Tag: colonialism

#REVIEW: Saints of Storm and Sorrow, by Gabriella Buba

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Really, the phrase “bisexual nun” was all I needed.

Here’s the thing about Gabriella Buba’s Saints of Storm and Sorrow: it’s one of those books where a lot of what I have to say about it is negative, but I’ve already pre-ordered the sequel, out this summer, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading it. I lost some sleep to reading this book, and several times I had to force myself to put it down at the end of the night to go to bed. There’s something compelling and propulsive about Buba’s writing that ended up outweighing some of the things about this book that didn’t make sense or didn’t quite work, and I guess I just need you to keep that in mind while you’re reading this, because I want to talk about the weird stuff. I ended up four-starring this, but in a different mood I could have been talked into a three, and for most of the first half it was going to be a five. So one way or another it’s kind of all over the place, but the tl;dr to this whole post is that the book is well worth the time to read it even if there are some issues.

So here’s the thing. The main character, Lunurin, is a nun. She is also a priestess, quite possibly against her will, of a storm goddess called Aman Sinaya. Now, when I first read this in whatever blurb or online review I saw that caused me to order this, along with the phrase “bisexual nun” and the phrase “Filipino-inspired,” I assumed that this meant that this book wasn’t set on Earth.

And … technically, it isn’t? But it totally is. Lunurin is a Catholic nun. The bad guys are the Spaniards. They speak Spanish. They’re in the Philippines. I’m pretty sure the word “Catholic” never shows up, but … there is no attempt to be subtle here. Lunurin and her female love interest are both Catholic nuns, biracial and despised for being so, in a colonial atmosphere that is more or less identical to the Spaniards colonizing the Philippines. (Do you know any Filipinos? Ever notice how they all have Hispanic-sounding last names? There’s a reason for that.) And the book wants to get into the syncretism that happened whenever Catholicism ran into indigenous religion, which is a fascinating and complex subject, but if the colonized people can literally call down typhoons while being literally possessed by their gods, and Jesus … doesn’t do any of that? It kind of wreaks havoc on your worldbuilding. Christianity toppled, say, Norse religion, sure. But you know who the Norse didn’t have? Actual fucking Thor. And Lunurin can call down lightning by letting her hair down. And everyone just acts like Christianity is a reasonable alternative to that, just because the priests say so?

Nah.

I would kind of love for a book where Christian missionaries run into a religion that literally grants powers to its priesthood, but this isn’t that book and that’s not the story that Buba is interested in telling. She wants to start a book that is already past the colonization phase and so that’s what she gives us, and it’s not exactly the book’s fault that it sent my brain down all sorts of other pathways once I realized what was going on. There’s something to be said about having trouble accepting the basic premise, of course, but I’m a lifelong fantasy/sci-fi reader and suspending disbelief is something I’m good at. But I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t an issue.

Let’s see, what else? This is something that’s going to get fleshed out better in the sequels, I’m sure, but I never quite understood the relationships between any of the main characters. Two of them end up married, and I’m not sure either of them wanted it except one of them kinda did and the other sort of shrugs and rolls with it, and the nun female love interest is an absolute mess of a character, which is yet another complaint that may or may not represent a problem with the book. Messy people exist! But holy shit is Catalina a mess. She’s inconsistent, jealous and a religious fanatic (nun, remember) and there’s also a healthy degree of self-loathing going on as well as some internalized racial hatred, and … she’s realistic, in a lot of ways, I think, maybe? But that doesn’t automatically make her fun to read about.

There are a couple of explicit sex scenes that tonally really do not match the rest of the book, too, so be aware of that. This is not a romantasy by any stretch of the imagination, and I let that fool me into thinking that at no point would glistening cocks be involved. Or, well, one cock that glistens at least once. And, again, I’m not convinced that the people fucking actually like each other, or whether they’re trying to play each other, and it’s okay for the characters to not know each other’s motivations, and it’s okay for the characters to be inconsistent in their motivations, but I definitely don’t get them and I’m not convinced the author did either. The problem is that in this particular scenario complicated characters come off exactly the same as characters with no actual arc and no planning, and I genuinely can’t tell which one this is.

So yeah. Again, I’ve bought the sequel. Lunurin’s relationship with her actual goddess– as opposed to Jesus, who doesn’t seem to be real and doesn’t occupy a lot of her time despite the nunnery going on– is fascinating, and again, she doesn’t appear to like her very much, and while I have my problems with the setting as it currently exists, it’s got its positives just out of sheer originality. It may be that I’ll read book two and tap out for what I’m presuming will be a third book in the future (this may be a duology, I’m not sure) or I might shift into full-throated approval. We’ll see. But I’m giving this one a thumbs-up regardless, now that you’ve read all the caveats and quid pro quos and such.

