Four books I read this spring: Exit, Ghost; Potential of Radio and Rain; The Bruising of Qilwa, and Liar, Dreamer, Thief

 

Four beautiful books that I read this spring, with reviews.

 

 Exit, Ghost by Jennifer R. Donohue

 

This is the modern fantasy retelling of Hamlet which I never knew I needed, set on the Jersey Shore with a snarky gender-flipped Hamlet and her dog named Yorick, a vivid cast of characters, and witches and dark magic galore. A deeply atmospheric, immersive story of grief, loss, love, mystery, doubt, and revenge.

 

Juliet “Jules” Duncan is heiress to a railroad fortune, a recent college graduate, and a witch. When we first meet her, she’s still recovering from the gun attack which killed her father in his own apple orchard, and which left her with a brain injury. She’s reeling from grief, and she’s just conducted a ritual to summon her father’s spirit, who tells her that his murderer is long-time family friend (and his widow’s new fiancé), “Uncle” Hector.

 

One of the pleasures of this book is seeing how the author translates specific plot points and characters from Hamlet to her modern retelling—the correspondences that are kept, updated, or cleverly twisted. Jules is at least as lost, bitter, prickly, cynical, and grieving as the Danish prince—if not more so. But unlike the prince, she has more than one devoted friend, and a highlight of this book are Jules’ friendships with her roommate and fellow witch, Ashley, and the book’s Ophelia stand-in (daughter to the Duncan family’s head of security), Una. Jules also has a complicated relationship with Una’s brother and Laertes stand-in, John, and to say more about her relationship with both siblings would be to give too much away.

 

 Exit, Ghost is a sly, witty homage to Hamlet that is also very much its own thing. It’s a story about a young woman in grief, trying to decide (like Hamlet) whether or not supernatural voices can be trusted, whether and how to avenge her father. And it’s also a love letter to the Jersey Shore, a story about a summer on the beach; about riding down a famously haunted Jersey road, navigating roommates and friends’ bad love lives and a period of young adulthood (college and post-college) that is challenging even to those who haven’t lost fathers to murder in an orchard. Dark magic and witchery are here, but the heart of this book is about a young woman facing her doubts and continuing to live through grief. A beautifully-written story, magical and compelling and moving.

Note: Thank you to the author for an advance review copy of this book.

 

The Potential of Radio and Rain by Myna Chang

“The prairie is made of dirt and sky, of shushling grass and starling night—and the creatures caught between.”

 

A gorgeous collection of miniatures, flash tales of the shortgrass prairie, lit with longing. These are stories of small towns, teenagers desperate to get away and adults just trying to survive. Stories of a tornado that upends everything, of rebellions small and large, people loving and leaving one another; a group of teens driving to a rock concert, a man who still retains the muscle memory of how to handle a horse even as dementia robs him of all else. These are stories of desperation and grit, dust storms and drought and longing. And these are tales of magic—of starlit nights and lightning bugs, of moments of sweet freedom, of the fat years when times are good, of the magic when it rains. Myna Chang’s small fictions build up to a small, interconnected world. An enthralling collection, where prose becomes poetry.

 

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

 

A fascinating secondary-world fantasy novella that is about many things: immigration, history, trauma on both individual and mass population levels, healing and blood magic, and the story of one family just trying to survive. It’s also a medical mystery, an aspect I found particularly interesting as someone with a biology background. And it all takes place in a richly textured, Persian-inspired queer-normative world.

 

As the book opens, Firuz-e Jafari is looking for a job. Firuz, a nonbinary character who uses “they/them” pronouns, is a refugee to the city-state of Qilwa, fleeing the persecution and genocide that targets people of their Sassanian ethnic heritage in their homeland. . and which particularly targets practitioners of Sassanian blood magic. Luckily, Firuz quickly finds a job as an assistant to the healer Kofi. Firuz keeps their blood magic abilities a secret, and uses more accepted magical arts to heal the sick. A plague is ravaging the city, and Firuz and Kofi’s skills are both in great demand. Slowly, the plague fades as Firuz begins building a new life and home: caring for the sick, drawing close to Kofi and others, caring for their mother and brother and the orphaned Sassanian refugee that they adopt off the streets. Things are still tough (there’s always ethnic tensions, there’s always political pressures on their health clinic), but things are looking up until Firuz sees the first signs of a new, mysterious plague with “blood-bruising” symptoms never seen before. 

