Tuesday, October 12, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Wild Ones by Nafiza Azad

 


The Wild Ones is the second novel by Nafiza Azad, author of 2019's fantastic The Candle and the Flame (my review is here).  The Candle and the Flame was a book taking place in a Muslim-inspired world (with inspirations also from Hinduism and Buddhism) that featured a number of incredibly well developed women as its central characters, dealing with sexism, racism, and class, in a really well done plot.  The male characters were a bit paint by numbers, but the women were incredibly well done.  

And so it was with great excitement that I picked up The Wild Ones from the library, as The Wild Ones is a feminist YA fantasy featuring a group of young women, who suffered abuse from their families, loved ones, or circumstances, escape through magic into a magical Between and come together as their own found family to recover from their traumas.  It's a story that travels the world to show how women are mistreated everywhere - by both men and complicit women - and how the rich and powerful take advantage of the less fortunate and in their greed threaten to destroy the world.  But again, it's a story featuring a great set of women as its central characters, told in a fascinating way, that makes it all short but incredibly powerful.  Highly recommended, and Azad clearly has cemented herself as a truly fantastic newer writer of SF/F.  

Trigger Warning:  Physical Abuse, Sexual Abuse, and Rape as backstory, although never on page.  On Page Suicide.  

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
We are the Wild Ones.  We began when one girl, Paheli, was sold by her mother to a man who raped her, and ran away....only to find a boy with stars in his eyes who gave her a box.  That box contained magic that put stars in her hands, and gave her access to the Between, a magical realm where magical beings travel quickly through the cities of the world.  And so, we began, with Paheli giving the rest of us gifts from the box at our darkest moments, and taking us away with her.  We, immune to magic, able to see the magical Middle-Worlders but not a part of their community, became a family of healing, enjoying the fruits and foods of the world until that moment we feel ready to rejoin the real world again, ready for another chance at normal life.  

But everything threatens to shift when the boy with stars in his eyes, Taraana, the ones who gifted us this second chance, comes back into Paheli's and our lives, on the run from a cruel cruel world that wishes to consume him and spit him out.  For the magical world, the world of middle worlders, is just as cruel as the one we came from, full of greedy power-hungry men and women who enable them, and Taraana's power, the key to saving the world, is just another tool for them.  

But we are the Wild Ones.  And we will not tolerate this behavior and these people.  Not for any longer.  Not if we have anything to say about it.  
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The Wild Ones is a story that may be short, but can be difficult to read in a single sitting, because it doesn't hold back on how shitty the world is to women (and by women, the book makes clear that is anyone who considers themselves one) and the abuse they face from both men and the women who enable them.  The book never shows any of this abuse on page - there's no need for it - but it shows full on the impact of such abuse on the Wild Ones, the girls who have literally taken themselves out of time - and literally have the ability to make themselves invisible to normal people - in order to try to heal, if that's at all possible.  And the book emphasizes this by including interlude snippets in which the wild ones tell their own story in one or two pages in verse, in a way that conveys their devastation without being direct.  

The book spends part of its time the first person viewpoint of Paheli, as the leader and first of the Wild Ones, as she deals with her feelings of love towards not just her found sisters, but a boy (Taraana) for the very first time.  It's a story very much about how Paheli feels desperate to save others, and how she's deathly afraid of her newfound feelings, for fear that someone new she will love will betray and abuse her once again, which leads her to reckless acts repeatedly - a dangerous habit in a world where greedy rich magic-wielding men will do anything to get what they want.  

But while a good part of the story is about Paheli, the story as a whole is about the Wild Ones, about girls who suffer in this world from abuse worldwide (the girls come from all over the world and have homes on every continent), and to emphasize this, most of the story is actually told from first person plural: with the story being told by "we", with the "we", being the wild ones in general.  For Paheli's troubles aren't just her own, they're the same as those of her sisters and of girls and women worldwide, and so the story very much focuses on all the girls as a whole as they find themselves protecting Taraana, investigating and then being chased by a powerful man who thinks they have what he wants - a man who is willing to kill any women, even his own family members, to get what he wants. 

And as the book makes clear, that antagonist isn't alone, and even if the Wild Ones take him down they will have to deal with others like him - men and their enablers who are willing to throw away the whole world for their own immediate greed, who do not care about anyone else, especially not women.  It takes the Wild Ones, and the many women they ally with, working together to threaten a change to this new world order, to assert that they are beings of worth, worthy of having a happy life of their own.  And it makes the story incredibly fascinating and really satisfying to read, tough as it can be.  

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