6 Books with Sam Hawke

Sam Hawke has wanted to write books since realising as a child that they didn’t just breed between themselves in libraries. Having contemplated careers as varied as engineer, tax accountant and zookeeper Sam eventually settled on the law. After marrying her jujitsu training partner and travelling to as many countries as possible, Sam now resides in Canberra, Australia raising two small ninjas and two idiot dogs. City of Lies is her debut novel.

Today she shares her 6 books with us...

Echoes of Understorey

1. What book are you currently reading?


Technically I’m on a fun hiatus because I’m behind on submitting my MS so I’m not allowed to read til I’m done writing – which means that I haven’t read any books for a few months (terribly depressing, I know). I just have a teetering pile of books I want to read. I’ll give you my couple from the top of the pile:
- Echoes of Understorey, by Thoraiya Dyer, which I hear is even better than the first Titan’s Forest book. Her worldbuilding and prose are always top notch!
- We Ride the Storm, by Devin Mason, which I picked up after I met and was utterly charmed by its excellent author at Continuum this year (the opening line is pretty spectacular, also!)
- Witchsign by Den Patrick, the Traitor God by Cameron Johnston, and From Unseen Fire by Cass Morris are all getting great reviews and are by cool people, so would like to get on top of those, too.




 

 2. What upcoming book you are really excited about?


Probably Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is the one I’m looking forward to the most. He wrote one of my favourite fantasy trilogies of recent years (the Divine Cities) and Foundryside has the thieves and heists in city state, Locke Lamora kind of vibe that I dig. Special mention to The Monster Baru Cormorant (because the Traitor was amaaaaazing) though I am scared of how much it is going to hurt me.

  3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?


I don’t know when I could possibly justify re-reading with my TBR pile but I have a very strong temptation to go back and do the entirety of the Realm of the Elderlings now that it’s complete. Robin Hobb did such an incredible job of bringing together threads from all the previous novels into the final book that I am really looking forward to rereading to pick up on all the subtleties I inevitably missed.

                                  4. How about a book you've changed your mind about over time--either                                              positively or negatively?

                                   There are books that definitely don’t hold up to an adult re-read and some I                                           suspect don’t but am too enamoured of my memories to try. I won’t name                                             names! :)

                                 

 5. What's one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Oh, that’s a tough one, isn’t it? We’re such sponges at that age, learning so much from writing without necessarily recognising what we’re learning. I do remember reading Catch 22 as a teenager and that being one of the first times I’d seen a scrambled narrative and such an effective combination of desolation and absurdist humour. It blew my mind.

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome?


My debut, City of Lies just came out. It’s about a brother and sister whose family is responsible for protecting the ruling Chancellor, chiefly by poison testing, and who are forced to take on their roles earlier than expected when their uncle and the Chancellor are murdered with an unknown poison. The city is besieged and the siblings have to work together with their odd skillsets to find the traitor targeting the new Chancellor – their best childhood friend – and stop the city falling to aggrieved rebels. You might think it’s awesome if you like mystery/thriller/escalating tension in your fantasy, complicated family relationships, mysterious lore, non-patriarchal societies, and decent people trying to do the right thing in trying circumstances.

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

Microreview [book]: City of Lies by Sam Hawke

City of Lies starts a new city-state focused epic fantasy with a pair of sibling protagonists wrestling with not only the coming of age of their abilities and responsibilities, but a threat to their world and conception thereof.

Jovan and Kalina are young siblings in the city-state of Silasta. Both siblings are far more than they appear. Kalina suffers from a physical disability that causes everyone to underestimate and discount her, despite her determined, willful side. Jovan is non-descript, forgettable, and since the age of seven, been in training to detect and employ poisons on behalf of the family of the Chancellor.When an assassination of the Chancellor coincides with a sudden and surprising siege of their home city, Jovan and Kalina are going to have to grow up if they, and their home, are going to survive.

Welcome to the world of debut author Sam Hawke’s City of Lies.

The rich world of Silastra, its environs, history, and culture are a strongly envisioned and conveyed world to the reader. This starts with the format of the text. Interspesed between the chapters are descriptions of various imaginary poisons, where they come from, what they do, how a proofer like Jovan might detect and stop them. This conceit really helps with the illusion that the author has thought of every single detail in her imaginary world, and the entries were a highlight of my reading. When a new chapter started, I was always eager for another morsel of the world conveyed thereby.

Too, the world of Silastra. The city-state, sitting on trade routes and rich and powerful, made me think of Italianate city-states, with its class stratification, scheming nobles, and it’s relations with often much larger neighbors. Rather than being a maritime power like the Renaissance Italianate city states, Silastra is landlocked, but given it is astride the shortest and best trade routes across the landscape, it has a power and reach that allows it to punch above its weight. This makes for all the more contrast when a besieging army shows up at the walls, Silastra’s army inconveniently (for them) away from the scene. Showing a potent power humbled, and suddenly scrambling when the chips are down and finding out what they are made of gives us a good idea of what the city really is like when the chips are down.

