BEGIN THE WORLD OVER, what happens if other hands hold the keys

BEGIN THE WORLD OVER
KUNG LI SUN
AK Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A revolutionary tale of Black and Indigenous insurrection. History as it should have been.

Begin the World Over is a counterfactual novel about the Founders’ greatest fear—that Black and Indigenous people might join forces to undo the newly formed United States of America—coming true.

In 1793, as revolutionaries in the West Indies take up arms, James Hemings has little interest in joining the fight for liberté—talented and favored, he is careful to protect his relative comforts as Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef. But when he meets Denmark Vesey, James is immediately smitten. The formidable first mate persuades James to board his ship, on its way to the revolt in Saint-Domingue. There and on the mainland they join forces with a diverse cast of characters, including a gender nonconforming prophetess, a formerly enslaved jockey, and a Muskogee horse trader. The resulting adventure masterfully mixes real historical figures and events with a riotous retelling of a possible history in which James must decide whether to return to his constrained but composed former life, or join the coalition of Black revolutionaries and Muskogee resistance to fight the American slavers and settlers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Counterfactual histories like this are my meat and drink in reading life. I love to see well-informed authors play with little things that, had they not happened in *exactly* the way they did, would have resulted in a completely different world than the one we live in. There is, of course, an element of wish fulfillment in this for me. And not just in modern times.

The ways and means of colonial oppression are alive and well in Anglophone literature, French literature...all the colonists' languages...as we can see by the marginalization of works by and about nonwhite peoples around the globe.
Literally everything that went wrong in the wars of Haitian, and Jamaican, liberation went right in this book; and that was sooo satisfying to this reader who find the smugness of US exceptionalism grating. On and on, the litany of "they won" rings its victory bells in my ears and my smiles of pleasure keep getting wider as, on reflection, I contemplate an alternative universe where this is history, not alternative history.

For reasons I'll never really understand, magical realism must be in any alternative history novel. I don't like it but it's going to be there, so be ready for that.

The part of the story where we see same-sex couples and coupling being accepted and acceptable is, for me, the best bit of the book. James Hemings, Jefferson's factual Paris-trained enslaved chef, is here a queer gentleman who provides an important central PoV, and that inclusion means that a LOT of attention is paid to food, and the eating of same, in groups and alone. Our trans and genderqueer siblings are well-represented in indigenous and enslaved quarters. This is something I truly can't praise the author for highly enough, the simple, matter-of-fact inclusion of people that the QUILTBAG community of today does far too little to include and celebrate. What's a harder sell, I think, to most people is that the revolution isn't bloodless and that's very much center stage for good swaths of the story. I am routinely appalled by the violence that many slaveowners enacted on their slaves' bodies. It isn't *better* when they, in their turn, enact that violence on their enslavers...it just reminds me that there are no truly good humans.

Starting our journey with James's PoV and then broadening the scope to include many others' PoVs was, I can see, a necessary way to get this story told. I will note that it felt frustrating because James won me over so completely that I wanted to return to him like a homing pigeon. That broadening does allow for more representation at the expense of depth of characterization. Part of the point of this particular story, as I see it, is to take the reader outside the usual and customary colonial hegemonic individualistic mode of storytelling. We're presented with an organic polyphony of PoVs. It pays to have that need in the reader's mind to get them into the spirit of the rebellion and its aims.

A read I strongly urge on you to understand and perhaps even align with the revolution so eagerly sought by young people and its aims. Younger readers, take heart! You're seen. Your concerns for liberation and justice aren't invisible.

RIVER OF TEETH, implausible, delightful, engaging and entertaining

RIVER OF TEETH
SARAH GAILEY (River of Teeth #1)
Tor.com
$3.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true.

Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two.

This was a terrible plan.

Contained within this volume is an 1890s America that might have been: a bayou overrun by feral hippos and mercenary hippo wranglers from around the globe. It is the story of Winslow Houndstooth and his crew. It is the story of their fortunes. It is the story of his revenge.

My Review: Okay, there's this little-known weirdness about the Congress actually considering the importation of hippos for real in the early 20th century...see my four-year-old review of the Kindle Single for my take on that...but it went nowhere, thankfully.

Also thankfully Sarah Gailey got wind of this deliciously loopy piece of fucked-up thinking. This novella is a terrific playful use of reality's undercooked braining. I can't be any more pleased about that.

I could be a bit more pleased about the novella. No. WINKING! Not at all, not ever, not even the three times in this book. *ahem*

But the main source of my discontent is the slightness of the characterization of Winslow, our "British"-or-maybe-not hero. He's very intriguing which is the source of my mild disgruntlement. Just as we're getting to know him, *whiz* offstage he goes with Archie the stout and stout-hearted confidence trickster...and just as *she* is getting interesting, what with her tendresse for U.S. Marshal Gran! Who barely registers before his search for the evil Adelia fails and he has to get our non-binary fascinator Hero to medical help...

...am I making myself clear? There is a LOT going on in these pages, all of it fun, much of it necessary, and some of it far too glossed over. More room for Mama's goodness, please. Yes, there's a sequel and I will be reading it soonest, but this is literary coitus interruptus.

