Pasha the Storm by Linda H. Codega
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic one-eyed MC in her 60s, nonbinary MC, bisexual polyamorous PoV character, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: B0FV5W4S7C
Goodreads

Moby-Dick meets The Bone Shard Daughter in this swashbuckling queer fantasy adventure packed with piracy, political intrigue, and the eternal souls of the drowned, for fans of The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi and Black Sun. 

An exiled pirate queen hunts a killer whale on the high seas, while caught between a power-hungry empress and a revolutionary conspiring to end her reign . . .

Pasha the Northern Storm was once the most infamous Meridian pirate who ever sailed the sister oceans. Now, a decade into her exile, Pasha’s afterlife is being held hostage by Atle, an absurdly attractive noble who knows far too much about pirate magic—but not enough about sailing to realize how dangerous Pasha really is.

Minister Atle Itaavar is duty-bound to serve the Kingdom of Garda, but as Queen Thivaldís gathers support for her ambitions of empire, Atle turns to treason to stop her. In order to destroy the Queen’s new necromantic navy, Atle plans to steal the Queen’s flagship, kidnap a washed-up pirate to sail it, and track down a legendary killer whale to bring it down. 

But the hunt for the great undying whale drags Pasha, Atle, and the crew of the Dog into a cosmic reckoning as they face threats from ghosts and gods alike—and the Queen of Garda is close behind.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, then bought my own finished copy. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~an epically horny 60yo pirate queen who’s still got it
~land-queens have much less fun, apparently
~find the finger or lose your soul
~one (1) extremely pissy whale monster
~war-crimes against merfolk

On the one hand, that this book was published at all is SUCH a win for queer readers and writers everywhere: we have an unapologetically raunchy, unstoppably flirtatious sapphic protagonist who is also unstoppably badass despite being in her 60s; our other main character is nonbinary, specifically a nonbinary identity that is tied to an individual’s political intent. There’s a wonderfully happy, well-adjusted polyamorous triad that made me go heart-eyes every time they were on-page. The setting is extremely queernorm, with multiple forms of being nonbinary as recognised parts of the cultures we see. It’s hard to imagine Pasha the Storm getting published even as recently as 10 years ago. I AM SO HAPPY THIS BOOK EXISTS!

For most readers, that’s all you need to know. Alas, I am unreasonably bothered by pretty small issues, which ruined the book for me. But I’m very much the exception; most of the things that bothered me aren’t going to bother anybody else. If the book description sounds cool to you? GO FOR IT.

Me, I have three (main) gripes.

Gripe the first is aimed solely at Erewhon Press, not Codega: nowhere in this book is there any indication that it’s the start of a series, but from the way it ended, there had BETTER be a sequel coming. I’m incredibly sick of publishers presenting books as standalones when they are not, in fact, standalones. (Tor, I am LOOKING AT YOU.) Do not let this become a trend, publishers!!! I don’t care if you’ve signed for the sequel/series already yet or not: I approach a standalone very differently from the way I approach a series-opener. You screw with my ability to enjoy the book if you send me in with the wrong expectations. STOP IT.

Gripe the second: on a line-level, Pasha the Storm has some pretty serious copy-editing issues. Throughout the book, there are sentences which are clearly missing a vital word, or ones which have an extra word that is there in error. Ideas or images are sometimes phrased confusingly or just plain badly. Over and over I ran into sentences where I couldn’t work out what was being said.

It’s not so prevalent or obvious that it renders the book unreadable for most readers – a quick search of Goodreads reviews turns up nobody else talking about typos or errors or wonky prose. And yet there is quite a lot of it, and I got more and more frustrated as I read. Every time there was a missing word or the incorrect tense or a sentence I couldn’t understand, it jolted me out of my immersion in the story. It pissed me the fuck off, to be frank. If Pasha and Atle hadn’t been so freaking cool, I wouldn’t have just DNFed, I’d have defenestrated my copy.

(Is this a ridiculous reaction to copy-editing flaws? Definitely. I can’t help what I’m bothered by, though.)

Examples taken from the final version of the book, which I bought on my own, not my advanced reader copy.

Blood would become a familiar taste for the ship. If she was the first meal, maybe the ship would recognize an offering rather than a sacrifice. Maybe this is what had helped her keep the last time.

Keep what last time? (From context, it might be ‘alive’, but I really don’t know.)

Pasha found this raised the raider crew’s esteem slightly.

Is this supposed to mean, the crew’s esteem of Pasha? Or Pasha’s esteem of the crew? Or something else?

Thivaldis had rarely seen the older man had look so disturbed.

That ‘had’ has to be a typo.

Pasha managed to lounge in a way that was simultaneously appealing and managed to exude an air of nonchalant casualness that Atle could never imitate.

