Nanoreviews: The Scapegracers, Fortuna, The Impossible Contract

The Scapegracers by Hannah Abigail Clarke [Erewhon Books, 2020]

CW: Sexual assault, magical consent violations

Eloise "Sideways" Pike is an out lesbian, and a practising witch, in a high school where both of those things put her at the bottom of the social heap. That is, until Jing, Yates and Daisy - the coolest girls in school - invite her to perform a magic ritual at one of their parties. What starts out as a one-off party trick almost immediately gets transformed into a friendship, with Sideways and her new friends discovering they all have magical affinity - and that there are plenty of people out there who would happily take that from them, and mould it into a form that they can control. Balancing the sudden change in her social circle, the pressures of sudden covenhood and the challenges of trying to pick up the hot queer girl, Madeleine, who she also met at the party.

The Scapegracers is an odd book in some ways, throwing its audience right into dead deer, kidnappings and magical book heists and only then deigning to sprinkle a bit of high school note-passing and generic teenage drama into the mix. Its external threats are present, and the first half of the book had me pretty concerned for Sideways' safety during one sequence in particular, but the second half of the book almost puts them on hold to instead escalate the tension on the teenage cliques side of things instead, before bringing back the supernatural threats at the very last moment. This feels particularly odd as a tension structure because of something I otherwise enjoyed very much: Sideways' relationship with Jing, Yates and Daisy, while full of quirks and development, is not really a source of conflict as much as it is a challenge of emotional growth for a girl who has been totally used to only looking out for herself. Sure, there's plenty to remind us that the trio aren't objectively wonderful people who deserve power and status more than other kids, but Clarke kicks any potential mean girls tropes to the curb. Instead, he offers up a group of girls who are on top because they're willing to fight for each other, and the friendship they offer to Sideways is genuine. That's underpinned by several other positive relationships, and while there is one significant betrayal, there's a lot more characters with whom Sideways and her crew end on solid (and very queer) ground.

Structural quirks aside (and perhaps for people closer to high school, there's far more tension in these scenes than I originally picked up!), if you're on board for a soap opera-esque ride with a messy but interesting and very backable group of young women, The Scapegracers is well worth sticking with. It does end with things up in the air for a sequel, and I'm very intrigued to see where the next one goes.

Rating: 8/10

Fortuna by Kristyn Merbeth [Orbit, 2019]

Fortuna is an interplanetary action adventure set in a system whose five habitable planets have all stopped cooperating with each other, introducing strict restrictions and xenophobic policies that make travel between them all but impossible. That's a problem if you want to be a successful smuggling family like the Kaisers, and particularly if, like Scorpia Kaiser, you were born between planets and have no citizenship anywhere. Scorpia and her family - all, thanks to the machinations of her scheming mother, born on different planets with the free movement rights that arrangement confers - run the Fortuna, a largely illegal smuggling operation which Scorpia is desperate to inherit, notwithstanding her problems with alcohol and general reliability and the claim of her older brother Corvus, who has been enlisted into a war on his own home planet for the last three years. Unfortunately, the moment she picks to make her move is the moment the system starts sliding into all-out war, and the Kaisers end up in the crossfire of something much bigger than any one of them.

Fortuna has lots of fun space tropes: a motley crew of smugglers whose hearts eventually end up in the right place, planets that are all a single unique biosphere with different global governments and cultures, a smattering of mysterious alien tech that nobody knows anything about, gun battles, space battles, breakneck runs back to the ship as the ramp lifts, a thief with a heart of gold falling for a princess, and all the mysterious cargo crates you could possibly ask for. It's not afraid to show that the stakes are high for the Kaisers, with a high bodycount and plenty of peril for the main team. There's nothing especially deep here, and Scorpia in particular is too self-destructive to be a particularly endearing protagonist, although when we start to see her from a third person perspective I found my view of her at least became more nuanced. Corvus is far from the relevant action for much of the book, but when he does dock into the main plot, things really start kicking off.  Despite this, Fortuna is a fun, tropey read that kept me entertained throughout and promises some interesting further adventures in its world.

