BIRD KING RISING, second in Letters from Maynara series by Samantha Bansil

BIRD KING RISING (Letters from Maynara #2)
SAMANTHA BANSIL
Bindery Books | Violetear (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A new queen reigns. A rebellion stirs. Will she risk it all to rule?

Newly crowned queen Laya Gatdula is determined to prove her worth to her subjects, her family, her rivals—and herself. When whispers of rebellion and rumored sightings of a giant raptor in the mountainous Skylands reach the capital, Laya must face the terrifying realization that her ex-lover and rival, Luntok, might still be alive and coming for the throne. Though she already wields power over wind and rain, to quell the threat from the north, Laya seeks the ultimate weapon: lightning.

Torn between the counsel of two men—her beloved confidant and her ruthless uncle—Laya must trust herself to cement her legacy and hold the throne. Is it better to earn her nation’s loyalty through benevolent rule, or risk everything to become an all-powerful god? And with Luntok rapidly gathering his army, will she live long enough to make the choice?

From Samantha Bansil, a brilliant, fresh voice in AAPI fiction, Bird King Rising returns to the world of Black Salt Queen with the gripping conclusion to an epic story of duty and strength, passion and betrayal, and the devastating cost of war.

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

My Review: If you have not read Black Salt Queen, which you certainly should, this story will lose a lot of impact though you will get a flavor of the world. The conflicts will I suspect, not need a lot of background, though the motives and the intensity brought to bear might surprise you absent that earlier tale's details. I'll quote myself from my earlier review for clarity: "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."

I'll say of this resolution to the earlier story's arc, I was all ready for it to be about what it is that separates the handover of power due to rebellion from a revolution. Was Laya merely leading a rebellion? I'd wondered in the first book; now she's in power, wielding her magic is...influenced...by the always-present web of interpersonal obligations, favors owed and ones desired to be accrued. It's a very fertile field to work, deep story-soil to till and many's the crop of plots it will sustain. I found the depth of this story's digging a tiny bit disappointing, like Author Bansil chose story resolution in a timely way over the longer, more complicated exploration I'd anticipated. That's why this book is a quarter-star lower than the first one in my personal rating; and, of course, the second-book phenomenon of post-joyous-discovery familiarity where there had been novelty.

What is foregrounded instead is the deeper look into individuals' ethical natures. I am here for women's wrongs as much as rights. I like women in power making terribly difficult decisions and getting them ambiguously right but somewhat wrong. Being in power very very seldom offers a leader the delight of choosing an unambiguously good course. But maybe, in addition to these reasons they'll make hard choices, could we also see justifications, rationalizations, pressures responded to that evoke right-becomes-wrong perspective shifts?

I sound more carping and negative than I feel. I think this series could easily go on a good while before the setting yields its last bumper harvest; the setting is one that bids fair, in Author Bansil's capable hands, to support many excellent tales to come. I am here for them all as they come.

Soon please, Violetear Books.

ROUGE, more than a color...a way of life and a (bad) reason to live

ROUGE
MONA AWAD
Simon Element
$28.00 hardcover, available now

One of Literary Hub's Best Reads od 2023!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.

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

My Review: I had the kind of mother who told her daughters, "you have to suffer for beauty, girls." Noelle reminded me a lot of Mama. Deeply shallow, focused to the exclusion of all else on irrelevancies, fripperies, and appearances, Noelle's my definition of toxic womanhood. Also very much the embodiment of what women were and are told they were supposed to be, to care about, and to focus on.

How horrifying. How titanically wasteful.

And how ripe for a loud, satirical takedown, which Author Awad delivers. Adding a supernatural edge to it, no less.

This kind of dark, menacing take on consumerism's extra-toxic focus on women and the messaging aimed squarely at their money is something I wish more women wrote. I remember my mother's obsessive regimens for her skin and how many perfumey unguents and masks she would bring home from the department store. I never saw the dentist and got one pair of glasses, one pair of shoes a year...she had dozens of these things littering her bathroom counter. Yep. I know this obsession is real.

The reality of it made, for me, the supernatural element...humorous, in a very black and cynical way. Of course there must be some awful, evil outside agent making us feel this way...no rational person would surrender to obsession so easily, you can hear the self-justifiers and excusers say. It was genius for Author Awad to make those evil outside agents the malevolent supernatural entities of La Maison de Méduse instead of the blandly corporate agents of evil called Lanvin, Coty, Revlon, et alii.

This gives her so much more latitude to poke fun, too. She's got her sights on the obsession with surfaces, and the ease of trapping women with such simple lures as beauty and youthful appearance. There's a whiff of colorism in the discussions of "managing one's skin tone" that made me cringe. It rang all the more loudly in my ears after I read her sketch of the beauty obsession that's gripped her middle-aged self in The Walrus (here). What a wonderful, wry way to send up one's own foibles and insecurities, I thought. What a talent this author has to make me, a certifiable man and victim of neglect by a beauty addict, read the story with such intensity and interest.

It didn't hurt that Author Awad wrote in that piece:

A bookseller once told me that when you buy a book, you’re also buying the idea of time in which to read it. A down payment on an extension of life, a shimmer of immortality. With my growing collection of serums, I was perhaps seeking something similarly existential. An illusion of control. A staving off of death.

Yep, as the saying goes, thass me.

Why I'd say to read it is that it's a great antidote to the huge ocean of mediocre man-blaming same-ol' same-ol' women's fiction. It's bracingly honest about the internal roots of obsession without ever excusing the forces outside that drive to turn it, purely for profit, into addiction.