Using ‘simultaneously’ and ‘managed’ sounds deeply wrong to me. Either switch the ‘simultaneously’ to ‘both’, or make it ‘and exuded an air of’, cutting the ‘managed’.

Within two days she had regained her use of her left shoulder, arm, wrist, and hand, all of which she made immediate use of with (spoiler). In that order. Frequently.

Pretty sure this is meant to be a sex thing, but that ‘in that order’ baffles me. You’re…leading your sexcapades from the shoulder? What?

It was hum, a whale song of worship, made of mourning the dead, made of making the ocean full of the dead.

‘It was hum’? ‘Made of making the ocean full of the dead’? What???

The war that Thivaldis has wanted against their neighbors had turned to brothers.

I think I understand what this means – that instead of warring their neighbors, Thivaldis’ country is going to be fighting ‘brother against brother’, ie civil war – but the phrasing is awful.

I could keep going, but you get the point.

Another thing I’d class as copy-editing issues: there are some weird instances of events being forgotten about. When the all-consuming magical call goes out for the pirates to gather, Pasha doesn’t feel it (even though we’ve been explicitly told that Meridian exiles do feel it) and why she doesn’t is never explained. We see another character entombed in rock with no windows or doors, and later he’s gotten out of it, but we never learn how. It really bothered me.

All of this copy-editing stuff baffles me, because I didn’t encounter anything like this in Codega’s previous book Motheater. Which makes me think that either Pasha the Storm was written much faster, or it didn’t get the kind of copy-editing Motheater did. Either way, these writing issues were my biggest frustration with this book. By far. At one point I was close to tears over it. (Yes, I know, no one should be that sensitive to writing issues. TELL THAT TO MY BRAIN. I’d much rather not be a person this unstoppably nit-picky.)

Gripe the third: the climax is way too rushed. The events themselves are MARVELLOUS – but it all happens so quickly that there isn’t really a chance to appreciate any of it. For example, at one point, Pasha and her crew are sailing on a sea that is full of dead people. I mean FULL; you can hardly see that it’s water because it’s so full of bodies all packed/squished together. This is an INCREDIBLE image, but it’s not lingered over, even though Pasha et al are on that sea for some time. The final showdown between Pasha and Atle vs the Vagnmyr (the ‘great undead whale’ from the book description) is both very quick and seriously uncinematic, and I found it so disappointing. I don’t think Pasha needed to be broken into two books or anything, but another 50 pages or so (if that) would have made it so much better.

On a much lesser note, Thivaldis’ entire plotline was dull and also often confusing, and it’s not until that obviously-a-series-opener ending that I understood why we were spending so much time with her. I spent most of the book wishing most of her chapters had been cut. (Not all of them. But a lot of them.)

All right, now that the griping’s out of the way, let’s talk about ALL THE THINGS TO ADORE HERE!

the storm above her would make a tempest blush.

Pasha is every bit as awesome as she thinks she is. She is ridiculous, I would be constantly blushing if I was in her vicinity, but I love her. She’s very funny, and really smart, and unbelievably strong as a person. She’s such a fantastic character, with a massive ego that she somehow always manages to back up, sneaky but also dramatic, and so horny. She’s one of those people that are larger than life, living up to every bit of her reputation and legend. Storytellers often fail to make supposedly charismatic characters actually charismatic, but Codega nailed it with Pasha.

I started off despising Atle – as I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to! – but they grew on me, especially when we learned more about their nonbinary identity. In some ways they’re a bit naive, but I appreciated and respected their idealism, their passion for trying to make their country better. And their frantic attempts to control Pasha were hilarious, as was how appalled they were at themself for finding Pasha attractive. Codega’s excellent at expressing how that feels, the crazy-making effect of intense attraction alongside the repeated urge to bang your head into a wall until your body learns some sense!

Pasha slipped her fingers between Atle’s and Atle wanted to die, actually.

CACKLING.

Pasha and Atle are definitely our leads – and more Pasha than Atle – but third in the roster is Thivaldis, Atle’s cousin and queen of a Germanic/Viking-inspired country that is really Not Happy with her rule. Thivaldis is primed to be a very interesting character, and complicatedly sympathetic, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. The magical connection between monarch and country is something she has a lot of trouble controlling – I never understood why – such that outbursts of temper can cause earthquakes, or level towns, and the like. Thivaldis thinks that making her country larger – conquering their nighbors – will make the bond easier for her, because…the magic will be spread out over a larger area? I never understood this either, since presumably she’d end up with the magic of the conquered nations too, which would only make things worse? But it means she’s desperate to manoeuvre her country to war. Her desperation is very real and convincing, and early in the book I felt really sorry for her. In the rushed climax, though, she…kind of loses it? I didn’t understand what happened, what she did, what changed. At the same time, this was the point at which her story finally became properly interesting – before that, her chapters all kind of re-trod the same ground over and over, especially emotionally – and it’s clear the sequel will be dealing with the fallout of that.

