soupçon/ˈsuːpsɒn,ˈsuːpsɒ̃/ noun
1. a very small quantity of something; a slight trace, as of a particular taste or flavorSunday 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!
Welp.
Stone and Steel by Eboni J. Dunbar
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Black sapphic MC, F/F, minor trans character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: 1952086094
Goodreads
When General Aaliyah returns triumphant to the city of Titus, she expects to find the people prospering under the rule of her Queen, the stone mage Odessa. Instead, she finds a troubling imbalance in both the citizens’ wellbeing and Odessa’s rule. Aaliyah must rely on all of her allies, old and new, to do right by the city that made her.
Well, that was a trainwreck.
Stone and Steel has a great premise: upon returning from campaign, Aaliyah, a general discovers that her (adopted) sister the queen has absolutely not been taking care of their people like she promised she would. This spirals out into rebellion. There are a lot of promising building blocks for this story; there are multiple kinds of mage each working with different elements/materials (including bone and iron); Aaliyah and the queen, Odessa, weren’t born royal but started out as street-kids until they overthrew the old king; and the setting as a whole, despite ticking all the typical High Fantasy boxes, draws on USian Black culture. The latter is what had me so excited for this book.
Unfortunately, the story is far too big for the format. This desperately needed to be at least a full novel; it just doesn’t fit into the 90 pages it is on my ereader. The pacing is on fast-forward, dizzying, giving absolutely nothing space to breathe or the time necessary for me to process the impact of each reveal or twist. The ebook at least is full of errors – mostly formatting ones, not spelling – and the prose is flat and blunt. The worst thing is that for some reason dialogue isn’t marked properly; instead of starting a new paragraph every time the speaker changes in a conversation, this…often doesn’t. Making it maddeningly impossible to tell who on earth was speaking! Seriously, wtf? I don’t know if this was the author or the typesetter, but whoever it was, wtf?
The characters are incredibly one-note, telegraphing everything the reader is supposed to think really clumsily. Odessa is swiftly revealed to be a villain, and she acts in the dumbest, most over-dramatic ways: she is not even a tiny bit believable. She would never have lasted five years as queen if she was this stupid. Her actions are just whatever would look coolest and push the plot forward, not anything that feels like a real thinking brain is behind it. I mean, she throws Aaliyah in a dungeon and tells everyone Aaliyah is a traitor because Aaliyah went to visit one of their old friends. The triumphant general who’s just come home from conquering the entire south of the continent, who had a parade a week ago. THAT’S who she tosses in a dungeon? If she’s that stupid, that lacking in any political sense at all, how have her own nobles/rich merchants not turned her into a puppet yet? Or just had her killed?
So much of her evil is just…cringingly unnecessary. When Aaliyah escapes and goes to a neighbouring king for help, she learns that Odessa’s earlier visit to him was not Odessa feeling him out for marriage – Odessa offered Aaliyah to the king. Like, why include this? How does it help? Why would Odessa do that? It changes nothing, and it’s just not believable; it feels like someone throwing everything a villain could possibly do against a wall to see if it sticks. When your villain is this straight-up-stupid, your story becomes a joke, because there’s no way I can take it seriously!
Odessa and Aaliyah are secretly girlfriends, btw. Which is a secret because Odessa thinks (or claims to think) that people will be weird about it, even though she and Aaliyah are not genetically related. So the offering Aaliyah to the king thing is – it’s a betrayal of a different part of their relationship, I guess? With all the rest of it, it’s just over the top. As is the reveal of the king’s lover; it’s all just drama for the sake of drama, ridiculous.
Aaliyah is gone for about a week and comes back to the city on fire, btw. Because that’s how bad Odessa is. Never mind that Aaliyah has been away on campaign for years; after one week without Aaliyah now, Odessa has ruined everything.
Come ON.
Hated it, stunned it was published in this condition. Do not be fooled by the stunning cover.
Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris
Genres: Adult, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Sapphic biracial Mi'kmaq (Indigenous Canadian) MC
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
ISBN: B0C9MD5KTD
Goodreads
The debut novella from the Elgin Award winning author of Elegies of Rotting Stars. After the death of her estranged father, artist Rita struggles with grief and regret. There was so much she wanted to ask him-about his childhood, their family, and the Mi'kmaq language and culture from which Rita feels disconnected. But when Rita's girlfriend Molly forges an artist's residency application on her behalf, winning Rita a week to paint at an isolated cabin, Rita is both furious and intrigued. The residency is located where her father grew up. On the first night at the cabin, Rita wakes to strange sounds. Was that a body being dragged through the woods? When she questions the locals about the cabin's history, they are suspicious and unhelpful. Ignoring her unease, Rita gives in to dark visions that emanate from the forest's lake and the surrounding swamp. She feels its pull, channelling that energy into art like she's never painted before. But the uncanny visions become more insistent, more intrusive, and Rita discovers that in the swamp's decay the end of one life is sometimes the beginning of another.
This reminded me of the very, very purple and deadly-serious stuff baby!Sia wrote around age 14. The prose is very, very overwritten, and if it isn’t quite purple it’s only a hair off it. It read as unbearably pretentious – better-written, but reminiscent of what a baby Goth might write. To be clear, I don’t think it IS pretentious, I think the emotions in it are all real and coming from real places, but the way they’re all written is…too much? Kinda?
The horror takes a long while to get going, and isn’t overtly supernatural till the climax. The book is much more about Rita’s grief for her deceased father, and her sadness/discomfort with not being able to speak fluent Mi’kmaq, than it is about anything I’d call Horror. This is not inherently a bad thing, obviously, but it was not what I wanted.
The climax was pretty great, but then the ending, a kind of epilogue, undermined the entire thing. I felt so cheated – the book is divided up into parts/chapters, each one starting with a critic’s write-up of a series of Rita’s paintings. They make it very clear that after painting this series, Rita vanished. But she only vanishes temporarily – she’s found by searchers after a few days and fully recovers.
THEN WHAT WAS THE POINT? You spent the whole book telling me she vanished! KNOWING what I was going to think you meant! And then to go ‘no worries, just kidding!’??? Are you serious? Just – URGH.
Do not even get me started on the speech Rita gives in the epilogue-bit about how we all need to make our peace with death. I very much agree with the messaging, but the phrasing! It sounded so false, so stuck-up and pretentious. Not genuine, not spoken naturally the way a real person might. Way, way too polished.
Three stars because the set-up (with the paintings) and the climax was great, and besides the borderline purple-ness there’s nothing wrong with the prose. But it is a very grudging three stars!
Trigger warnings: View Spoiler »
Completely agree about Green Fuse Burning, unfortunately. Even though it’s a novella, I remembering listening to the audiobook and shouting “it’s still going???” during the interminable climax. Rooting for the author but I hope she puts out something better next go ’round.