#REVIEW: The Vagrant Gods series, by David Dalglish

On 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.

#REVIEW: Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

You might remember a few years ago that I did a project called Read Around the World, where I read one book from every US state and from as many countries as I could manage in a year. The final-final-final update never got published, and has a few more countries on it than the “final” 2021 update did, but I never managed to read anything from Israel during that time. I can remember thinking about what to do if I read something from a Palestinian author during the project– would I count that as Israel? Should Gaza and the West Bank count as their own place, and leave, for lack of a better word, Israel Israel untouched? Well, I never had to decide, because I wasn’t about to try rereading the biography of David ben-Gurion I bought when I was in Israel on a dig after college, and nothing else ended up dropping into my lap.

I haven’t really worried about geographical diversity too much since 2021. Or, at least, I didn’t until October 7 happened, and I decided to make a stronger effort to find some books by Palestinian authors to read. I don’t think I talked much, if at all, about Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, which I read in … December? I think? But Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World has been sitting on my shelf for way too long, and since I wanted something different after three straight Red Rising books, I decided it was time to dig into it.

So, I just wrote a post where I told you to read Red Rising because it was good. I still stand by that post, obviously. But you need to read Against the Loveless World because it is important, which is not quite the same thing. Don’t misunderstand me– it is also good; I would not have, for the second day in a row, read an entire book in less than 24 hours if it was not a good book– but it is a story that Americans in particular need to hear.

Against the Loveless World is a novel, not a memoir, but it is written in the style of a memoir and both Abulhawa and the main character, Nahr, are Kuwaiti-born Palestinian refugees. Abulhawa has lived in America since she was 13 and Nahr narrates her book from solitary confinement inside an Israeli Supermax prison, so this is clearly not a self-insert. It feels a lot like My Government Means to Kill Me in that respect. Nahr grows up more or less happily in Kuwait, but the Iraqi invasion leads to persecution of Palestinians and her family is forced to move to Jordan. She and her family spend the rest of the book moving back and forth between Jordan and Palestine; I don’t know for sure that the word “Israel” is ever used in the book; when it is grammatically necessary to refer to it the phrase “the Zionist entity” is often used. The book takes its time with her radicalization, saving the events that put her in prison for the last fifth or so of the book, but from the moment Saddam invades it becomes clear over and over that by virtue of being a Palestinian and in particular a Palestinian woman she is considered to be less than nothing by everyone with any power around her. When her husband abruptly abandons her and disappears things get even worse and she is forced(*) into prostitution for a while, she manages to provide for her family but at the cost of not being able to admit to anyone how she is doing it.

Her first trip to Palestine is so that she can obtain a divorce, which of course she can’t do without permission of her husband, the guy who abandoned her and prompted the need for a divorce in the first place. He more or less signs power of attorney over to his brother, and it is when the two meet that the book really takes off. She’s able to meet some members of her family for the first time as well, family members who were never able to come visit in Jordan or Kuwait because leaving the country would have led to the Israeli government stealing their homes out from underneath her. At one point she visits her mother’s childhood home, which is occupied by a colonizer at the time. It’s … quite a moment.

At any rate, the book is marvelous, and I don’t want to spoil a lot of it. But I will read more by Susan Abulhawa, and I think I’m going to try to find a few more Palestinian fiction authors to read work by, which I’ll be able to get to in a million years, since I am so far behind. You really, really, really ought to strongly consider picking this one up. It’s cheap. Do it.

(*) It’s more complicated than that word implies, and Nahr’s relationship with her, uh, procuress is incredibly layered and frankly one of the highlights of the book. If you’re thinking you might need a trigger warning about this book, though, you’re right.

REPOST #REVIEW: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R.F. Kuang

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

8/28/22 addendum: This book finally came out last week, and despite pre-0rdering it months ago it took until Thursday for my copy to show up, because Amazon is buttheads. I may actually end up with three copies of it eventually because the UK cover is absolutely amazing. At any rate, I still love this book, and you still need to read it, so reread my original review in case you missed it.

I admit it: I thought about just putting Babel in as the name of the book for the headline there, but really, when a book has this grandiose of a title and more especially when it earns this grandiose of a title, you really need to lean into it. So you get the whole thing.

First things first: this book does not come out until August 23rd. I have had absolutely incredible luck lately with getting advanced reader copies of books I was frothing at the mouth to read– first getting a copy of Jade Legacy several months early, and now lucking out and getting my hands on Babel by winning a Twitter drawing. I have reviewed all three books of her series The Poppy War, and two of the three ended up on my Best Of list at the end of the year. To be brief– because this book has nothing to do with those books except for some overlapping themes– they are an astounding achievement in fantasy, particularly when you take into account that even now, four books into her career, R.F. Kuang is somehow only 26 years old, meaning that I was in college when she was born.

