Book Review: We Are the Crisis, by Cadwell Turnbull

Cadwell Turnbull returns with book two of The Convergence Saga, balancing social critique with entertainment

Note: This review will contain spoilers for book one, No Gods, No Monsters, which Adri reviewed here.

I’d been anxiously waiting to read We Are the Crisis as No Gods, No Monsters was one of my favorite recent reads and a book I recommend to just about everyone. I enjoy urban fantasy, and The Convergence Saga has been a great blend of urban fantasy fun with social critique. Plus the series directly references one of my favorite books of all time, The Dispossessed by Le Guin. Book two, We Are the Crisis, doesn’t disappoint as a sequel. It maintains the same energy and devotion to examining characters while continuing to raise the stakes for the multiverse.

We Are the Crisis starts in 2026, two years after what is called the Boston Massacre—the pro-monster protest that turned violent due to magicked mass shooters. At the end of book one, Ridley, Laina, and Rebecca had agreed to become a pack, and book two starts with Ridley full embracing his “wolf.” Not only are they all werewolves, but they are prepared to fight and have practiced how to protect themselves. The first forty pages open with a tense sequence of the pack being followed and having to fight off a vampire that perfectly plays into the camp of urban fantasy. The fight scene demonstrates how powerful they have become with their wolves and how they have learned to work together. Considering Ridley’s trauma around monster rights at the end of book one, this scene demonstrates how his character has changed and how the wolf has made him a more powerful protecting presence.

The pack is searching for the other wolves that started disappearing after monsters initially revealed themselves. In book one, Rebecca’s pack had shown themselves shifting on the freeway but then slowly shrank to just her and Sarah, until Sarah died at the protest. Now, with her new pack, the three of them search for the lost wolves, who seem to have just… vanished. After the vampire attack, Ridley finally reaches out to Melku for more information, and Melku explains that the secret monster societies are in conflict, which is only aggravated by a monster hate group called the Black Hand, which has an upcoming rally in Boston.

Like the first book, We Are the Crisis follows multiple characters via the disembodied narrator, Cal. Cal’s powers allow him to visit different universes in the multiverse, and throughout the book, Cal learns more about his powers and what he can and can’t do with them. In Cal’s world, there seem to be no “monsters” per se, but things bleed from other universes, such as the god Asha, who visits Cal and his niece Gina in the form of a cat, even when Cal and Gina leave the U.S. Virgin Islands to visit the States for Gina to look at colleges. While Cal struggles with reconnecting with his family and bringing Gina into their lives, the multiverse becomes more dangerous, even for his incorporeal form.

One of my favorite characters, the young Dragon, intersects with a new character in the book, Tez, the Wanderer, a monster who runs a co-op that provides mutual aid for humans and monsters. In book one, co-ops and networks were a theme and part of the characters’ passions, but in book two, those co-ops become a deeper part of the plot as there is a rise in cooperatives at the same time as the monsters reveal themselves. Both humans and monsters work at Tez’s cooperative, but the Black Hand’s violence is directed indiscriminately, and the co-op’s human members suffer as much as the nonhuman. Dragon gets to know Tez because he volunteers at the co-op and the members help him find safe places to stay. A few years older, Dragon is starting to learn how the world works and how hard it is to protect the people he cares about.

As in our world, when revolutionary work is being done and people are uniting, there are always government agents and propaganda trying to stop it. The struggles that the monsters and activists face mirror what revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers have struggled against (and in the acknowledgements, Turnbull mentions how his research on the Black Panthers influenced the book). As in book one, the social critique of the novel about civil rights but also revolutionary organizing is carefully woven into the story. The character of Tez and his mutual aid practices are one area, but also the return character of Sondra, who has stepped away from politics on the U.S. Virgin Islands to start a nonprofit called Solidarity Commonwealth VI, which helps small businesses become worker-owned. Her partner, Matthew, is a senator, and over the course of their relationship, they have in-depth discussions about power, statehood, and revolutionary thinking.

Much like book one, this book focuses on the characters and their developing identities and ideas, which allows for these discussions to feel like part of the story rather than infodumping leftist concepts. One of my favorite parts of book one was the intimacy of the character portraits as Cal observes them in the different worlds. Tez continued this pattern, as did a deep dive into a real occult figure, Marjorie Cameron, whose paintings are referenced in book one. Due to the character focus, Turnbull can deftly weave in the social critiques because they spring from the characters’ lived experiences. I was particularly excited with how the co-ops move from more of a background theme to something central in book two, and I hope this trend continues in the third book.

