![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven_cromwellSo, I've always got two or three books going at once, courtesy of my gadfly brain, and recently I finally finished Nicole Kornher-Stace's 2015 Archivist Wasp (link to the publisher's site where you can purchase a DRM-free EBook through their sister site, which should help my non U.S. friends and let U.S. folks avoid the amazon monster while supporting one of the finest small press houses I know.)
It's near expected hyperbole by now to say that a book is like nothing you've ever read before, but this book is so astonishing, holds such complexity in such sparse and even terse language, that the hyperbole is entirely fitting. It left me so stunned and breathless with joy and horror alike, pondering the strength of friendship, the ethics of war and revolution that even a day later I still...don't really have words for it. So I'm just gonna excerpt some of Amal El Mohtar's Lightspeed review which first put it on my radar so long ago--and which highlights some of my other fav queer books from that year--and then put a smidge of the prologue beneath the cut and scream at y'all to A. pls go read it and B. pls come scream with me when you're done.
She was sick of it. She was beyond sick of it. There had to be another way.
So many eyes on her. The crowd’s. The Catchkeep-priest’s. The upstart’s. Catchkeep’s Herself. Wasp kept hers straight ahead. She turned and walked to the edge of the sand and threw the upstart’s knife as far as she could into the lake. It flew out into the dark and splashed.
Voices behind her, outraged now. Calling for a bloodletting, as was Catchkeep’s necessity and the people’s right. If the ritual had ever ended before with two girls alive, Wasp didn’t know when, and it seemed the crowd didn’t either. Well, let them squawk. She was done listening.
The upstart had stayed where she had fallen, hugging her wrist and screaming through her teeth. She gathered like a cornered hare as Wasp approached, but did not try to run. Some pride in that, thought Wasp, used to chasing upstarts across the sand as they fled her knife.
Wasp stood looking down at the upstart. She wondered if the upstart had gone into this fight gladly, her eye on becoming Archivist, or whether she, like Wasp, was only fighting to survive, because the least of evils couldn’t possibly be death. She wondered what the upstart thought she’d miss when she was killed. Whether her list was longer than Wasp’s. Wasp wasn’t sure whether or not she hoped it was.
The upstart’s wounds weren’t immediately life-threatening. If she got to the midwife’s for stitching, fast, and had the leg and wrist set, and nothing became too badly infected, she’d get out of this alive. Certainly Wasp would be punished for her disobedience, but she was long since used to that.
She collared the upstart and hauled her to her feet.
“Come after me,” she whispered, “and I will see to your ghost personally.”
She let go, and the upstart dropped deadweight to the sand. Stay down, Wasp thought at her. Please stay down.
The upstart stayed down.
When the crowd tried to block Wasp’s path, she shouldered through. One of the gamblers grabbed her arm but let go fast when he saw her eyes.
“Kill her yourself, then,” she spat at them, knowing as well as they did that interference in the fights was forbidden, even by the Catchkeep-priest himself, and they wouldn’t harm an upstart any sooner than they’d heap filth on Catchkeep’s shrine.
Then she walked away across the lakeshore, not looking back along the beach toward where her people watched her, not looking up into the stars toward where Catchkeep did, and kept on walking, leaving a red trail, until the world around her darkened and she went down face-first in the sand. Yeah, I just gave you a 500 word excerpt, but I dare you to try and cut anything from that insanely tense sequence--astoundingly, this's only a sliver of the prologue itself. I still can't believe this's Kornher-Stace's debut, and that aside from the Wasp sequel which I haven't read but have been told by those with unimpeachable taste is even more incredible, she's essentially under publishing blockade cause her stuff is too tricky to market, despite editors/agents raving at its quality.
It's near expected hyperbole by now to say that a book is like nothing you've ever read before, but this book is so astonishing, holds such complexity in such sparse and even terse language, that the hyperbole is entirely fitting. It left me so stunned and breathless with joy and horror alike, pondering the strength of friendship, the ethics of war and revolution that even a day later I still...don't really have words for it. So I'm just gonna excerpt some of Amal El Mohtar's Lightspeed review which first put it on my radar so long ago--and which highlights some of my other fav queer books from that year--and then put a smidge of the prologue beneath the cut and scream at y'all to A. pls go read it and B. pls come scream with me when you're done.
