Tuesday, March 23, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Soulstar by C.L. Polk

 




Soulstar is the third and final book in C.L Polk's "Kingston Cycle", which began with 2018's "Witchmark" (Reviewed Here) and continued in 2020's "Stormsong" (Reviewed Here).  The series is one featuring queer romances (M-M in Witchmark, F-F in Stormsong) as major elements, but also featuring court intrigue and thriller/mystery plots in an alternate fantasy version of England with themes of oppression, of unjust uses of power, of revenge and justice and fear of consequences and the ends justifying the means.  I didn't quite love Witchmark as much as others did (it was nominated for a Nebula and won the World Fantasy Award) mainly because I didn't quite love the romance, but Stormsong's romance and plot worked significantly better for me...up until it ended seemingly on a cliffhanger for everything except the romance.  So well, I was really interested to see how the cycle would pick up those threads in the final book of this series.

And well.....Soulstar doesn't, wiping away the majority of that cliffhanger unceremoniously in the first chapter, and taking the story in a new direction (kinda).  The book still features a queer romance (F-NB), but it's shunted more to the side than in the prior books, with Soulstar instead focusing on the struggle of the oppressed, now seemingly freed and trying to deal with the aftermath of atrocity demanding reparations, facing off against an entrenched power structure refusing to give anything more than the bare minimum of recognition as to the harms they have done.  It's a very 2019-2020 kind of book, with the events described within (police brutality, kettling, voter suppression, etc.) all being very much taken out of the modern day and put into this world.  And it both works and doesn't - on one hand, how very easily the reader can recognize what is happening from our own world makes it very powerful, on the other hand, the book tries throwing in so much of these modern forms of oppression so as to dilute the individual aspects of the plot such that it doesn't quite work as a story, especially with an ending that perhaps puts too much of a bow on it all.  

DISCLAIMER:  I have a strong suspicion, given the focus and subject matter, that this book will play very differently, and have perhaps a stronger power, if the reader is a person of color. I am not a person of color - I'm a White Cis Male - so that is not my perspective on this one, which might be affecting my feelings on this book.  

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
For most of her life, Robin Thorpe has hid who she was from view, pretending to be just another nurse at one of Aeland's hospitals.  Openly being a powerful witch, a deathsinger able to see and work with the dead no less, would've been a quick ticket to one of the asylums under Aeland's laws against common magic - as Robin's spouse Zelind found out 20 years ago.  But the open discovery of Aeland's atrocities has started to change everything....and when Grace Hensley comes to Robin with the news that the "Witchcraft Protection Act" that threatened her and her people has been abolished and begs for help, she knows that a new dawn might be approaching.  A dawn in which the Witches held in the asylums for cruel horrible purposes could be set free and brought back home - including Zelind.  

But while Robin and her people seek restitution for the horrors they have suffered and a rightful equal place in Aeland going forward, the entrenched powers of Aeland's nobility and King Severin quickly prove to be unwilling to bend far from the old order.  And as Robin tries to figure out what is left of her marriage to Zelind and how to renew their relationship, she finds herself increasing pushed by her community to take a leadership role in fighting for justice.  But such a role carries danger, as unknown enemies prove willing to resort to anything to preserve the old order, leaving Robin, along with her allies Miles and Grace, with a quandry: can she manage to renew her beloved relationship while also staying alive long enough to bring Aeland into a new era?  Or will the country and her people be doomed to a repeat of old oppressions?  
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Witchmark and Stormsong were both very much queer fantasy romances - with the romance plotlines being at least equal in importance to the political thriller/mystery plotlines.  Those books certainly dealt with injustice and oppression and abuse of people for the sake of power, themes resonant in this book, but the romances were arguably bigger parts of those books.  Stormsong even ended on the conclusion of its romance, with a cliffhanger of how Grace was going to deal with a huge storm and the revocation of the witchcraft protection act being pushed to the side.  

And Soulstar does deal with romance to a certain extent, and it's certainly real interesting when it tries to do so. The story of Robin and her (non-binary) spouse Zelind, kept apart by cruel laws and imprisonment for 20 years, trying to reconnect, where both have established new roles during that time to conflict with their attempt to restore that love....it's really interesting and Polk invests it with the urgency it deserves at first.  But Soulstar resolves the romantic plotline basically halfway through, and even when it's sort of revived in the final third for a short bit, it doesn't spend very long on it to really make it a big deal. So if you're looking for more queer romance as a central part of this book, you're going to be a little disappointed.  

Heck, if you're looking for a resolution to Stormsong's cliffhanger ending - a major storm coming needing the Witches to work together with the Noble Stormsingers to stop it, with King Severin under the influence of Miles & Grace's Evil father Christopher....you'll be disappointed, as Polk ties most of that up in the very first chapter.  Instead, Polk uses this book to tell a story about a people oppressed for years, meeting a new regime that seems to promise them the potential for change, for freedom and restitution, and reacting to that new regime not living up to that promise. In some ways, this is a similar theme to the prior two books, but with one key difference: our protagonist here isn't one of the privileged like Grace, but is instead one of the oppressed in Robin, who has felt the pain and suffered at least indirectly as a result of the old regime's atrocities.  

