The Spear Cuts Through Water

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.

This book sank its hooks into me and refused to let go. When this happens with a book, it’s often because I empathize deeply with the characters and care about their journey. Other times because the writing on a sentence-by-sentence level is beautiful and compulsive. This achieves both.

Simon Jimenez might be the best prose stylist working in the genre right now, and he uses that skill to great effect in crafting a beautiful, slightly surreal world. He also has a keen eye for character and the power to tug on my heartstrings like no one else. I felt hollowed… show more.

I have not read a more exquisitely crafted fantasy novel in the last couple of years. Two men – a guard and a prisoner – release, and shepherd an ancient god imprisoned beneath a castle across the lands. 

Simon’s writing flows like a knife on melted butter spread upon the most perfectly toasted slice of bread. I’ve always been a fan of non-linear narratives. There’s a pleasure in deciphering the arrangement of fantasy stories layered across time, but Spear is layered intricately even within this temporal mishmash in order to deceive, enchant, and ultimately blow your mind away.

It’s gritty,… show more.

There are books that dazzle you with their poetic, fever-dream prose.

There are books that are structurally inventive. There are books that wow you with the mythic quality of their worldbuilding. There are books that leave you tormented by their characters. And there are books that truly have something important to say: about violence, about love, about queer identity, about belonging, and about how we write history and tell our stories.

And then there is this book, which does all of the above and then some. It had me in a vice grip from the first sentence. It reminded me… show more.