Y’all may remember me screeching and carrying on about the first book in this series, Deal with the Devil, and how gosh-darn fun it was despite being about a dystopian future in which a few scrappy and independent-minded escapees of government torture banded together to carve out a small space for happiness and community. Well, this is the sequel, and I stand by everything I said about Deal with the Devil and it’s true in The Devil You Know as well. This is Maya and Gray’s book. Maya is the former information courier for sinister corporation TechCorps, who was given the dubious gift of an eidetic memory and a whole host of corporate secrets. Gray is the sniper from among Rafe’s unmerry band of supersoldiers, and he is very stone-faced, and the implant that makes him a supersoldier has begun to deteriorate and will soon kill him. Plus, someone’s trafficking in cloned children, and everybody is determined to put a stop to that. Fun times all around!

When I said “fun times all around!” before, I was being flippant, and in fact flippanter than I would have been being¹ if I’d used the same phrasing about Deal with the Devil. Deal with the Devil is more of a caper, setting up the world and the characters in a road-trippy setting that’s hard not to find fun.² The Devil You Know, by contrast, addresses the aftermath of trauma and the effort it takes to find value in a self that has been so significantly fractured by the selfishness and greed of the people who hurt you.

In a world controlled by variously malicious corporations and governments, just about everyone we meet is recovering from trauma of some kind. Maya and Gray share the experience of having been molded into the perfect tools for their evil overlords, then pressed into service of a cause they didn’t believe in, for which the skill sets they were forced to possess have made them particularly suited. Though their suitability as weapons was purpose-built by bad guys, Maya and Gray still have to grapple with the ways they’ve been wielded to do harm in the past. Gray views his own impending death as a kind of amends, while Maya lives with the fear that she’ll be taken and used again in the same way she was before.

Because this is a Kit Rocha book, both those impulses translate as action taken to protect those around them who are more vulnerable. Most obviously, the trafficked, cloned children. Maya and her friends take a personal interest, given that Nina herself is the product of a prior child cloning experiment. Remembering their many losses of agency, Maya and her friends are determined to put an end to the traffic in children — of course — but also to find a safe and comfortable life for the child survivors they rescue. Rocha makes a point of the children’s agency: at one point, the little girl Rainbow is offered a new home, but she chooses to stay in the librarians’ enclave, and that choice is respected. Love to see it! Children are people too!

On the other side of the innocence/experience spectrum is the newly returned, somewhat brainwashed supersoldier Rafe’s team thought was dead. Once their medic and sworn brother, Mace now tries to kill people sometimes. Not all the time, though! Gray and Rafe and the rest of them are pretty confident they can keep Mace and his potential murder targets (who are mostly them, anyway!) safe until he’s all the way unbrainwashed; this is not an opinion warmly shared by Nina’s feral murder twin, Ava. She keeps coming around with extravagant gifts delivered with a scowl and threats to Rafe’s crew delivered with — okay, not with a smile, but certainly you imagine with a lot of teeth.

Unusually for a Kit Rocha book, The Devil You Know is low on sex, given Maya’s and Rafe’s mutual extreme cautiousness, Rafe’s impending very much death,³ and Maya’s sensory issues. (Sensory issues: You know more people who have them than you might realize!) It’s another reminder that sex scenes are a tool for telling story and building character and can be deployed, or withheld, very effectively in those two capacities. When Maya and Rafe finally do have sex, it’s not just hooray-boning, although Hooray boning!, it’s also a sign to the reader of how much their relationship has grown and how much Maya has learned to trust Rafe and even more so to trust herself with understanding and enforcing her own limits. The third book is about Dani and will undoubtedly be just wall-to-wall boning. Sex as character development! Who knew!

(The romance genre knew. For quite a while now.)

All in all, a fast-paced, emotional, deeply satisfying second outing for the series. I am already making yearning-cat noises about Dani’s book, which is probably either called Devil in the Details or Dance with the Devil, and I am choosing to live in the uncertainty of not knowing which.

(Oh shit, or Devil May Care. Or also Devil’s Advocate. Or Speak of the Devil. Help, I can’t stop thinking of titles! Kit Rocha will just have to keep writing romances in this series until they run out of idioms!)

Note: I received an egalley of The Devil You Know, whose title I forgot as I was writing this sentence because I have thought of too many devil idioms and it’s rotted my brain, for review consideration from Netgalley.

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The mainstreaming of fandom has created some deeply weird ripple effects in terms of fan/creator interactions (my hot take is that we should never have wanted this, at least for the large franchises), but one of the best things about it has been that more and more authors are speaking openly about their fannish influences. All the Feels and A Marvellous Light each feel like books that couldn’t have existed without fanfiction, partly because of subject matter, but mostly because they draw so deeply from the well of joy that makes the fannish engine run.

All the Feels is a companion to Spoiler Alert, a romance novel I have recommended prolifically and at loud volume. Like its predecessor, All the Feels follows a lead actor in the television show Game of Thrones Gods of the Gates, which had some good years but is now kind of a mess because its showrunners lack vision and are mean, superficial jerks. In a mean, superficial jerk move, one of the showrunners has hired his very put-upon cousin, an ER therapist named Lauren Clegg, to follow star Alex Woodroe around and make sure he doesn’t get into trouble. This has become necessary after Alex got in a bar fight, but also because he is an agent of chaos. By contrast, Lauren is relentlessly sensible and self-effacing, though like Alex she’s trying to figure out her next moves as her life’s work implodes around her.