Christopher Paolini, eat your fuckin’ heart out.

Anyway.

Babel is set between 1826 and, oh, the mid-1830s or so, primarily at Oxford, and is at least mostly a historical fiction novel. Why “mostly”? Because in the real world there wasn’t a gigantic tower in the middle of campus that housed the Royal Institute of Translation, which kept the British Empire afloat via a translation-and-silver-based magic program. That’s … new. And it’s weird to say that Kuang mostly adheres to real history other than this thing that literally touches every aspect of the British Empire, but she does. And this is where I’m kind of perfectly situated for this to be my favorite of her books: you might recall that at one point I was working on a Ph.D in Biblical studies– the Hebrew Bible, specifically– which means that while intellectually I can’t hold a candle to any of the four students who form the main cohort of this book, it does mean that I’ve had a lot of the same conversations that they have at various points in the book, and that I’ve spent lots of time thinking hard about a lot of the same issues that are inherent to the concept of “translating” something from one language to another, even before you get to the part where one of the things being translated is literally considered holy Scripture.

Also, one of my buddies from that graduate program is now an actual professor at Oxford, so while I’ve never set foot on the campus I know people who work there, which … doesn’t mean anything at all, actually, but I’m happy to bask in Bill’s reflected glory– and if you’re reading this, my dude, you must find a copy of this book when it comes out. And then send me one, too, because the UK cover is way better than the US one and books with sprayed edges make my jibbly bits feel funny.

The main character of the book is called Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan who is taken as a ward by a professor at the Institute of Translation and brought back to London, eventually to become a student at Babel himself. Why “called” Robin Swift? Because Dr. Lowell tells him that his actual name– never revealed in the text– is no fit name for an Englishman, and makes him choose another one. When Robin arrives at Oxford, he meets the rest of his cohort, composed of two women, one of which is Black, and a young Muslim from India. You may perhaps be raising an eyebrow at this, and you’d be right to, as Oxford didn’t admit women or anything other than white people in the 1830s, but Babel has different standards and different rules than the rest of the university. The book follows Robin and his friends through their first four years at the university, as they learn more about Babel’s workings and about how the silversmithing that underlies so much of Britain’s power works, all while living in Britain and attending a university while, for three of them at least, being visibly Not British.

So in addition to being another really good R.F. Kuang book about a young scholar in over their head (no uterus-removals in this one, though) this book is also about racism and colonialism. In fact, I’d say it’s mostly about racism and colonialism, and specifically the way both manifest themselves in the university, and about what it’s like to be complicit in the oppression of your own people, and what “your own people” even really means if you were raised away from them. And all of that sounds really deep, and it is, but it’s also a hell of a good story, with fascinating characters and lots of worldbuildy magic stuff that may as well be serotonin injected directly into my brain.

I loved the Poppy War books. I loved this more than any of them, and if R.F. Kuang wasn’t one of my favorite writers before, she absolutely is now. Pre-order this, immediately. You can have it in August.

#REVIEW: Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R.F. Kuang

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

I admit it: I thought about just putting Babel in as the name of the book for the headline there, but really, when a book has this grandiose of a title and more especially when it earns this grandiose of a title, you really need to lean into it. So you get the whole thing.

First things first: this book does not come out until August 23rd. I have had absolutely incredible luck lately with getting advanced reader copies of books I was frothing at the mouth to read– first getting a copy of Jade Legacy several months early, and now lucking out and getting my hands on Babel by winning a Twitter drawing. I have reviewed all three books of her series The Poppy War, and two of the three ended up on my Best Of list at the end of the year. To be brief– because this book has nothing to do with those books except for some overlapping themes– they are an astounding achievement in fantasy, particularly when you take into account that even now, four books into her career, R.F. Kuang is somehow only 26 years old, meaning that I was in college when she was born.

Christopher Paolini, eat your fuckin’ heart out.

Anyway.

Babel is set between 1826 and, oh, the mid-1830s or so, primarily at Oxford, and is at least mostly a historical fiction novel. Why “mostly”? Because in the real world there wasn’t a gigantic tower in the middle of campus that housed the Royal Institute of Translation, which kept the British Empire afloat via a translation-and-silver-based magic program. That’s … new. And it’s weird to say that Kuang mostly adheres to real history other than this thing that literally touches every aspect of the British Empire, but she does. And this is where I’m kind of perfectly situated for this to be my favorite of her books: you might recall that at one point I was working on a Ph.D in Biblical studies– the Hebrew Bible, specifically– which means that while intellectually I can’t hold a candle to any of the four students who form the main cohort of this book, it does mean that I’ve had a lot of the same conversations that they have at various points in the book, and that I’ve spent lots of time thinking hard about a lot of the same issues that are inherent to the concept of “translating” something from one language to another, even before you get to the part where one of the things being translated is literally considered holy Scripture.

