I spend almost all of my reading time with novels. Which doesn’t sound strange, but is because I love short stories. I love the challenge of the shorter length: on the author, to fit a world, a character, and a plot, fully realized, into only a few pages; and on the reader to trust the author enough to not have a whole world, a whole explanation, a history or a future or a 300-page psychoanalysis. I love the speed and the incompleteness and, as Yoon Ha Lee once said, the assassination of the reader, because there is no time for anything else. And I love the weirdness, the awkwardness, the whimsy that publishers often allow in short stories, but not novels. Despite loathing surprises generally, I like when my reading surprises, and short stories surprise me far more often than books.
Which is not to say that I don’t love novels. Give me a fat novel, full of adventure and intrigue and swords and heroines who make decisions, and I will happily read to the exclusion of everything else. But it seems to me that my reading – in terms of short stories vs. novellas vs. novels – has been vastly imbalanced, given my abiding love for non-novel forms of writing. So this year, I’m working on balancing that.
I chose Sunbolt, by Intisar Khanani, in part to help with that balance. Sunbolt is the first novella, in a series of novellas, which perhaps you see every day, but I generally don’t. I was intrigued – and delighted – with the idea of a series of fantasy novellas.
I also chose Sunbolt because it’s Sirens’s year of defiant, disobedient heroines, and Hitomi – with her involvement with the Shadow League attempting to overthrow the powerful, corrupt Arch Mage, who holds the ruler of Karolene in thrall – is one of those girls. Not to mention that Sunbolt is a great diversity pick, for its author, its diverse heroine and cultures, and its small-press publisher.
And after all that, do you know what? I wanted this to be a novel.
Hitomi, a relative newcomer to Karolene, is instantly and irrevocably recognized as an outsider. Her skin is different and her hair is different, no matter than she tries to wear the head wrap popular with locals. Her father is dead, and her mother, casting an overarching pall on Hitomi, is missing, presumed dead. She’s a street rat, but a resourceful one – and one who has joined the Shadow League, led by the mysterious Ghost.
The book begins predictably, if you’re a regular reader of high fantasy. The Shadow League needs to extract a sympathetic noble and his family from Karolene before they are caught and executed. A plot is hatched, Hitomi makes a bad decision, another character makes an unexpected decision, and everything goes catastrophically wrong. As you expect of a heroine, Hitomi sacrifices her freedom – and she believes, her life – to save the Ghost, since Karolene needs him more than it does her.
But everything that happens after her capture is a revelation, because Hitomi is a smart, resourceful, rebellious heroine. She, of course, defies Karolene’s ruling structure every minute of every day, but she also defies Ghost and his lieutenants regularly, finding ways to interpret their directives to suit her desires. She’s a heroine who makes decisions, sometimes bad decisions, but always decisions that drive the book. And fascinatingly, what you think is going to be a novella about intrigue and politics only begins that way; soon, Hitomi’s personal journey (and her sometimes utterly unexpected decisions) take the book out of Karolene altogether, leaving Hitomi stranded in yet another strange land, desperate for help – help that, brilliantly, she conjures through cleverness and tenacity (and notably, not through beauty or power or love or money). Give me a disobedient girl who makes her own decisions, and I’ll give you a revolutionary.
Sunbolt is a bit of a kitchen-sink novella. It has politics, intrigue, shape-shifting, vampires, soul-suckers, mages and a missing-maybe-dead mother. But driving all of this is Hitomi: her desires, her decisions, and her constant determination to help others. Khanani was quite clever in Sunbolt’s structure: it’s only by removing Hitomi from Karolene that Hitomi is able to focus on her own journey, rather than others. It’s a nice upending of the heroine’s journey.
Frankly, there just isn’t enough of Sunbolt. What’s there is often fabulous, but I would have very much liked more world-building, more developed characters, and more history. I liked the focus on Hitomi – and it’s a very tight focus – but Karolene, its politics, and the larger world in which Hitomi finds herself are intriguing. Additionally, Sunbolt suffered from some pacing issues that, somewhat counterintuitively, I think a greater length would have helped.