A Marvellous Light is a queer fantasy romance set in an alternate version of Edwardian England where everything’s the same except, unbeknownst to most, there is magic. The sunshiney, athletic, slightly laddish Robin Blyth takes a job for which he is numerously unqualified; the most pertinent of his unqualifications is that he has no idea magic exists and it’s kind of a magic-forward job. The job turns out to be its own hotbed of intrigue and murder—as Robin discovers when he meets the magical (but not nearly magical enough to suit his judgmental, Daisy-Fay-from-Gatsby-careless family) bureaucrat Edwin Courcey. Together they uncover a conspiracy that threatens the very foundations of English magic.

A Marvellous Light is notable for its inclusion of explicit sex scenes, which have always been common in romance novels (A Marvellous Light is a romance novel) but whose presence in mainstream commercial SFF is a pretty clear result of having editors, writers, and decision-makers who came out of fandom. As various genres (honestly including tradpub romance novels! and certainly including things like SFF movies; fuck you, Marvel) have become more squeamish about including sex and makeouts, it’s been refreshing to see SFF publishers shift in the opposite direction. A Marvellous Light is the latest of many recent books from Tor, Harper Voyager, and others that have included frank discussions and portrayals of sex. Yay! (Kit Rocha and Jessie Mihalik’s books are, like this one, romances, but recent books by authors like Rivers Solomon and Nghi Vo have also included sex scenes.)²

A Marvellous Light feels especially fannish in the unfussy queerness and careful building of the romance (despite being set in a historical era that was less than friendly to queer love). Marske dispenses quickly with the necessity for Robin and Edwin to conceal their sexual orientation from each other, which allows for her to explore the far more interesting question of what sort of relationship they each want from the other and–crucially–how much of themselves they’re willing to give away. The possibility of romantic and sexual attraction is flawlessly twined around the plot (plant imagery used advisedly): Robin has to spend time with Edwin if he wants his curse lifted (Robin’s under a viscerally nasty curse; I heart folk magic), giving them both plenty of time to gaze yearningly at each other’s hands and dislike each other’s unsatisfactory families.

Freya Marske is open about her background in fandom, and the DNA of fanfic and specifically fanfic sex is all over A Marvellous Light. Her sex scenes, and the scenes leading up to sex, are funny and frank (the two guys realize each other are queer because one of them finds the other one’s, like, porny pamphlet, which is extra funny if you’ve ever read any Victorian or Edwardian porn, all of which is goddamn absurd), and they do this thing that feels inestimably fanficcy to me: Marske’s sex scenes—and the book as a whole—are tender toward the realities of embodiment.

Outside of romance and fic, literature often treats bodies as pure grotesquery, a distraction from the loftier life of the mind. In the first place, I will have no truck with dualism, for it is nonsense. Secondly, this sort of thinking inevitably leads to heightened contempt for bodies perceived as unruly or transgressive, which somehow always belong to marginalized people. An amazing coincidence! And C, hating your body, and bodies generally, really sets a bitch up for failure. We do not actually possess the technology to convert you into a being of pure thought, so you’re kind of stuck with your meatsack, and you might as well be kind to it, even if you do insist on thinking of it as nothing more than the squishy, annoying vehicle that hauls your brain around.

All the Feels is similarly tender about its protagonists’ bodies, which would be par for the course in the romance genre, except that Olivia Dade’s work most wonderfully features protagonists who aren’t cast in one of the, like, three acceptable romance novel heroine physical types. Lauren is petite and round, with sharp features and a beaky nose that makes her look like a bird. As in Spoiler Alert, it’s never suggested that this makes her undesirable to Alex, nor is her body ignored or glossed over during sex scenes. It’s part and parcel of a bigger theme (in both books) of finding within yourself the ability to celebrate your own gifts and strengths, rather than constantly finding fault with your weaknesses.

Lauren is accustomed to people trying to make her feel small, and she no longer reacts to it and doesn’t want Alex to, either. All well and good, until you realize—as Alex does, almost immediately—that she’s fully internalized the idea that she deserves and should expect nothing better than the contempt and snottiness of people who will always, always put her last. On his side, Alex is perpetually terrified that he’ll disappoint the people around him, and perpetually certain that he already has. It’s easy for him to see his flaws and failure, particularly those that arise from his ADHD, but much harder for him to recognize how those same traits make him special, fun, helpful, kind.

A driving impulse of fanfic—though certainly not the only one—is the sense that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s the source of so much joy in fic, this simple idea to look at a piece of media or, you know, the world, and say, “Actually, I think we can do better than that.” Everybody can be gay! Everybody can have therapy! Everybody lives! For good and ill,³ there’s a critique baked in to what fic writers keep from canon and what they leave behind, a Marie Kondoing of the elements that don’t spark joy in favor of the ones that do.

