soupçon/ˈsuːpsɒn,ˈsuːpsɒ̃/ noun
1. a very small quantity of something; a slight trace, as of a particular taste or flavor

Sunday Soupçons is where I scribble mini-reviews for books I don’t have the brainspace/eloquence/smarts to write about in depth – or if I just don’t have anything interesting to say beyond I LIKED IT AND YOU SHOULD READ IT TOO!

One cosy fantasy that is my new favourite thing, and one excellent High Fantasy inspired by Irish history and mythology!

Chai and Cat-tales by Lynn Strong
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Cosy Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Middle-Eastern setting and cast, neurodivergent MC with selective mutism, asexual MC, fat queer MC with chronic pain, minor trans character
PoV: Third-person past-tense
ISBN: B0DPHTMTBS
Goodreads

Bask in a sunbeam with three cozy fantasy novellas of the Catsprowl, a busy neighborhood brimming with cats and cat-goddesses, book-keepers and bath-houses, piping hot chai, and pouncing kittens' mischief.

This volume includes the novellas The Prince of Her Dreams, Priye, and The Potter's Dream under one cover.

The Prince of Her Dreams
Najra has three dreams in her First, catch the attention of a prince. (Specifically, the God-Emperor’s bookish youngest brother.) Next, get him to hire her to assist with his research in the marvelous Archives in Tel-Bastet. And then, at last, read ALL the books.

Marrying the prince has never been in the plan. Najra has never lusted for anything but knowledge.

Unfortunately, the prince has dreams as well. Because he's also a prophet who foresees trouble coming. Between her heretical geometries and her cursed spellbook, Najra has to admit that his dreams of trouble have her pegged.

Now what is she supposed to do with a matchmaking busybody of an Archivist pushing them together, an angry catfolk bodyguard pulling them apart, and a sweet, anxious prophet-prince who won't even tell her what he wants?

What does a happy ending look like for a pair of mismatched dreamers who both love learning best of all?

For the asexual folks and the questioning folks who've wanted a story where your own desires are respected and valued, this one is for you. For the Witches vs. Patriarchy crew, this one is for you too.

Priye
For a small alley-kitten, human words make a tricky tangle of misunderstandings that bite back. Purring and hissing and yowling are much more clear.

A human named her Priye, though, and he taught her that it means someone who is darling, someone who is treasured.

Growing up in the nooks between three cultures is hard, but Priye wants to make her own way. And she wants to repay the kind people who feed small hungry kittens. But it's not always easy to hunt when everyone else is bigger and stronger and faster.
The humans who named her like soap and water entirely too much. But maybe they have a point about sharing things instead of hunting things?

(They absolutely do not have a point about soap, though. Soap is the most horrible thing ever.)

For the neurospicy folks who struggle with the words people expect, this one is for you. For the disabled folks and those who need to hear that your value isn't in your work output, this one is for you too.

The Potter's Dream
Usually, the Temple of Bastet teems with cats and catfolk and cat-priestesses and cat-goddesses. It is not supposed to teem with mice. But kind-hearted priest Shai Madhur isn't very good at denying a nourishing meal to anybody… not even the mice.

He needs a better mouse-catcher. But first, he needs to know where the shrine's cauldrons have gone. Because a potter has come to Shai Madhur's temple shrine, and the poor man looks hungry.

What kind of priest can Shai Madhur be if he can't feed someone a nourishing meal? When he's sworn his life to serving others, and suddenly he has nothing at all to give, what does he have left? Sermons of acceptance are all well and good, but they don't fill an empty stomach.

And there's something very strange about the potter.

I received this book for free from the author, in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

THANKS I LOVE IT

These are very warm, soft novellas following a few different (queer, neurodivergent) characters in a fantasy city where catfolk (cats who can take a bipedal form) live alongside humans, and I loved every second of it. The setting is drawn from the Middle East, richly and lovingly detailed in everything from food to clothing to architecture; the sensory descriptions had me swooning. The prose is wonderful, exactly the right balance between descriptive and light, easy and quick to read without ever feeling blunt or plain, and I loved loved LOVED how often the imagery of the story manifested in the prose -I mean, look at this!!!

