Genres: Queer Protagonists, Sci Fi, Science Fantasy
Representation: Major bi/pansexual character
Published on: 19th September 2023
ISBN: 1466869216
Goodreads
A wild girl with sand magic in her bones and a mad god who is trying to fix the world he broke come together in SANDYMANCER, a genre-warping mashup of weird fantasy and hard science fiction.
All Caralee Vinnet has ever known is dust. Her whole world is made up of the stuff; water is the most precious thing in the cosmos. A privileged few control what elements remain. But the world was not always a dust bowl and the green is not all lost.
Caralee has a secret—she has magic in her bones and can draw up power from the sand beneath her feet to do her bidding. But when she does she winds up summoning a monster: the former god-king who broke the world 800 years ago and has stolen the body of her best friend.
Caralee will risk the whole world to take back what she’s lost. If her new companion doesn’t kill her first.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~the sky is broken
~the metal people broke it
~sci fi masquerading as fantasy
~I really wish this had been a different book
Sandymancer is one of those books where you watch the remaining page count get smaller and smaller, with a sinking certainty that there isn’t enough room left for everything that needs dealing with to get dealt with.
And that sinking feeling is completely correct.
As far as I can tell, everything about Sandymancer promised it was a standalone. It’s not. It’s the start of a series – or at least, it had better be, because Sandymancer is all set-up with no pay-off, and the book ends with almost every thread we started with still left hanging.
And the thing is, if it had been presented to me as the start of a series, I would have gone in with completely different expectations. My entire reading experience would have been very different. There are things that are huge no-nos for a standalone that are acceptable, or even great, in a series-opener…and because I thought this was a standalone, they landed wrong for me. Sandymancer didn’t leave me excited to see what happens next; it left me frustrated as hell with all my unanswered questions, and a pretty pathetic milk-sop of an ending.
To be honest, it worries me GREATLY that I can find no mention online of Sandymancer being a series, of there being a sequel planned. Because you know how there are books that could stand alone just fine, but also leave room for the author to come back and write a sequel if they want and are able to? Sandymancer is not that book. Sandymancer does not stand alone in any way, shape or form. It is incomplete.
I have not encountered this particular kind of set-up many times, but it’s familiar enough: a post-apocalyptic world that looks back on the civilisation before the Fall/Rending/insert-your-term-of-choice here as mythically perfect. When inhabitants of this world encounter workings of the ancients, they call them magic, but they’re not magic, just very advanced science. This is Caralee’s world, and it is dry and dusty and pretty dead, because eons before the Son of the Vine ruined it all.
And then Caralee meets the Son of the Vine. Who is still around – in a manner of speaking. And who, inscrutably, decides to try teaching Caralee rather than killing her with a wave of his hand, as he could absolutely do. She will accompany him on his mission to do…things.
Thus begins a good long trek across a fairly dead landscape, where we hear about various critters and monsters but don’t see them, encounter several Rather Alarming mysteries that do not get resolved, and endure a whole lot of telling-not-showing. Often literally, since the Son is given to lecturing.
There’s probably a name for stories that are basically just people travelling from point A to B to C – where the moving is the only real plot – and I don’t know what it is, but you can slap that label on Sandymancer. There are a few tiny sub-plots that delight – like the carpet, and the memory-songs, and I thought Caralee drawing everything she thinks into her miraculous-to-her notebook was quite sweet. But mostly, things are encountered, and then the characters move on, without anything really happening. The sky is broken! There are metal people! The world-sustaining Vine is dead! All of that is touched on, and then the narrative sort of…wanders off from the point. We don’t get to sink our teeth into any of the potentially Very Interesting bits, and it’s maddening.
The part of the book I adored, though, were those chapters written from the Son’s point of view, where he’s looking back on the world he knew and the events that led up to him doing what he did. Those were powerful, full of intrigue and emotion and magic (if you can make plants grow out of your head, dude, I’m calling it magic), with the hints of a truly glorious, strange, and wonderful world sketched in around the edges. I wanted more of that so bad. To the point where I pretty quickly came to resent the main story, because the main story was one I didn’t care about; I wanted the Son’s story, and specifically the world he grew up in. I think, for Sandymancer, keeping Caralee as the main character and making the Son’s chapters few and short was the right choice – but I wish we hadn’t had Sandymancer at all, but a different book entirely, one set in that past. That I would have been glued to.
Caralee…there’s a little bit of comedy – or something, comedy doesn’t seem like the right word, but I don’t know what else to call it – in how limited Caralee’s understanding of things like biology and physics are, at the very beginning of the book. But that effect – comedic, or charming, or whatever it is – runs out fast, and then it just becomes kind of tiring. I liked Caralee as a character a lot – I loved how determined she was, and how hungry for knowledge, and how few fucks she had to give for anyone trying to scare her or make her feel small. But the smallness of the story is made even smaller through her perspective on it, and not in an interesting Unreliable Narrator kind of way.
The Son was my favourite kind of villain, right up until he wasn’t. Seriously, the whole Thing of the ending was so pastel and perfect and Friendship Is Magic that I just Cannot, okay? I Cannot.
I will not.
Final point: I recognise that I am a prude, and I want my SFF to be pretty. I’m shallow like that. But what is the obsession with faeces here??? It’s one thing to replace ‘shit’ with ‘scat’ as a curseword; that’s fine, whatever. But it’s everywhere – as a curse, it feels like it’s every third word out of Caralee’s mouth, and hi, her laughing while the giant bugs who eat scat are ‘licking’ all over her face is disgusting. Way, WAY too much of that, did not need it, did not want it, do not care if you call me a prude for it. Just: nope. Stop. Why???
I adored Edison’s debut, The Waking Engine, and I will pounce on future works of his – but probably not any sequels to Sandymancer, if we do in fact get any. There were so many great individual bits and pieces here, but they were lost and overwhelmed by what I can only call the vagueness of the story. It fails as a standalone, and honestly, it doesn’t impress as a series-opener either.
Skip it and read something else.
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