Review - All the Stars and Teeth by Adalyn Grace

All the Stars and Teeth

Adalyn Grace

Titan Books, 4 August 2020

Available as: PB, 416pp, e

Read as: PB advance review copy

ISBN: 9781789094060

Snap verdict: Sure to be popular

I'm grateful to Titan for an advance copy of All the Stars and Teeth. I don't think I've had an ARC before that came with its own stars, as this one did, and necklace - after reading the book I'm concerned though at what curses or other magic might lie on that necklace. I will be very careful with it...

Adalyn Grace's debut novel is, at one level, a fairly traditional coming-of-age story. At the age of eighteen, Princess Amora Montana, heir to the kingdom of Visidia, is about to undergo the testing that will prove her worth to take the throne as High Animancer - wielder of the magic of souls. But on the brink of success, she gets things terribly, terribly wrong and her life is placed in danger. To survive, and to stand a chance of coming into her own, she must flee and explore her future kingdom, working to prevent a catastrophe ass well as to save her own life. Starting as a rather spoiled and ignorant girl, she grows up and begins to questions her place in things and the direction of her life.

At another level, though, Grace seems to me to be casting a rather cool eye over a familiar template and introducing some challenges to it. Yes, Amora begins rather self-satisfied and knows little of the world around her but it soon becomes clear that's because her father kept her that way - and in part he wasn't being protective, given the kingdom is nowhere near the good and harmonious place he makes out. The spotlight is soon on his failings and on the things that have been omitted from Amora's education. 

Oh, and that education... well, it involved using her magic to execute prisoners. That's the essence of the test that she fails, creating a real sense of horror right at the start of this book which I felt was heightened by the contrast with the preceding party-and-food heavy scenes. 

Behind Amora's growing doubts about the kingdom and her place in it is a growing sense of struggle and injustice and a feeling that the system she expected to inherit may not be the wise and just edifice she'd assumed. There is a real moral complexity in the eventual encounter with the forces that threaten the kingdom, a mixing of the personal and the political that includes Amora, her father, the cryptic, swashbuckling, pirate Bastian and a feminist mermaid ('I've a collection of men who I intend to repay for how generous they were to me... Dismemberment for anyone who ever tried to touch me. The tongue flayed from those with wicked mouths. And the heart eaten from any man who's ever told me to smile.') This book recognises that it isn't all about finding the True King (or Queen) - there must be justice beyond that. It leaves Amara, after much loss, looking to establish that, based on what she's learned on her journeys and I'm sure that in future books we'll see the difficulty of carrying this through.

In style, this book is often direct, with things seen from Amara's point of view and reflecting her limited experience (so it's appropriate, for example, that the parts set at sea aren't salted with nautical terms she wouldn't know, or that in an episode where villagers are trying to repair their homes after a storm - without help from the King - we get her perspective mainly as people hammering at wood). Grace reveals the Kingdom gradually, giving us, one after another, encounters with the various islands that make it up, each occupied by people with a different magical bent. The differences between these settings and their people are well realised, supporting the complex picture that Amora is gradually putting together of her world and of her family's place in it.

With its blend of magic, fantasy, romance and  politics, I think this book is bound to be popular and to lead many readers to enjoy the world and peoples of Visidia.

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.

Review - Malorie by Josh Malerman

Malorie (Bird Box, 2)

Josh Malerman

Orion, 21 July 2020

Available as: HB, 291pp

Read as: Advance e-copy

ISBN: 9781409193159

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Malorie via NetGalley.

Malorie is a sequel to Malerman's Birdbox. Birdbox has been made into a successful TV series. I haven't seen that, so if you haven't be warned, I may be inadvertently spoiling something for you! Though, if you haven't already read Birdbox, I think you should before you read Malorie or watch the series.

Malorie is set in the same world as Birdbox, a USA invaded by "creatures" seeing which sends the viewer into a frenzy leading them to kill others and then themselves. Wise people, "safe" people, live "by the fold" - swathing their eyes in cloth, never uncovering them or opening them unless they have explored their surroundings and are satisfied that no creature is present. People stay indoors, windows painted over, and distrust each other. For who knows who may have seen a creature?

The Malorie of the title is a young woman, who we saw previously navigate the new world, eventually to arrive at a school for the blind which provided her and her two kids a haven. The new book picks up this story six years later, and sees them forced to leave the school, setting up in an abandoned summer camp. Here, the horrors Malorie has experienced push her into a style of fierce, even over protective parenting. Tom, 16, and Olympia, 13 are bright children who have grown up in the new world. They understand the dangers, but they haven't faced the trauma Malorie has, of losing everything. Tom especially is restless and inventive and Malorie often has to tell him "no". Olympia - whose birth we saw in Birdbox - has her own secrets.

This is a short novel, and one I raced through over a couple of days. It's less about the practicalities of survival post-apocalypse than it is about the moral, psychological and cultural aspects. Malerman doesn't bother to explain where the food comes, from or precisely how it's possible for sighted people to survive while denying themselves that sense. More important is the sense of loss, of a world having been stolen away, the rage at the creatures that Malorie shows - but which she also feels at Gary, the man who broke up her previous sanctuary. Gary represents those who deny the threat posed by the creatures.

Reading all this during the time of covid  lockdown made the story come vividly alive for me. Everyone - everyone "safe" - is isolated, alone or in small groups, largely indoors. Contact with others is minimal, in case their sanity is compromised. Some wild people out there deny the situation, getting others into danger. And people wait - for what? For answers? For a solution (a vaccine?) Malerman can't have intended this but his timing seems impeccable.

Against this background, Malorie is very much a story about growing up, taking risks and letting go. Malorie the woman has sacrificed such a lot, been so hard on those kids and on herself, teaching them the lessons of survival she has learned so painfully herself. Of course they - or Tom at least - resent her (Olympia sees herself as a peacemaker between the other two). The story - essentially of how the sanctuary at camp Yadin ends and of what follows - is not hard to predict, but Malerman delivers it with such verve, such aplomb, that the pages blur past. Malorie, especially, comes out of those pages and speaks for herself: I felt such empathy with her, while also being appalled at much of what she is doing. Fixated on saving the "teens" from the creatures, she ignores or doesn't even imagine other problems and dangers: universal human problems, and very specific dangers. There were times when I was shouting to her, times when I was crying with her. It's that involving.

Tom and Olympia are also well drawn - over-confident, enthusiastic Tom, mature, self-controlled Olympia. Despite the weird circumstances they've grown up in and live in, Malerman makes them human, familiar, as growing teens and as people. You want to know more about them, you wish them the space to grow and flourish.

It's a superb book, carrying the story of Birdbox forward in new ways, supplying answers and hard lessons which are intimately built on what went before.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Malorie, see the publisher's website here.