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Review: A Book of Tongues
4/5 Stars. Buy at: Amazon
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A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files is the first book in her Hexslinger series. Let me borrow some of the back cover’s excellent summary:Two years after the Civil War, Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow has gone undercover with one of the weird West’s most dangerous outlaw gangs—the troop led by “Reverend” Asher Rook, ex-Confederate chaplain turned “hexslinger”, and his notorious lieutenant (and lover) Chess Pargeter. […] Rook, driven by desperation, has a plan to shatter the natural law that prevents hexes from cooperation, and change the face of the world—a plan sealed by an unholy marriage-oath with the goddess Ixchel, mother of all hanged men. […] Caught between a passel of dead gods and monsters, hexes galore, Rook’s witchery, and the ruthless calculations of his own masters, Morrow’s only real hope of survival lies with the man without whom Rook cannot succeed: Chess Pargeter himself. But Morrow and Chess will have to literally ride through hell before the truth of Chess’s fate comes clear…
This book is fantastic in so many ways. The writing is incredible—relentlessly sharp prose, deeply believable characters, and a fascinating magic system. It’s very dark and gritty, full of violence, death, and swearing, but it’s not what I’d call “grimdark”, not nasty for the sake of lifting up nastiness. All three of the main characters are absolutely understandable, even while I found myself begging them not to make the bad decisions they invariably end up making. Morrow is a genuinely good man with a strong sense of loyalty, lying to those around him for the sake of his job. Chess is hot-headed, amoral, violent, and loves to kill; he’s also hurt, in love, and afraid to make himself vulnerable even for a moment. And Rook is a once-good man who believes himself damned to hell, and makes choices, these days, out of his trauma and loss and self-hate more than he makes them out of goodness. Call them the good, the bad, and the ugly!
Plus, the book starts with a Wild West shootout over some men insulting Chess’s in-your-face homosexuality, and quickly proceeds to him making out with Rook over the bodies while Morrow stares in disbelief, which I’ve got to say is a real quick sell for me.
I’d have rated this a five out of five, except that it’s also an intensely uncomfortable read, and not just because of the very real hurt these characters visit on each other as they make bad choices. The characters are products of their time and place and are damned racist and sexist; the narrative follows the voice of whichever character is on screen, which is a very strong narrative choice when selling a mood or setting—but means we do see anti-Chinese racial slurs repeatedly in the narrative text itself, depending on which character is the POV character at the time. This might not be as uncomfortable if, for the duration of the first book, the story itself showed more to the POCs and the ladies of the text—but unfortunately, we don’t have any POC characters who are not in some way tropey to the setting (opium dealers or users, prostitutes, mystics, etc), and I don’t believe there’s a single female character in this book who isn’t evil, doesn’t get hit in the face, and/or isn’t killed. Nor are any of them important to the story bar the main villainess.
Now, some of it is called out narratively, via a character’s condemnation of white people and some other references to their biases that crop out throughout, but it was still a big lack in the book, and I wavered for a long time over whether I should rate this 3 or 3.5 instead of 4/5 rating. I actually read partway into the next book before writing this review to check it was a continuing problem or one the author recognized, since that might tell me if the “hints” I was picking up were there or if I was just reading into it because I wanted to believe in this—and, at least halfway through the sequel (which is as far as I have read at this point), it no longer seems to a problem to the same degree. The Chinese wizard we have met previously gets an actual name rather than just the one white people use for her and we see some of her thoughts and feelings in the prologue; the protagonists are also joined by a new female POV protagonist (of Jewish descent!). Since it seems to me like the author was setting up the characters’ close-mindedness through the narration in order to deliberately open this up throughout the series (and here’s hoping it stays that way!), I settled on a higher rating—but even so, we don’t get it in this book, and I still want to mention it since there are definitely people to whom this will be more of a personal sore point, and I wouldn’t want them stumbling into it unawares.
That said aside, coming back to the good: The narrative frequently jumps around in time in a way that I think some people could find off-putting, but it worked for me because it tells a nonlinear story by creating the emotional storyline separately from the narrative timeline, and choosing to follow that emotional storyline instead. I think that it wasn’t always successful with these choices due to small flaws (for example, if Chess says “Don’t leave me” at x later point in time, and y earlier point of time that we read afterwards references those words, the first conclusion is it’s chronological, not that he’s said it more than once, so that’s a place I got tripped up in understanding when sections were set). But it was successful more often than it wasn’t, and seeing a story prioritize building the emotional story over a chronological one was a fascinating narrative experiment.
I can’t stress enough how rich the text is, and how quickly I came to love these characters—massive warts and all. It was a fascinating, engaging read, and I’m very interested to keep reading; I’m completely caught up in the story and very, very excited to see how it resolves.
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Review: A Distant Soil – The Gathering
4/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon
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A Distant Soil: The Gathering by Colleen Doran is a fantastic and beautiful space opera in comic format. “The Gathering”, in particular, is a graphic novel compilation of the first 13 issues of the late 80s/early 90s era of her comic (still ongoing, though after a long hiatus, so currently up to issue 42). Doran came up with the story when she was twelve, and originally published the early issues when still in high school.
I chose this book for the #readproud June challenge Wild Card category because I know that most of the people I know aren’t familiar with it, and I wanted to bring it to a larger audience. Having last read it in my teenage years I was looking forward to revisiting it!
