One day, at the absolute end of her rope, Casiopea opens up a locked chest in her grandfather’s bedroom, and out comes the spirit of Han-Kame, the Mayan god of death. He needs to regain his throne from his usurping twin brother Vucub-Kame, and he needs Casiopea’s help. As they travel around Mexico searching for the missing pieces of Han-Kame, Casiopea’s life force is gradually drained, while Han-Kame gradually becomes more and more human and less and less god.

Gods of Jade and Shadow draws from the Popul Vuh, but I can report from my own experience that you don’t need to be familiar with it to enjoy the story. At its heart, it’s a road trip story and McGuffin hunt of the highest order, and a story about stories without getting too terribly precious about it. I loved following Casiopea and Han-Kame around Mexico on trains and in fast cars, as each of them learns about being a human in a wide and varied world. Han-Kame, of course, has always been a god, and Casiopea has always been a drudge, with a life that offered her very little scope for self-discovery. It’s brilliant to witness her world opening up.

Casiopea overall is just a terrific character. One of my favorite things about this book is that although it’s a fantasy novel, and although it’s set in The Past (Jazz Age!), Casiopea is never under sexual threat. Her physical safety grants her the space to be her own person, a stubborn and intelligent woman who looks up at the stars and dreams of freedom. Most particularly, she refuses to be cast in the role of a drudge — she may have to act the part, but she’ll never internalize it, and this is what drives her cousin Martin wild. Though she agrees to help Han-Kame (she doesn’t have much choice, since he’s draining her life force as long as he’s not a full god), there’s little she wants in return — just her freedom.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, Martin is called upon by Han-Kame’s twin brother to stop Han-Kame and Casiopea from realizing their goal. As they travel across the country in search of the missing pieces of Han-Kame’s body (his eye, his ear, a necklace, and his index finger) that will make him fully a god, Martin is trained and aided by Vucub-Kame to stop them. He’s a whiny sack of shit who’s been shitty to Casiopea since she came into his home, but he’s been promised great rewards if he succeeds, and utter doom if he should fail. So like, he’s motivated. And Casiopea and Han-Kame, though they are growing closer as Han-Kame becomes more of a man and less of a god, weaken each day their spirits are linked.

Much as I love a road trip (I really, really love a road trip), Gods of Jade and Shadow wouldn’t have worked without Moreno-Garcia’s brilliant evocation of Jazz Age Mexico. Everywhere Casiopea goes, she sees new things: flappers with bobbed hair, high-ceilinged hotels with room service, and flower shops with witches inside. Despite being on record as hating places (down with places!), I was all about this setting. It’s particularly good viewed through Casiopea’s eyes because — I don’t know how to say this exactly! — her wants are so modest. She wants soft sheets and a comfortable bed; she wants to see the world and be larger than herself. For her it’s not a question of gold and jewels, but a question of expansiveness: her adventure with Han-Kame is dangerous, yes, but it offers her a chance to live in the world, instead of being hidden away from it forever.

All in all, a gorgeous historical fantasy about gods, death, mercy, and freedom. Highly recommended.

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I will freely admit that it has taken me some time (and the evangelism of numerous bloggers) to come around to Frances Hardinge. Like Diana Wynne Jones, Hardinge writes books that start slow and meander for a while before they come to what appears to be the main plot. Like Diana Wynne Jones, Hardinge writes books that are full of weirdness — though Hardinge’s weirdness has a creepy and ashen quality, whereas DWJ’s tended to feel more sunny.

Perhaps most DWJ-ish of all, Hardinge writes books full of protagonists who know themselves imperfectly. What they think they want and who they think they are change as the book goes on, and they come to a fuller understanding of their past and present selves. Makepeace is on a journey to find freedom for herself and her brother, but much of that journey takes place entirely within herself.

(Metaphorically. I mean, she’s also doing cross-country travel a lot of the time. Road trip with ghosts!)

Even more than in past books, Hardinge has packed A Skinful of Shadows with needle-sharp insights, some of which genuinely rocked me back as I was reading.

Children are little priests of their parents, watching their every gesture and expression for signs of their divine will.

and (said of Charles I)

It was as if History were walking at his heels like a vast, invisible hound. It followed him, but he did not command it. Perhaps he would tame it. Or perhaps it would eat him.

One of my favorite things is to witness an author developing her powers over the course of several successive books. If Hardinge’s recent work is anything to go by, she’s on a steep climb with no summit in sight.

The post A Skinful of Shadows Is Decidedly Unsettling appeared first on Reading the End.

Arian is a warrior, linguist, and Companion of Hira, an order of women who draw their power from the Claim, a type of magic that draws its power from sacred scripture. They are battling against the Talisman, a movement led by the One-Eyed Preacher that seeks to eradicate scholarship and knowledge and the written word and to subjugate all the lands under an absolutist patriarchal rule. But Arian has a chance to find the Bloodprint, a physical copy of her faith’s scripture — if she can undertake the dangerous quest to retrieve it.

I’ve been a fan of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s for a while now. She gets me to read mysteries, and I never read mysteries! But her mysteries are grounded in history and grapple deeply with questions of culpability, complicity, and oppression, so they’re catnip to me. The Bloodprint deals with many of the same issues: Arian’s enemy, the Talisman, use a distorted version of her own faith to enslave women, brutally conquer every city in their path, and suppress literacy wherever they go. This is genuinely really hard to read in places, because the Talisman are destroying monuments and texts that Arian’s order values deeply, but that cannot be replaced.

The Bloodprint is very much a road trip story, which is always fun for me. Arian travels with her apprentice, Sinnia; her friend and would-be lover, the Silver Mage Daniyar; and a freed slave named Wafa. They cover a lot of territory, and I was glad that Khan had provided vocabulary and character guides in the back of the book. However, things did tend to get a trifle complicated, in that way secondary world fantasies often do, where the writer has a lot of elements and is trying to introduce all of them in the series’s first book. I got muddled in spots, and it wasn’t always clear which names and concepts I needed to remember for later vs which ones were just there to provide local color on Arian’s journey.

I gave up on secondary world fantasy years ago, when I started to notice how heavily inflected by imperialistic worldviews it all seemed to be. The Bloodprint, which draws on Islamic art, culture, and history, is a refreshing reminder that there’s nothing inevitable about Eurocentric fantasy stories. I’m thrilled to see Ausma Zehanat Khan branching out from mystery into fantasy, and I’ll look forward to reading more in this series.

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