#REVIEW: Blood at the Root, by Ladarrion Williams

On June 14, 2024June 14, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

This is another one of those “See that cover? Go buy this book” types of reviews. Because … damn.

They say that authors nowadays need a social media presence in order to sell any books, and, well, I’m only aware of Blood at the Root because the TikTok algorithm put Ladarrion Williams in front of my face over and over again until I caved and ordered his book. And Williams is refreshingly direct about why he wrote this book: there aren’t enough Black boys in fantasy books, and so he wrote a fantasy book with a Black boy as the main character. Or, a Black young man at least, as Malik is 17 at the beginning of the book. Which, come to think of it, I don’t remember him having a birthday during the book, so he’s an awfully young college freshman, but I think he mentioned finishing school early at some point, so it’s probably fine.

I am certain that I’m not the first person to describe Blood at the Root as “Harry Potter at an HBCU.” In fact, I’m pretty sure the author himself has used that formulation. And, honestly, for the first half of the book or so, it’s a little bit too much Harry Potter at an HBCU, to be honest with you. You will literally be going through this book saying “Okay, here’s Hermione, and this guy is probably Draco, and that guy is definitely Snape, and oh! look! Death Eaters!” and so on and so forth. The first half is very, very tropey, in a way that I was willing to let slide because 1) the book is YA and 2) the actual intended market of the book is Black boys who don’t read much, so, y’know, the repeated tropes from other books that they haven’t read isn’t going to bother them, right? But it’s definitely there and it would be kind of ridiculous to not take note of it.(*)

That said, Harry Potter at an HBCU in Louisiana with a Black male lead is going to be pretty distinct from the Daniel Radcliffe books no matter how much it borrows, and the freshness of Williams’ Afro-Haitian mix of magics and characters is enough to carry you through the first half. Malik himself is a great character; I recognize this kid, and I’ve had to teach him math in the past, and his relationships with the other characters in the book, particularly his younger foster brother Taye and his childhood friend Alexis are tremendously well-drawn.

And then that second half hits, and you discover that all that emotional investment in the characters is about to be used against you, and the number of twists and turns and betrayals is head-spinning. Like, I don’t cry when reading books, and to a large extent I don’t understand people who claim that books make them cry all the time, but if I was a crier this one would have gotten me at at least two or three entirely distinct points.

The book definitely has some weak points, and there are bits and bobs here and there where you can tell it’s a debut novel, but it ends so well that I can’t help but strongly recommend it. I’m not sure when the sequel comes out, but I’m sure TikTok will let me know, and I’ll have it on day one. Check it out.

(*) Not that I think anyone’s going to call me out on it, but I want to point out that all of the punctuation in that sentence is exactly where I want it to be. “Black boys who don’t read much” and not “Black boys, who don’t read much”. Thank you.

I’m reading books tonight

On June 13, 2024June 13, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading3 Comments

I have a hundred pages left in Book 8 of Shadows of the Apt, and I want that series done and dusted by the end of next week. Two more to go after this one. So.

What are you reading?

What I did today

On June 12, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

This little bastard isn’t much to Puzzle People, I imagine, and it’s not a ton of pieces or anything, but it occupied a couple of hours of my afternoon and then immediately got photographed, torn apart, and given to my wife. If you look carefully there are a bunch of nautical-themed pieces in there which was a cool little touch. Also, a lot of those pieces don’t really lock together all that well so I kept accidentally shoving them out of place and having to put everything back together.

Other than that? It’s Wednesday. Comic shop. Tomorrow, I get to go to the dump. I’m super excited.

In which I’m not dying

On June 11, 2024June 11, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Another “not much going on” day, and if I wasn’t sure it was summertime before, the way I can’t find anything interesting to say about anything very well might be the clearest evidence I’ve seen yet.

Oh, wait, I do have something.

So, yeah, I don’t have liver cancer.

Not that I really thought I had liver cancer, but it’s been a possible-but-not-especially-likely future that’s kind of been floating over my head for the last few weeks. I had a liver ultrasound in May to confirm that some bloodwork abnormalities were because of fatty liver syndrome(*), and the ultrasound found a lesion on my liver. This is one of those “this is common, and not a big deal, but we’re going to check it out in case it’s a big deal, because if it’s a big deal, and it’s not a big deal, but if it’s a big deal it’s a big deal” type of things, where it’s almost definitely not liver cancer but hey dude, uh, go schedule a CT scan just to be sure?

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a CT scan before. I hadn’t, so I went in kind of not knowing what to expect other than that I was going to be fed into a large doughnut-shaped machine. They’d told me not to eat for four hours before the procedure, but as it was at 8:25 in the morning, that wasn’t a challenge. What they didn’t tell me, and I’m not sure if this is the case for every CT scan or not, was that I’d be on an IV briefly during the procedure, so I probably should have had a gallon of water or so before going in. My veins are utter bastards under the best of circumstances– I have grown used to telling people trying to draw blood to go directly to the back of my hand and not even to try the crook of my arm– and “slightly dehydrated” is not the best of circumstances. Two people, four sticks, and the bruises on my arm right now are impressive.

At any rate, the IV was to feed something into my veins that would dilate them to make them show up more easily on the scan. NBD, right? I was impressed at the length and detail involved in their explanation of what I was going to experience during the “minute to a minute and a half” that the chemical was going to be active in my veins. Namely, everything heated up, starting with my ears, which were abruptly twenty degrees warmer than the rest of my body, followed by my face, and then everything else.

