Publisher: Tordotcom Publishing

Review: The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran Wilde

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: The Fire Opal Mechanism by Fran WildeThe Fire Opal Mechanism (Gem Universe #2) by Fran Wilde
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: epic fantasy, fantasy
Series: Gem Universe #2
Pages: 208
Published by Tordotcom Publishing on June 4, 2019
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The Fire Opal Mechanism is the fast-paced and lively sequel to Fran Wilde's The Jewel and Her Lapidary
Jewels and their lapidaries and have all but passed into myth.
Jorit, broke and branded a thief, just wants to escape the Far Reaches for something better. Ania, a rumpled librarian, is trying to protect her books from the Pressmen, who value knowledge but none of the humanity that generates it.
When they stumble upon a mysterious clock powered by an ancient jewel, they may discover secrets in the past that will change the future forever.

My Review:

Information may want to be free, but there are always people and institutions working to keep it caged and under their control. At first, that argument seems to be the central tension in The Fire Opal Mechanism.

This turned out to be a whole lot more relevant to the present than I originally expected. Which was both wonderful and frightening, as it was published 4 years ago and therefore written several months at least before that.

But the impulses that move both the Pressmen’s and the Librarian Ania’s resistance to each other are always with us. Even more fascinating, those motives and that resistance turn out to be a bit of misdirection from the real problem that Ania and her reluctant ally-turned-friend, Jorit, need to resolve.

In whatever time period they can manage to solve it.

Escape Rating A-: At first, and for a rather long time thereafter, it seems as if the core of The Fire Opal Mechanism is about the freedom of information versus the censorship of it. And yet, at the beginning – the beginning that Ania and Jorit observe and not the place where they personally start – that wasn’t actually the case.

There’s more to unpack there than the reader initially has a clue about. The conflict seems so obvious. The Pressmen – the people who belong to the cult of the Great Press – have come to the last university in the Six Kingdoms to set information free by confiscating all the books and feeding them all to the machine that will literally chew them up and spit them out as part of the all-encompassing Compendium of Knowledge that the machine is producing.

That initial conflict turns out to be a bit too simplistic once Ania sees the Pressmen blow something into people’s faces that causes them to forget who they are. That the same substance erases text whenever it falls upon a book adds to those doubts. Which are stripped away entirely when someone picks up a copy of the Compendium and watches as the print turns from a faithful reproduction of an original – now consumed – work to an overtly propagandist interpretation that spouts the Pressmen’s view of history.

Which is when Ania, with Jorit tagging along, learns that the clock mechanism she has been clinging to for comfort and safety can take her and her companion back through time. Back to the origins of the Pressmen and their conflict with the universities.

Where she discovers that what she is experiencing in her present is a corruption of a past created by the Great Press that has been erased by that same object. And that the Great Press itself is the biggest and most dangerous corruption of all.

In this year of 2023, when book bans are everywhere and governments daily attempt to rewrite history to make their favored groups feel better about themselves in both the past and the present, it’s easy to become invested in the narrative of the brave librarian fighting the forces of evil repression the Pressmen represent – especially for a librarian.

But that’s far from the whole story. Just as The Fire Opal Mechanism loops Ania and Jorit back to the beginning of the conflict, it also wraps the story back to the history of the Gem Universe as a whole as experienced in the first book in the series, The Jewel and Her Lapidary.

That shifting and sifting through time changes the story from its initial, overt conflict about information wanting to be free to being a bit more of ‘the truth will set you free’ because it’s only once Ania and Jorit learn the truth about the Great Press and the origins of the Pressmen by traveling to the past that they are able to find the explosive and cathartic solution they very much need in the present.

That their harrowing journey together bonds Ania and Jorit in their own mutual truth is the sparkling icing on a very tasty and thought-provoking little book-cake.

I decided to read The Fire Opal Mechanism now because I just picked up a copy of the third book in the Gem Universe, The Book of Gems. I was planning to dive right into it, believing that I had already read the first two books in the series, only to discover that while I adored The Jewel and Her Lapidary, I hadn’t actually read this second book. So I immediately set out to rectify that situation and I’m very glad I did. The Book of Gems awaits!

