will watch as new flowers spring up through the cracks, upright and open to collect the light. ...more
Fireheart Tiger is fierce and fragile spill of a story that mingles subtly cutting court politics with tangled lesbian relationships and renders both Fireheart Tiger is fierce and fragile spill of a story that mingles subtly cutting court politics with tangled lesbian relationships and renders both with breathless heat, intense intrigue, and deep pangs of yearning.
** Memories of the time Princess Thanh of Bin Hai had spent as a royal hostage in Ephteria sat heavy and uncomfortable in her chest, a gnawing weight that threatened to eat at her unchecked for the rest of her life: the shock-bright clarity of unbelonging and a palace set afire, the blaze carrying with it all the certainty of death. Thanh had since been sent home, the fire had died away, and the dust clouds had settled on the rubble, but in Thanh’s mind, she was always in exile, and it was always burning.
Fireheart Tiger opens with a “friendly” visit from Princess Eldris—heiress to Ephteria, Bình Hải neighboring predator empire—and the visit not only brings with it the threat of Ephterian expansionist agenda but also shocks Thanh into a terrible kind of longing, a pang of unfinished business. Thanh held her past affair with Eldris quiet and close, another secret to go along with her enormous other one: memories of another girl, garnished in fire and fight.
** In the small space a novella allows, de Bodard tells a sprawling story about potent forces that we know all too well in the real world, perfectly bound within the prism of a profoundly personal and intimate story. Fireheart Tiger is an examination of the all-conquering, all-devouring beast of empire, and about the fierce indomitable women keeping it from setting its jaws upon their homes through diplomacy and negotiation and acid under the bitingly polite manners. It's also a story about love and abuse: love that builds and baits for you a gold and velvet-soft trap, strips you down to a blind and hopeless longing, and leaves you splayed out on the floor like the plucked petals of a ruined rose—all the tainted bits of broken comfort that we can’t grab hold of without getting cut first. And another kind of love: love that comes softly, like a dawning sun, and warms like fire in the teeth of winter, love fashioned not in blistering bitterness or a vicious desire to own, but in companionship, compassion, and understanding. But it is, above all, a story about learning to stand straight and steady and tall, and feeling whole again, all your fragments coming back to you, meshing back together into someone who can orbit their own purpose and be answerable for themself.
All in all, Fireheart Tiger was such a delight to read. I wanted to be taken somewhere else by a story, and I was—I just didn’t expect to feel utterly and tenderly stripped to the bone by the gentle blade of the author’s voice....more
This book is so blisteringly good. P. Djèlí Clark reimagines history with vivacity, ingenuity, and pure damn style in his alternate early 20th c. EgypThis book is so blisteringly good. P. Djèlí Clark reimagines history with vivacity, ingenuity, and pure damn style in his alternate early 20th c. Egypt that has forcibly sloughed off the British colonial yoke and risen to power with the help of Djinn. It has murder, magic, mayhem, and at the center of it all, one lesbian detective with a sharp taste in suits and even sharper monster-hunting chops. I had so much fun reading this!...more
Star Eater’s premise stalled me in my tracks. It sounded, simultaneously, like nothing I’ve ever read and everything I never knew I needed: a story a Star Eater’s premise stalled me in my tracks. It sounded, simultaneously, like nothing I’ve ever read and everything I never knew I needed: a story about an order of bureaucratic priestesses who practice cannibalistic magic in service of sisterhood. Also…zombies (with a deliciously hideous twist!). I was viciously intrigued.
Star Eater lives up to its billing, in the most fucked up and delicious of ways. It astonishes and harrows to the bone, all at once. We are plunged, from the outset, into a world where cannibalism is a hereditary ritual, borne out of rueful necessity more than anything else, an ostensibly sufficient sacrifice in exchange for the powerful lace-magic that preserves Aytrium. But that isn’t the only price. This is the trinity of a priestess’ fears: pregnancy, Haunts (i.e. zombies), and rot. The first (pregnancy) is carefully wrapped up in towering words of honor and duty and sacrifice, but is in truth “the beginning of the end”. The second (Haunts) is the vicious product of a renegade Sister. The third (rot) is more awful than death.
