Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (Vintage Books, 2004)
★☆☆☆☆
This is my first Toni Morrison novel, and had I not been reading it for a book club, I’m sure I would have abandoned it. Though I can see how Morrison refracts phrases and concepts throughout the book, and find that noteworthy craft-wise, few of the characters interested me. I felt completely uninvested in the main character’s search for rootedness/ancestral history, despite finding that idea intellectually compelling. I would draw a comparison to Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, but I recall enjoying the latter far more.
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Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks (Tor Books, 2004)
★★★★★
This is it. This is the book I’ve been waiting for.
Fire Logic opens hard: the land of Shaftal, plagued for years by the militant Sainnite invaders, loses its protector-mage. In the aftermath, the Sainnites begin in earnest a campaign of systematic colonization and subjugation. The remnants of Shaftal’s government and soldiers flee to the countryside, where they commence a gritty, grueling guerilla war.
Zanja is a member of the Ashawala’i, a mountain tribe on the fringes of Shaftal. She is a warrior-ambassador, whose duty is to walk between worlds and across cultures, as well as a “fire blood,” endowed with a intuition so keen it can shade (unreliably) into prescience. For a brief interval, she believes her small, well-protected tribe may be able to fly under the Sainnite radar.
Then the Sainnites come in the night.
Some days later:
Fifteen remained, including herself, but they bore the weapons of dozens more dead companions, and they knew how to survive in these ungenerous mountains. They waited a few days to let the Sainnites lower their guard, and they struck again, once or twice a night, night after night, and during the day made it impossible for the weary Sainnites to safely forage for food, or use the latrines, or even take off their armor. While the [Ashawala’i] ate roots and greens and berries and trout, the Sainnites began butchering and eating their starving horses.
Zanja and her companions lived ghost lives. They did not speak of the past, or of the dead, or of their own deaths. They watched the Sainnites, and slipped through the mountains like shadows, and from time to time let fly a precious arrow, or cut the throat of a straying soldier.
For all the atrocious events that follow, Fire Logic is fundamentally about Zanja and her companions choosing: choosing to survive, and survive again. Choosing new futures in spite of their pasts. Choosing to love radically and live in hope.
And it’s about them finding—love, support, tribe. It’s about them finding literally everything that’s on my mind right now about queer/polyamorous chosen families and supportive co-housing.
“So sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know my husband had gone out.” She served them heavy mugs of ale and went into the kitchen to warm up some pies for them.
“Husband,” snorted Willis. When Zanja glanced at him curiously, he added, “City folk use it to mean something completely different from what it truly means, and then they call us backwards. These are the same people who let their kin live on the streets, like those beggars out there, rather than keeping them decently clothed and fed.”
“Those beggars are smoke sick,” Zanja said.
“All the more reason why they need their families,” Willis snapped.
“So what would you call this woman’s man?”
“Not her husband,” Willis said obstinately. “Where is the household? Where are the other parents for the child? It’s just the two of them. That’s no family.”
Did I mention all three POV characters are queer, Zanja is a woman of color, and all three manage disability and trauma? And in this world, that’s neither remarkable nor surprising (nor, in the text, exploitative)?
Read this. Read it for the complex, agentic characters. Read it for the human interests that scramble the “Shaftali vs. Sainnite” conflict. Read it for the considerations of addiction, coercion, desire—and the precarious intermingling of the three. Read it, by god, for the non-patriarchal, non-heteronormative world.
(And if you’re still not convinced, read Lee Mandelo’s brilliant essay/review at Tor.com.)
Buy Fire Logic (affiliate link) and support local bookstores.