Maej by Dale Stromberg
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic MCs, trans MC, F/F, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: 394966632X
Goodreads
Hundred-day children are stolen from the Ilasghra every week. No one can stop it.
Madma and Tantli have grown up like sisters in the tentslum of the Ilas, where their people are starved and beaten. All their lives, they’ve powerlessly witnessed the regular abduction of hundred-day babies born with too much mæj. Just before an Ilasi boy is killed by djanizaries for daring to venture beyond the tentslum walls, his final words lead Madma to the Gaol where the boy’s stolen sister is locked away—a place from which Ilasi children never return. Burning to act, Madma vows to free the imprisoned girl, setting off events that will ignite a revolution and convulse the Sforre-Yomnic matriarchy from its squalid dungeons to the labyrinthine paths of its scheming elite’s hovering parliament.
Delicately plotted, sumptuously set and vibrantly worded, MAEJ is a lavish standalone high-fantasy epic, perfect for fans of A Stranger in Olondria or The Spear Cuts Through Water.
Highlights
~god-tier worldbuilding
~linguistic delight
~matriarchal parliaments do it in the sky
~time to join the resistance
~evil is treating people like things
The tl;dr version is: this is Lord of the Rings meets Shakespeare in a matriarchy. The official description claims it’s perfect for fans of A Stranger in Olondria or The Spear Cuts Through Water, and it is completely correct. GO READ IT.
If you’d like to know more, then you have two options to choose from! The first version of this review is the shorter, caps-locky version that went on Goodreads; the second is the longer, ‘smarter’ version I posted to r/Fantasy, slightly edited here. Read which you choose! Personally, I don’t think either one comes close to expressing how phenomenal this book is, but I tried!
Review the First (short version)
HOLY FUCK. WHAT EVEN. HOW CAN ANYONE WRITE LIKE THAT?! I’ve just been staring at the ceiling for the last few days, because every other book feels like a letdown after that! I was so impressed with Wolf and His King by Finn Longman last year, because I thought that was doing really cool things with language, especially with tenses and POV. And I mean, it was! But MAEJ just BLOWS IT OUT OF THE WATER.
Before the book even gets started, the author’s note gives us the head’s up that the different languages are presented in different forms of English, and I immediately thought that was genius. What a freaking CLEVER way to make it instantly obvious to the reader what language is being spoken! Just as it would be to people in this world! The IMMERSIVE EFFECT, oh my freaking gods!
But it’s not just the dialogue, the WHOLE BOOK is written in a kind of – semi-Shakespearean style? And it’s AMAZING. So many incredible words I’d never heard before, that were a delight to go and look up, and almost all of them it was already clear what they meant from context. And the slang and insults and proverbs and all! Just using ‘wife’ to mean ‘woman’ is so smart I could SHRIEK (because the story’s set in a matriarchy, and ‘woman’ comes from ‘man’ so it would make no sense for a matriarchal culture to base their nouns for humans around men!) and that’s the TINIEST PART OF IT ALL!
Which is without touching the rest of the worldbuilding, or the freaking STORY! I was so gutted when it ended – because in the ebook, it stops at about 93%, the rest is author’s note and the glossary and things, so I didn’t realise the book was almost over until suddenly it was. I didn’t want it to end! But at the same time the ending was pretty perfect? There was no NEED for more story, which makes it the perfect place to stop.
I kind of want to WAIL at how unknown MAEJ is, it should be FAMOUS, it should be STUDIED AT UNIVERSITY. I feel such contempt for anyone who doesn’t finish it, what cowards, how could you, how dare you! But also I feel so sorry for people like that, because wow, you were lucky enough to discover the kind of book we get MAYBE once a generation, and you didn’t stick with it. That is a tragedy. It’s like seeing the face of god and turning away. You have my heartfelt pity.
I have never had a book hangover this intense. Rationally I know I will be able to read novels again in a while, but right now it feels like I can never read another word of fiction because WHAT COULD COMPARE TO MAEJ??? What book would not be a letdown after reading THIS?! I have been ruined for literature! All that is left to me is non-fiction. Farewell, novels, I did love thee so, but now I must abjure to the shelves of non-fiction only, for it cannot be borne that any novel I try is not MAEJ.
Review the Second (long version)
I am here to tell you about a book you probably have not heard of, but which I think MANY people which read this blog will love, so!
