It’s going to be hard for me to review this book without spoilers because the plot is a convoluted one with lots of twists and turns that you just have to read to enjoy, but I will try. “The Death of Jane Lawrence” by Caitlin Starling at first seems like it will be your typical Gothic novel full of tropes. I have very mixed feelings about it in the end for spoilery reasons. It’s got the spooky old house in the provincial countryside; it’s got a handsome, mysterious doctor with a woman locked in a cellar, reminiscent of Jane Eyre; it’s got a feisty heroine who thinks she knows what she wants and defies societal expectations.

But it’s different in that it is a dark-mirror alternate universe version of England in which after a war with this universe’s version of Russia, religion of all kinds basically becomes obsolete, even though people still practice the old religions of magic and witchcraft in secret. Jane is an orphan, raised by guardians, who doesn’t want to return to Camhurst, the scene of a pitched battle that brings up ugly memories. So she contrives a plan to marry the single doctor in town, Augustine Lawrence, a business arrangement, who turns out far more charming than she expected. He only has one rule – that she not return to Lindridge Hall at night.

Best-laid intentions go awry and she discovers the reasons for his secrets. At night at the crumbling old mansion, designed by magicians, the practical doctor is haunted by visions and supposed ghosts.

It is there that the plot takes a turn into the unique. Jane is a bookkeeper and a mathematician with a head for numbers; I thought it was interesting how she started thinking of magic spells like mathematical proofs. The universe that Starling created was fascinating and unique. The twist behind the ghosts-but-not-ghosts also surprised me and was quite inventive.

My mixed feelings come in because I found the prose annoyingly overwrought and emotional, which granted is a genre trope, but I don’t care for that writing style and voice. And Jane is painted as a practical woman with nerves of steel during her first bloody surgical operation, and then she falls to hysterics when she thinks the house might be haunted by the doctor’s dead wife; even her approach to magic is frantic, manic and not that of a sensible, practical person. I would have thought she would have been skeptical until pushed to believe otherwise but we were expected to believe that her character changed on the turn of a dime. As a result I didn’t care for the main character and I found her inconsistent and unreliable, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but I found the characters poorly written.

However, the storytelling is excellent and the universe behind the story is richly imagined. A nice addition overall to the staid gothic canon currently on tap.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control is a gorgeous novella of impeccable worldbuilding. In a future Ghana in which people are glued to their phones, robocops patrol streets, and autonomous vehicles mingle with foot traffic, a mysterious corporation called LifeGen controls technology behind the scenes. A young girl the people call the Adopted Angel of Death, also known as Sankofa, has the power to end life and destroy any technology she touches after a strange alien artifact lands on Earth near the girl’s beloved shea tree on her family’s farm.

Loved everything about this book. Okorafor painted Sankofa as a complex character, doomed to wander from town to town with nothing but her pride, making connections and only to ruin them in the most devastating ways. She’s shown brilliantly as a child with experience beyond her years, and yet still a child whose closest companion is a fox, who climbs trees and talks to cats, who is asked to wear a hijab because of the awful things she has seen and done.

The worldbuilding in such a short space was stunning. Sankofa is an anachronism in a highly technical world, and you get the idea that there is much more going on than meets the eye; but it still feels as if a novella length is enough to tell the story. Okorafor’s world is rich in imagination, detail and folklore, layers of ancient and modern tradition, and thrumming with the incredible speed at which a community can turn into a violent mob when faced with something that does not belong in their world but cannot be stopped.  

I’m back to doing book reviews on my blog! Took a long hiatus due to burnout, but I am taking a different approach with them. Here’s the most recent book I finished.

This book had me at epic fantasy with roots in Ghanian and Arabian folklore, and a sapphic enemies-to-lovers romance.

“The Final Strife” by Saara El-Arifi is Book 1 in a trilogy that centers on the main character Sylah. In this repressive empire on this dystopian world, people are divided into castes based on their blood. Embers, who have red blood, have the most power because they can do bloodwerk magic; using their blood to activate rune patterns. Dusters are second-class citizens and Ghostings are slaves who once rebelled against the ruling class and have been punished for centuries by their overseers dismembering their tongues and hands.

Sylah is one of the Stolen, Ember children kidnapped from their families, raised from infancy to compete in trials to choose new leaders; sleeper agents who will overthrow the government from the inside. But her people are killed and Sylah becomes a drug addict, hopeless and alone. Until she meets Anoor, the Duster raised in her place who needs help with training to compete in the trials.

The “revenge against the colonizer” trope has become so commonplace in fantasy now that frankly, I’m tired of it. There’s always some Chosen One who’s going to overthrow an evil empire. But I loved this book because the characters were complex and it didn’t go the way I expected. Loved the slow-burn romance and that Sylah’s bisexual. I also appreciated the way the author handled her drug addiction; it was sensitive without being trite.

Will definitely be reading more in this series.