Bastet’s Temple settled as magnificently as a cat in sunbeam-basking repose, halfway up the floodplain, framed by canals where celebrants poled flower-bedecked barges at the festival days. The Catsprowl marketplace and neighborhoods heaped around it in a tumble towards the river, as though the buildings had pounced on each other and cuddled up in a tangled kitten-pile.

Besides being an objectively beautiful paragraph, using cat imagery to describe buildings is a) wonderfully unique, I’ve never seen that before, and b) fits with the worldbuilding!!! Worldbuilding almost NEVER gets reflected in prose and I am such a sucker for when an author does do it. AHHHHHHHHH!

(And this is not my own insight, but: this is such a warm, positive way to describe what by Western standards would usually be considered slums or something. It’s just one of a hundred ways these stories firmly reject Western views of what is good, and beautiful, and who deserves to have their stories told.)

The stories are warm and shining, but they’re not bland, each one concerns high stakes for the characters involved. We don’t usually do it by catching pigeons, but I defy anyone to not perfectly understand Priye’s need to justify her existence, to make up for being small and not-strong. Priye is catfolk, she’s a KITTEN, and my heart broke for her repeatedly, the way she religiously tracked obligation and worth in an effort to take the absolute minimum from everyone around her. These are small stakes in a big-picture view of things, sure, but Lynn Strong makes you FEEL Priye’s anxiety and determination, how much it all matters to her. I legit teared up over her story, okay? The other two stories are the same, in the sense that the emotions of them are vivid, you get swept up and Lynn Strong makes you care, oh my gods did I care!!!

There are hysterically funny moments scattered throughout (the colourful mouse pawprints!!!) but mostly the stories here are about – not people taking care of each other, exactly, but also yes? They’re about care, people caring for each other, kindness and open hearts – this is a hot chocolate book, the kind that gently washes your dingy faith in humanity and leaves it clean and fresh and sparkling again. I don’t know how to put it better than that. If I had a paper copy I would hug it and then sleep with it under my pillow. I am very tempted to put my ereader under my pillow because surely that would count, right?

And if you, like me, will mourn not getting to try any of the mouth-watering treats for yourself – THERE ARE RECIPES AT THE END OF THE BOOK. Excuse me while I swoon!

This collection stands alone, but also, the stories here are set before the upcoming novel Chai and Charmcraft, and because I am ridiculously lucky I have an early copy of it and GOODBYE, I MUST GO DIVE INTO IT IMMEDIATELY!

Sister Wake by Dave Rudden
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy
Representation: Secondary brown nonbinary character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: 9781399732659
Goodreads

A proud culture oppressed for centuries. An island over-run by bestial gods. And a girl with the power to raise the fallen . . .

For three hundred years the wild island of Croí has been subject to the Empire of the Answering. Clans have been subjugated, their language outlawed, their religion reduced to the whisper of fugitive priests.

Until Croí's prayers are answered. The Gods return. Feral and majestic, they stride the land as colossi, throwing the Empire into chaos.

The dispossessed and the vengeful struggle for power. A ruthless priestess rallies the faithful, offering a simple choice - believe, or die - even as the empire's Queen makes the first moves in a long and dangerous game.

But for all their machinations, one woman will decide the fate of them all . . . Sister Wake, unwilling saint of the Goddess of Death.

The first in a high fantasy trilogy, inspired by Ireland's history of English oppression. With the help of their newly arisen gods, Croí is finally about to fight back against the Empire of the Answering - but are the gods on their side, after all?

Fantasy ‘inspired by Ireland’s history of English oppression’ is ALWAYS going to get my attention, and Sister Wake did not disappoint!

The Croí are the Irish, and the Answering who rule them as colonisers are a mash-up of English, Roman, and bits that as far as I can tell were entirely invented by Rudden – I approve. And just as the English were in real life, the Answering are cruel and brutal overlords, having spent the last 300 years doing their best to stamp out the Croí’s language, faith, and culture. Unsurprisingly, there have been many uprisings, and Sister Wake opens in the newest one. What’s different this time? Is that the Croí have saints, individuals who’ve been granted impossible powers by the newly reawakened Croí gods. Meanwhile, across the channel to the West in Dreodyrne, capital of the Answering, the Answering king has vanished on one of his superstitious quests. The only communication he sends back to his councils? Pull out of Croí.