Also, one of my buddies from that graduate program is now an actual professor at Oxford, so while I’ve never set foot on the campus I know people who work there, which … doesn’t mean anything at all, actually, but I’m happy to bask in Bill’s reflected glory– and if you’re reading this, my dude, you must find a copy of this book when it comes out. And then send me one, too, because the UK cover is way better than the US one and books with sprayed edges make my jibbly bits feel funny.

The main character of the book is called Robin Swift, a Chinese orphan who is taken as a ward by a professor at the Institute of Translation and brought back to London, eventually to become a student at Babel himself. Why “called” Robin Swift? Because Dr. Lowell tells him that his actual name– never revealed in the text– is no fit name for an Englishman, and makes him choose another one. When Robin arrives at Oxford, he meets the rest of his cohort, composed of two women, one Black, and a young Muslim from India. You may perhaps be raising an eyebrow at this, and you’d be right to, as Oxford didn’t admit women or anything other than white people in the 1830s, but Babel has different standards and different rules than the rest of the university. The book follows Robin and his friends through their first four years at the university, as they learn more about Babel’s workings and about how the silversmithing that underlies so much of Britain’s power works, all while living in Britain and attending a university while, for three of them at least, being visibly Not British.

So in addition to being another really good R.F. Kuang book about a young scholar in over their head (no uterus-removals in this one, though) this book is also about racism and colonialism. In fact, I’d say it’s mostly about racism and colonialism, and specifically the way both manifest themselves in the university, and about what it’s like to be complicit in the oppression of your own people, and what “your own people” even really means if you were raised away from them. And all of that sounds really deep, and it is, but it’s also a hell of a good story, with fascinating characters and lots of worldbuildy magic stuff that may as well be serotonin injected directly into my brain.

I loved the Poppy War books. I loved this more than any of them, and if R.F. Kuang wasn’t one of my favorite writers before, she absolutely is now. Pre-order this, immediately. You can have it in August.

#REVIEW: King of the Rising, by Kacen Callender

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I was not a huge fan of the first volume of Kacen Callender’s Islands of Blood and Storm duology, Queen of the Conquered. Feel free to click through to the review, of course, but the short version is that I felt like the book was both too ambitious for its own good and a main character who was not only not especially likable to the reader but was also flatly detested by literally every single character in the book. It had potential, though, and I decided to keep an eye on Callender in the future although at the time I wasn’t committing to picking up the sequel to the book.

Well. Kacen Callender is from St. Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands, and I hadn’t read a book from there last year, so …

It took a while to get to it; in fact, when I picked it up yesterday it had been on my unread shelf since 2021, and had spent more time there than any other book on the shelf. I honestly just picked it up to get it out of the way, and for a brief moment I considered not actually reading it, since it’s not like the Read Around the World thing is something official any longer.

*cough*

It’s a lot better.

King of the Rising begins exactly where Queen of the Conquered left off, at the beginning of a massive slave revolt on an archipelago colonized by the white-skinned Fjern, and if you want the historical equivalent you need nothing more than to recall that Callender is a St. Thomian, and St. Thomas was colonized by the Dutch. What makes this a fantasy novel and not just thinly-veiled historical fiction is the existence of Kraft, which is basically X-Men style magical powers that some of the characters possess. Kraft, if I’m being honest, is the weakest part of the book and in general its main role in the plot is to give the main character of this book and the main character of the last book a way to communicate with each other across long distances.

That switch in narrators is probably the singe change that that played the biggest role in my enjoying this book more than Queen. Sigourney was kind of rough as a narrator. She was very passive in a lot of ways and literally everyone hated her, and she just wasn’t a great choice as an MC. This book is told from the perspective of Løren Jannik, her half-brother, and while Sigourney still plays a pretty significant role in the story, Løren is a much more dynamic character than she was. He is still flawed, certainly; one of the major themes of the book is leadership during crisis, and the book isn’t interested in backing away from his failures as both a leader of the revolt and as a person in general. But the main thing is that he makes decisions during the book and while some of them are definitely bad decisions, at least he acts throughout the course of the book. Sigourney was just too passive, and pushing her offscreen or at least into the background made King of the Rising a superior read.

I probably should have put this first, but, like, you don’t need a trigger warning for this one, do you? Because this book is about a slave revolt against a colonial slave power, with everything that implies, and it can be a really fucking rough read. If you read Queen of the Conquered you should absolutely pick this up even if you didn’t particularly like it. If you did like Queen, I feel like you’ll really enjoy this one.