The major characters arcs of All the Feels and A Marvellous Light are about finding ways to make use of your existing qualities and competencies in a world that’s not set up to find them, or you, valuable. The broader critique, of course, is that it’s all a trap anyway. There’s no middle ground you can find, no level of adherence to the desired standards that can exempt you from being made to feel small. Alex’s ADHD is met with contempt by—mostly jerks, sure, on page, but jerks who have power over him and are trying to persuade him to be less chaotic. Yet on the other side we have Lauren, a person defined by her ability to bring order out of chaos (that’s why she gets this job!), and it’s clear she’s been conditioned to think of herself as kind of a dumpy killjoy. The system has been set up for both of them to fail, and their emotional journeys are about carving out space for themselves and each other to thrive.

In particular, both books treat the gaze of the beloved as a kind of… I don’t know, splint? braces?, a small refuge within which the characters can begin to see themselves the way their love interests immediately saw them. As the least powerfully magical member of his family, Edwin has been subject to near-constant bullying from his siblings. He’s been convinced that his powers are inadequate, and that induced certainty prevents him from recognizing the areas in which he excels. Robin—new to the world of magic—brings a fresh perspective that Edwin allows himself, slowly, to share.

“You invented this system? You applied it?” Robin looked around them at the hundreds, thousands of books. “And you carry the whole thing around in your head?”

“I made a catalogue.” Edwin indicated a small hand-bound volume he hadn’t once touched. “And if you’re going to suggest that I was a very dull child, let me assure you that it would by no means be an original insult.” …

“Remind me not to make an enemy of you, Edwin Courcey,” he said, smiling to show he meant no sting. “I think yours is probably the kind of brain that could run a country.”

IT’S BEAUTIFUL TBH. I too would be very impressed with someone who had deduced the entire Dewey Decimal System from first principles.

I’ve been pretty critical this year of fannish spaces and racism in fandom, and I stand by those critiques. At the same time, it remains true that fandom contains a lot of beauty and tenderness and also thoughtful critique of inequitable social structures. It’s why I keep coming back to fanfic and why I probably always will. All the Feels and A Marvellous Light are both deeply engaged with the best of the fanfic ethos, and it was a pleasure to get to read them.

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Jebi is a specific type of protagonist that I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but is definitely my cup of tea. In many ways they’re very naive, despite having a sister who’s a freedom fighter. They don’t want to become involved in politics; they don’t feel qualified to be involved in politics; they aren’t any good at doing politics. What they want is to be left alone to do their art. Or as a next-best outcome, they don’t want to be actively contributing to the imprisonment of a sentient being and the destruction of their own culture. But as it turns out, there come times when you have to make a choice — and once Jebi has made theirs, they have to keep making it, or lose everything.

What’s particularly neat about this choice of protagonist is that all the other characters clearly have their own shit going on, and nobody’s clearly in the right. For instance, Jebi doesn’t want to kill people. A perfectly cromulent position! I too do not want to kill people. By contrast, their sister Bongsunga deeply wants the colonizers out, which is also a very cromulent position. Better yet, Yoon Ha Lee has a real gift for imbuing numerous different characters with protagonist energy. Vei, the shatteringly hot swordswoman who Jebi has a crush on, very clearly has her own shit going on, to the point that you could easily see a future book shifting into her POV. Same for Bongsunga. Same even for minor characters, like Vei’s parents — despite their relatively small amount of screen time, you’re so aware that these are not just satellites for the characters we actually care about. They’re all people who have their own stories and their own lives.

Speaking of characters with real protagonist energy, I absolutely loved the dragon automaton. Its name is Arazi and it acquires a telepathic connection with Jebi and I am here for it. I know that I have spent the years since the Heralds of Valdemar books trying to play like I’m too cool for telepathic connections with supernatural creatures, but the fact is that I am not now and never have been too cool for it. (See also: The Bone Shard’s Daughter.) And like, how refreshing that Yoon Ha Lee is not too cool for it either, despite being a very deeply cool writer. (See also: Nicefox Gambit et seq.) Arazi is a tremendously sweet and great character. It’s very very very smart (and in different ways than a human is smart!), but also in many ways a little innocent. I adored it.

If I had to register a complaint about the book, I guess it’s reasonable to say that Jebi’s crush on Vei progressed a little fast once things got going. The transition from “chill boning” to “I would bathe in the blood of your enemies for you” happened kind of fast, but you know what? I don’t care! These are hard times, and I love an artist one / murder one romance, and Vei is very hot and Jebi has a dragon ally, so it is no surprise they were so into each other. So there! I loved it! I would read a whole other book that was just Jebi and Vei and Arazi flying around the world doing stuff. Maybe petty crimes / acts of sabotage against the Razanei regime? Petty crimes, but for justice? I’d read it.

Basically, I’m thrilled to have this new standalone fantasy novel from Yoon Ha Lee. The magic system is very cool but not nearly as difficult to grab onto as the one in Machineries of Empire series, so if you’ve been wanting to try this author but nervous that his books will be too hard to follow, give Phoenix Extravagant a try.

Note: I received a review copy of Phoenix Extravagant from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

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