Star Eater has murder, martyrdom, and macabre political games: a necessary recipe for any vibrant and memorable tale. Throughout it all, the novel ponders very weighty questions: about lineage and power—power as a superlative performance, like a story well-told, power as corruption and gore, its cost and the question of who must pay it—and about the atavistic horror and silence of women’s inheritances and the virtuoso illusion of choice which can be, like any successful illusion, carefully unraveled.
Elfreda’s journey is the novel’s deep, bloody heart, and the unsettling specificities of her struggle against a system that ties her to it by chains that supersede both her will and her heart amount to a haunting illustration of how society’s memory—the stories we enshrine as something gleaming and shining and those we shake off as lies and rumors—can contribute to dangerous systematic misunderstandings. In that sense, Star Eater works as a brutal, sobering jolt of self-awareness, and an invitation to take a long hard look at the narratives we mechanically, unconsciously, and recklessly allow ourselves to follow and at the poisonous constructs within which we allow ourselves to live and fester. The slow unravelling of Elfreda’s certainties throughout the novel—like a hand shoving away cobwebs—is the novel’s most rewarding experience, and it empties Elfreda out of everything but an ineradicable desire to finally consider what she wants, what kind of person she might be when she isn’t bending like the stem of a flower for someone else’s will.
That said, I do have a real quibble with Star Eater which, despite my overall enjoyment, put a noticeable dent in my memory of it. For a novel set in a queer-normative world and in engagement with gender politics, the stark absence of trans and gender non-conforming people in both the world-building and plot is one that I stepped out of the story itching over, feeling bereft of answers to questions that weren’t even asked in the first place. I feel personally more and more out of charity for—and suspicious of—stories that treat queerness as the norm but markedly exclude trans and NB identities in their world-building. This inclusion is a missed opportunity to add sorely-needed depth to the novel’s gender politics, and would have filled many of the gaps pockmarked through the world-building.
All in all, this was an enjoyable read, with an origina premise and a (mostly) great execution....more
There are few books I can’t read without pain, without all my old wounds flaring open. These are the stories that feel almost unbearably personal, theThere are few books I can’t read without pain, without all my old wounds flaring open. These are the stories that feel almost unbearably personal, the stories I can’t talk about without the words filling my throat to choking, without unlocking something I cannot begin to reconcile. Coming face to face with The Unbroken, a story that is built out of the bones of the colonial history of North Africa—the history of my people, my history—a story which drags out those perennial hurts and exorcises those familiar demons on the page, I was completely and utterly defenseless.
The sheer thematic gravity of The Unbroken ambushed me. The novel is quite nakedly about empire and colonialism, and it is utterly unafraid to leap into the immensity of those words, their labyrinths, the dark and deathlike cold of their truth. But while there is no shortage of fantasy novels that wrangle with the definition of empire and the long, precise catalogue of its colonial cruelties, what makes The Unbroken stand out is that it is most interested in the emotional experiences of the people caught in that empire’s teeth.
Indeed, at the core of this book is a rich, faceted, and jewel-clear examination of not only empire and colonialism but of what it means to be a cog in that blank-eyed hungry machine and to perpetually scrounge for a way to survive without being utterly subsumed.The novel goes deep into all the terrible minutiae of taking a long, hard look at your own colonization, of unraveling the strands of your own complacency while empire is so hideously entangled in your understanding of yourself—just the sheer, exhausting enormity of inheriting an atrocity, of being at the center of that atrocity, and trying, every single day, to find the strength to not dissolve into the weight of it.
—
Touraine, a Qazāli-born conscript in the imperial army of Balladaire, has a past that she keeps locked in doorless and windowless rooms where the walls are fortified against memory. Now Touraine is back in Qazāl, as an agent of Balladaire’s will, and the dam keeping her past there is finally threatening to burst.
Unlike the other desert-born conscripts—called “Sands” by Balladairans with a boorish lack of affection—who were ripped from their mothers’ arms and thrown into the machinery of empire before they could finish being children, Touraine does not indulge herself in extravagant hopes of home-coming or in vicious dreams of revenge. She stuffs her mind instead with more attainable aspirations, like keeping her soldiers alive, and proving herself an industrious pupil of General Cantic, and an apt subject of Balladaire—hoping Balladaire might like her better for it, that they might look past all that is barbaric about her, and allow her entry inside the warm and glittering center of their grand civilization. For Touraine, who has spent her whole life crawling out of one shallow grave after another, it was about survival: “I can fight for the side that’s winning.”