I was warned that I might think I was wetting myself, and guaranteed that I was not. I was also warned that I might feel like I had an erection and that that also would not be happening, and my immediate and complete crackdown on the urge to make some sort of terrible joke made me kind of proud of myself. At any rate, I didn’t really experience either, although I can kind of see how people might feel like a spreading pool of warmth in their lap might be alarming. The sensation in general came right up to the edge of unpleasant and then receded as quickly as it came, and then I was done. I had the results this afternoon; I have a “tiny,” their words, cyst on my liver, perfectly normal and either highly unlikely or actually unable to turn into anything alarming.

(I am unsure, and I’ll talk to my doctor about this, if this is something I should keep an eye on in the future, or if I have, as my wife put it, “a new liver friend,” but they’re definitely not worrying about it now, and I can stop mentally appending “… so long as I don’t have liver cancer” to every discussion of anything happening in the future.)

Oh, and then once I was done the nurse went to take the blanket off of me, and abruptly stopped and said “Wait, do you still have your pants down?”, which, yes, I do, because lady you can see my hands, and I did not use the muscles in my ass to pull my pants back up, so … gimme a second, here. I also refrained from wisecracking at that, so I genuinely deserve some sort of prize here for my restraint and class.

(*) They were. This is also not especially alarming, although I need to do some reading on exactly what it means other than that my liver is as fat as the rest of me.

Not a lot today

On June 10, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Let’s see. I didn’t manage to accomplish much with my Monday; anytime I’m considering bragging about putting my laundry away and beating the final boss on a video game, it wasn’t much of a day. But whatever; the pool is almost ready, and finishing off Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has genuinely been on my nerves lately, and I got both of the spelling challenges right today in one of my Arabic programs, so fuck it, I’m gonna call today a win and go sit outside and relax.

#REVIEW: The Vagrant Gods series, by David Dalglish

On June 9, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

It took me eight days to read through David Dalglish’s three-volume, 1500-page Vagrant Gods series, the covers of which ought to be clickable above. I don’t recall what drew my attention to this series initially, but I bought all three in a fit of consumerism before reading any of them, and they’ve been sitting on a shelf for perhaps longer than they should have before I finally got to them. I’m not about to go back and look to find out how long; it’s been a while.

Shoulda read ’em earlier, because they’re awesome, and they manage the rare feat of starting off pretty good (I four-starred the first book) and then getting better with each successive volume. The series tells the story of Cyrus, a young (initially, at least) prince who not only witnesses his parents’ executions in front of him during an invasion but also literally witnesses the death of one of his gods. Cyrus is held in captivity as a puppet regent for a few years, and ultimately is able to escape with the help of a small band of revolutionaries, who forge him into the Vagrant, a vicious assassin whose one and only goal is to drive the Everlorn Empire from his native island of Thanet.

It is possible you are rolling your eyes right now; the word “assassin” is used way too much in fantasy literature nowadays, and a whole lot of assassins don’t really do a lot of assassinating because the authors want them to be relatable, and it’s harder to do that with somebody who is killing people all the time. You will possibly be pleased to learn that Cyrus does an immense amount of assassinating in Vagrant Gods. Holy crap, does he do a lot of assassinating, and his body count by the end of the series is horrifying. He’s practically the PC of a first-person shooter out there; this is a series that does not shy away from violence and is really not at all interested in a relatable main character. (It’s also, for what it’s worth, rotating-POV third person, but Cyrus is absolutely the main character for all that.) The books also do a pretty good job of making even the ultimate big bad guy of the series feel, if not relatable, at least understandable; the Everlorn Emperor is (mostly) immortal but the previous emperors live in his head, and he’s really only about half-sane during the book his POV shows up in, which makes him a fascinating character.

But the most interesting thing about this series is the way it handles divinity. Gods can be killed, and in fact are killed, and resurrected and sometimes killed again after resurrection, all over the place in this series, and the Everlorn Empire’s drive for, well, empire is due mostly to the need of the Divine Emperor for more worshippers. I’d call it an analogue of Christian imperialism, but only if Jesus was, like, still alive, but on his fifth or sixth body, and if he literally got more powerful with every new worshipper. One character ends up channeling one of the deceased gods for most of the series, and she can literally transform back and forth like the world’s most awesome lycanthrope between her form and the god’s. The crew that Cyrus amasses around himself is uniformly very cool, with a lot of interesting abilities, some of which are divinely inspired and some of which aren’t. Basically everything magical can be traced back to some god or another; this isn’t a world where mages, per se, exist, but the gods are generous with their followers.

Also, for what it’s worth, nearly everyone in the series is brown to some degree or another, and there’s a handful of prominent gay characters. Thanet is clearly more friendly to the LGBTQIA spectrum (not that they call it that, and the words “gay,” “lesbian” and “transgender” are never actually used) than Everlorn is, and some of the most noteworthy revolutionary activities are triggered by Everlorn trying to mess with Thanet’s rules about who can marry who.

Again, I don’t remember what brought me to this series, but it turns out David Dalglish has written a lot of books, so I’ve got a nice back catalogue to dip into if I want. I’m pretty sure this series is the only one set in this world, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of what he has to offer. If you’re looking for a series with a lot of political intrigue, great action, and a fascinating perspective on fantasy religion, you’ll love these books.

Ah, Mounjaro

On June 8, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I don’t mind the weight loss, but being sick the whole day after each injection is starting to get real old. Today featured a five hour nap and not much else, although I’m about to watch Godzilla Minus One, so hopefully that will be good.