The God of Small Things

 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, 321 pages.

This novel is very hard to describe. It is about twins Estha and Rahel, and dances between their lives in the present and the week their childhood was destroyed in the state of Kerala in the year 1969. It is a book about love and family, but in ways that are as often painful as beautiful, and it is hard to know what else to say about it without flattening the experience of reading it. 

It was an excellent book, and I definitely think people should experience it. Normally books that feel like they're built around one big event the author refuses to tell us tend to annoy me, because they tend to feel contrived and a little cheap, but this book is definitely an exception for me. I suspect it's because it feels less like the author is concealing from us the big terrible thing that happened and more like Estha and Rahel can't bear to think about it. The novel is graceful and engaging, and the prose is absolutely lovely (the phrase "a viable, dieable age" has been popping into my head at random for days now). I definitely plan on picking up another book by this author at some point.

The Merciful Crow

 The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen, 384 pages.

In a society divided into magical castes, each with their own birthrights granted by the thousand dead gods, Crows are at the bottom. They have no birthright of their own, but are the only ones immune to the Sinner's Plague, meaning that their role is to burn the bodies and give a quick death to those dying a slow one. They are universally mistreated and often literally hunted and tortured, and the life of a Crow is generally a short one.

Fie is a Crow Chief in training, which means that she has the power to draw on other people's birthrights through their bones (generally teeth), and also that she abides by the same rule as all Crow Chiefs, look after your own. Which is hugely complicated when her people get intertwined with the Phoenix Prince Jasimir and his bodyguard Tavin, who are fleeing Jasimir's stepmother's assassination attempts. They strike a deal that will protect her people if he survives to make it to the throne, but if they fail his stepmother will give the Oleander Gentry (essentially a KKK analog) free reign to hunt them.

I read Little Thieves by this author earlier this year and really enjoyed it, so I was excited for this one. It also hit on a lot of weirdly specific things I like in a story (crows, dead gods, teeth magic) so I was really excited. And it lived up to my expectations! The plot was exciting, and I'm really into all of the world-building we got this book (although there's still huge swathes of the world we know very little about because it was so plot focused, and I hope we get more in the second book of the duology. I also really appreciate that Prince Jasimir is gay, which handily circumvented the inevitable love triangle of a young woman traveling with two handsome young men. Owen dedicated Little Thieves to "the gremlin girls" and that definitely seems to be the type of protagonist she likes to write. Fie is complicated and messy, and I really really like her as a character. Owen's prose is strong, sometimes poetic, always extremely readable, and this book is definitely worth a read.

Son of the Storm

Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, 487 pages

Despite his high position as a scholar, Danso is an outsider in the strict caste system of Basso. His mother was an immigrant to the city-state, his father a native healer, so he's a rare mixed-race member of the upper caste. He's also VERY curious about the world outside Basso, though information information is hard to come by. But when a skin-changing woman from the Nameless Islands (which, according to Basso sources, don't even exist any more) appears in Basso, Danso finds that what he thought he knew isn't right at all.

As the beginning of a series, this book does an excellent job of addressing a multitude of complex topics — including race, caste, propaganda, colonialism, political uprisings, and immigration — without losing any of the action and adventure. The characters are equally complex, and grow (sometimes horrifically) throughout the novel. I can't wait to see what happens next in this series!