Through Touraine’s character, The Unbroken asks, with an icy clarity that cut through me: what does it do to a person to suffer, day by day, the tyrannies of the powerful who abominate them, while slowly disintegrating from the strain of trying to belong—the equivalent of willfully putting your hand in the mouth of the thing which wants to kill you and pray it doesn’t kill you? And icier still: Where is home, when you are too foreign for your country, and too foreign for theirs, an outsider wherever you land? What is a way of belonging, when the colonizer’s words are stuffed into your mouth and your ancestors’ language is sluggish on your tongue, too cobwebbed with desuetude? Who are you, after they’ve robbed you of your identity and left you bereft of everything that you might have been?
Touraine was cut adrift—sealed off even—from Qazāl, and from everything that made her Qazāli, her memories of her family burned out of her, scoured clean by training, by punishment. When Touraine finds herself back in Qazāl, years later, her return is too contemptuous to be called a coming-home, like trying to fit back into a skin that’s already been ripped out of her. Touraine feels very little continuity between that innocent Qazāli child and this soldier who toils to Balladaire’s whims, and this discontinuity creates in her a painful landscape, a hole eaten through the fabric of her. At one point, Touraine muses: “it [is] impossible to come from one land and learn to live in another and feel whole… you [will] always stand on shaky, hole-ridden ground, half of your identity dug out of you and tossed away.”
For so long Touraine had been full of Balladaire; Balladaire was where she grew up, where she lived, where she remembered Qazāl only as a distant and unsalvageable memory. Accepting that she could no longer lay claim to Qazāl, Touraine wanted to be a good guest for Balladaire, she wanted them to accept her, to approve of her, and she wanted it with the fierceness of someone who hadn’t been allowed much to want. Balladaire, of course, saw it. Balladaire saw the kindling of that helpless desperation and coaxed it to flame. They saw how Touraine soaked up their tutelage like a sponge does water, how she burned with the shame of unbelonging—the weakness of that emotion—and they wielded it against her with silken, meticulous cruelty. They made sure Touraine knew, every day, that she was indebted to them, that she was bound unequivocally to their sufferance. They promised her belonging, but only if she behaved, only if she were good, if she were sufficiently grateful, and kept her dangling, endlessly, on the leash of that hope, chasing hopelessly after something which will always be just beyond her reach, irretrievable.
This is the seduction and horror of empire, a species of violence that is far worse than anything conceivable: how it clamps down, with jaws like a vise, and devours—entire cultures, histories, and peoples lost to its perpetual thirst and hunger—until there is nothing left of you. Except your barbaric marrowless bones, which it spits out so you may bear its civilized lustrous skin—so you may speak its language, ingest its stories, worship at its altar—and be reborn. And when you do—because you always do, you are so eager to fill the absence you hold at your center—it will seize and weigh and measure you before it shakes its head with utter contempt because “you are notenough” and it wants you to never forget it.
—
After a false accusation almost ties a noose around her neck, Touraine is offered reprieve by working as a precisely-edged weapon for the imperial princess of Balladaire, Luca, who is trying to secure her path to power and prove her imperial bona fides amidst an increasingly intensifying climate of social upheaval and rebellion. And this is how Touraine’s and Luca’s worlds begin to scrape together like the two halves of a broken shard of glass.
My dislike for Luca sprung to life like flint very early on. Everything about her is so perfectly imperial: from her avowed ambition to seize the imperial throne that cared not for who has to succumb to make that accession possible, to her brutal sangfroid when faced with the abject tyrannies of the colonial nobility, to her sheer entitlement—epitomized in her desperate hankering for Qazāl’s magic, which she longs to either possess or annihilate. Even the threadbare excuses Luca drapes herself in to maintain her innocence are so endemic to empire, including her sleek and well-fed delusions about Qazāl and Balladaire growing stably and equilaterally together, living in peace as oppressed and oppressor, an offensive impossibility dressed up as a perfectly tenable eventuality, hindered only by the Qazāli rebels’ inconvenient chafing at Balladaire’s yoke.