On a more positive note, if you’re wary of fantasy-set-aboard-ships? You don’t have to be with this one. Yes, there’s plenty of sailing terminology, but the book’s not in-your-face about it, and Codega is too smart to write long passages at sea where nothing is happening. There is ALWAYS plot, either because the ship is encountering a new sea monster or enemy, or because Pasha is plotting a mutiny, or – you get the idea. And the passages of high-tension, when everyone is desperately trying to make the ship go faster to outrun someone or something? EXCELLENT. I was holding my breath on the edge of my seat, absolutely FRANTIC for these characters. That’s always impressive, but I think it’s extra impressive writing when that kind of tension is wrapped up in making a ship move, which even at its fastest, is pretty slow by most people’s standards!

She was not a queen but a vessel, not a woman but a wound, torn open every day–every prayer a grain of salt against her.

That being said, don’t expect Pasha the Storm to wrestle at all with the idealisation of pirates and pirate life. We never see any pirates raiding, and only hear about the coastal towns where pirates are welcome; the impression is almost that the common people are hugely in favour of pirates and only the government isn’t. Pirates – who call themselves the Meridians – see themselves as forces against Authority (in all its forms?), giving the finger to governments everywhere; the story here presents them as unambiguously heroic. Which… Sure. It’s a similar vibe to Pirates of the Caribbean, except that in those films, we do see pirates betraying and back-stabbing each other and breaking their codes of honour when it means risking their own necks. None of that here. I can roll with it for the sake of a good story, but some readers are going to be rolling their eyes at it.

The worldbuilding is phenomenal, and I was so, SO happy that Codega did one of my favourite things – gave us extracts of in-world texts in-between chapters, as a way of filling in the details of the world for us. Lots of those details aren’t plot-relevant, but I enjoyed them all immensely; we get scholarly papers, propaganda pamphlets, the minutes from a parliamentary meeting… They’re all brief, but delicious. We even get glimpses into other nations through these excerpts, at least one of which made me laugh out loud.

some professions–notably warriors, bards, and land-owning farmers–have their own pronouns (Vi, vig, vais; Skald, syklda, skaldr; Bu, bon, bond respectively).

Granted, the worldbuilding is sometimes confusing, partly because it can take a while before we get an explanation of what a thing is, sometimes because those explanations aren’t very clear. (I never did make sense of the term/title Gyard’a Olkyunen, which is used in several seemingly-contradictory ways throughout the book.) At least one example was due to what I’d call a poor writerly decision: the choice to name the parliament the Thing. This is a real historical term, but in an English text, it took me a while to understand wtf Thivaldis was on about every time she thought about or referred to the Thing. You don’t need to be historically accurate in a fantasy novel, and sometimes you’d be better served choosing a word less likely to cause confusion among readers who primarily know it through another meaning. (Codega has this problem in Motheater too; I still think using ‘cleavage’ to describe breaks in a mountain isn’t smart in a non-technical context, and in fact we had that use of cleavage in this book too.)

Rus’ head was intricate metalwork, small bands of gold looping down the sides of xer skull, inlaid into the Meridian’s mahogany skin. The metal was of the finest sheen that Pasha had ever seen. Jewels flashed in bright colors inset into the bands–at least five different gemstones, not including the pearls that seemed to outline the finer shapes of Rus’ face.

None of that makes the worldbuilding any less fantastic. This is a world that feels lived in, packed full of different kinds of people with different traditions, different magics, different ideas about the world. Natronic spirit-talkers, the fenhearted, the godsfall 3000 years ago, the seaborn, ‘starfucked’, matelotage – some we learn a lot about, some we only get the edges of, but even the details that aren’t dived into in depth add to the sense that this is a WORLD, a world as diverse and strange as ours. It’s wonder-full and awe-inspiring, and it delighted me endlessly.

Eikons all take it, Atle didn’t want to die. They had just found something that made selfishness feel like absolution.

And when the prose isn’t in need of copy-editing, it’s beautiful; gorgeous imagery, powerful emotion, lines that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Images that are so clever. Or hysterically funny;

He hoped Yrr would remember him fondly, and if she took any other lovers he hoped they would be terrible disappointments.

Will I be picking up the sequel? Probably – I love these characters and I love this world, and since Motheater didn’t have the writing issues Pasha does, I’m hopeful that this is just a one-off and the next book won’t have similar problems. Codega’s prose is mostly gorgeous. I’m very invested in finding out what’s next for this cast, especially after some of the WILD things that happened in the climax.

I’m still kinda heartbroken that this could so easily have been a six-star read, and wasn’t, for me.

Related Posts