So, too, the protagonists. Putting her protagonists under pressure is a way for the author show the true quality of Jovan and Kalina, both imperfect, flawed and striving young people who are trying to transcend their limitations. The sibilings play well against and with each other and seeing how the siblings see each other and how they individually see the world. The novel’s format is of alternating chapters, each alternating the point of view from one sibling to another, in an intimate first person point of view that gives us lots of internal thought and feeling that makes us sympathize and really get to know them. Jovan’s inexperience and the pressure of suddenly being a proofer for the new Chancellor, his best friend, is an immense responsibility for someone whose training is not complete. Kalina, by contrast, whose disability has long since washed her out of becoming a proofer, has an even more fraught path, and one without a clear future that she must try and find and forge for herself, in the middle of the chaos surrounding the city.

In the offing, we learn lots about Jovan and Kalina, and also enfold in even more worldbuilding in the doing. If you want to read a novel where we go deep into the lives of young minor nobility in a fantasy city state under threat, City of Lies is the novel for you.

The novel has room and space to explore some interesting themes, even as we have our protagonists dealing with their home under siege, a slowly constricting situation that gets ratcheted worse and worse as the novel progresses. There are strong themes of responsibility, sacrifice, duty and stepping up to a challenge, true. I was expecting those, and those themes are well explored. But there is an even richer backstory of history, of subjugation, of lost culture, of appropriation, of colonialism and a lot of fraught subjects that get exploration as well. Silastra, as it turns out, as a surprise to our protagonists, is not the shining city that it first appears.The title of the novel as premise and promise is fulfilled.

My major issues with the book really come off at the end matter of the book. Throughout the book, we’ve slowly gotten to learn more about the setup, what is really going on (even as the main characters themselves do).The ending chapters though, don’t quite live up to the first 3/4 of the book. Kalina’s POVs chapters at one point turns almost perfunctory and not quite as sharp as Jovan’s. There are plot-related reasons that explain some of it, but I felt that the novel really wanted to tell much more of Jovan’s story than Kalina’s, and so a “two hander” of a point of view gets unbalanced. There is also a distinct sense that the author pulls some of her punches in the denouement.

Also, the book, with such a grounded and localized sense of setting, and the layout of the city under siege being rather crucial to the plot, the book really could use a map of the city-state.

I do hope that there will be subsequent books set in this world. The questions that the book answers by the end really are just the beginning of the questions I have about the world. In addition, Jovan only really comes into his own by the end of the book, and I am looking forward to seeing where his character development can go in subsequent books.

The Math

Baseline Assessment 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for a compelling set of protagonists, +1 for an interesting thorny problem unearthed in the revelation of the excellent worldbuilding

Penalties : -1 some first novel roughness, especially in that the ending feels like a punch is distinctly and unconvincingly pulled

Nerd Coefficient :8/10 Well worth your time and attention”

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Hawke, Sam. City of Lies [Tor, 2018]

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

Summer Reading List 2018: Paul

While winter is for reading and trying to stay warm in the Great White North when the Ice Giants and the White Dragons roam the wastelands of Minnesota, summer is for getting out there and enjoying the all too brief warm weather. That hardly means, however, that reading comes to an end, far from it. It does mean that reading time on weekends is while having lunch somewhere on the North Shore, or even more distant destinations, and audiobooks consumed to eat up the miles driving on the highways and byways in search of photographic subjects. So here, find a list of six of the books I am looking forward to getting to before Summer turns to Fall, and green shifts to hues of red, gold, and orange before a clattering change to brown.

1. From Unseen Fire, by Cass Morris.

 When I first heard about a take on an alternate fantastic Rome with magic, I sat up and paid attention. Set roughly after the fall of their Julius Ceasar figure, From Unseen Fire looks to feature a bevy of strong characters, crunchy politics and worldbuilding and magical intrigue.

2. The City of Lies, by Sam Hawke.

I met Sam in Australia during my 2017 Down Under Fan Fund adventure, and later in Helsinki at Worldcon that same year. I learned about her forthcoming novel, and became excited by the high concept. That debut novel, City of Lies, looks to be an epic fantasy of city states, poison, treachery and ancient magic. A pair of siblings trying to save their city state in a time of magic, war, and poisons? I'm on board!

3. Red Waters Rising, by Laura Anne Gilman.

 I’ve been a fan of Laura Anne Gilman’s previous Devil’s West novels (Silver on the Road and The Cold Eye), set in an alternate early 19th century western North America where a Devil-like figure controls a large portion of the land west of the MIssissippi river. The novels follow Isobel, a young woman who enters into the Devil’s service. She’s grown in power, authority and ability, and judging from the blurb, this this third novel in her story challenges all she has learned and done to the utmost.

4. Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse.

 Trail of Lightning is a debut novel from the author, who has been getting award nominations and accolades for her short fiction, particularly her fantastic “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”. This novel promises a Native American look and setting for a post-apocalyptic novel, something I’ve just not seen before. I’m excited to see what she does with the concept.

5.By Fire Above, Robyn Bennis.

I really enjoyed the steampunk adventures of Captain Dupre in Bennis’ first novel, The Guns Above. I enjoyed the worldbulding, the excellent action beats and the strong characters in that first novel. I am looking forward to more and going deeper on both the world and the characters in this next novel. .

6. State Tectonics by Malka Older

 The third and final novel of her Centenal Cycle series, the previous volumes (Infomocracy and Null States) created a fascinating near future world where the political order and society have been painfully moving to a new and intriguing one, and yet showing that even such a change is no utopia, providing challenges and opportunities all of its own. Deep currents of change and reaction in the political spheres have been building in the previous two novels, and in this third novel, those forces appear to be moving toward a head. I am very eager to find out if Older will stick the landing for the characters and world she has created.