Wednesday, November 18, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Each of Us a Desert by Mark Oshiro

 




Each of Us a Desert is a YA Fantasy novel by author Mark Oshiro and is their second novel.  I missed their first novel (Anger is a Gift) but from twitter they've been on my radar for quite a while, and so I put this book on hold a while back.  Naturally it came in when I had a billion other books to get to, and I was tempted to send it back and put it back on hold for later.  

I'm really glad I resisted that temptation, because Each of Us a Desert is....something, something really damn impressive.  It's a tale of a young woman in a post-apocalyptic world, who has a magical gift that has bound her seemingly to only one destiny...who travels the world in search of something else, and finds what she could never have expected.  It's a tale of human ugliness at times, of how we justify evil behavior and try to make excuses for it, but it's also one of love and finding oneself, and of determining a better way forward.  

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------------
Xochitl is the "Cuentista" of her village/aldea of Empalme - gifted with the power to take others stories/memories from them and return them to Solis through a ritual, leaving her with no memory of what she has been told.  She has been taught that Cuentistas are a necessary part of life in the world - because if the negative stories of an aldea are not given back to Solis, monsters may come and destroy everything, just as Solis once burnt the entire world to a crisp.  

But Xochitl is a teenage girl, one who wants really just to have a story of her own.  And the role of cuentista instead makes her both an outcast and someone forced to remain within the aldea, making her feel trapped in misery - making her wonder if it can really go on this way forever.

Yet when the market manager gives her a story about the dangerous man threatening to conquer the village, Xochitl finds she can't go through with the ritual to forget it.  This one choice however changes everything, and soon Xochitl finds herself on a journey through the burnt world, discovering that what both she and the world are is not quite what she has been taught.....
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Each of Us A Desert is a hard book to describe.  It's a story set in a post-apocalyptic Latinx world, and the book is told as a story that Xochitl, our protagonist, is telling Solis - the Sun God who is the God* of this setting.  It's both a personal journey - Xochitl is desperate for freedom, for a life and story of her own, and a truth about the world that allows her to have that and to make sense - and a story about humanity as a whole, and how they react differently to horrible truths about the world.  This is not a small theme, and this is not a large book, and somehow Oshiro makes this actually work.

*Oshiro has said in interviews that the religion/Solis here is based on Catholicism, and as someone who isn't even Christian, it's a connection I wouldn't quite have gotten other than figuring out the connection between Confession and how Cuentistas work, and that didn't affect my reading of the story at all.* 

It works because Xochitl is an incredibly relatable and enjoyable protagonist, a young woman/teenage girl (I don't think we ever get her age?) who due to her role as a Cuentista is treated as a necessary outcast, whose friends have all moved away, and who is treated more as a tool than a person by the people who remain.  And that life she remains in features her hearing all the sins and confessions of all the people around her, which literally makes her retch and sick when she has to give up those stories.  But keeping in those stories for her is almost as painful, just in a longer term way, as she is burdened with the horrors of those around her and what they feel and have done. And yet she finds herself after the beginning unable to forget for the sake of short term relief, which causes her to journey away from her village with only the words of an unknown poet - La Poeta - to comfort her, as only the Poeta seems to understand the nature of solitude.  Xochitl is a tremendous character as she searches for truth and freedom, still being good natured enough despite what she's heard to be horrified by what more she discovers, so she refuses to simply just accept everything she finds.  

This allows the book to show some truly awful ways humanity copes with its horrors.  You have the version of cuentistas in Xochitl's home village, where they're used to hear people's sins....which allows the people to just keep committing them over and over.  In another city, they're actually complete frauds, without any actual power, who hear sins solely for money and then sometimes use that information for their own end.  You have a group of people who oppress others instead of coping with a world that is harsh for them, doing horrible things.  Even the non-human characters get into it, with a group of "Guardian" creatures supposedly protecting the humans for the sake of Solis (God), except they themselves are only acting out what they think they're supposed to do, without actually thinking and changing based on the circumstances now that Solis is no longer speaking to them.  Each step in Xochitl's journey usually takes her to more horrors, which confront her with more and more truths about humanity.  

This is not however, a grimdark book, and it provides hope as well along the above themes of humanity's awful reactions to the world.  There's a group of people who take care of the forgotten and lost in the city, and who cares for them.  There's a farmer who provisions strangers who wander into his land, because he has the means, so why not.  And then there's the Poeta and Emilia, the young woman with her own tragic story who joins Xochitl on her journey, and who she finds an attraction to that she doesn't know what to do with.  These positive moments help keep this from being too absolutely dark, and the story adds to them by ending in a way that is both dark and hopeful, with a potential solution of changing things, through the use of telling stories instead of hiding them.  It's a hell of an ending and it really just caps things off tremendously.  

One final thing of note for this book - owing from this Latinx setting, this book includes a scattering of Spanish throughout.  Some of it (the poems) is translated, most of it is not.  I actually have been studying Spanish since March, so I actually was able to understand 90% of it, but I suspect most English readers will not be able to and that might affect someone's enjoyment here since I don't think they're 100% understandable from the context.  It was great for me, but others may find this an issue.  Still, even if you know 0% of Spanish, this book is well well worth your time.    

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)