You just don’t know how she’s going to handle it once it happens.ĭani’s situation is dire, but never bleak. The minute you’re introduced to Dani’s situation you know where she’s quickly headed. Now imagine sharing your husband with her…while you’re being blackmailed into spying on him for a group of rebels. The girl you trust least in the whole world.
Then there’s the Segunda, the other wife Dani’s going to live with. Inequality, in myth and practice, is part of Medio’s soul, so the elite would have us believe. And the parts of the island said to have been cursed by the vanquished god, a place where Medio’s poorest are exploited and hidden from the wealthier inhabitants by a wall. Not just the marital situation, but the elite finishing school that prepares girls for one wifely role or the other. Such an arrangement might have come across as bizarre or worse, hopelessly contrived to put our heroine, Daniela Vargas, into the terrible position she finds herself in when she’s chosen by Medio’s most eligible, wealthy bachelor, a man many believe will one day be president. The Segunda is chosen for her passion and beauty. She’s the wife he takes to a state dinner. One wife, the Primera, is chosen for her logical, analytical nature. The myth, for Medionites, is there to provide justification for how their society operates.
But the story isn’t about gods behaving badly. The story-and the island nation of Medio-begins with a myth about two brother gods fighting over a woman. The world here-and this is the main thing I wish for in a fantasy book-felt immediately logical and real, even before I’d begun to explore it. I never thought that reading We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia.
That doesn’t mean I can’t love fantasy, of course, but where some people are automatically excited to be dropped into a new world they don’t know anything about yet, I’ve been known to read a book and think, “So…why isn’t this just set in regular California instead of California where some people do magic?” Confession: Sometimes I suspect I’m not a natural fantasy reader.
0 kommentar(er)