I spend almost all of my reading time with novels. Which doesn’t sound strange, but is because I love short stories. I love the challenge of the shorter length: on the author, to fit a world, a character, and a plot, fully realized, into only a few pages; and on the reader to trust the author enough to not have a whole world, a whole explanation, a history or a future or a 300-page psychoanalysis. I love the speed and the incompleteness and, as Yoon Ha Lee once said, the assassination of the reader, because there is no time for anything else. And I love the weirdness, the awkwardness, the whimsy that publishers often allow in short stories, but not novels. Despite loathing surprises generally, I like when my reading surprises, and short stories surprise me far more often than books.
Which is not to say that I don’t love novels. Give me a fat novel, full of adventure and intrigue and swords and heroines who make decisions, and I will happily read to the exclusion of everything else. But it seems to me that my reading – in terms of short stories vs. novellas vs. novels – has been vastly imbalanced, given my abiding love for non-novel forms of writing. So this year, I’m working on balancing that.
I chose Sunbolt, by Intisar Khanani, in part to help with that balance. Sunbolt is the first novella, in a series of novellas, which perhaps you see every day, but I generally don’t. I was intrigued – and delighted – with the idea of a series of fantasy novellas.
I also chose Sunbolt because it’s Sirens’s year of defiant, disobedient heroines, and Hitomi – with her involvement with the Shadow League attempting to overthrow the powerful, corrupt Arch Mage, who holds the ruler of Karolene in thrall – is one of those girls. Not to mention that Sunbolt is a great diversity pick, for its author, its diverse heroine and cultures, and its small-press publisher.
And after all that, do you know what? I wanted this to be a novel.
Hitomi, a relative newcomer to Karolene, is instantly and irrevocably recognized as an outsider. Her skin is different and her hair is different, no matter than she tries to wear the head wrap popular with locals. Her father is dead, and her mother, casting an overarching pall on Hitomi, is missing, presumed dead. She’s a street rat, but a resourceful one – and one who has joined the Shadow League, led by the mysterious Ghost.
The book begins predictably, if you’re a regular reader of high fantasy. The Shadow League needs to extract a sympathetic noble and his family from Karolene before they are caught and executed. A plot is hatched, Hitomi makes a bad decision, another character makes an unexpected decision, and everything goes catastrophically wrong. As you expect of a heroine, Hitomi sacrifices her freedom – and she believes, her life – to save the Ghost, since Karolene needs him more than it does her.
But everything that happens after her capture is a revelation, because Hitomi is a smart, resourceful, rebellious heroine. She, of course, defies Karolene’s ruling structure every minute of every day, but she also defies Ghost and his lieutenants regularly, finding ways to interpret their directives to suit her desires. She’s a heroine who makes decisions, sometimes bad decisions, but always decisions that drive the book. And fascinatingly, what you think is going to be a novella about intrigue and politics only begins that way; soon, Hitomi’s personal journey (and her sometimes utterly unexpected decisions) take the book out of Karolene altogether, leaving Hitomi stranded in yet another strange land, desperate for help – help that, brilliantly, she conjures through cleverness and tenacity (and notably, not through beauty or power or love or money). Give me a disobedient girl who makes her own decisions, and I’ll give you a revolutionary.
Sunbolt is a bit of a kitchen-sink novella. It has politics, intrigue, shape-shifting, vampires, soul-suckers, mages and a missing-maybe-dead mother. But driving all of this is Hitomi: her desires, her decisions, and her constant determination to help others. Khanani was quite clever in Sunbolt’s structure: it’s only by removing Hitomi from Karolene that Hitomi is able to focus on her own journey, rather than others. It’s a nice upending of the heroine’s journey.
Frankly, there just isn’t enough of Sunbolt. What’s there is often fabulous, but I would have very much liked more world-building, more developed characters, and more history. I liked the focus on Hitomi – and it’s a very tight focus – but Karolene, its politics, and the larger world in which Hitomi finds herself are intriguing. Additionally, Sunbolt suffered from some pacing issues that, somewhat counterintuitively, I think a greater length would have helped.
Have you read Sunbolt? What did you think?
Amy