It’s called MAEJ, and it’s by Dale Stromberg. And I shall pitch it to you as ‘Lord of the Rings meets Shakespeare in a matriarchy.’
What I mean by that is not that it’s a quest, but that we are talking about god-tier level worldbuilding, written in English that is semi-Shakespearean. And the setting is a matriarchy, ofc.
Bear with me.
A lantern bat flits through the garden just about Meadguard’s head, its belly glowing orange.
This is a world where there are birds that turn into fish for half the year. People keep tiny griffons as pets. The years are 181 days long, so a 30yo is 15 in our terms. The country Hwoama is a matriarchy; the book is set in Sforre Yomn, the capital of one of its provinces. Not far away is Enn, which is a patriarchy. There is virtually no conflict between the two; that is not the source of the plot. Almost everyone in Hwoama produces maej (magical energy), though relatively few people can do much with it. Even so, maejwork has made Hwoama advanced and rich.
Within Sforre Yomn are an oppressed group called the Illasi. They are forced to live in an enclosed slum, the law prevents them from having or using money, they can be beaten or killed at whim, and when they give birth to ‘hundred-day children’ – who have lots of maej but will not live very long – those babies are confiscated and taken away, no one knows why.
The Illasi are the heart the book revolves around. The cast is fairly large but the main characters are two Illasi, Madenhere, who has secretly learned some basic maejwork, and Taraentlere, her best friend who does sex work under a false identity. Over the course of the book, they get drawn into the struggle for Illasi freedom – but we’re also following politicians and warriors and someone who caches her maej into a form others can buy and use. There’s an embassy from Enn, come to Sforre Yomn in the hopes of acquiring the secrets of maejwork. There are tons of minor characters, who we only follow briefly or rarely; gamblers, this world’s version of police officers, slaves, ghosts, all sorts.
MAEJ is a standalone, but I think it’s perfect for the sorts of readers who love big long Epic Fantasy series, the kinds of readers who are well-practiced at patience and keeping track of multiple plotlines and dozens of characters with very not-our-world names. MAEJ is A Lot from the first page, but I think a lot of readers who find it intimidating could handle it if they just gave it a shot.
Do you love the linguistics of Middle Earth? Then you should have SO MUCH FUN with this book. Before the story even starts, the author’s note gives us the head’s up that the different languages are presented in different forms of English. Tell me that’s not genius, not the PERFECT way to place us in the same position as a native of this setting, ie able to tell one language from another immediately!
That’s the dialogue, but the rest of the prose goes hard as well. It’s AMAZING. Remember I called it semi-Shakesperean? There were so many FABULOUS words I’d never heard before, that were a delight to go and look up (even though mostly, looking them up confirmed that they meant what it sounded like they meant from context). MAEJ is full of slang and insults and proverbs, some of which I actually started using without noticing in normal life (‘she mads me’ to mean ‘she drives me nuts’, for example. I just think it’s more fun to say!)
“I am sore ashamed that such a chalk-hearted, ague-shivering, hontish, twittering, rort-boasting go-astern miscreant–aye, that such a ruffing, teatless, slabbering, thrice-feagued, tettle-scratching, crizzle-pated broke-branch-rampike of a blackguard hath had her ticket chopped beyond our wall and not within it!”
Stromberg’s linguistic genius is far from limited to insults: he uses obsolete words (guilesome, antient) and rare or archaic ones (pietism, irrefragable, glacid) with abandon, and I’m very suspicious that some terms are entirely his own invention (properly Shakespearean). I found this a joy: some readers are going to find it a challenge. But I truly think the same skill that lets you roll with the math-magic in Yoon Ha Lee’s Hexarchate, or keep up with Tolkien’s linguistics, is able to cope with this. Whether you happily obsess over that kind of thing or are able to let it wash over you (to be completely honest I’m usually in the latter camp), if you’ve read Lord of the Rings, you can handle MAEJ.
“Foh, ye tribe of sillytonians! What, have lost your wits?” laughs Taraentlere at the gamboling animals. “A pox o’ ye lunaticks!” She leaves them still muiing and maiing.
More than that, I don’t believe for a second that I’m the only reader who will revel in it. Every single word is exactly what and where it should be, has been placed in its sentence like a jewel in its setting, with full awareness of all its potential implications for the meaning. A brilliant example is that in Hwoama, they don’t say ‘woman’ – they say ‘wife’. Because it’s a matriarchy, and ‘woman’ comes from ‘man’, and why would a matriarchy use a word that comes from ‘man’? (Whereas in English, ‘wife’ originally meant something like ‘female human’, so it’s perfect for this.)
