It’s been a long time since I’ve written any book reviews… mainly because I haven’t had time to write one, but also because it’s been a long time since I’ve read any books with queer characters in them.
I know, the irony, right??
I actually have a good excuse: I do most of my “reading” via audiobook these days, and I like to switch back and forth between fiction and nonfiction. For most of this past fall, I was working my way through a hefty nonfiction book by journalist Annie Jacobsen called The Pentagon’s Brain, which was a history of DARPA — the science arm of the U.S. military. For better and/or worse, DARPA is the organization that gave the world night vision goggles, drones, Patriot missiles, GPS, and many other gadgets that are supposed to protect us but whose creation and implementation is ultimately a moral grey area.
Anyway. The Pentagon’s Brain is long but good. And scary. You should check it out if you’d like to know about what the U.S. government / military industrial complex is quietly up to in the background. If ignorance is bliss for you… definitely stay away.
But I digress. On to the actual book review!
So my writer friend Sarah recommended Ship of Smoke and Steel by Django Wexler (which has GOT to be a pen name, right??). I have been looking to read more and watch Netflix less, so when she told me I should check it out, I went to Amazon and read the preview — which is pretty long. Three chapters, I think.
Here’s the premise of the book: Isoka is a strong(wo)man for the mafia of a seedy part of an overcrowded fantasy city. Basically, the local mafia extorts business owners, and Isoka’s job is making sure that they pay up… and kicking some serious ass if they don’t.
She has a secret weapon: She was born with the ability to touch one of this fantasy world’s nine “wells of sorcery” (also the title of the series). Each well of sorcery grants its user different types of superpower-type abilities. So for Isoka, she can produce energy-based weapons and armor with a mere thought, which comes in handy when you are a mafia strongman. Other wells grant super speed, fire, a kind of telekinetic push/pull power, healing, short-distance teleportation, etc.
So anyway, (skipping ahead) some bad stuff happens and Isoka finds herself on ginormous ship — the titular ship of smoke and steel, called the Soliton. As often happens with “secret superpower” stories, people with these rare magical powers are either revered or despised, depending on where they live within this vast fantasy world that author Django Wexler has built (can’t get over that name — Django??). But loved or hated, the city-sized Soliton has a crew made solely of people with magical powers. The thousand-strong crew are all young people, and they have all been given to the Soliton as human sacrifices — yearly tributes kind of a la the Hunger Games.
Except tributes with magical powers.
Which is weird for our heroine, right? Because Isoka is used to being the only one of her kind wherever she goes, which means she ALWAYS dominates in a fight, but now all the sudden she’s meeting her match right and left, surrounded by people with various motivations and various magical powers.
The ship is also like the Hotel California… you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Everyone on the ship is trapped. For life. Yet for some mysterious reason, there’s no one on board older than thirty.
Hmmm. What could THAT be about??
Action-Packed Dungeon Crawl
Much of the book has the feel of a kind of RPG hack-and-slash dungeon crawl.
So here you’ve got these thousand people on this enormous steel ship, and they’re stuck there and have to find a way to survive. There’s lots of food around… in the form of the giant mushrooms that are growing everywhere on the old ship, slowly eating away at the ship itself, along with giant monsters that somehow got on board and which are referred to as “crabs.” Some of the crabs sound more like giant centipedes or other Scary Big insects, but okay, crabs.
So like any good RPG dungeon crawl, crew members with different magical abilities are divided up into “packs” and sent out on missions into the bowels of the rotting ship to bring home the bacon — er, crab. The more success a pack has, the more they “level up” within the ship’s social system, getting better quarters and access to other perks.
I will say that in some ways, the dungeon crawl aspect of this book gets a little repetitive. I mean, it definitely keeps you turning pages, because no sooner do you finish one fight scene than you’re thrown into another. It’s fun, and there’s a lot happening all the time. In this way, perhaps I should take a hint from Django Wexler for my own writing… which tends to always be a slow build up. There’s no “slow” anything in this book. It’s go-go-go, fight-fight-fight from start to finish.
LGBTQ Subplot
When Isoka first comes on board the Soliton, she meets Meroe (pronounced Meh-ro-ei), a princess from a faraway kingdom who has also been offered up as a recruit. I’m not giving anything away here to say that Isoka and Meroe eventually get together. They meet in like chapter four, and it’s pretty obvious from the start that they’re going to eventually wind up as a couple.
There’s a coming out aspect to the story, as Isoka, for all her badass warrior chick butch-ness, has only ever been with men. There are some clear red flags that she doesn’t see — for example, she is only interested in men for sex and never has a real emotional connection with her lovers. She’s portrayed as bi in the story, and let me say that I’m very pro-bi, but frankly, I think Isoka is gay all the way and just hasn’t figured that out about herself yet.
I don’t generally like coming out stories. I guess I want to read stories about queer people who have already gone through that phase of their lives and are confident and comfortable in their sexuality. (Having said that, my novella Paradise is a coming out story in many ways, and the short story I co-wrote with LT is also kind of a coming out story.) However, I feel like Isoka’s coming out conflict feels natural, and neither over- nor under-done. After all, she is eighteen when the story opens, and she lives in a world in which queerness is generally acceptable but also Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. So it makes perfect sense for her to be going through a sexual awakening.
I was also nervous about reading something with a f/f romance subplot written by a male author, but I think it’s tasteful and not gratuitous. If you read f/f tales for the sexytimes, though, be prepared that everything in Ship of Smoke and Steel is fade-to-black, both the f/f and the (two) f/m scenes.
Verdict: Worth Your Time But Maybe Not Your $10?
I actually sprang for the book at it’s full Kindle price of $9.99, which I don’t often do. Like I said, most of my reading is via audiobook, which means I pay $15/month for a credit for an audiobook, along with the perk of usually getting an extra free short novella or audio program each month. Occasionally I spring for the extra audiobook credits, which are $11 each. When I buy an actual sit-down-and-read book, I usually get them off BookBub for a deep discount, or I go to the library.
I’m telling you all that to explain that I don’t usually pay full price for books. I know I’m going to binge-read anything I like and finish it in 1-3 sittings, and $10 seems like a lot for one to three days of entertainment, given that I can binge watch a Netflix show over the same time period for free.
So maybe $10 for a book is totally reasonable for you. If I paid $10 every time I read, though, I would go broke pretty quickly. In the end, I enjoyed Ship of Smoke and Steel and I’m glad that I read it, but I kind of wish I would have held out for a BookBub sale or gotten it from the library. It wasn’t so AMAZING AWESOME! that it was truly worth my ten bucks. I will eventually read the other books in the series, but hopefully I can find them at the library. If not, I will probably use my audiobook credits.
But hey, I’m a poor grad student pinching pennies. So maybe it’s different for you.
PS, I’m currently reading (listening to) book two of NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth series. There’s a reason why she won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for her books — her writing is soooo exquisite. And there are some queer subplots here, too. I highly recommend it.
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