Polk packs plenty of action into a short space, along with a decent number of plot twists, but the heart of the book is the love between Helen and her longtime girlfriend, Edith, who has a secret of her own. A romance between two people who are as good as married is a tall order, but Polk gives them one hell of a spark — and the homophobia they face ends up being as scary as any demonic force.
“Sign Here” (Berkley) by Claudia Lux is another book about damned souls, but it’s more satirical, with a bite that sneaks up on you. In Lux’s version of hell, the damned can work their way up to middle management, allowing them to journey back to Earth to persuade living people to sign their souls away. Peyote Trip (who’s been given a ridiculous new name, because it’s hell) is slowly working to capture the members of the Harrison family, but he’s saddled with a new trainee who knows more than she’s letting on.
Lux shuttles between the cartoonish office politics in hell and a more grounded portrait of a mother and daughter in the Harrison family — and, to her credit, there’s no whiplash at all. Instead, she suffuses both storylines with a misanthropic sympathy: People are terrible, but you can’t help feeling for us. Several rushed twists at the end thankfully don’t do much to take away from an otherwise delightful ride.
“The Sunbearer Trials” (Feiwel & Friends) by Aiden Thomas features another kind of doom: One of the teen demigods (or “semidioses”) competing in the titular trials will be sacrificed to replenish the sunstones that keep evil forces at bay. This unshakable doom hangs over Teo, a trans semidios, as he competes with his way-mightier peers in a series of games and challenges.
This Mexican-inspired fantasy is full of beautiful details, but Teo is also a fantastic protagonist: generous and kind but with a bad attitude. “The Sunbearer Trials” is a total thrill ride, one that focuses on friendships at least as much as romance, but the book’s greatest pleasure is in seeing Teo come into his own and gain power, in the face of unavoidable heartbreak.
I handed in this review column a tad late, because I got sucked into reading “The Last Gift of the Master Artists” (Other Press) by Ben Okri, and it’s not a book you can rush through. (Okri even exhorts the reader on the very first page to “Read slowly.”)
Okri, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, originally published “Last Gift” in 2007 under the title “Starbook” — but now he’s substantially revised it, he says, because critics missed the central role of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery in the narrative. The result is one of the most beautiful and profound novels I’ve read in ages. It also packs an unsettling punch, tracing a mystical love story between a prince and a maiden from a secret tribe of magical artists whose world is about to be destroyed by a menace they can’t yet understand.
It’s easy to get lost in Okri’s fable, which weaves the intimate with the communal and is full of mystical revelations — both protagonists suffer a kind of death and are reborn, and both of them come to a greater self-knowledge, which, we’re told, is “better than being a king.” And yet a creeping sense of dread also suffuses the novel, as a vision of people in chains, first revealed in a mysterious nightmare-inducing sculpture, eats away at everything. Okri never dwells on the horror of slavery itself — instead, he makes us fall in love with the world it’s about to destroy.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of “Victories Greater Than Death” and “Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak,” the first two books in a young-adult trilogy. Her other books include “The City in the Middle of the Night” and “All the Birds in the Sky.” She’s won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus awards.
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