The Blackhart Blades by David Gullen
(Newcon Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is a whimsical slice of fantasy involving the usual suspects: a gang of good-hearted mercenaries, known as Blackhart’s Blades, are taking home the heart of their former leader, when, in need of money, they decide to take on one more job while crossing a remote mountain kingdom. The King of Zangomar having just died, the crown has passed to his daughter, Queen, formerly Princess, Zaphron. However, as the Steward Sieur Bon Banacort explains, in between reciting his own bad poetry, Zaphron rushed to her rooms at the top of one of the castle’s towers the day after her father’s death and hasn’t been seen since. That very same night, the kingdom’s Treasury was emptied and the General of its army, so-called ‘Black’ Talahan, retreated to Hardknot Keep, where he is currently holed up, refusing to come out. The Blades’ mission, should they choose to accept it, is to kill Talahan, return the gold to the Treasury and persuade Queen Zaphron to show herself, although Banacort doesn’t seem that bothered about that last bit. A further pinch of spice is added to the stew by the threat that Zangomar faces from Veng the Usurper whose army is massing on the border. And, it turns out, Hardknot Keep occupies the ‘pinch-point’ at the mouth of the valley which offers the only passable route for such an army to march into the kingdom.
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Review from BSFA Review 22 - Download your copy here.
The Other Side of Never edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane
(Titan Books, 2023)
Reviewed by Ksenia Shcherbino
A good story is always like an onion—it opens new layers of meaning each time you approach it. Even more so, if the book in question is Peter Pan—less than a book and more a mythology, a way of seeing the world, an identity. The protean nature of the original has its impact on its literary progeny: The Other Side of Never is a collection of short stories engaging with Peter Pan, spin-offs and palimpsests, sidequels and crossovers, re-tellings and re-imaginings, and its variety is both its strength and its weakness. I found the stories uneven in their depth, but isn’t it the essence of Peter Pan the book: as Kirsten Stirling mentions in her Peter Pan’s Shadows in the Literary Imagination (2012), the book is full of shadow-play and make belief, with various seekers searching their own truths: Peter Pan, his shadow, Wendy and Captain Hook (both with their own agenda), Wendy’s parents, their children, the crocodile, Captain Hook, the readers (and, as The Other Side of Never shows, the writers with various degrees of fascination, approval and dismissal), their own version of the boy who wouldn’t grow up.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs
(William Morrow, 2023)
Ink Blood Sister Scribe is a love ode to books and their intrinsic magic. It is also a fantasy with elements of a thriller and has all the right ingredients for a captivating read: libraries, mirrors, dysfunctional families, powerful villains, spells, secrets and magic. There are a lot of traditional fairy tales elements that work (or don’t work) according to expectations: evil (or not so evil) stepmothers, old houses filled with magic and mirrors opening passages, magical (or not so magical helpers) along the quest, and the quest itself—a discovery of one’s true story, one’s belonging and one’s identity. There is also gun violence, mutilation and murder. In a nutshell, three narratives are tightly woven together by three main characters: two estranged step sisters, Joanna and Esther, and Nicholas, a scion of a wealthy and powerful family, all with different degrees of book-bound magical abilities and crossing their paths to uncover the secrets of their heritage and parentage.
A Sword of Bronze and Ashes by Anna Smith Spark
(Flame Tree Press, 2023)
This is one of those rare novels in which style and content are skilfully brought together in a way that leaves the reader (or at least, this reader) enthralled by both the story itself and the manner of its execution. It begins with Kanda, a mother and farmer’s wife who, one summer’s morning, while walking down to the water meadow to call the cows in for milking, spots a body floating down the river. Realising immediately what that means, she desperately tries to save her family from the terror that she knows is coming, revealing, as she does so, that in another life she was none other than Ikandera Thygethyn, the greatest of the Six Swords of the Hall of Roven. Together these golden and glorious knights would ride out, repeatedly, from that place of peace and beauty and light, to challenge the darkness, to fight the good fight, and to slaughter their enemies, again and again and again. This is not just a tale about a mighty warrior, however, taking up her sword one last time to protect those she loves. It’s also about facing up to the past, it’s about the hope for redemption and whether that hope can ever be truly fulfilled. It’s about the lies that parents have to tell their children to protect them and about how, inevitably, those lies will twist and strain and maybe even break the bonds between family members. And above all it’s about the contrast between the mythic and the mundane and about which of the two, in truth, offers the greater challenges and the richer prizes to be gained.
Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid
(Del Rey, 2022)
Ava Reid’s Juniper and Thorn is a dark and complex story about identity, silencing and betrayal, and forgiveness. Its fairy-tale setting is as delightful as it is misleading—there is nothing magical about abuse and trauma, and the wondrous and baroque details hide all too common violence and power struggles within a dysfunctional family.
