Black Gate

I’m still running behind on book reviews, but I’ve started to receive submissions again. Please keep them coming–see the instructions here.

The Seventh Colour by Will Davidson is the tale of a society in stagnation. A thousand years ago, the elves departed, and the dwarves’ slow decline led to their eventual extinction, leaving the humans alone in the world. But magic faded with the elves, and the humans were never able to match the dwarves’ technical ingenuity, so all they had were the technology and social structures left by their departed allies. And whether they worked for the dwarves and the elves or not, human society is dying trying to cling to those things.

The story is told in multiple ways. The first, and most straightforward, is the view of Tomas, an investigator in Rivertop looking into the disappearance of a number of individuals whom his boss, Victor, believes were involved in an incident that injured Victor and killed his wife. Interspersed with Tomas’s perspective is the redacted confession of subject T187356, who recounts his harrowing encounters with highwaymen and orks and the criminal rebellion that his aunt and uncles are involved with. These converge when Tomas meets the vanished individuals, and we recognize the interrogated subject as one Alyster Trale. He and his sister, Elyssa, are currently under the protection of their parents’ friends. Far from arresting his suspects, Tomas joins them on their journey to find someplace safe for Alyster and Elyssa, and he hears them out as they travel.

Merson, Forba, Rauor, Lias, Lariad, and Pepina were all good friends at University, and like many University students, they held many long discussions about the ills of the world, and what could be done about them. They hit upon the idea that they should seek out the vanished elves, and went about learning what they could of them. Much of the novel is their account to Tomas of their quest, twenty years before this new journey he’s joined them on.

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Ghost Talkers
By Mary Robinette Kowal
Tor (304 pages, $24.99 hardcover/$11.99 paperback, August 2016)

Every year I end up teaching at least one section of Grade 10 Canadian History as part of my day job (yes, I work with high school students by choice on top of writing) and begin the course by talking about the First World War. I’ve discussed trenches, the Battle of the Somme, German artillery, etc. so often that that particular stretch of history feels like a long-time colleague. Which meant that Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers (my first exploration of her work, though I’ve listened to Writing Excuses for years) was interesting for me not just as an avid reader but also as a historian, to see how introducing mediums and spirits to the front lines would change the nature of the war.

The amount of research that Kowal must have done for this novel shows. From the dialogue between the characters, to the references to actual events and aspects of period culture and slang, the characters in Ghost Talkers felt the same as individuals from primary sources I’ve read for my teaching. At the same time, the characters are realistic and easy to relate to; central protagonist Ginger, one of the senior members of the army’s Spirit Corps, is particularly compelling because she’s motivated by the death and grief around her (some of which is quite personal) but keeps pushing herself to discover the threat against her people before it’s too late.

Ginger’s entire story is set against the historical fact of women’s status and patriarchal society at the time of the First World War (in Canada most women couldn’t vote at the time) and since part of the story is about women proving their worth in a “man’s war,” I’m left wondering what would happen at the end of this alternate war. Would women be forced to go back to their traditional roles, like in our world, or would things be different?

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