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Powerful, touching, and original

Revisado: 02-19-23

This evocative story rightly won the World Fantasy Award for creating a richly imagined world, an empire feeling the weight of its past successes and the failures of its current ruler. The two female protagonists each find their own path to power that fulfills their backstories and sets up future books. Of course, if your notion of a good fantasy novel is “Draw your sword and wade through blood to the end” this may not be for you. Don’t get me wrong: there’s plenty of blood, and some truly creepy descriptions of new ways to die … but these are deployed strategically not continuously throughout the book.

Strong recommend.

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Boldly and brilliantly rewriting the rules of Fantasy

Revisado: 05-24-21

The landscape of fantasy has changed remarkably in a few short years and C.L. Polk’s brave reimaginings are an important part of this ongoing transformation. Polk gives us all the charms of an Edwardian romance while winding through the plot twists and turns of a political thriller, all built in a magical world where a legendary race of immortal beings have revealed themselves to a populace kept almost entirely in the dark about the extent of magic and its existence in the world. This and many more secrets have been kept from the common folk and revealing those secrets threatens to fundamentally reshape the political, technological, and cultural world of Aeland and its neighbors. It’s a brilliant read, with characters we’ve already fallen in love with once, and several more join them in this latest offering. The complications of love and duty are always inviting themes, but Polk delights in complicating these notions further by challenging our notions of the very loyalties that she will put to the test.

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Blurring the lines between essays and poetry

Revisado: 04-10-21

Abdurraqib won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his book A Fortune for Your Disaster, which I had read, and so I knew of his deep capacity to infuse language with pathos. His essays are always profound, and continually weave together seemingly disparate notions into seamless perfection. As an author, Abdurraqib revels in pressing against the boundaries of our expectations and so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I discovered as much poetry as prose in this beautiful, elegant volume of essays. But I was surprised. Again and again, the author surprises us with things that are so obviously true that they appear simple because they are honest. Abdurraqib’s hard-won vulnerability is anything but simple, however, as he illuminates an emotional landscape where “tenderness and rage are braided together”. In a book which celebrates Black performers, Abdurraqib manages to explore the innumerable ways we perform our racial identities, regardless of the color of skin we inhabit. And throughout it all, his words play harmony to his subject matter. whether he is turning last lines into first lines, or using ‘and’ as part line break, part metronome, Abdurraqib creates rhythms and incantations that get inside you as surely and unrelentingly as any of the songs or singers he writes about. By memorializing the subjects he does, Abdurraqib recovers and humanizes a series of unforgettable moments in our cultural tapestry even as they each slowly traced their own inevitable trajectories toward the stage exits of our social history. I, for one, am grateful that he did.

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