Rating: 7/10

The Impossible Contract by K.A. Doore

The second in the Chronicles of Ghalid trilogy, set around a desert city where water is a precious, rationed currency and a family guild of assassins help to keep the peace by removing morally inconvenient folks from the equation, picks up soon after the first book leaves off, although it could easily stand alone if you don't mind endstate spoilers for the previous book, The Perfect Assassin. It follows a new protagonist, Thana, as she takes on a contract to kill a man who has come from the powerful empire across the desert, claiming that said empire now has jurisdiction over the city. Working for an expansionist foreign power is bad enough, but Heru also appears to be in control of some very dodgy dark magic, and he's also very rude to serving staff; unfortunately, when Thana's first attempt to kill him goes wrong, she ends up having to travel with him and with a very lovely healer called Mo back to the Empire's heart, where she becomes integral in unravelling the mystery of a rival dark mage who might be out to kill them all.

Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised me given the previous volume in the series, but The Impossible Contract relies on its reader accepting the morality of its assassin characters: that there might be something valuable to society in having a secret group of people who can accept contracts to kill, and that society as a whole is capable of regulating how that mechanism is used for something other than political gain of the wealthy. The narrative doesn't present this as entirely unproblematic (for example, Thana tries to keep this a secret from her love interest Mo, because a healer probably wouldn't approve of killing, you know?) but it's never explicitly challenged either, and Thana never has any doubts about whether killing Heru would be the right thing to do until the circumstances of her contract change rather radically in the third act. On the other hand, Thana is perfectly willing to judge Heru for his use of magic to reanimate the dead or bind people to his will by controlling their jaan (spirit), and without giving too much away there are plenty of deaths that are certainly not seen as necessary for societal order. The result is a book whose premise itches, like a contact lens with a grain of dust underneath it, and I couldn't help but read everything with constant calculations in the back of my mind about how I was supposed to feel about all of this, because what was happening and the presentation of the book just weren't lining up. It's a shame, because it's a fun world and queer fantasy is always worth looking out for. The Impossible Contract might have a lot to offer the right reader but I couldn't get it to work out for me.

Rating: 4/10

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Microreview [book]: The Perfect Assassin, by K A Doore

In K A Doore’s The Perfect Assassin, a reluctant young man, trained to be an assassin in a time where such work seems to be a thing of the past, learns that his skills become necessary when a death threatens the social fabric of his home city-state of Ghadid.

Amastan would rather be buried in scrolls and the written word. Unfortunately for him, he was born into a family that has for generations provided a rather deadly service to the powers of the city, assassinating those who have transgressed the laws in a way that their death is necessary. Amastan doesn’t want to be an assassin and is openly relieved that their services have not been engaged in years. And still, he has trained and perfected his skills in the hope that they never actually come to pass. This works for him as a life until an assassination occurs. Worse this assassination was deliberately done in a horrific manner: The body was not laid out for people to find quickly. What this means is that the spirit of the dead person was not consecrated properly, an act that not only is impious but also produces a supernatural creature, the Jaan. The malevolent Jaan is capable of possessing and driving people mad. It’s a legitimately terrifying creature.

Amastan and the rest of his fellow assassins are under suspicion for the murder, and so, to save himself and his family, to catch an assassin, you must set an assassin. Amastan, being a witness, and for other reasons as well, is chosen to be the lead person to investigate the murder. And so Amastan delves into the role he never wanted, to save himself and his family. And perhaps his city-state in the process. Amastan is the protagonist in K A Doore’s  debut novel The Perfect Assassin.

The center of the novel is Amastan’s story and we get the entire novel from his point of view. He is a historian, a records keeper, someone immersed in documents and research, whose ability and skills as an assassin makes for, at first, a really strange “cross-class”. However, the novel does make it clear that his ability to run down information becomes important, and attention to detail, research and deep diving are important to properly doing the job as an assassin in the Basbowen family. We get a good perspective of Amastan’s life, his thinking, his emotions and passions, His conflicted nature over what he has been tasked to do, and how it intersects on a personal level once he "becomes involved" is very well done. We get to see how conflicted he is about his job, especially as a relationship with Yufit, a person Amastan investigates to get more information about the murders, starts to deepen and become more serious.

