This astonishing novel is a rare treasure for any reader who loves both imaginative high fantasy and exquisite, sometimes challenging literary fiction. I read with a double sense of wonderment: at the powerful beauty of the story itself, and at the very fact that it was so powerful and beautiful. It is not often I find a book as good as this.
The people suffer under the centuries-long rule of the Moon Throne. The royal family-the despotic emperor and his monstrous sons, the Three Terrors-hold the countryside in their choking grip. They bleed the land and oppress the citizens with the frightful powers they inherited from the god locked under their palace.
But that god cannot be contained forever.
With the aid of Jun, a guard broken by his guilt-stricken past, and Keema, an outcast fighting for his future, the god escapes from her royal captivity and flees from her own children, the triplet Terrors who would drag her back to her…
This audacious novel delivers a wallop of zany absurdity, impish satire, phantasmagoric imagery, and hyperbolically burlesque characters. Zoe is the very incarnation of pathological narcissism, while Lily is in hopelessly bad faith with herself. Watching the danse macabre of their imploding friendship makes for peak literary enjoyment.
The story of talented young dancer Ly, his budding romance with the seemingly flawless Colin, and his increasingly tangled and messy relationship with his flatmate and bête noire Valerie, trespasses into increasingly murky regions of desire, consent, and self-deception. It is a daring book, one which explores how cursedly impossible it can be for one person to know another.
Hundred-day children are stolen from the Ilasghra every week. No one can stop it.
Madma and Tantli have grown up like sisters in the tentslum of the Ilas, where their people are starved and beaten. All their lives, they've powerlessly witnessed the regular abduction of hundred-day babies born with too much mæj. Just before an Ilasi boy is killed by djanizaries for daring to venture beyond the tentslum walls, his final words lead Madma to the Gaol where the boy's stolen sister is locked away-a place from which Ilasi children never return.
Burning to act, Madma vows to free the imprisoned girl, setting off events that will ignite a revolution and convulse the Sforre-Yomnic matriarchy from its squalid dungeons to the labyrinthine paths of its scheming elite's hovering parliament.