Turnbull’s Convergence Saga delivers compelling characters, unique structure, and literary lines. On top of that, the way he plays with the urban fantasy genre is a great combination of entertainment and more literary fantasy. On top of that, these books aren’t merely entertainment but also contain social commentary in a manner that doesn’t detract from the plot. I can’t wait to see what Turnbull does with book three!

Reference: Turnbull, Cadwell. We Are the Crisis [Blackstone Publishing, 2023].

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change.

Microreview [book]: No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull

A tightly plotted iteration on the mosaic novel, which grapples powerfully with questions of solidarity and justice

First up, if you're in the US (or you get your books from there), both the timing of this review and the cover above might be a bit confusing. That's because No Gods, No Monsters, released in 2021 in the US and Canada, is getting a UK release later this month thanks to Titan Books. I want to point that out specifically because Titan do an excellent and underrated job bringing books to the UK that otherwise would not be released here - some of their other authors include T. Kingfisher and Stephen Graham Jones. Thanks, Titan, for your services to transatlantic book availability.

And if we in the UK had to wait an extra year and change to buy this title on the shelves here? Well, that wait was absolutely worth it, because this is quite the book. No Gods, No Monsters circles around a broad group of characters the events immediately leading up to, and following, the public reveal that monsters have been living alongside humans in society all along, from shifters to witches to more unsettling powers. Split into lots of short sections, this is basically a "mosaic novel" (see here for more examples of the form), except that Turnbull's plot circles back to focus on the same characters and viewpoints more regularly than I would associate with the term, creating a central plot that feels tight and microcosmic even as it brings together a whole range of viewpoints. Throw in some non linearity and time shenanigans and a unifying narrator who only plays a minor role in the plot itself, but has his own story to tell (eventually), and you've got a novel that feels held together by its overlapping characters, as they face off against increasingly terrifying and mysterious forces.

There are a couple of points of convergence within this structure. The main one is around Laina and her partner Ridley, both workers at a cooperative bookstore. Laina's estranged brother becomes the catalyst for the reveal of monsters when he is shot and killed by Boston police, and Laina receives video that shows him attacking the officer as a werewolf at the moment of the shooting. Despite this video, and a protest by other members of Lincoln's pack in which they shift in front of camera, the public evidence for the existence of monsters is quickly deleted from the public eye, and becomes the subject of debate as people decide whether to believe that 1. monsters are real and 2. there is a giant conspiracy to cover them up, or to deny the evidence of their own eyes in favour of the status quo. Laina begins a  relationship with Rebecca, a member of Lincoln's old wolfpack, and the existence of monsters becomes a known part of her life; for Ridley, the journey to acceptance is longer and involves a more dangerous encounter with forces opposing the protagonist community. It's through Laina and Ridley that No Gods, No Monsters explores the question of solidarity and community organisation, and whether either concept can be applied to a community which remains hidden for its own safety. It's interesting to watch this struggle play out against a leftist cooperative movement, rather than among a more politically apathetic set of characters, and the parallels to marginalised - especially multiply marginalised - folks trying to get involved in left wing politics in our own world are obvious and important.

The other point of convergence is around a secret society, the Order of the Zsouvox, and the people working in direct opposition to it. We don't spend much time with the Order itself, encountering it at first from a complete outsider's perspective and learning some small additional details from a young escapee. Instead, the Order and the malicious force it seems to represent casts a shadow over everything else that happens, and in practice its actions serve to disrupt any community building that the protagonist characters try to engage in, even though this seems to be in service of an unknown larger goal rather than an end in itself. The characters opposing the Order include Sondra, a St Thomian Senator, her invisible sister Sonya, and nonbinary tech wizard Melku; all three have impressive powers which are even more impressively (and terrifyingly) countered by their enemies.

No Gods, No Monsters is the start of a trilogy, and it's only the first of those two plots that gets a satisfying resolution here. Laina, Ridley and Rebecca's journey towards solidarity and mutual understanding is a painful and grief-stricken one, but ultimately, it adds up to something that feels tentatively hopeful about the future for these characters and for the state of humanity. When it comes to the Order of the Zsouvox and what might come next in the broader struggle, things are left much more open, and despite the reappearance of one of the book's most compelling early characters, I didn't get much closure or catharsis over these plot strands. I feel like I'm in safe hands for the rest of this trilogy (the Convergence Saga), and regardless of which individual characters return for a second and third book, I'm highly invested in the world which Turnbull has created here and the fight between the forces seeking to control it.