We follow three protagonists: the eponymous Sister Wake, a young woman with necromantic powers over animals and birds since her encounter with the Cailleach, Croí goddess of death, storms and winter; Abelard, a would-be naturalist from a noble Answering family; and Talasa, an awkwardly-royal princess of the Answering with no Answering blood in her. And though I didn’t love all their storylines equally, we very much need all three to get a sense of the Big Picture; each of them have very different points of view on the situation, and bring different knowledge and context to it that the others don’t have. Abelard makes his way to Croí to study the gods, hoping they’re just another form of wildlife that can be understood within the realms of natural science; Talasa spends most of the book in Dreodyrne, showing us the politicking going on behind the curtain among the Answering nobility. And Sister Wake is with the uprising – at least until she discovers something behind enemy lines that ought to be impossible.

Rudden’s prose is silky-smooth and full of rich similes and metaphors. And that always gets a thumb’s up from me, but what’s especially wonderful is the way in which the imagery changes depending on who’s POV we’re in. With Sister Wake, we get lines like

The first blush of light on the horizon, like milk feathering in tea.

or

The gale was plastering Da’s leine to her collarbone, rolling around the sky like a miser scraping up soup.

This kind of homely imagery underscores who Sister Wake is, and more importantly who the Croí are, that they are a nation of people who are…if I say ‘close to the earth’ that sounds like some mystic savage nonsense, and that’s not it. But they live in small villages and towns, they’re people who work with their hands and bodies, and all of that’s underscored when we have similes about tea and porridge and things.

When we’re instead with Talasa in the Answering;

The richest areas of Theobardy and Easteld were not cradled close to the city’s centre but instead pooled out like wax cratering under a signet ring.

We go from soup to signet rings, because we’ve gone from a Croí commoner to a princess. And it’s so RARE for authors to do this, we almost never get to see prose reinforcing worldbuilding/character this way, and I love it and was so delighted to see it here!

Beyond that, Rudden is excellent at crafting powerful lines that are either hilarious

Sister Wake formally released Brother Wight from his geis about five times a day. So far, it had not taken.

or heart-stoppingly poignant.

Abelard remembered the look on the sailor’s face when Netha had sung. Not hungry, but malnourished.

The context there is that the sailor is listening to an ancient Croí song, the kind that the Answering have banned and destroyed knowledge of. Which means he’s malnourished for his heritage. Doesn’t that give you chills?

And I cannot get over the sheer BRILLIANCE of lines like this one, when we encounter the Cailleach for the first time;

It was as if someone had taken every single cruel story about an old woman, every mean and monstrous caricature, and stacked them thirty feet tall.

Yesssssssssss!

For me, story is often secondary to amazing prose, but the story here rocks as well. Rudden does an incredible job at conveying what the Croí have lost and what they want to get back, without flinching away from how complicated the situation is three hundred years down the line. This is a story about heritage, fighting for it and reclaiming it – and about outsiders trying to understand it, in the cases of Abelard and Talasa. (Talasa’s storyline is the weakest, in my opinion, but it does come to an extremely epic, jaw-dropping climax that has me craving her part of the sequel!) The gods are very real but they are also a metaphor – now that they’re back, they’re not what they once were, and they don’t seem to differentiate between Croí and Answering, which is understandably gutting for the Croí who want to welcome them back. It’s a heartbreaking reminder that the Croí have lost so much, that they no longer know all of their heritage, that so much of what they have now has been warped by colonisation. But at the same time – the gods are a huge, plot-central mystery: what ARE they, and where did they disappear to, and why are they back now? Can they be reasoned with? Bargained with? What’s WRONG with all of them; is it something the Answering did, intentionally or not?

The Answering are atheists, which very much pits them against the Croí gods even if they weren’t specifically Croí deities, and I think Rudden was doing a lot with the idea of…not religion, exactly, but maybe the idea of faith? And the evils of disrespecting and/or colonising the faiths of others? The Answering want to kill the Croí gods, refuse to accept that they even ARE gods – and at the same time, they have this king who is devouring the superstitions of every foreign culture he can get his hands on. It’s a situation that can’t be sustained, especially not after the reveals at the end of the book.

Sister Wake is a bit darker and grimmer than most of what I read, but I enjoyed it immensely, and will be keeping an eagle-eye out for the sequel!

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