An Archivist has two jobs. The first is to hunt and catch ghosts in order to learn about the precataclysm past from them; the second is to defend her life and position against “upstarts” — the other girls marked by the goddess Catchkeep’s claw-shaped scars at birth — once a year. Wasp has been Archivist for three years, and wants nothing more than to escape a dismal life of killing her sisters and obeying the Catchkeep-priest — so when an unusually powerful ghost asks her to help find his former partner in the underworld, she agrees. But, as is so often the case with the underworld, she finds both more and less than she bargained for.What she was supposed to do at this point was cut the upstart down, preserving her role as Archivist unchallenged for another year. For three years she had done precisely that. She could still see the face of every upstart she’d killed. Still woke from dreams in which they died all over again, woke nauseous and sweaty and scrubbing invisible blood from her hands.
More than anything else, this book is sharp. You could cut yourself on the prose — Wasp’s world is one of thorns, knives, edges of thick, broken glass, a constant background-hum of pain that sometimes swells into a shout. Wasp’s perspective absolutely thrums with tension and violence, but also aches with a fierce, hollow loneliness to break the heart. The longing and gratitude for the smallest beginnings of true friendship make the betrayals more vicious, and the stakes just keep rising. I burned through this book in about three hours, desperately rooting for her.
It’s also a brilliantly constructed narrative and world. The gods are cruel and absent. The underworld is a maze in layers, a twisting, turning palimpsest, one that allows Wasp to descend almost archaeologically through time by literally experiencing her ghost-partner’s memories. The pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds reflect each other in shards and fragments, all the more powerful for being subtle, for their resistance to being spelled out.
It was also keenly refreshing — especially in something that’s ostensibly YA, where the Love Triangle of Doom is so annoyingly pervasive — to find a book in which all of the strongest, primary relationships are friendships; where friendship has the narrative, motive force usually reserved for sexualized romance.
She was sick of it. She was beyond sick of it. There had to be another way.
So many eyes on her. The crowd’s. The Catchkeep-priest’s. The upstart’s. Catchkeep’s Herself. Wasp kept hers straight ahead. She turned and walked to the edge of the sand and threw the upstart’s knife as far as she could into the lake. It flew out into the dark and splashed.
Voices behind her, outraged now. Calling for a bloodletting, as was Catchkeep’s necessity and the people’s right. If the ritual had ever ended before with two girls alive, Wasp didn’t know when, and it seemed the crowd didn’t either. Well, let them squawk. She was done listening.
The upstart had stayed where she had fallen, hugging her wrist and screaming through her teeth. She gathered like a cornered hare as Wasp approached, but did not try to run. Some pride in that, thought Wasp, used to chasing upstarts across the sand as they fled her knife.
Wasp stood looking down at the upstart. She wondered if the upstart had gone into this fight gladly, her eye on becoming Archivist, or whether she, like Wasp, was only fighting to survive, because the least of evils couldn’t possibly be death. She wondered what the upstart thought she’d miss when she was killed. Whether her list was longer than Wasp’s. Wasp wasn’t sure whether or not she hoped it was.
The upstart’s wounds weren’t immediately life-threatening. If she got to the midwife’s for stitching, fast, and had the leg and wrist set, and nothing became too badly infected, she’d get out of this alive. Certainly Wasp would be punished for her disobedience, but she was long since used to that.
She collared the upstart and hauled her to her feet.
“Come after me,” she whispered, “and I will see to your ghost personally.”
She let go, and the upstart dropped deadweight to the sand. Stay down, Wasp thought at her. Please stay down.
The upstart stayed down.
When the crowd tried to block Wasp’s path, she shouldered through. One of the gamblers grabbed her arm but let go fast when he saw her eyes.
“Kill her yourself, then,” she spat at them, knowing as well as they did that interference in the fights was forbidden, even by the Catchkeep-priest himself, and they wouldn’t harm an upstart any sooner than they’d heap filth on Catchkeep’s shrine.
Then she walked away across the lakeshore, not looking back along the beach toward where her people watched her, not looking up into the stars toward where Catchkeep did, and kept on walking, leaving a red trail, until the world around her darkened and she went down face-first in the sand. Yeah, I just gave you a 500 word excerpt, but I dare you to try and cut anything from that insanely tense sequence--astoundingly, this's only a sliver of the prologue itself. I still can't believe this's Kornher-Stace's debut, and that aside from the Wasp sequel which I haven't read but have been told by those with unimpeachable taste is even more incredible, she's essentially under publishing blockade cause her stuff is too tricky to market, despite editors/agents raving at its quality.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-30 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-30 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-30 10:50 pm (UTC)