Teen siblings Liana and Jason are psychics, being experimented on by a terrible government agency; when they finally break out, they imagine they’ll finally be free—but their powers came from their alien heritage, and two warring alien factions take advantage of their being out in the open to snap them up, one each, to try to use in their political striving. Jason is captured by the evil Hierarchy; Liana, the protagonist, ends up being rescued by a pair of alien rebels (and lovers, both male) who are hoping to overthrow the Hierarchy. Since Liana seems to be the next Avatar—in other words, super-powered psychic—of their people, she seems like the best place to start a rebellion. If you liked “Jupiter Ascending”, I imagine you’ll love this early take on a similar idea!
A Distant Soil is notable for a lot of things—it’s one of the first US graphic novels created solely by a female writer/artist, and also one of the earliest comics to feature openly gay characters (Rieken and D’mer, the pair of aliens who are trying to overthrow the Hierarchy), as well as presenting them as the romantic leads. The art is lovely (and improves drastically across the series as well, which one would expect as the artist aged and gained more practice; she actually redid the first 300 pages a few years after starting) and the characters are treated with sensitivity and love. The cast includes quite a few poc, as well (including D’mer, and three of the major secondary characters). In general it’s a book with a lot of inclusion in it.
It’s also just a lot of fun. The characters are entertaining, the storyline is wide-sweeping and epic, and the villains are genuinely threatening. With a intense and quick-developing story, it still takes time to develop its leads. You pick up bits of their tastes throughout, and see a lot of their personalities—rather than focusing solely on the plot, you get plenty of scenes of, for example, Rieken getting distracted by new disguises to pass as human, and see D’mer’s relentless teasing of him. It wants to tell its story, but not without making us come to love the cast first.
The problem with this volume is primarily in its subtitle, “the gathering”. The main story of the Ovanian Hierarchy, the Avatar and the Resistance, and the confused half-alien children is compelling and strong. However, this volume also includes a large amount of Rieken and D’mer trying to find people willing to help them, and this large number of wacky secondary characters occasionally feels like a distraction from the main story. It even includes an Arthurian mythological character, Sir Galahad, who falls through a space-time rip. I assume they all will have skills that will come into play later, but it does read very much like a Getting The Team Together arc. Regardless, I’d say it’s well worth getting through the actual gathering part of the Gathering for the rest of the content within.
I haven’t reread the rest of the volumes yet, but previously I owned vols 1-3 and I see now there’s a volume four out now—that’s something I’m going to have to grab, because now that I’ve come this far in my rereading, I don’t want to stop!
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Review: Glitterland
5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon
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Glitterland by Alexis Hall was recommended to me by my friend and fellow author Luna Harlow (whose review of it can be found here), and I am so, so glad I took her up on the rec. Spoilers: I loved it.
Glitterland is the story of stuck-up novelist Ash Winters, post-breakdown and suffering from anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. When he runs into aspiring model and Essex boy, Darian Taylor, who he can only describe with the words glitter pirate, Ash absolutely intends to have no more than a casual hookup with him. But despite himself, Ash finds himself drawn to Darian’s honest good nature, even while he’s ashamed by his awareness of what the people around him, who already think less of him due to his breakdown, will think of him for being with someone so lower-class. And mental illness is no fun ride, either, making him want to ruin his own happiness. But is it possible that being around someone who doesn’t want to fix him—someone who just wants to be there with him through the hard times as well as the good—can help him move forward?
This book had me from page one. I’ve had anxiety attacks before, and the description of how he felt was so horrifically familiar. All kudos to Alexis for being able to describe it so aptly—and everything else besides. The prose in this book is lovely, and the writing feels like what I’d expect from a first-person narrator who is also a literary author.
Beyond that, the character writing is wonderful. Everybody is complicated. Characters frequently say terrible things because they’re hurting; that doesn’t make them terrible, and the narrative doesn’t give them a pass for the terrible things they say even while it understands and empathizes with them. The writing is careful about these things most of the time; for example, one character early on says something unpleasant about bi people, but the narrative itself shows the bi character happy, genuine, and loving, and also shows that the rudeness of the speaker there is rooted in his own current pain.
In a lot of ways, this story is about words. What people say that they don’t mean, what people don’t say that they do, and when it’s time to try to balance that back out again. It’s also about taking responsibility versus acting out of guilt, and admitting culpability versus self-hatred. It’s a book that is very kind to itself and the characters in it while not going easy on the terrible things people can do to each other when upset, guilty, afraid. As I said earlier, it’s also about mental illness, and how hard it can be both on the person with it and those around them… while not blaming them for it, not acting like behavior is immutable, and accepting, too, that sometimes executive dysfunction is part of it. Sometimes sadness happens. Sometimes worse. It treats it as something Ash is living with (and sometimes doesn’t know how to live with), and doesn’t either victimize him for it or hate him for it. It feels very, very genuine.
It’s also really darn cute, which is incredibly impressive when dealing with material as heavy as this book does. I found myself smiling throughout the whole thing, and sometimes sending my fiancee quotes. The characters are charming and the dialogue is witty and it was fun.
Ultimately, it was a book I had faith in to do its best by its characters, and it lived up to that.
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