The Unbroken cuts through the vocabularies of white entitlement and complacency like an obsidian knife, and the words part to reveal the enormity of the damage even considerably less ill-intentioned white people do, by dint of willful ignorance or appalling gullibility. Indeed, Luca participates in a tradition of white people who nod and utter all the right platitudes, make all the appropriate noises of sympathy, even as they pull the doors behind their eyes closed against your pain—and it only served to make me even less prone to charity towards her. After all, Luca is loyal to empire—to the endlessly self-justifying greed that is empire—and a person who is loyal to empire is never innocent of the blood that waters that empire’s soil. Yet, rather than face her shame, and accept accountability, Luca consistently fails to recognize her complicity, always shoveling blame away from herself, and sifting excuses in her head to choose only those which would obviate her direct responsibility. Luca was never the one doling out lashes, after all; she was simply standing aside, letting terrible things happen, an eerily austere and silent presence during public executions, or in more private dinner parties where Balladaire’s best and brightest paraded their ill-treated Qazāli servants while they devised spectacularly cruel plans intended to strip Qazāl to its bones. It is, the novel hauntingly illustrates, by such deliberate omissions that evil fails to recognize itself.
—
The relationship between Luca and Touraine, two characters who sit across the world from each other, is a complicated one—the imbalance of power between them stark and troubling—but the author handles it with remarkable care. Luca is, to borrow some of Touraine’s words, “as much a jailer as she [is] a safe bunker”, and their dynamics are a pendulum swinging between flinching back from each other and wanting to pull each other closer. In my more generous moments—and there were very few of them, believe me—I wanted Luca to get it right, I wanted her to understand that it had never been the shape of the world for her like it had been for Touraine, that one cannot love in oppression but in freedom, and most crucially, that Touraine is not the “exception” that absolves Luca's single-minded devotion to an entirely heartless and impenitent empire. I’m not entirely convinced that Luca gets it by the end of the book, though the final pages do hint at an upcoming process of deeper reconciliation, reparation, and retribution in future installments—and it’s something I’m looking forward to reading.
I was really most interested, however, in the relationship between Touraine and the Qazāli rebels she was duty-bound to suppress and crash into silence and darkness and the places that bloomed into agony where their lives met and misaligned. Touraine’s collision with these women—women who, even in shaking despair, fought to rise above their griefs, to bear each other up and carry each other through one torment to the next—informs a significant part of her journey. In the fragile trust they built between them—a scaffolding held together by desperation, necessity, and purpose—there was something like the word family. This connection dissolves the lies Touraine needed to tell herself because she felt safer inside them: that she no longer belongs to Qazāl any more than it belongs to her, that if she were good, if she did Balladaire’s bidding, she could still earn their respect, and no harm would come to her.
Denuded of the protection of that specious, self-perpetuating belief, Touraine begins, heartbreakingly, to reckon with a part of herself which she had until then tried to excise from her mind in order to survive. That reckoning comes with layers upon layers of choice, and every single one is infused, inconsolably, with a sense of loss, a cold hollowness like the space left behind by a pulled tooth: the knowledge that Qazāl and Balladaire will always fight for the same room inside Touraine’s chest, half of her always at war with the other half, and there is no end for that kind of war.
The ending of The Unbroken, flinchingly hopeful though it may be, refuses to chlorinate the tragedies of colonialism, and it had crystallized for me something I’ve always known, at the back of my mind, unadmitted: that though the wounds of colonial violence can be soothed, they are incurable. There are absences, in the gasping aftermath of war and colonialism, that are impossible to fill, like a hunger that can never be satisfied, but these are the words I keep returning to, like a febrile meditation: “Give me hunger on my own terms.”
Give me hunger on my own terms.
—
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“Father told me I’m broken,” we can all agree, is one of hell of an opening line.
Those five words immediately swim through a thousand questions floodi“Father told me I’m broken,” we can all agree, is one of hell of an opening line.
Those five words immediately swim through a thousand questions flooding the reader’s mind. The questions will be answered eventually—most of them, anyway—but not before Andrea Stewart makes us at home in the minds of four different narrators. In that sense, the plot of The Bone Shard Daughter feels like a fist clenching a tangle of threads, and the most vivid of those threads begins with Lin.
