Wednesday, August 26, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron


Kingdom of Souls is the debut YA fantasy novel of author Rena Barron, and is a the start of a new YA Epic Fantasy trilogy inspired by African mythologies.*  The Marketing press compares it to Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone, another book/series inspired by African history/myth (which I haven't loved), but it's honestly quite a bit different outside the continent that inspired it.  Whereas that novel dealt with themes of discrimination and class/racial power dynamics, this novel deals with dreams of power, the powers of elites, and the costs of revenge.  It's a very different dynamic, and honestly a much darker book as a result.

*The author created her own names for all her deities/orishas in this novel and I am not fully familiar with African religions/mythologies so I could be wrong, but it seems like the author is playing with more than one African mythology here, as we have a being called a "God" and others called "Orishas" of seemingly equal power worshiped by different in-universe cultures, so I'm not going to be more specific in this review.*

 And I liked the result mostly, although the book kind of bites off a bit more than it can chew, it does so through a really strong lead character and solid story that makes me definitely want to see where the 2nd book in this trilogy will go.  It's not a short book for a YA novel, but it packs a ton into its content, from establishing a very expansive setting to a number of mortal and immortal characters with varied motivations throughout.  Whereas other authors honestly might've split this book into two, this book tries to combine it all into one work, for better or worse, but the character work and atmosphere is just strong enough for it all to work...

TRIGGER WARNING:  Off-Page, several women are described as being mind-raped and implied to have been abused/raped physically.  Moreover a male character is essentially raped by trickery (again off-page).  How necessary some of this is....is a bit debatable (the latter instance isn't handled well).

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Arrah is the daughter of two powerful Witch Doctors - with her father's mother being the leader of Tribe Aatiri and Aarah's own mother once being considered the proper heir to Tribe Mulani, two of the five tribes that worship the God of Magic, Heka.  But despite that and despite being able to see magic, Arrah has no magic to call on her own, to her great disappointment, and seemingly the disappointment of her mother Arti.  At age 16, everyone assumes that if the magic hasn't come yet, it'll never come at all, and while having no magic makes her nothing unusual in the Kingdom, the shame of not living up to her Tribal and family legacy embarrasses her to no end.

There is however one way to gain magic however - to use the technique of charlatans and to trade years of her own life for magic.  But her parents have forbidden her from even thinking of such a thing, as once such a magic is invoked, no one can control the cost incurred.....

Yet on her last visit to the tribal lands, Arrah's grandmother has a vision of a green-eyed serpent, one of the legendary demons long sought defeated, nearby Arrah.  And soon after, children in the kingdom start being kidnapped, with not even Arti, the Ka Priestess of the kingdom, able to see the culprit.  When one of those children taken turns out to be one of Arrah's friends, Arrah can stand by and do nothing no longer - not if she has some connection to the demon she knows must be responsible.  But when she finally uses the ritual, and sacrifices her life for power, she discovers truths she could never have imagined, and a darkness in the land that threatens to envelop all........
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Kingdom of Souls is a dark YA fantasy tale.  I want to be up front and clear about that.  There are deaths on page that are brutal, the villains are painfully evil, and even the supposed good deities have flaws that make them honestly hard to like.  And then there's the actions of the villains and others that happen off page, which inspired the Trigger Warning I had above.  You'd think the fact that it quickly becomes clear that our heroine is going to trade years of her life for power is a sign of how dark the story is going to get, but honestly, that is only the tip of the iceberg - as such, this novel will not be for everyone.  But the darkness does work for the most part.

It's also a tale with a pretty expansive setting right from the get-go.  You have an ancient past of 5000 years past, in which Demons fought against Orishas (Demigods/Gods), with the Orishas finally prevailing by sealing the Demon King away at great cost.  You have two nationality groups: 1) the tribes who worship the God Heka and possess magical powers, with the greatest among their numbers earning the rank of "Witch Doctor"; and 2) The Kingdom, which worships instead the Orishas and treats magic as an equal thing to ordinary administration, with the Vizier and the Ka Priestess as rivals for the 2nd most powerful position in the Kingdom.  Very little of this setting is fluff, and it all comes into play, as the plot moves on.

In this setting comes our protagonist, Arrah, a 16 year old girl whose heritage should be one of great magic, and yet it's a magic she cannot reach.  Even worse, she has the ability to still see magic that nonmagical people usually don't possess, so what she cannot reach is right there in front of her.  It's easy to see why she's frustrated by her lack of power, especially with a mother who may care for her (even if Arrah may not believe it) but who insists upon acting passive aggressively, if not downright emotionally abusively, towards Arrah for not manifesting her magical gifts.  Yet at the same time, thanks to a loving father and grandmother, as well as her friends, Arrah is unquestionably good, wanting not only nothing to do with her mother's political schemes, but to help people like poor kids in the market who have to pickpocket to survive or a poor son of a fishmonger whose stepmother is actually physically abusive until she intervenes.   And so while the allure of power is always there, unlike other similar protagonists, Arrah never gives in to that allure until her need to do good makes her believe she has no choice.

Unfortunately, this is a really dark world.  And while Arrah and her friends - her love interest Rudjek (the Vizier's son), his guards, and her other tribal friends - may be good, the world is not kind to those with ideals, from its leaders and elders like Arrah's and Rudjek's parents to the very deities themselves.  Both Heka and the Orishas are very present themselves in this novel, with the Orisha's getting small interludes from their own points of view, and they may be immortal but they are not good, with them allowing some seriously bad things to happen.  The plot meanwhile takes some really dark turns following a long first act that seems to be setting up a much calmer different plot, only to go overdrive into the darkness from there, as Arrah works to overcome her lack of power - and the supreme power of those working for evil opposes her.

And when I say darkness, I don't just mean the people, but the actions as well.  An early plot point that is basically dropped after the first act is how Arrah, as a tribesperson whose mother abandoned the Tribes and doesn't have power, is ostracized by those with power to the point of having kids try to beat her up (with the aid of magic).  That's the lightest of it all, as the motives of the main antagonist early are from a past that will raise severe trigger warnings, as she is one of a bunch of women who were physically and psychically abused to the point of breaking, and wants revenge.  And then there's the antagonist who takes over, who is downright psychopathic.  And the overall biggest bad of the series doesn't come fully into play....but might be the most tragic of all.

All of this again is in a plot that is absolutely jam packed, which is a bit of where this book stumbles.  The first act almost feels like a different book in where its going, with Arrah's being ostracized is basically abandoned and never returns early on for example, and the final two acts twist and turn so often you barely have time to breathe.  It manages to make it all work, but you could easily see this book being split into two and being better for it.  Instead everything has to rush, to the point where there's a situation in which a male character is basically raped by a shapeshifter, and the book never really explores the significance of that, using it instead to ostracize him from his loved ones.  And then there's the ending, which leaves a big cliffhanger that is kind of confusing as to what really happened and what everyone really remembers, which could've probably been fixed if it had just 20 more pages to breathe.

Overall though, Kingdom of Souls is a fascinating if dark fantasy story and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
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