One Hundred Years of Solitude, or how to film the unfilmable

For a massively revered classic, a faithful rendering may not suffice

As nation states go, these we have here in Latin America are rather young. The Westernized portion of our history only covers a few centuries, and the much longer Native portion barely survives in mutilated fragments. Unlike the Greek or Chinese or Icelandic peoples, who long ago developed a solid sense of who they are, we're still in the middle of figuring ourselves out. It would seem pointless to attempt to write a national epic about us when "us" still has many blank spaces awaiting definition.

And yet, the multigenerational saga One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez succeeds at both transmitting and creating a portrait of the Colombian nation. Like Don Quixote, it narrates the chaos that follows men when possessed by an idea. Like the Iliad, it laments the escalating destruction that can result from an unyielding sense of honor. Like War and Peace, it traces the ways individual lives intersect with big history. Like the Divine Comedy, it creates its own cosmology and makes the reader take it as true. Like Macbeth, it dissects the forces that lure men toward excessive ambition. Like the Old Testament, it bridges the passage from mythic origins to known history. It's an ostentatious book, the kind that requires a writer to err on the side of overconfidence. Such a bet is risky, but that's the price of admission in this game: you simply can't pull off something of the monumental scope of One Hundred Years of Solitude if you have any humility left in you. You must think yourself worthy of it.

The Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, released just this month in a first batch of eight episodes out of a planned total of sixteen, faced a comparable challenge. And on the technical level, the challenge is met with the highest excellence: period-accurate costumes, meticulously researched set design, authentic 19th-century furniture, handcrafted props, true-sounding accents, and multiple full-sized versions of the entire town of Macondo. The production's stratospheric budget is noticeable in every scene: in exquisite cinematography, in pitch-perfect casting, in brutally honest war scenes, in taking every opportunity to boast Colombia's gorgeous geography. If the series can be said to commit any fault at all, it's only in its absolute reverence for the source text, precisely the kind of humility with which it couldn't have been composed in the first place.

This degree of allegiance to the source text is understandable given the impossibly high expectations placed on the project. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a sacred cow of our literary canon, so there would have been a loud backlash had the scriptwriters and directors hired by Netflix dared introduce a more personal touch into the story. So what we get is an almost word-for-word translation of the novel, to the point that a voiceover narrator is used (in fact, overused) to explain the plot to the audience.

Now, before someone accuses me of being inconsistent: I'm aware that I praised the film adaptation of Pedro Páramo for staying strictly faithful to the book. So why do I see the same choice as a defect this time? The difference is that, despite being much shorter, Pedro Páramo is a far more experimental book than One Hundred Years of Solitude. The disorienting effect of hearing so many voices at the same time already gave Pedro Páramo (the book) some of the qualities of the audiovisual medium, which made the task easier for Pedro Páramo (the movie). With One Hundred Years of Solitude there's a bigger maneuvering margin to build upon the book, but the directors don't take advantage of it. To rely heavily on a voiceover narrator isn't as jarring in Pedro Páramo (the movie) because Pedro Páramo (the book) is composed as a continuous conversation: the protagonist is being told his father's story in the voices of the dead. So it makes sense for the movie to also be composed as a conversation. One Hundred Years of Solitude uses a more traditional formula (omniscient third-person narrator who is not part of the plot). Giving the narrator such a prominent position in the adaptation feels like an intrusion, almost an admission that the directors didn't trust the images' ability to tell the story. Watching a dramatized adaptation of a book shouldn't feel like a read-along of the book.

This deferential attitude toward our canon has already been defied in literature; audiovisual media shouldn't have to recapitulate the whole progression that went from the generation of writers who prayed at the altar of García Márquez to the generation of writers who spat in the face of García Márquez to today's generation of writers who are neither for nor against García Márquez and are just focused on doing their own thing. For example, in the Anglo world, iconoclastic reinterpretations of Shakespeare are a long-established and respected tradition. García Márquez himself was no stranger to that kind of transformative creation: he wrote the screenplay of a retelling of Oedipus Rex set in the violent 1990s of rural Colombia. It shouldn't be seen as blasphemy to do a less than faithful adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, as long as the core theme is treated with respect.

