Windburn Whiplash (Streets of Flame Quartet Book 2) by Matt Weber
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Brown bisexual MC of fictional minority; F/F; extremely minor nonbinary character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: 1960189026
Goodreads

It’s been six years since Zaya Shearwater lost her wife and her dragon in the most dangerous race in Yemareir. She’s retired from the dragon-racing circuit, supporting her family as a security guard on long-haul trade expeditions… until she comes back one night to discover that her newly adopted daughter, Vanako, has been dealing for a mob boss. Worse, she owes him a sky-high sum of money for lost product. And there’s not much he wouldn’t do – to Vanako, to Zaya, or to anyone in their family – to get it back.

Zaya doesn’t want to go back to the racing circuit. She doesn’t have a trained dragon, she doesn’t have anyone to ride with, and she thought she’d put those memories of pain and loss away. But even if she does ride again… after six years away from the scene, can she win what she needs in time to pay what she owes?

Windburn Whiplash is the first full-length novel in the Streets of Flame Quartet. Start with Brimstone Slipstream, the novella that opens the series, and keep an eye out for Heatstroke Heartbeat and Wildfire Riptide, forthcoming!

Highlights

~Central/South American setting
~with FEATHERED DRAGONS
~family is hard (but so worth it)
~illegal dragon-racing
~neon hair = queer
~Empaths Do It Better

:Although listed as book two, Windburn Whiplash is the first novel in the Streets of Flame series. The book listed as book one is a prequel novella, Brimstone Slipstream, set six years earlier. You don’t have to read it first, but it’s excellent, so why wouldn’t you?:

I dove right into this after finishing Brimstone Slipstream, the novella that introduces this series. And although Windburn Whiplash is very different – mostly because it’s a novel, not a novella framed as a journalist’s piece on an illegal sport – I was not disappointed!

Weber goes hard on the worldbuilding, but takes a very balanced approach to conveying it all to the reader. On the one hand, each chapter starts with an excerpt from a visitor’s guide to Yemareir (the city which is our setting), which give us quick rundowns on things like the various pharmaceuticals available, or the differences between dragon breeds, or the fucking demons. (Delightfully, the visitor’s guide is written by the same journalist who ‘wrote’ the article that is Brimstone Slipstream!) But most of what we learn from the excerpts is…fun-to-have info, but not necessary. The necessary stuff comes hard and fast and depends on the reader being alert and paying attention – little is explicitly explained; info-dumps simply do not exist here. For example, it might take you a while to realise that Zaya and most of her family are brown-skinned; it only really becomes clear in contrast to their one pale-skinned family member, or a brief description of one of the children as ‘rosewood’. (Alternatively, you can pick up the cultural coding, like the mentions of the haka, and conclude that Weber is not enough of an idiot to pull inspiration from Maori culture and give it to a fictional white group.)

This is basically my favourite approach to worldbuilding – one that rewards rereads and presumes readers don’t need to be spoon-fed – and I ate it up here with sprinkles. *chef’s kiss* It’s especially great because, reading this directly after finishing the ‘intro’ novella Brimstone Slipstream, I assumed I now knew everything I needed to know. Surprise! I did not; there was still plenty more to learn about this setting, and that there was more to learn plus what there was to learn delighted me endlessly!

Yemareir is a city in a Central/South American environs whose districts are each built around the ‘broodspires’ of different dragon breeds; different breeds reproduce at different intervals, so each district is out of commission (and unlivable) at different times every few years. The solution to this is surprisingly neat for a bureaucracy (although I bet it must have been such a hassle to set up!), and I won’t spoil it – but I will tell you that some of it depends on ancient, impossible-to-replicate magics that I really hope get explored more in future books! The dragons – wyrms – themselves remain incredible: feathered, often brightly-coloured, very interested in alcohol, and able to adapt physiologically to environmental pressures. (I cannot overstate how freaking cool this is, or how brilliantly dragon-racers take advantage of it!) And of course, we get to see a lot more dragon-racing in this book, including more of the individual races, each of which has a set ‘course’ with its own history, challenges, and perils.

Because even if the book opens with Zaya out of the game, obviously she’s getting dragged back into racing. Obviously. And although the blurb sounds fairly straightforward, things are actually pretty complicated: there’s the nature of Vanako’s adoption, for one, which leads to a lot of tension in Zaya’s home as the family divides on whether or not to keep Vanako around, and the reason Vanako was dealing at all is a mystery that winds through the entire book. A small subplot that grows more and more important is the ‘illness’ of Zaya’s son, who is – let’s call it haunted – by a demon that no one can do anything about, and which will kill him sooner or later in a horrific manner; he’s not a one-off, either, because being haunted in this fashion is a recognised, not-nearly-rare-enough condition, one so well-established there are even support groups. And not only does Zaya not own a dragon at the start of the book – which she’s going to have to rectify if she wants to race! – she also doesn’t have a partner, and a partner is mandatory if she wants to use her empathy-magic to win the way she and her deceased wife used to.

