Summer Book Reviews
I post reviews to Twitter, Instagram and Literal within a day of finishing a book. Here are the books I read over the summer of 2022.
The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart
A historical fantasy about the early years of Merlin that spends more time on cultural, religious, and political upheaval than, like, cool wizard shit. And it’s good!
I first read this version of the Merlin origin story as a young teen, having run through all the YA iterations I could get my hands on. This one really felt different then, and while it’s not as novel to my adult palate I still had a good time.
Grounded by its 5th-century setting, CAVE is a story about the evolution of the British people and national identity—a combination of Welsh, Briton, and Saxon with some leftover Roman. But Stewart has some fun with it, giving us druids and mystery cults, knights and hermits. This Merlin’s power comes largely from his intellect and ability to read people. He’s an engineer of both the physical and social kinds, cultivating his wizardly image for its symbolic value. But he’s also a lonely kid trying to find his way through a violent world.
This is a story with a lot of mysteries. Stewart doesn’t avoid the supernatural elements of the story, but also doesn’t feel the need to explain them. There’s an epic scope to this story, but Stewart’s direct, evocative writing keeps it personal.
Flint and Mirror by John Crowley
In this historical fantasy, the Irish earl Hugh O’Neill struggles with dual obligations to his ancestral land and to Queen Elizabeth I, who communicates with him through a black mirror crafted by the legendary magician John Dee. This novel expands a story by the same name that appears in Crowley’s collection And Go Like This (which I read—and loved—last year), beginning with Hugh’s early encounters with Dee’s magic and the Sidhe of his native Ulster and ending with his death in exile.
It was interesting to read Flint in close succession to The Crystal Cave. Whereas Cave historicizes myth, Flint mythologizes history—and they end up in a similar place, though in Flint’s case, I think I could have done with more myth and less history. While Flint and Mirror certainly contains the real-world/fairy-world tensions that characterize so much of Crowley’s work, the scope of this story necessarily requires more time spent on things like troop movements than on the esoteric weird shit I love so much.
That said, Crowley manages to filter a decades-long political conflict through a personal lens, the tensions between Ireland and England embodied by a real, fallible man. It’s an impeccably written, evocative book—though now I mostly want to go back and re-read THE SOLITUDES.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
This intense, challenging novel wields uncompromising formal invention to tell a total ripper of an action-fantasy story, breaking new ground in an increasingly stale genre with a truly astonishing display of craft and creativity. Set in a secondary world modeled on pre-colonial African cultures and mythologies, Black Leopard, Red Wolf takes the form of a tale told by its protagonist, the wayward Tracker, to his most recent captors. After detailing his origins, he launches into the main story—the ill-fated search for a kidnapped child.
On its face, Black Leopard is absolutely an epic fantasy adventure—with all the battles, magic, and political intrigue that entails—but, coming from such a resolutely non-Western background and mythic structure, it feels utterly different in the best way possible. Beautiful and brutal, tender and horrific, grounded and psychedelic, this is a work of intense extremes—James’ complex language and tagless dialogue opening the door to elegant, violent action sequences and multifaceted queer eroticism.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fascinating addition to a lineage of difficult literary genre fiction, in a league with seminal forebears like Morrison’s Beloved, Delany’s Dhalgren, and Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer without being indebted to them. A hard, wild, deeply rewarding ride.