And what is that core theme? The same as in every national epic: This Is What It Feels Like To Be Us. However, García Márquez wasn't merely reporting on an already existing sense of nationhood; he was codifying it. The earliest Colombian novels were meant to serve as almost ethnographic descriptions of social customs, but the generation of writers to which García Márquez belonged had a much clearer idea of that task. By reading him, we learn to be Colombian. We learn to pay attention to what is at stake in our embarrassing saga of repeated errors. Particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude, we learn about the folly of putting abstract allegiances above universal human needs, about the dangers of forgetting basic truths, about the poisonous consequences of imposing artificial obstacles to love. Above all, we learn that the one thing you should never be afraid of is love.

One isn't required to 100% agree with the guy's ideas about love, though. His oeuvre was uniformly influenced by outdated and sometimes very harmful views on gender dynamics. In his interviews he blamed women for the problems of sexism. The last book he published before his death is a romanticized account of child prostitution. When approaching his writings, one must keep in mind both his exceptional talents and his abhorrent opinions. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that got him the Nobel Prize, is replete with instances of unchallenged, as in authorially endorsed, sexual misconduct that can't be easily removed in an adaptation without unraveling the rest of the plot.

So what can be salvaged from One Hundred Years of Solitude? What justifies its continued place of honor in world literature and the undeniably beautiful adaptation Netflix threw bucketfuls of money at? I've already mentioned how it conveys the general feeling of what it's like to be Colombian. Let me give a more concrete example: a few years ago, when I reviewed Encanto, I briefly considered mentioning a factoid that existed in parallel with the announcement of the movie but was completely unrelated. What happened was that, on the same day that the first trailer for Encanto was released, it was reported in the news that the murderers of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse were Colombian ex-army mercenaries. I didn't include that bit of news in the review because it was already long enough, but it's relevant here: Encanto was offering me a rare occasion to feel good about my country, but it was instantly ruined by the revelation about the murderers. That whiplash of incompatible emotions, that corrosive question in my head (Why did I bother getting excited?), that millionth refusal by history to let us feel proud of anything, that abrupt cold shower of pointlessness—that is what it feels like, every day, to be Colombian. And the biggest artistic merit of One Hundred Years of Solitude lies in capturing that infernally complicated feeling and exploring how we live with it and through it, and how we stubbornly keep looking for a way to someday live past it.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Pedro Páramo

Netflix adapts one of the most acclaimed classics of Latin American literature

Latin American history has been stained with blood since the time of colonization. The respective canons of our national literary traditions have variously grappled with the sense of disorientation of having to figure out how to build new nations after finally winning our independence; and the ever-present shadow of violence that haunted those first attempts (and that still haunts us in many ways) left a clear mark on our writers. But the special blend of Indigenous and Catholic beliefs that occurred in Mexico created a unique cultural relationship with death.

One of the manifestations of the role of death in Mexican consciousness is Juan Rulfo's 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, one of the biggest masterpieces of the Spanish language. Told in a minutely fragmented, extremely nonlinear style, it anticipated many of the technical innovations of what would eventually be called magical realism. It follows multiple first-person accounts in the remote town of Comala, where the main narrator travels to look for Pedro Páramo, his father. Pedro Páramo embodies the archetype of the Mexican macho: a selfish, violent authoritarian who exploits men and consumes women. His inner demons gradually turn him into a bitter loner, feared and hated by everyone. By the time the narrator arrives looking for him, Comala is an abandoned waste, its inhabitants long gone. But the deep pain that lived there still echoes in the walls and in the streets. Pedro left behind many tormented, restless spirits, from whose voices we piece together his story.

Pedro is a rich landowner at a time when the Mexican Revolution is trying to put an end to the outrageous inequality that has always been the scourge of our countries. Through shameless fraud, manipulation and murder, he gradually becomes the uncontested authority in the town, but all his money and his power are useless against the capricious hand of death that continuously denies him any morsel of happiness. One character defines him as "living rancor," and that sentiment takes hold of him until nothing else remains.

Of many classics of literature it has been said that they can't be adapted to cinema. Curiously, the numerous jumps in the narration of Pedro Páramo, from past to present and from one narrator to another, feel ready-made for the screen. The Netflix adaptation follows almost exactly the sequence in which the text is written, and that structure, full of abrupt breaks, which in book form demands constant attention and effort from the reader, lends itself to the audiovisual medium with surprising ease. (Rulfo also wrote movie scripts, so maybe he had a sense of the possibilities of scene cuts when writing his novel.)

