What The River Knows by Isabel Ibañez

(Hodderscape, 2023)

Reviewed by John Dodd

Together We Burn surprised me when I read it, I wasn’t expecting to like it anywhere near as much as I did, particularly with the nature of the story. With that in mind, I took a chance on reading What the River Knows, which turned out to be something else entirely.

Inez Olivera is an adventuress in the making, her mother and father are famous explorers and are missing much of the time because of their ongoing adventures. Until they die, and Inez is left with the mystery of what happened, but more importantly, the same adventurous spirit to journey out to unknown lands and find out what happened to them. Thus begins a twisting tale of death, revenge, and mysterious artifacts. After reading Together We Burn, I was expecting betrayals and complex familial situations, and nothing to be what it had been set up to be by the end of the book, and I was not disappointed.

There’s a lot of research gone into this, and the fact that Inez is an artist and several of her drawings are included in the text adds to the realism of the character. Turns out Thomas Cook is a person who made the firm of the same name, and they’re featured as well. The nature of the English and how they treated everyone out there is very clear and the studied arrogance of those with privilege is laid bare at every turn, but it doesn’t detract from the story at hand.

I liked that nothing that we’ve been told in the beginning is correct and that all things are fluid, there’s no concrete facts to anchor the story to, but that fluid nature keeps you guessing all the way through it. There’s the hope that everything will work out fine, but at every opportunity another development takes things further, till there’s so many plates spinning that you need a chart to keep a track of them all.

The story is told in first person, but switches between the characters that are telling the story, thus allowing the story to be told in the immediate perspective, thus allowing a shift to let the audience in at various points when it’s expedient for them to know something that Inez wouldn’t. It’s an interesting way of doing things and works very well for this particular book.

Around three quarters of the way through, I was starting to wonder how all the parts of the book would be drawn together to give us the ending that something this richly written deserves. As the pages sped by, I realised that despite no warning to the contrary, this book isn’t a stand-alone novel. It is very definitely part one of a series of however many, and the last line is one that throws into doubt (again) all the motivations of one of the central characters and while it’s an interesting switch, there is the very real frustration that by the end of the book, we’ve got a perfectly good first act.

But no resolution.

As always, Ibañez writes vibrant and interesting characters, their motivations are real and meaningful, and while they may do stupid things from time to time, those things are perfectly in keeping with the nature of the character as presented. Inez and Whitford are very similar to Zarela and Arturo from Together We Burn, and the same chemistry, the same denial of passion, runs through the book. It’s a compelling story, but I hope that the novel following this one expands on what Ibañez is clearly capable of. I know that books have to be a certain length these days, but I’d have been happier for a six-hundred-page epic that started, built, and then completed the story.

Still, recommended for those who like adventures in exotic locations, and for those who are in my age bracket, ignore the title of the third act, Jewel of the Nile, it’s nowhere as cheesy as that.

Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.