Yemareir is so believably complicated, as full of surprises and contradictions as a real city, and over and over again that was what struck me about Windburn Whiplash: it all feels so powerfully real, so easy to believe in. That we’re talking about a story packed full of dragons and demons and empaths doesn’t seem to matter; at no point did I ever feel that any part of this book was impossible, unrealistic, Too Much or Too Little. We have politics and social classes and traditions not everybody follows (because what tradition is universally followed or understood by those who follow it?), impossible magics that are taken for granted right alongside a police force I’d love to see defunded. And, vitally, we have characters who leap off the page; messy, complicated, brilliant characters, every single one of whom feels too real to be fictional, too true.

One of the consistently amazing things about this book was getting to see adults adulting – grown-ups who actually talk to each other, who admit when they fuck up and acknowledge when their emotions are being irrational. Who make mistakes, and often have to try things several times before getting it right. It’s not that Zaya and her family are perfectly evolved humans, but it made me so happy to see characters who stop and say ‘you know what, this isn’t your fault, I’m having a bad day, I apologise’, or ‘you’re right, that is what I was doing’, or ‘I know that’s not what you mean, but this is how it feels to me’. HI, THIS IS WONDERFUL, CAN I HAVE MORE OF THIS PLEASE??? And on a similar theme: found-family who actually get each other!!!

Cerminir turned without a word and walked to her mother’s pavilion.

Thelendil started after her; Zaya blocked him with an arm. “Leave her be,” she said. “Walking away isn’t telling you how serious she is, it’s managing how much stuff is in her brain. She needs to be in her own head to figure out what she’s feeling. If we try to make her do that while putting a bunch more stuff in her brain, she’ll just get more upset and take longer to recover.”

I mentioned in my review of Brimstone that, in Yemareir, found-family can become legal-family, and I was so happy that that was explored more in this book! House Shearwater, Zaya’s family, is made up of a bunch of people who aren’t blood-related, but who share a family name (Shearwater), live together, raise their children communally, and make decisions together. This isn’t the only House in the book, and some of the subplots touch on and explore the House system in ways that are clearly going to be a bigger deal in future books – but suffice to say, I love this. Like everything in Weber’s setting, it has its downsides (one of the reasons it all feels so believable is that every original concept/thing is used for good and for awfulness by someone) but, given how beloved the found-family trope is, I think many readers are going to adore a world that lets you make a legal family out of your found-, scavenged-, and upcycled-family! And the way Weber dives into what this means in practical terms, what it takes for people to live together like this, what family means and what is required to count as a family… It’s absolutely wonderful, and every bit as fascinating as the dragon-racing.

WHICH IS INDEED SERIOUSLY EPIC.

brought her back six years, to endless nights in bars with Kiriki and this man, when the skies had knelt to them.

It seems so freaking human that dragon-racing is completely illegal…and almost no one really cares. There’s a Standards Board! How can an illegal sport have a Standards Board?! Well, corruption, that’s how. And the politics of the racing – the changes that were brought in to stop Kayalim (poor, oppressed psychics descended from refugees) like Zaya and her wife from being able to compete, never mind being able to win… It’ll all make your blood boil, as it’s clearly supposed to – but the actual racing will set your blood on fire. Weber does a fantastic job at putting the reader in the rider’s seat, immersing us in the races, the flying and fighting and lightning-fast communication between Zaya and her dragon; you can all but feel the wind on your face. Obviously, a story about dragon-racing is an easy sell, but I had no idea how great the actual racing scenes were going to be – and the answer is, INCREDIBLE. I want to bury my face in a pillow and squee just THINKING about them. I PROMISE, THE DRAGON-RACING IS EVERY BIT AS FREAKING AWESOME AS IT SOUNDS!!!

Mercantalist colonizers like Transdesert are literally why we invented holes with poisoned stakes at the bottom.

I can’t get enough of this series: the world, the characters, the dragons, the racing, all the undercurrents and politics and magic and deliberate, defiant queerness. It’s so damn EXUBERANT, as if Weber decided to put everything and anything that brought him joy into these books – and even better, made it all work together. It’s brightly-coloured, glorious wish-fulfilment, without being pure escapism: this story has teeth, there’s pain and struggle and suffering in it, systemic injustice galore, behemoths too big to be taken down by a poor civilian (even with the best family ever at her back). That streak of grittiness anchors the rainbow, makes it real in a way it wouldn’t be if Weber had written it all as a cosy utopia; makes the bright colours more vivid by contrast.

I love it. Is that not obvious? And my gods, so will everyone else, if they just pick this up and start reading!

This series will blow you away – so quit sleeping on it!

Related Posts