Precisely because the movie didn't need to add more technical embellishments to a text that was itself quite complex, some Anglo reviewers have reported feeling left unimpressed by it, describing it as too long and not experimental enough for its source material. My suspicion is that they watched the movie in its lackluster English dub instead of the powerful dialogues of the original Spanish, most of them taken verbatim from the novel. I'm not surprised to find that, where English media have assigned this movie to a Hispanic reviewer, its reception has been more favorable. The languid, understated tone is part of the point. The trip to Comala is a descent into hell, and when these ghosts speak, they have much to lament. You can get bored with Pedro Páramo if you're not intimately familiar with the way the real and the unreal are experienced by Latin Americans. The generational shock of colonization and the repeated shocks of subsequent civil wars built a collective mindset where no assumptions are guaranteed, where things can crumble down at any moment and the most delicate beauty coexists with utter terror. You don't need fancy CGI to tell our stories. Our mundane, common lives are already full of the impossible.

Director Rodrigo Prieto masterfully communicates the intensity of the events in Pedro Páramo with vivid colors and stark chiaroscuros. The result is a slow-paced account of a life of frustrated desires painted with heightened accents. Nothing much seems to happen while a tempest of emotions roars under the surface. That's the tension in the heart of a Mexican macho, who is expected to show at all times a hard face that nothing can move, even as his unacknowledged feelings eat him alive. Here's where we can notice the ace up the sleeve of this movie: Gustavo Santaolalla's monumental soundtrack, at the same time unobtrusive and ominous, matching the all-consuming resentment and fury that hide in the ordinary flow of everyday moments.

This production lives up to the thorny responsibility of adapting a national epic. Many classics of Latin American literature took upon themselves the task of expressing an entire country in a book. To get a feel for the soul of Argentina, you read Martín Fierro. To get a feel for the soul of Colombia, you read One Hundred Years of Solitude. That's the position that Pedro Páramo occupies for Mexico. And the many souls trapped between the empty houses of Comala tell of a land mercilessly punished by men's ambitions, a land that resonates with the clamor of a very old pain that still hasn't found peace, a land where the melancholy of memories finds some comfort each time someone listens to them.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview: Uncanny Times by Laura Anne Gilman

Laura Anne Gilman’s Uncanny Times leverages her skills at Urban Fantasy to tell a Historical fantasy tale of a supernaturally oriented pair of siblings who bump back the things that bump in the night.

Rosemary and Aaron have a problem. Being Huntsmen, with a touch of the supernatural, the weird, to them, trouble is something they are drawn to, and vice versa. Their role as Huntsmen is to police and deal with the supernatural elements when they rise and threaten people. When a relative dies, and calls for them to come to their town, Rosemary and Aaron find that there is definitely a supernatural creature in the town, but something beyond the brownies in the bakery, or even the Merwoman. Something...they aren’t familiar with. Something extremely deadly.

This is the story of Uncanny Times, a historical urban fantasy from Laura Anne Gilman.

For Me, reading Laura Anne Gilman has always been a dive into communities. Overlapping penumbras of communities, relationship webs and characters interacting and working together is a hallmark of her fiction. Be it the epic fantasy of the Vineart War, the intense relationships in the Casa Nostradamus series, the bonds seen in the Devil’s West saga, and more, it is those relationships that one can read for in a Laura Anne Gilman story, or novel. Gilman makes us care about the characters, who they are, what they are, to themselves, to each other and the world around them.

Here we have, first and foremost, the brother and sister relationship. They are an effective team, have been for quite a while, and Gilman does an excellent job in showing us their past competence, allusions to prior encounters and sets us up for the adventure at hand, their trip upstate New York, and working to uncover the mystery.of what Uncanny (supernatural creature) is causing trouble in the town, and what is to be done about it. Gilman makes this story seem like an episode in a long running series, this episodic nature grounding the reader in the illusion that there are many more stories about them, past and forward, without making a reader have to read more to understand their story.  We are given enough to understand them, their role, their tools, and why they do what they do.