Review: Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
Review: Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters by Aimee OgdenSun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters by Aimee Ogden
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: fantasy, retellings, science fiction
Pages: 112
Published by Tordotcom Publishing on February 23, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Gene-edited human clans have scattered throughout the galaxy, adapting themselves to environments as severe as the desert and the sea. Atuale, the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, sparked a war by choosing her land-dwelling love and rejecting her place among her people. Now her husband and his clan are dying of an incurable plague, and Atuale’s sole hope for finding a cure is to travel off-planet. The one person she can turn to for help is the black-market mercenary known as the World Witch—and Atuale’s former lover. Time, politics, bureaucracy, and her own conflicted desires stand between Atuale and the hope for her adopted clan.
Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters has all the wonder and romance of a classic sci-fi novel, with the timelessness of a beloved fairy tale.

My Review:

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting with this one. I know it isn’t like anything I expected it to be – and that’s always marvelous.

OK, I was expecting it to be short and it was. This week kind of fell apart for me, so I was looking for something short to round out the week and get me back on track and this definitely ticked off those boxes.

Now that I’ve had a chance to cogitate on it a bit, Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters has left me with three sets of resonances that really shouldn’t gel, but somehow do.

First, there is a fairytale at the heart of this story, although I didn’t figure out which one until after the end. I was just not expecting an SFnal retelling of The Little Mermaid. And it isn’t obvious at first, but when you look back, all of the elements are definitely there, even though the happy ending in this version is way more bittersweet than Disney would ever have left things.

Although I think Atuale is actually a selkie rather than a mermaid, that isn’t clear in the story and it really isn’t necessary to know. What is known about her story is just about enough. She gave up her place as a Sea-Lord’s daughter because she fell in love with a land-dweller.

But Saareval is not a prince. And he doesn’t need to be. Love is love is love, as becomes even clearer as the story continues. Atuale’s shift from sea-creature to land-dweller was also the result of intervention by a witch with a hidden agenda, but the World-Witch is no Ursula.

And in spite of its fairy tale underpinnings, this story is no fantasy.

There’s a plague on Atuale’s world, and it is raging among the land-dwellers. Her husband and his entire family have been struck down with it and the healers are unable to find a cure. It’s up to Atuale to reach out to her friend-turned-enemy, the World-Witch, to make a deal to take her out to the stars in order to find a cure that her husband’s people won’t even want if she finds it.

But her journey among the stars makes her question every single thing that has happened since the day she left the sea. There’s an entire universe out there and Atuale is eager to explore it, along with someone who loves her exactly as she is and not just the parts of her that he finds acceptable.

“For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been’”. Atuale’s choices are both sad. She can save her husband’s people, knowing that they will never fully accept her or the cure she brings. Or she can travel among the stars. She can never do both.

And the choice, her choice, is both bitter and sweet.

Escape Rating B+:The above quote is by John Greenleaf Whitter from his poem Maud Muller, and it kept running through my head the entire time I was reading this story. It’s so clear that the story isn’t about the plague, but about Atuale’s choices about what to do about it.

She’s immune, she’s not going to get it no matter what happens. The process that made her capable of living on land did not fully make her one of her husband’s people, leading to their grudging tolerance of her but also her immunity to a plague that strikes only them.

So this is a story about what we sacrifice for love, because that’s the choice that faces Atuale at every turn. In order to have one love she has to give up another, and it’s a choice that tears her in two through the entire story.

I think I felt most for Atuale as she experiences the wonders – and very definitely the dangers – of exploring the wider universe. It’s a tease and a torment and she wants it and wants to share it, but the price is too high. Which does not erase that wanting at all.

But, and it’s just enough of a but to have kept this from getting an A grade, I wanted a bit more about Atuale’s people and their world, because it’s a much bigger world and a much sadder story than we see at first. It’s not that this story isn’t complete in itself, because it is, but rather that the relationship between Atuale and the World-Witch has SO MUCH history behind it and we get hints rather than a full picture. And I wish I had that full picture, complete with its story of love both requited and unrequited, royal privilege, royal politics and revolution. I felt teased and wished I had more to go on.

Initially, I said there were three things rattling around my head after reading this book. One was The Little Mermaid. The second was that quote from Whittier. The third is also from Disney, and was that ever a surprise. The ending of Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters and the post-credits scene from the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, At World’s End, encapsulates the ending to the romances in both stories in a way that echoes back to the bitter sweetness of that quote from Whittier. Love and happiness, pain and heartbreak, all jumbled together in a ball of tears.