I also did like how Amastan was situated, not only within his peer group, but within his family, and the city as a whole. There is a really well thought out relationship map here of the various people in Amastan's life, who have their own agendas and perspectives that, while we only see them from Amastan's point of view, come across as agents of their own narratives. They are a diverse group, in terms of gender and sexuality (including but not limited to Amastan himself), and Doore' book easily and effortlessly makes a world where queerness is casually accepted.. I am really enjoying how writers like Doore are making that more and more something I expect in my reading.

In addition  Doore’s witing does provide a very sensory-rich look at his life. From the feel of the paper of scrolls to how his shoulders ache after a particularly hard bit of movement, the writing effectively brings the experience to a reader. I appreciated the vividness in the text.

The worldbulding is both interesting and just slightly frustrating at the same time. Ghadid is set on supports hundreds of feet above the desert floor below. The reason for this, the xxxxx that roam the desert, as well as providing physical security, gives the city a Middle Eastern feel but with inventiveness and invention unique to the author. The use of water as a currency is a logical extension of it, and the ticking clock of the city trying to hold out until the yearly rains arrive is an interesting mechanic, story wise, to use for the novel. It also shows quite nicely how precarious and how life in Ghadid is, at times of the year, quite marginal. There is also some good worldbuilding baked in that shows that such a community in the end only works if it acts and works as a community, people working together and supporting each other. However, when the water simply is not there, it simply is not there. Resource management is important in a desert city, and resource depletion is keenly important, and the novel conveys that.

In addition, I liked the idea of the Jaan and the metaphysics around them. From a plotting and mechanics and worldbuilding standpoint, it almost feels like it’s the main bit of worldbuilding that much of the rest is built around, including the plot. If someone dies and is not properly cared for, you get an jaan, which is an existential threat to all and sundry around them. This partially explains some of the facets of how the assassins work and operate (leaving a body so that it is not found is a big no-no, hence the driver of the plot), to a reason why the city is built to stand above the desert floor, to events that occur to Amastan as part of the plot. There are hints.of deeper and more dangerous variants, but those references and that strand is a bit scanty.

And along that line, the  world building Doore presents did frustrate me a bit in that it raised questions about how the city works that the novel doesn’t address. I strongly wanted to know more about how some facets of the society worked and aspects of the metaphysical portions of the universe. Although the book does linger at points on building the world, I think at some points the text is much more of a veneer and obvious trompe l’oeil than fantasy novels always effect in a reader.

There is a significant amount of roughness in the plotting and pacing I found. It was mostly upon reflection, after thinking about the book that the flaws in it were a bit more apparent and glaring. The worldbuilding and the characters, particularly, were the two engines that propelled through the novel, and it wasn’t until after the fact that the areas where the novel could have been stronger became much clearer in my mind.The novel IS a murder mystery much more than flashy action, but even given that chassis, the pacing and plotting could have been much smoother. Readers who want a clockwork jewel of a murder mystery plot are going to be disappointed on what is offered here.

The other thing to keep in mind for some fantasy readers is that while Amastan is an assassin in his own mold, and ethos, and style, and personality, it is not precisely the least tread ground these days. I wouldn’t directly compare him to a lot more Grimdark infused protagonists except for the most basic and fundamental level. It is, as they say, what precisely is on the tin. And yet it is something more, and tries to be more. It doesn't always succeed as much as I'd hope but I see the potential here.

Based on the characters and the world presented, however, I am interested in continuing to follow Amastan’s story in subsequent volumes from the author. (The Imposible Contract, a sequel to The Perfect Assassin, comes out this fall)  Doore has put a lot of work and thought into her world and her characters, and that enthusiasm, as expressed on the page, makes me want to learn and experience more with them.

***
The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +1 for excellent and inventive worldbuilding, a unique and interesting fantasy city.

Penalties: -1 for roughness in plotting and pacing. 

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws


Reference:  Doore, K A, The Perfect Assassin  [Tor, 2018]


Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.