Lin is heir to the Phoenix Empire, but with memories of her past washed away by the Sickness, her father, the Emperor, refuses to acknowledge her as such. Shutting himself away with Bayan—the Emperor’s protégé and Lin’s rival—to experiment and pry away at the bone shards inside of his constructs, the Emperor has no time for her brokenness. Lin has forgotten how to work bone shard magic and she feels the absence of that knowledge within her like a hunger. Determined, Lin sets out to pry at her father's secrets and unlock the mysteries of his creations one by one.
The second thread is tied to Jovis whose missing wife’s face is suspended in his memory like an axis point around which all else turns. Seven years have fallen away, and Jovis still sails the Endless Sea, chasing rumors of a dark boat with blue sails—the one that took his wife Emahla—while outrunning his creditors. One day, Jovis plucks a strange creature out of water, and the strange creature plucks him out of a grief so vast Jovis can't see its edges. Soon, rumors begin to speak of a smuggler with preternatural strength who saves children from the Tithing Festival with his peculiar animal companion, but notoriety is the last thing Jovis needs.
In Nephilanu Island, the third thread runs through Phalue’s story. Phalue—daughter and heir to the island’s governor—is wondering if the ravine between her and her partner Ranami will ever be small enough to close. Phalue’s fear properly kindles when she discovers that Ranami is conspiring with the rebellious Shardless Few to take down the Phoenix Empire and restore power to the people. Phalue and Ranami’s beliefs soon start clashing, and Phalue realizes that if she hopes to make a bridge for her and Ranami to cross, she must first confront all the things about empire and her role in it that she’s studiously avoided looking in the eyes before.
Sandu’s story is the last thread of the novel. After Sandu falls from the tree where she collects mangoes and hits her head, the lull fog she’s been living in suddenly clears and Sandu is able to recover some of her memories. Sandu sets out to break the other residents of Maila from the thrall of the mysterious spell she had been under and break out from her prison.
**
To say that there’s clearly a lot to set up here would be an understatement. Fortunately, Andrea Stewart does it without breaking a sweat. There is no shortage of things to be impressed by here, but the book’s main strength to me lies in the voices the author gives her characters. Stewart has gone for a bold, tricky form: the author ushers in readers through four different storylines from four different narrators, which she juggles with the confidence of a circus performer on a tightrope. The characters have a chapter each, and within their chapters their lives sometimes overlap, forming a complicated composite of friends and foes, but their backgrounds, their experiences, their motivations, and choices could not be more different. To create such distinct characters in a multi-voiced narrative is no easy feat, but Stewart genuinely makes it look effortless.
There are, however, distinctly similar thematic currents that run through the narrative. The Bone Shard Daughter is a novel that is undeniably preoccupied with the complex facets of empire. Lin, who is set to inherit an Empire fraying at the edges, discovers that by attempting to salvage it her choices might have only tugged loose more threads; Phalue, whose image of empire was preserved for so long in false glossy perfection, is forced to reckon with the extravagance of tricks with which that same empire presents itself as good; Jovis, who’s spent seven years drifting through empire looking for his missing wife, wants nothing to do with empire but it is that empire which turns out to be a dark hole standing between him and the answers he sought; and Sandu, though far away from the empire’s heart, is a victim of empire in ways she is still slowly piecing together. Ultimately, the characters must, individually, reckon with the terrible unpayable cost of empire, but it's only together that they can figure out how to dismantle it.
Along the way, the novel also brings up head-spinning ideas about power (how it can be a double-edged sword, something to be yearned for as well as distrusted) and identity and how our personal histories can both build us up and trap us, and leaves you with plenty to pore over long after you turn the last page.
All in all, I really enjoyed reading this book. I consumed it in two settings, hanging tightly each time onto the different threads of the narrative so that I could hold the whole puzzle up in my mind, spin it, look for how it all fit together. It's clear that Stewart has her final destination in mind, setting up what promises to be even more exciting challenges in subsequent installments, and I can't wait to follow her there....more
Raise your hand if you too are intensely interested in a himbo/librarian pairing (but make it gay) and are practically vibrating in barely-leashed excRaise your hand if you too are intensely interested in a himbo/librarian pairing (but make it gay) and are practically vibrating in barely-leashed excitement to read this book...more
chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡
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