 I thought it was a nice touch to make the last name of the brother and sister Harker, a nice little touch of the hat to Dracula. They each have their strengths and abilities and complement each other nicely, both on a professional and a personal level.

The brother and sister relationship extends to their dog, Botheration, or, Bother. Bother is a descendant of Molossian hounds, bred and sculpted to deal with the Uncanny and is a character in and of himself. His loyalty and doggedness remind me of another recent SFF dog that I (re)read and that would be Bortan from Roger Zelazny’s THIS IMMORTAL. Both dogs are tirelessly loyalty, intelligent, and characters in their own right. Both are called Hellhounds in the text. Was Bother inspired by Bortan? I don’t know, but I was charmingly reminded of Bortan in reading about Botheration.

Beyond the brother, sister and dog relationship, we also get the social relationships of the town, and the uncanny in the area as well, providing a rich depth of character background for even the most minor of characters up to the eventually revealed antagonist. The book is, in the end, a mystery, a unfolding of secrets and history of the town that describing the plot too much would spoil.  The relationship between various Uncanny in the town put me in mind of Juliet McKenna's Green Man novels and how the supernatural creatures in that verse relate to each other.

Brunson itself is an imaginary town, but I couldn’t have told that it wasn’t just lifted from real life until I looked it up. And it is in the creation of Brunson and its grounding in history, culture and the historical moment that the novel takes place in (1913). What Gilman gets to work with, in the time period for her novel, is social change in the twin streams of the labor movement, and women’s rights (voting) movement. As always, SFF is often about the time and place in which it is written, rather than where and when it is set. This is a time, a moment, as of the publication of this novel, where both labor rights and women’s rights (bodily autonomy) are being litigated and coming under threat. Gilman’s use of this time period puts a lens on us, as well as this moment before World War One, and she does it to good effect. The tools that capital and the rich use against these are different in 1913 than 2022, but the feel of that oppression is real. As far as how this ties into the main plot of the uncanny murdering people in the town, I leave for the reader to discover. Gilman’s mastery of plotting had me guessing throughout, trying to anticipate the answers eventually revealed. This is a case of where competent and experienced protagonists are running up against the unknown and Gilman does a great job at the balance.

There is also a community in the background, sketched in and indistinct but real enough from the hints, and that is the Huntsmen community itself. It’s made clear through the text that the Huntsmen is a calling, something you are born to, and a society for lack of a better world that has been going on for decades, perhaps centuries. How and where the Huntsmen came from was a question burning in my mind, That’s not the focus of this novel, of course, but given my relentless curiosity, I want to Know More.  And there is a hint here in the book that some longstanding ideas and principles are under threat.

As mentioned above, this is clearly a “one shot” episode of the Harker’s adventures and the novel concludes satisfactorily with a complete and whole story. The bottom of the novel says “A Huntsmen Novel” which provides the hope that there are going to be more Huntsmen stories, either with the Harkers, or with other Huntsmen, elsewhere and elsewhen. I would be most interested in reading more stories of these individuals who stand between the normal and the uncanny and the adventures and situations they get entangled with.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for a strong and interesting worldbuilding

+1 for excellent characterization and relationship maps.

Penalties: -1 A couple of shifts of point of view are not quite as effective as they might be.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: Gilman, Laura Anne, Uncanny Times [Saga Press, 2022]

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

Microreview: The Green Man's Silence by Juliet McKenna

 The Green Man's Silence continues the story of Daniel Mackmain, changing up him, and the entire series.

When last we left Daniel Mackmain, things had been looking up for him. After his adventures in the Cotswolds, he has a sort of relationship going with Finele, the swan may he met on his adventure there. Now, visiting her and her family back in their coastal home, Daniel finds that a new problem affects them--and him. An entitled heir is riling up the supernatural denizens of the Fens, with doubtless no good purpose. And the Green Man, Daniel’s patron, is mum on the matter. Loner Daniel is going to have to forge new relationships to face this latest problem.

The Green Man’s Silence is the third book in Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series.