 

The world-building in this novella is layered and intricate. The geopolitics and history underlying this world—the history behind the Sassanian refugees’ persecution, and their own past history of empire—are complicated and only slowly explained. The magical system is also intriguing and complex; I particularly liked the way both magical healing and “physicks” (non-magical healing which appears to be based on knowledge of real-world anatomy and biology) co-exist, and the biological details of the “blood-bruising” plague. It is in many of the small domestic details, however, that this world comes to life. A description of an eggplant dish, the act of making tea or heating a bath—in this and other domestic details, the author evokes the feel of a textured, truly lived-in world. Firuz and their struggles feel real; even apart from magic and mystery, the story of one family of refugees trying to survive and build a new home is compelling on its own. And the author has a particular gift for evoking the complexities of family relationships—both the tensions and the love.

 

The pacing is a little slow at the start, but it picks up and then races as multiple threads begin to converge. Firuz’s past and secrets, the secrets their mentor Kofi keeps, the accelerating new “blood-bruising” plague, and blood magic talents of the orphaned Sassanian whom Firuz adopted off the streets—all come together in a dramatic climax. All in all, this is an impressive debut: a rich and layered story with compelling characters, beautifully told, that raises complex questions and issues without easy answers.  

Note: Thank you to Tachyon Books for an advance reader copy of this book.

 

Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

Maria Dong’s debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, is like nothing I’ve read before. It’s an intricately plotted crime thriller where neither the narrator nor the reader knows what’s real and what isn’t. A story drenched in magic that may all be delusion. A genre-bending adventure that subverts all your expectations; a tense, hallucinatory, deeply moving ride.

 

When we first meet the story’s protagonist, Katrina Kim, she is, to put it charitably, a mess. Once a promising student on a music school scholarship, she’s now a college dropout abandoned by her parents and working a soul-sucking temp job in hospital billing. Her only friend and support is her roommate Leoni, who often isn’t even around. Anxious and unstable, it’s all Katrina can do to get herself to work on time. And at work, Katrina has developed an unhealthy obsession with one of her coworkers, Kurt. She doesn’t speak to him, but she spies on him, rifles through his desk when he’s not around. She doesn’t think he’s noticed her. But then one night Katrina is on a bridge and sees Kurt jump to his death. Before he jumps, he tells her that it’s her fault.

 

What follows is one of the strangest murder mysteries I’ve ever read. As Katrina works to solve the mystery of Kurt’s death, the mystery of her own life—her estrangement from her parents, and the identity of all those close to her—unravels as well. Katrina sees symbols, portents, magic in the world. She was convinced that Kurt might see the world similarly. Years ago, she read a portal fantasy children’s book, Mi-Hee and the Mirror-Man, and in times of stress she retreats to that world; the magical “kitchen-door world” of the book leaks into her real world, and magical mushroom forests sprout in her kitchen. Analogues of people she knows in real life also show up in the “kitchen-door world.” Fantasy and arcane rituals (counting steps, fixating on prime numbers, drawing “sigils” on doors as protection) are all part of Katrina’s coping mechanisms for dealing with life. Is any of this real? Or as Katrina’s roommate tells her, is she utterly insane?

 

Liar, Dreamer, Thief is a slippery book in which we don’t know what’s real—not for large portions of the story. This is a book that sets up expectations and then demolishes every one. It is a magic trick of a book, with the author pulling out revelation after revelation at the end, making you see the beginning in an entirely new light. It is also a book of deep compassion. Katrina is mentally ill, but there are ways in which her coping mechanisms work for her, even as there are also ways in which they hurt her and make her life difficult. And though Katrina is indeed a mess, although she cannot even (as her roommate says), take out the garbage alone without somehow messing it up, she is also a spectacular badass when it counts. She’s tenacious, cunning, and fiercely loyal to those she loves.

 

There’s so much I could say about this book, yet I don’t want to give too much away. This is a book that’s trippy crime thriller, coming-of-age novel, workplace novel, a story of Asian-American diaspora (the relationships between Katrina and her Korean immigrant parents are beautifully done), and also somehow (kinda?) a portal fantasy novel in reverse. It’s gorgeously magical, propulsive, devastating, heartbreaking, and then cathartic. It’s a book for all of us who have perhaps fallen too hard for a fantasy world, and taken it too much to heart. It’s also a book for all of us who have trouble fitting in, and are just trying our best. Which, in the end, is perhaps all of us.