I was delighted by the comeuppance delivered to the very appropriate party at the end; I was hugely relieved that the author provided us with a timeline at the end of the book; but really, there's only one thing that I can't explain away or make better with rationalizations: Handwaving away the Civil War. This wasn't a fixable slip-up. The fact is that hippos in the Civil War would've changed things drastically given the location of the Harriet (our lawless, feral hippo-infested stretch of Mississippi marsh). Its construction in Louisiana would've made the economy of the state radically different; its slave or free labor demands would've changed the military calculus of the region in extremely significant ways.

So I'll accept a gayish hero, I'll go along with a non-binary person passing unchallenged, yup yup okey dokey mm hmm, but not the unchanged Civil War. That by itself would've cost a less gung-ho gonzo nuts author with a blah little idea all but one star. You, Sarah Gailey, disappointed me where a less talented writer would've made me snort derisively, roll my eyes, and Pearl Rule this bad boy. You're capable of better thinking than this elision of a central fact of US history.

Tsk.

GHOSTS OF TSAVO, African paranormal lion-hunting with ghostly husbands, possessed zebras, and nasty Dursleyesque families!

GHOSTS OF TSAVO Society for Paranormals #1
VERED EHSANI
Kindle Edition
FREE!

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Armed with Victorian etiquette, a fully loaded walking stick and a dead husband, Beatrice Knight arrives in colonial Kenya desperate for a pot of tea and a pinch of cinnamon. But she’ll need more than that if she’s to unravel the mystery of the Ghosts of Tsavo without being eaten in the process. All this while surviving the machinations of her best friend’s dashing godfather and the efforts of her safari guide to feed her to any lion willing to drag her away. What is a ghost-chasing widow to do?

This is Case #1 in the “Society for Paranormals” series: A series concerning dead husbands, African legends and the search for a perfect spot of tea. For those readers who adore “Pride & Prejudice” and would love to experience “The Parasol Protectorate” set in colonial Africa, this is for you!

My Review: A possessed zebra, "ghost" lions who turn out to be shape-shifters, an automaton with many exciting characteristics (including a ghost-in-residence who happens to be the narratrix's dead husband), a Dursleyesque family far from Privet Lane and therefore even more disagreeable than usual...it's all here, and all the moving parts are managed by our narratrix, Mrs. Knight. Bee to her most unpleasant aunt, Mrs. Steward, whose unpaid labor keeps the Steward house running. Certainly Jonas, their one African servant, isn't much help. He's unfamiliar with tea and toast, those urgent requirements of the entire British race. He has a wonderful survival knack, though, simply listening to Mrs. Steward bloviate and inserting "yes, mama" into the spaces made by her inhalations to bloviate some more.

The barely-more-than-tent-city that is Nairobi, British East Africa, upon the Steward ménage's arrival, meets with vocal disapproval from the ladies of the party, though Bobby the 12 year old son is unaware of anything about the place except that he'll get to go lion hunting. Bee, in her ever-unflappable way (how would one frighten a lady accustomed to sniffing out and dealing with werewolves?), sets the house to rights just in time to greet her shipboard friend Cilla, come to Nairobi to stay with her handsome, unsettlingly odd godfather Mr. Timmons. The Steward ladies find Mr. Timmons' presence makes the African savannah much more palatable. Lilly, the daughter of the house, is in the market for a husband as she was forced to leave London on the eve of her grand Coming Out. Bee doesn't quite know why Mr. Timmons affects her so negatively, but as an investigator of things paranormal, she has learned the long and hard way to trust the prickings of her thumbs.

But, as is usual in slightly romantic books, Mrs. Knight and Mr. Timmons are thrown together to solve the mystery of the "ghost" lions while preventing the baying packs of foolish British hunters from killing their mutual prey before the two paranormals can discover what exactly they are. As the hunt fails spectacularly on its first night (lions are, keep in mind, nocturnal hunters) and the camp is brought to a state of swirling chaos by the disappearance of the aforementioned automaton (and with it the lively ghost of Gideon Knight), seeds are sown that will reap a bitter harvest quite soon.

A mysterious, tall, dark, and handsome African paranormal contact called Kam has been communicating with Bee since her arrival in Nairobi. He appears and disappears with disconcerting silence and always utters unsettling, sibylline warning-cum-instructions that Bee must decipher in order to navigate hazardous paranormal surroundings new to her. It is his major revelation to Bee about the nature of the ghost/shape-shifting lions that propels the wild, careening ride in the last third of the story. Bee and Kam hatch a desperate plan to save the more recalcitrant of the target lions from the bumbling Great White Hunters...and unexpectedly from Mr. Timmons as well. After the comical success of this silly plan, a conversation between Bee and Mr. Timmons reveals information she would greatly prefer not to know about the living and desperately needs not to believe about the dead.

It's a rollicking good ride, similar in its tenor and pace to the much-beloved Chronicles of St Marys by Jodi Taylor. I'm very much looking forward to future installments in the series, three more already being available. I expect that they will fill in some bits of Bee's story, such as an alluded-to previous trip to Africa, West Africa that time, that has left Bee with a disfigured right ear and a goddess who appears as a praying mantis--yuck!--of any size she wishes--yikes!--as a bitter enemy.

Yes indeed, a good time will be had by all!