Marlinchen is the youngest daughter of Zmij Vasilchenko, the last wizard of Oblya, an ancient land swallowed by the cosmopolitan and capitalist empire of Rodinya. The eldest daughter, Undine, is beautiful and can see the future, the middle daughter, Rosenrot, is wise and skilled in herbs. As it often is the case with the third child, Marlinchen is plain-faced and simple-hearted, and her gift to read people’s feelings by touching their skin is closer to a curse. Her father seems to love her most, but his love is a curse, too, as there’s neither warmth nor kindness in it.
The Cleaving by Juliet E McKenna
(Angry Robot, 2023)
Reviewed by Estelle Roberts
The Cleaving is a feminist take on the traditional Arthurian legends, being told from the perspective of four of the main female characters, Nimue, Ygraine, Morgana and Guinevere. It begins with a celebration in Winchester of Uther Pendragon’s latest victories, where he announces his intention to become High King, much to the chagrin of many of the other monarchs. This appears to be mostly at the instigation of his advisor Merlin, who, from the start, very much works to his own agenda. It transpires that both he and Nimue are not actually human, but supernatural beings with magical powers, Merlin’s being exceptionally strong. When Nimue dares to question his decisions, she is angrily dismissed, with Merlin asserting his assumed superiority. It is noted at this point that the women, while not completely without power, are reliant largely on their ability to influence the men around them, particularly their husbands and lovers.
Together We Burn by Isabel Ibañez
(Titan Books, 2022)
Reviewed by John Dodd
I have neither time not patience for matadors, I thought I understood the nature and pageantry of it, but now I see that there were so many things about it that I didn’t understand.
Now imagine if it were not bulls that they fought, but dragons…
Zarela lost her mother at a young age to a dragon that got loose, and she lives on with her father in Hispalia, where he continues to work as a Dragonodor for the delectation of a heartless crowd. Then comes the betrayal, when her house is struck down by a series of seemingly random events, her father is left crippled, and she must stand as her own woman against the tyranny of a patriarchal society.
Sing Me to Sleep by Gabi Burton
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2023)
Saoirse Sorkova is the best of the best, the top of her graduating class who wins the brutal hand-to-hand combat that is the ‘Ranking’, to be offered a coveted place as a member of Prince Hayes’ personal guard. She is also a Siren, the last of her race who were exterminated by Keirdre’s fae rulers, who allowed only witches and humans to remain—the former for their magical abilities and the latter for their role as servants. As such she also works a side-gig as an assassin, luring ‘marks’ to their doom on the orders of her employer. However, one of her targets turns out to be a personal friend of the prince and when he takes over the investigation into the murders, Saoirse, with her true identity magically hidden, finds herself aiding the very fae who are hunting her.
All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall Harrison
(Briardene Books, 2023)
As a former editor of both Vector and Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison knows whereof he speaks when it comes to mapping the landscape of recent science fiction. This collection of 55 reviews, covering novels and short stories as well as entire magazine issues, and spanning the years 2005 to 2014, is bookended by a clutch of typically informative essays. It opens with Harrison’s reflections on the changing state of play over the last twenty-odd years, charting the rise—and fall—of New Weird, Mundane SF, Slipstream… all dismissed as movements that ‘turned out to largely be moments’ (p. 10). Nevertheless, he notes, their cumulative effect was to batter down various walls and the debate over ‘racefail’, the subsequent Sad and Rabid Puppy backlash, and the latter’s fade into pathetic irrelevance are all touched upon. Of course, as Harrison emphasises, there is still more to be done, along a number of axes, including the further internationalisation of the genre.
Sparks Flying by Kim Lakin
(Newcon Press, 2022)
Kim Lakin’s Sparks Flying is a truly miscellaneous collection of short stories: Victoriana and voodoo, cyber punk and morality play, grim industrial dystopia and deluge apocalypse, all the oddballs of deft imaginative writing crafted in evocative and distinct voices. Such an expanse of moods, ideas and genres left me with mixed feelings: this is not a book you can read in one go, instead, you keep returning to it, savouring one story at a time.
My favourite is a steampunk variation of Peter Pan, “The Island of Peter Pandora.” With the unthinking cruelty of a precocious child, Peter Pandora is playing God (or Dr Moreau) on a small island in the middle of nowhere. His lost boys are automatons, his pirates—the Rogues—are hybrid monsters he created by experimenting on dead animals, his main antagonist, Hookie—a family pet turned into antagonist through vivisection and animatronics. The palimpsest of Peter Pan, The Island of Dr Moreau and Frankenstein is poignant and powerful, and Lakin’s ingenuity is a treasure trove of conscious echoes and unconscious ripples. Peter’s sister, Bella, lives with the natives of the island, while Peter is tinker-ing with his boys, is it a linguistic vivisection of Tinkerbell? My inner reader claps in belief. Yet with all this intellectual guess making in the background, it is a story about loneliness and loss and despair, when a child scares himself with monsters not to feel scared of the real world.
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