A TASTE OF HONEY, second novella set in Olorumi's realer-than-reality world

A TASTE OF HONEY
KAI ASHANTE WILSON (The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps #2)
Tor.com
$3.99 ebook, $14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Long after the Towers left the world but before the dragons came to Daluça, the emperor brought his delegation of gods and diplomats to Olorum. As the royalty negotiates over trade routes and public services, the divinity seeks arcane assistance among the local gods.

Aqib bgm Sadiqi, fourth-cousin to the royal family and son of the Master of Beasts, has more mortal and pressing concerns. His heart has been captured for the first time by a handsome Daluçan soldier named Lucrio. In defiance of Saintly Canon, gossiping servants, and the furious disapproval of his father and brother, Aqib finds himself swept up in a whirlwind romance. But neither Aqib nor Lucrio know whether their love can survive all the hardships the world has to throw at them.

My Review: Sheer bliss. Storytelling of the highest order. Unfolding like an origami crane, showing the reader its creases and its tucks after he has absorbed its graceful shape, it becomes a completely different story as the end arrives.

Wow.

I just loved it. I can't say enough about how very different the experience of reading the tale is from the experience of having read it. I am utterly enamored of Author Wilson's magic-tech. The beauty of it is that it allows for the fantasy trappings of powers beyond the ordinary but it explains them rather more logically than I'm accustomed to. And the beautiful way Author Wilson folds in the eggwhites of real-time physics in the shape of the multiverse to the mousse of this story is a deep pleasure to me. I've always felt in some essential part of myself that we really are multidimensional beings and travel in linear time...a concept absent from physics, by the way...solely as a means of learning essential lessons on our way Out. Of what, I'm reasonably sure, is the endless recursive reincarnation that seems logical to me in an existence that is defined by energy formed into patterns and perceived as solid when it's actually anything but. Into what is a much more intriguing question. I'm looking forward to finding out.

Another case where my notes were extensive in the Kindle. Twelve of them in fewer pages than THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS, which earned no fewer than 17 notes its own good self. I think it's fair to say that Kai Ashante Wilson has a new fanboy in me. Who would not fall in love with a writer who says this:

Most would only ever guess at who and what was most precious to them—up until the day of loss: then they’d know—and most would also have to guess at why and how, or what might have been.

Perfection.

And then there's the glorious moment when a man knows himself for the first time:

Ah, this was why his wayward gaze alit so often on whom it shouldn’t, going back to peek howevermuch snatched away: those taut bellies and hard thighs of men heroically scrawled in scars. So yes, then: clearly two men could kiss! And what else might they do? Lie down together kissing, if they both wished it, and furthermore . . . unclothed? A desperate thrill of desire throbbed in Aqib’s loins, nearly a climax.

I assume something similar happens to young straight men, couldn't prove it by me; but that *snap* of complete clarity, the sensation of the hand settling into the glove, is expressed beautifully and accurately in that passage.

My recommendation is that you read both books in the Olorumi-verse. The best $7.98 a Kindle/ereader person will spend this fall; slightly more for paperbackers, but the pleasures are commensurate with the expenditure.