THE AND THAT WAS, beautifully illustrated novella-length prose poem

THE AND THAT WAS
MIA TIJAM (illus. Rustom Pujado)
Rosarium Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The and That Was is an archipelago of words: lush and mountainous in parts, civilized veneer in others, almost all of it seemingly born from instances when the forces within could no longer be restrained. The thing about archipelagos is to not view them as chains of islands, but as the space that envelops them.

That is what this collection contains.

The land. The culture. The rustic and the urban, religious and heretical. The fractures. The spaces. The cities without dragons...

The Fairy Tale Reality of the Philippines...

Where the end began and begins again...The wishes that point to what we should have wished. These stories contain–and release. And so do you.

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

My Review: "Stories" and "collection" are slightly misleading descriptors. There are under 150pp in this book; there are very cool illustrations on full pages, elucidating angles of seeing on the, the, uhm vignettes or prose poems they're surrounded by; the sum of these parts is less "collection" than stream-of-consciousness novella.

I don't know anything meaningful about the Filipino culture I was within though apart from as I read. I'm very clear that I'm in a world that's dreamlike, delineated in flashes, and in swirls of awareness.. It's bounded and bordered and depicted by the artwork that, malheureusement, I'm not able to show you (put up downloadable samples, Rosarium! you can watermark them!) for added edge-giving. Illustrator Rustom has either read these stories with great care and deep personal connection resulted or he is the male half of Author Tijam's bicameral mind. The prose is deft and rich:

The child gingerly stood up and warily folowed her out of the bodega, into the afternoon light, and through the dirty-kitchen—a hut beside the main house where the old women chopped ebverrything on a long wooden table and cooked in a kiln banked by dried wood.The old nursemaid led her to the deep-well pump beside it. The child wited silently as Nana Kuring lifted the tin basin that was shaped like a soft drink bottle crown and filled with laundry to hoist it on top of her head while bending to pick up the palo-palo used as the laundry paddle. The old woman began walking towards the gate that led to the road and after a dozen stepsm stopped when she realized that the child wasn't following her. The child was looking up at the windows of the old house, at those shuttered shell windowpanes, and then looked at her. Nana Kuring swung the palo-palo in a forward motion to the child, and the little girl hurried after the old woman.

An entire cultural milieu, images sounds and all, is in this brief not-unique passage.

I found the reading experience satisfying on several levels: curiosity about a culture I do not know, immersion in an unfamiliar sensory world, stimulation of visual language fresh to me. I'm sure it's hard to look stuff up, to see the places you don't have a ready-made image in your head to match, at first anyway. It' really worth making the effort and I recommend this work to you as a rewarding place to start your efforts.

BLACK SALT QUEEN, non-Western woman-led fantasy for successful (self-)gifting

BLACK SALT QUEEN (Letters from Maynara #1)
SAMANTHA BANSIL
Bindery Books | Violetear (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There can be no victory without betrayal.

Hara Duja Gatdula, queen of the island nation of Maynara, holds the divine power to move the earth. But her strength is failing and the line of succession gives her little comfort. Her heir, Laya, is a danger—a petty and passionate princess who wields the enormous power of the skies with fickle indifference. Circling the throne is Imeria Kulaw—the matriarch of a traitorous rival family who wields recklessly enhanced powers of her own—with designs to secure a high-ranking position for her son and claim the crown for her family. Each woman has a secret weakness—a lover, a heartbreak, a lie. But each is willing to pay the steepest price to bring down her rivals once and for all.

Filled with passion, romance, betrayal, and divine magic, Black Salt Queen journeys to a gorgeous precolonial island nation where women—and secrets—reign.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Filipina Author Bansil gives us a gorgeously written, beautifully described fantasy epic in a secondary world that feels fresh to me. I'm not the biggest reader of fantasy...I've lost fifty pounds!...but mostly it's because I am *mortally*tired* of Eurocentric settings that retell European history plus magic. I'm old, I studied history, I read about history, so I'm maybe a bit jaded because I read mostly European slants on the world's broad sweep of history. The problem with being an Anglophone reader is it has too little variety of subject and viewpoint. We need more translated non-fiction, fiction, trashy novels, sci fi...everything.

This book doesn't need to be translated, nor does it need to be viewed through any lens but that of fantasy worldbuilding. It's rooted in precolonial Philippine culture, adding fantasy elements; this is a part of world history I'll bet big money most of my fellow old white people have less knowledge of this cultural milieu than they do of Middle Earth...very few of y'all need any context to know who Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Legolas are or represent.

Getting onto fantasy worlds requires investing into the worldbuilding required for you to feel mise-en-scène. When someone doesn't enjoy that process' iteration in a particular work, they call it "infodumping." The first third or so of this story is more worldbuilding and conflict-establishing narrative. I enjoyed it, though I know the pace suffers for its necessary thoroughness. (The drug, akin to Dune's spice, that enables the powerful to wield their powers, is more present than the powers themselves.) Shorthand available to Eurocentric story settings isn't ready to hand here.

My favorite quality of the story told here, first in a projected series that I very much want to happen, is that every power-wielding woman in this story is aware of her power's cost, to her and to those she uses it for and on. They are women, not girls learning the ropes as is so deeply, tediously common. They've ruled their world for a while, they're now being responsible and planning for the succession to power as they realize mortality is no longer distant. Imeria and Duja are shrewd, flawed people with many problems to solve, many characters to assess, many judgments to render. (Note to Duja: think twice about your idea of Laya.)

I would give the book all five stars but for the straight "romance" building up for Laya. It's not gonna work out, which is not my problem with it; it's that the two are waaay too young to be in this situation and Duja is, perhaps calculatedly, not helping Laya figure anything out. It's a niggle, really, because I can certainly see why this happens; it's just...well...to me, it's brutal to play with people you *can* help out.

So that's my missing quarter star explained. I think, on balance, I'd eagerly push this story at fantasy readers fourteen and up, slightly more to women than men. Any younger giftee whose taste you're passingly familiar with would be a good target for receiving one.