As the series has progressed, from The Green Man’s Heir  through The Green Man’s Foe, and now to The Green Man’s Silence, McKenna has been expanding the sphere of her urban(rural) fantasy verse. More lore about the supernatural universe. More about Daniel’s history and background. Building on previous episodes to enrich the relationships and worlds that Daniel finds himself in. As the son of a mortal man and a dryad, and the agent of a mysterious entity known as the titular Green Man, we have a protagonist who has one foot in our world and the other foot, as the series progresses, crosses more and more into the supernatural world.  

Take this third book, The Green Man’s Silence, as illustration. In the first book, Daniel starts off gamely enough as his mother’s son, but living a most regular life otherwise, until events push him into the supernatural outside of the context of his mother. He steps further into the borderlands of faerie, as it were, but its clear that while he knows more than the average person, he is still way in over his head. By this book, Daniel’s ties to the supernatural have gotten deeper and more permanent.It’s not just his burgeoning relationship with Finele, although associating with her and her family (many of whom are of her swan man nature) but it is also the base assumptions and the water that he swims in is significantly more supernaturally aspected and focused.

That is a strength, and perhaps for some readers, a mild drawback of the book. This book amps up the supernatural lore, plotting and ties significantly. There are many more moving parts to the supernatural world and Daniel, and us, get meshed in with those as he struggles to deal with the problems Finele and her family are having with the local would-be-magician causing problems for them and for the rest of the local supernatural population. The choice to, as the title suggests, keep the Green Man offstage paradoxically gives the author room to introduce a lot of other elements and powers within the supernatural realm for Daniel to negotiate with. These entanglements in order to deal with the antagonist do complicate the narrative. 

In a sense, too, they also crowd out the villain a bit. Although in the previous books, the antagonists do not take large swaths of pages, the focus on Daniel meaning necessarily that they do not appear over much, in this third novel especially, the would-be magician really is offstage for good rafts of the book, personally. His actions and effects are outsized, and are always a threat, but this is a novel where his actual presence on screen, as it were is a little more limited. I don’t know if this novel heralds a tonal and textual shift in the series, and I will be curious as to where The Green Man’s Challenge goes in this regard. 

One thing is clear though, and that McKenna is not content to simply repeat the formula of the first book and just come out with christmas cookie cutter shaped narratives of Daniel’s story in different settings. As he gets ever deeper into the woods (or the fens, if you take Finele’s perspective) of supernatural doings, the author is willing to make changes to how the stories run, and what Daniel has to deal with. This book, then, after the first two, feels like some of a very transitional book, or one might say, given its setting, it’s a Esturarial book--a book sitting in the in-between zones of two different worlds. I know a bit about estuaries from my college days--Estauries are between the sea and the land, between salt and fresh, a zone ever and always changing, with inhabitants who are only successful if they are ready to adapt to that change. But estuaries, for all that, are some of the most fecund regions on the globe, rich places for life to develop. 

So, too, is the richness of this book. It’s a transitional book, its a book where the text, the plot and narrative, the worldbuilding and yes the main character himself is in this borderland and liminal space, and it is richer for all of it. Daniel building a real relationship with someone who is not his Mom and Dad and navigating that space. The wealth and welter of supernatural creatures and their relationships with each other. The sense of place that the Fens, our third locale in this series, provides, especially showing how deep the history of the area really goes. 

I look forward to the next book to see where McKenna continues to go with Daniel and his ever changing world.

---

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for a rich estuary of character and worldbuilding as she changes up Daniel and his narrative

 Penalties: -1 The novel is definitely a gear shift, and readers new to the series will not find traction here. 

 Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

 Reference: McKenna, Juliet.The Green Man’s Silence (Wizard Tower Press, 2020)

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

Microreview [book]: The Green Man's Foe by Juliet McKenna

The second book in the Green Man series deepens and broadens the otherworldly adventures of a Dryad’s son.

Being mortal, but also the son of an otherworldly being isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. Ask Daniel Mackmain. After dealing with a threat to a wood and coming in contact with a very powerful supernatural entity, the titular Green Man, it is no wonder that his success in dealing with a rather nasty problem (that had some unfortunate consequences for him with the press and with the police) has resulted in the Green Man calling him on again.  At a new construction  job site in the lovely Cotswolds, a mysterious figure seems to be influencing the local kids...and trying to get into the job site Daniel has been hired for. But what is he after? And why?