That’s the kind of detail that so many authors wouldn’t think of, but Stromberg is, as I said, a GOD-TIER worldbuilder. And not only will you never catch him out on a detail like that, but he also scatters little delights throughout the book, irrelevant to the plot but which, I feel, will bring joy to anyone who reads Fantasy because it’s the genre of wonder: geckos that teleport in a puff of smoke, lantern bats, opalescent sharks, rivers of air. I love how casually he lets fall things like this; the reveal that the police force have SKYSHIPS is presented as no big deal – because of course it isn’t, to the characters we’re reading about. The things they take for granted, they don’t make a fuss about to flag them for the reader. And so when we do learn about them, it’s a mic-drop, and you can FEEL how much fun the author had with all the little beasties and magics and things, how much he ENJOYS sharing them with readers who absolutely were not expecting them!
“With what eyes must a ruler see?”
“She must watch her enemies with the eyes of a pineapple,” answers Rhyli.
One (of many) things that had me in awe about this book was how often later events dramatically changed the view of earlier ones. It wasn’t constant, but a bunch of times I was left rapidly re-evaluating what I thought had happened; or even if the facts of the matter were unchanged, I’d realise things that looked like coincidence were nothing of the sort, and that completely altered what I thought about some characters, some actions. I’d look back and realize this stirring speech in that one scene was actually deeply ironic, or that some innocuous thing was actually grim foreshadowing. It was like Stromberg wrote multiple versions of the scene and had me read all of them, and each one gave me a wildly different perspective on plots or characters.
Actually, the more I think about it, the clearer it is that Stromberg has a pattern of – or preference for? – revealing information many readers would consider crucial or at least important much later than most authors would. It’s a way of challenging our preconceptions and biases, I think – or at least, that’s functionally the effect! One of the more obvious examples was the approach to queerness; MAEJ is extremely, but also very casually, queer, but it takes a while for the reader to realise/learn that. This is my favourite take on queer fantasy – no coming out stories, no making a big production of it, just completely normalising it – but it feels potentially mischievous here. It creates a false sense of security for any bigots – and by the time they might realise they’re reading a queer book, they can’t apply their usual snap judgements to the characters because at this point, the reader knows these characters.
Possibly that’s not the intent at all, of course; possibly Stromberg just doesn’t think it’s information we need to know, doesn’t think that a character’s sexuality or gender identity is a defining trait of theirs. That’s an approach I can fully get behind. But it definitely feels as though Stromberg wants us to make up our minds about each character without that knowledge, first – maybe so that we notice and recognise if our feelings change once we do have that knowledge? (Even if the way our feelings change is positive.) In the same way that various scenes later take on a whole new light in hindsight when we learn things we didn’t know at the time?
I don’t know, but I love it. I think it’s brilliant.
Just. I cannot oversell how incredible this book is, on every possible level. As a reader who often feels like I’ve read everything there is to read, MAEJ made me so excited. It’s rich and heady and complex, it’s loving and dark, it’s so incredibly unique. You should read it just for what Stromberg’s doing with language in it – but if you do, you’ll absolutely get pulled into the story of these fully fleshed-out, vividly alive characters, all of them flawed, all of them Doing Their Best (whatever Best means for them).
I don’t want MAEJ to sound intimidating. It’s an infinitely easier read than Wheel of Time or Malazan or anything like that. It’s only one book, not a series. It doesn’t feel like a slog, like work to read; it feels like it’s revelling in and celebrating everything Fantasy readers love about the genre, and it wants us to come revel in and celebrate that too. Speaking as someone who’s been obsessed with Fantasy since I was tiny, who reads 200+ books a year every year: this is not just one of the best things I’ve ever read, it is also one of the most gloriously fun.
It’s going on my Best of the Year list; it’s going on my Best of the Decade list. I’m declaring it a Crescent Classic, aka absolutely mandatory reading.
If you want to read a true masterpiece, something genuinely unlike anything you have read before, then I am BEGGING you to give MAEJ a try.
Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »
I haven’t heard of this book, but the ratings for it are very high! Excellent review! I’ll be buying this book soon and reading it whenever I get to it!
Thank you! There’s actually a sale on right now – all the books from this publisher are $1 until the end of the month on their itch.io! So this is the perfect time to grab it :D