Tuesday, March 17, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: We Unleash the Merciless Storm by Tehlor Kay Mejia




We Unleash the Merciless Storm is the sequel to last year's YA "We Set the Dark on Fire" (Reviewed by me here).  I loved We Set the Dark On Fire, which featured a story with a really well done F-F romance, a setting ruled by an upper class through classist and racist oppression and a rebellion that was not above stooping to immoral means to get its way.  Add to those themes a really great protagonist and a heartbreaking cliffhanger ending, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on the sequel - literally: I reserved in 3 different ways through my libraries, and picked it up and read it completely on its day of release.

A Quick Note:  This is a fantasy story solely in the sense that it takes place in an alternate world, with an alternate history and culture to our own - there are basically no fantastical elements at play, although some may be suggested in the ending sequence.  

 Alas, We Unleash the Merciless Storm doesn't quite fit the promise of its predecessor.  The story flips its perspective to Carmen, the love interest from the last book, and goes inside the revolutionary organization La Voz, which seeks to overturn the classist and racist government that literally walls off the people on the outside of the island country.  But while the romantic elements are mostly still effective, and the story begins in a way to setup an interesting conflict within the revolution, the book winds up copping out on trying to answer some of its more interesting questions, settling instead for a resolution that is quick, easy and conclusive.  Again I wonder if this series may have been better served as a trilogy instead of a duology, because the result here just seems a miss given the potential shown.

Note: Spoilers for We Set The Dark on Fire below are inevitable, not that much of that book was unpredictable.


----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
When Carmen Santos left her La Voz headquarters as a child, she was already one of the resistance group's legendary agents.  Then she went undercover for five years, became the Secundo wife of  Mateo, the horrible young man destined to rule Medio with an iron fist, and fell in love with Mateo's Primera wife, Dani, a young woman La Voz was blackmailing into a resistance agent.  Now, after her resistance was blown, she has returned to La Voz for the first time in years, leaving the girl she fell in love with behind and heartbroken.

But what Carmen finds at La Voz headquarters isn't what she expected: for while she was gone, a young man named Ari  has somehow managed to rise up to the right hand of La Voz's legendary leader, and is encouraging the group to undertake more and more reckless actions - actions that could result in the deaths of innocents and operatives alike.  And when Dani stops responding to her La Voz contact and Ari makes the case that Dani must be killed to prevent her from betraying the cause, Carmen will be forced to make a choice: the woman she loves, or the cause she has given herself to since birth.  But if she chooses the former, who will stop La Voz from taking actions that may ultimately result in its destruction - dooming the cause forever?
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We Unleash the Merciless Storm flips the perspective of the story around by telling the story from the perspective of Carmen.  Whereas the last book was told from Dani, a girl who grew up hiding who she was for fear of death upon discovery, and who slowly became resolute in the cause of changing this sexist/classist/racist system that rules Medio, Carmen has always known of the importance of fighting for change, growing up in the revolutionary camp from a young age.  Carmen was always a fighter, and that makes her a very different voice to hear the story from, and provides a very different perspective on the cause and means of revolution.

For the revolution was one which definitely wielded a lot of gray methods in the last book - in particular, blackmailing individuals into helping the cause - even individuals who have a good underlying reason to support the cause in the first place (such as Dani).  Carmen did not have much of a problem with those methods - in fact she still doesn't mainly in this book - but she does have views on the use of exposing those committed and innocent to the cause: something that La Voz seems to have gotten more and more willing to do in her absence.  It's another way of examining a question posed by the first book - how far is too far to go for the cause?  And it's a question that obviously doesn't have a particularly easy answer, given how important the cause may be and how rough the world - both this one and ours - really is.

It's perhaps for that reason that this book takes a turn near the end which was really disappointing to me: it decides to not bother trying to further examine the question and abandons this conflict in favor of one with more clear good and bad guys.*  The first book had a clear bad guy in Mateo for sure, but the other characters opposing him weren't clearly good - they were shades of gray, and attitude that this book seems to abandon near the end.  It's as if the author found herself stuck on how to resolve everything satisfactorily in this book and improvised the last act to give everything a sweet and happy-ish ending.  As I noted above the jump, I wonder if stretching this series to at trilogy, with this entire book being a middle installment of Carmen at La Voz fighting to shape the cause back into a form she believes in, would've worked better, and allowed for a more thorough examination of the themes.  Instead we get a plot that tries to wrap things up very quickly in ways that are not very satisfying given the setup, and after the first book ended on such a terrific (if heartbreaking note) it just can't help but feel wasted.

Ending Spoilers in ROT13: Va gur raq, Nev - gur lbhat zna jub unf jbexrq uvf jnl vagb frpbaq va pbzznaq fgnghf bs Yn Ibm, jub unf orra hetvat erpxyrff npgvbaf gung chg bcrengvirf naq vaabpragf ng evfx, vf n genvgbe, jbexvat sbe Zngrb.  Nf fhpu, uvf ragver zrgubqf ner qvfperqvgrq nf orvat gur jbex bs rivy vafgrnq bs n gehr fhccbegre, juvpu vf xvaq bs n jrnx jnl bs erfbyivat na vagrerfgvat dhrfgvba.  Gura gurer'f gur snpg gung uvf evfr va cbjre jnf orpnhfr....Yn Ibm'f yrnqre jnf rzoneenffrq gb nqzvg ur'q orra gevpxrq naq yrg uvzfrys or oynpxznvyrq?  Yvxr, jung?  Vg whfg nyybjf Zrwvn gb jvcr gur obneq pyrna bs gur vagreany eribyhgvbanel pbasyvpg orgjrra qvssrerag ivrjf bs ubj Yn Ibm bcrengrf va gvzr sbe gur pbapyhfvba, naq vg'f fhpu n jnfgr bs cbgragvny.

Mind you, there are still parts of this book that work wonderfully - Carmen is a great voice for a narrator and her heartbreak and leaving Dani makes her actions easy to understand, and allows for the romance between Carmen and Dani to continue in a very enjoyable fashion.  I kind of wish we could get flashbacks to Dani's actions between the last book and this book's reunion, since the book kind of avoids dealing with Dani's response to heartbreak, but overall the two of them make a wonderful pairing.  And the book does a tremendous job showing the difficulty of managing the conflicts between one's love and one's beliefs, and how high the costs are of living in this society overall.

So yeah, this one feels like a disappointment mainly because of how good its predecessor was, and what was set up there.  But it's still a fine novel....it just seems like it should have been more than fine.
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