In this way, Soulstar is very much a book that seems to have been inspired by the events of 2019-2020 in America, and beforehand.  So you have the witches coming home from the asylums, where they were tortured for their power and faced even worse atrocities involving breeding for the use of children, which will clearly bring to mind ICE's camps in the US (or China's imprisonment of Uighurs in Xinjiang), who the new regime is forced to allow to return to their homes, where they must struggle to find a place for themselves in a world they know little about.  You have restitution being given at the level of a pittance, in fear supposedly of what it would cost to give more.  You have the murder of activists, a murder that police don't seem to really care to investigate.  You have an election - one more for show than for actual power - that the powers that be conspire to steal by suppressing the votes of real voters for technical reasons.*  You have police brutality of peaceful protestors, using tactics from the real world - such as kettling protesters and then gassing them when they don't do the impossible task of disbursing.  

*Note: This is a parallel to the voter suppression tactics of Republicans, in which real voters votes are invalidated for not following incredibly arcane process rules designed to make it hard for people of color to cast votes, rather than a parallel to Trump's "fraudulent voting" scheme.*

You get the point, I think.  And on one hand, Soulstar is powerful by showing all these tactics but separating it from our own world, to truly show how monstrous they all are in applying these familiar horrors to a fantasy world where we can see even more clearly how wrong they are.  And so I would definitely say Soulstar is a strong and powerful book for the moment.  But on the other hand, Soulstar is overstuffed with all of these, and never really gives it all a chance to breathe.  And yes there is some power in seeing all these atrocities one on top of the other....but it also means we never get to see the implications of these things.  

So yeah, the peaceful protest government is broken up by police brutality and protestors start getting arrested, but before we can see the implications of that, we're on to the murder mystery plot and a side-plot about jealous children refusing to lose their inheritance to people in need.  There's a sideplot over Zelind inventing a green energy generator to save the country's electricity program and wanting to give it to the people whereas the King wants it for entrenched powers, and that itself gets bagged down in the politics of it all.  And then there's the ending, which decides that when it all seems impossible, to create a spark that seems completely unrealistic compared to everything else which enables our heroine to lead the protest to revolution in a way to change everything.  

SPOILERS in ROT13: Nf rirelguvat frrzf qvfzny, Tenpr qrpvqrf gb erfvta naq gb gel naq tb bire gb Ebova'f cebgrfg zbirzrag va choyvp....bayl sbe Xvat Frireva (jub unq gur cevbe cebgrfg yrnqre nffnffvangrq) gb unir ure xvqanccrq, gb gel naq senzr gur cebgrfgbef sbe vg naq ure zheqre, fb nf gb gvtugra uvf tevc ba pbageby.  Ebova nyfb trgf pncgherq nf jryy, ohg gur gjb oernxbhg naq hfr gur erirny gb juvc hc gur cebgrfgbef vagb n znepu ba gur pncvgny jurer gurl hfr gurve zntvp gb qrguebar Frireva naq trg whfgvpr.  

In essence, this plot turn just enables Polk to move the protest from where it is in our world into outright revolution and a storming of the capital - a peaceful one unlike the January 6 riots in America, thanks to the handy use of magic to ensure that no one is harmed of the good guys (the fact that Nobles have magic too seems to be completely forgotten in this book as they never show up to oppose the protesting witches).  This allows for a tidy ribbon to be put on this bow, so everyone can have a happy optimistic ending with a new possible future for everyone. 

And well......listen, not every book dealing with these realities needs to end on a pessimistic or even realistic note.  And for many out there, the fact that this book ends on an optimistic happy note may be crucial for them, given where they are in the real world.  But as a way to end this story, it didn't really work for me, as these twists and turns happen repeatedly one after the other so that we never really get to see how these horrors affect people, how they make things so desperate and dark, such that a successful revolution could really feel meaningful.  Basically it just feels like the book was written to be the same length as its predecessors despite trying to contain 5 times as many ideas and as such takes shortcuts to resolve them, such that their individual impacts are dampened and not really felt as they should be.  

So yeah, Soulstar's display of real world events - of real world oppression through camps, from separations, from police brutality, from voter suppression - is very strong in showing how awful all of these things are when set against a backdrop that makes their supposed purposes clearly laid out as cruel and evil.  But it doesn't really work them in well into a cohesive story, and as a result I felt kind of shortchanged for this to be the conclusion of this trilogy, because the prior books had worked somewhat as this kind of story, and because the ending just felt like it was never really earned.  There was something clearly great within all the ideas contained in Soulstar, but the book just doesn't have the length to pull it all together to fulfill that greatness, and it shows.
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