This is the second story of Daniel Mackmain, The Green Man’s Foe.

While I was enthusiastic and interested in subsequent novels after the first novel in the Green Man’s sequence, I recognize that The Green Man’s Heir was a nicely self contained novel and one could one and done the series. So the extension of that into subsequent novels is something I was curious about.  

McKenna tackles this in a number of ways. Crucially, her writing style and format lends itself to readers starting the narrative here as easily as in the first novel. You don’t need to have read The Green Man’s Heir or remember it well in order to pick this one up and go with it: McKenna layers in everything you need to know about Daniel, his nature, his heritage and role and his capabilities. We get mentions and some discussions of the previous novel, and we do get some touchbacks to his mother and father but this novel leaps forward. Although we get a character besides his family recur from the first novel, this one is in a new location, a new situation and a new problem for Daniel, so deep knowledge of the terrain is not needed and one can launch themselves into this Cotswolds adventure without missing much from the first novel. 

The relatively mortal nature of the protagonist also lends to the serial nature of the story and allows for readers to pick up the story here, if they so wish, and launch themselves into Daniel’s latest adventure as their first. He has knowledge and ties to the supernatural, but he is very mortal, and as such he has to rely on his very mortal skills, luck, and determination to see him through than what might be considered more traditional Urban (Rural?) Fantasy tropes and powers. You don’t need a catalog of Daniel’s magical abilities, because aside from being able to see Dryads, Nixies and the like, there really aren’t any.  This allows the author to focus on more low powered action and character, immersive setting and excellent plotting, which are her strengths from other books in any event. 

So what does happen here? Daniel gets a job overseeing the renovation of an estate, Brightwell House, into an estate in the lovely Cotswolds, a region of England I’ve only seen in pictures (it also happens to be the home turf of the author, and the writing shows that). The immersive writing, a style that had me wondering if Blithehurst House in the first novel was real (it is not), really suits McKenna here, as she brings Brightwell House and the Cotswolds to life. A drifter is nearby, though, doing *something* with the local disaffected youth, and the Green Man did convince him to take the job with dreams of the place. So a chunk of the novel has Daniel trying to figure out the supernatural nature of the problem. The drifter and his bad influence on the local youth and their habits seems straightforward enough--but how that ties into the supernatural and what Daniel has to do is part of the mystery and joy of discovery in this book. There are definite reasons why Daniel is involved in matters by the Green Man, and we get some more exploration of the supernatural world that Daniel has more than a foot in at this stage.

The book also introduces a secondary character that is going to, based on descriptions of subsequent novels, become more important in future books: Finele Wicken. Finele is more explicitly a supernatural being than Daniel is. She is a swanmay, able to change into a swan, as can all the members of her family. She’s also a ecologist specializing in wetlands and water (a suitably modern job for such a being).  Finele is not the “love interest” in any facile sense, she has her own agenda and perspective, and is something of a “Consultant” in the matters. 

This novel does start raising issues not really explored in the first novel, and Finele’s intersection with Daniel does bring to life his often lonely nature. We really get a good sense here, even more than the first novel, how much Daniel keeps people at an arm’s length, especially romantic entanglements. His nature (not really a power but he does have a degree of supernatural charm), and the nature of his mother means that bringing home girlfriends to Mother is something Daniel doesn’t have a lot of experience with ,and there is a pathos to that isolation of a lonely life that I felt resonant with my own. Connecting him with Finele here, in this novel, is a good character development, then, so the same beats aren’t endlessly repeated. 

Given the rich characters, the worldbuilding and rotating settings, it is no wonder that there is a lot of runway for McKenna to continue to explore Daniel and his supernatural heritage and world, and this novel very successfully builds on the first, provides an onramp for new readers and provides superstructure and scaffolding for future books in the series. If you like the ruralistic urban fantasies of, say, Alex Bledsoe, or Paul Cornell, The Green Man’s series is definitely the cup of tea that you want to give a try.  I look forward to continuing to read and see where the series progresses.

The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for excellent characters and worldbuilding 

+1 for making it very accessible for new readers

Penalties: -1  Some of the elements of the mystery solving felt a little repetitive. 

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: McKenna, Juliet. The Green Man’s Foe (Wizard Tower Press, 2019)

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