Tuesday, September 13, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron

 




This Poison Heart is the first in a Young Adult Fantasy Duology written by author Kalynn Bayron (author of Cinderella is Dead).  I liked Cinderella is Dead - it was a fantasy subversion of the Cinderella story - a queer and feminist story of a girl triumphing against a patriarchal and seemingly unstoppable society.  So I was curious about how this novel would turn out....especially when a certain critic I follow was gushing on social media about this novel and its sequel.  

And well, This Poison Heart is a very enjoyable novel, although one that is sort of predictable in enough ways to not quite really stand out too much.  The story is a Modern Fantasy story that plays with classic Greek Mythology, featuring a black girl with an uncontrollable power to grow and draw attention from plants....and an immunity to poisonous plants of all kinds.  It also has veins of gothic fantasy, as the protagonist Bri finds herself investigating a strange house left to her by her birth mother, which contains potentially deadly secrets.  Bayron's prose is very readable and her lead character is excellent, the story features multiple queer characters as well as the potential for F-F romance, and the plot works well, such that I'm curious to see where the duology goes in book 2.  


---------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Briseis ("Bri") has never really thought much about her birth parents.  She's grown up the beloved daughter of her two mothers - Mom and Mo - and enjoyed helping them a little bit with their business of selling flowers in Brooklyn.  But she's always had a strange gift - the seemingly inexplicable ability to grow plants at will and to draw plants towards her unconsciously - and it's always made it hard for her to have friends and to have any semblance of an outside life.  

And so when Bri and her family receives word that her biological aunt has died and willed her, as the last member of the family, an estate in a small town just upstate in New York, Bri and her moms are willing to check it out and see if she can get a new start on life.  

But what Bri discovers at her new estate is a house full of secrets...particularly in a garden full of poisonous plants, a locked door without a key to enter, and paintings that hint at a family legacy dating back to ancient times.  And soon she'll discover that her own power is more wild than she knew, and is one passed down from generation to generation - a power that makes Bri of interest to all sorts of local characters....some of whom have sinister aims towards Bri's most secret and deadly inheritance.....
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This Poison Heart serves up a story focused upon a clearly young adult (well high school aged) protagonist in Bri, from whom the story is entirely focused, and it does that generally well.*  Bri is a teen from a loving family of two mothers, happily adopted yet wanting a little bit more like any other teen, and a bit frustrated by a lack of friends and even romance...a good bit of which is caused by a magical blessing/curse she can't quite control more than anything else.  So of course moving to a new location will appeal to her, where she can try to get a fresh start, especially with her parents' struggling to keep their flower-business alive in Brooklyn with its growing rents and rising costs.  

*If you have issues with YA protagonists, especially in the type of mistakes and youthful stupidity you see in characters who are well...teens, well this will not be the book for you.  But it's a YA book so you should know that already.

And the combination of Bri plus a gothic-esque setting works really well, because Bri is an excellent version of the classical YA type heroine.  Bri is caring and intelligent and understands quite well what she, as a black girl moving to a mostly White town, should be a bit wary of.  She's smart enough to slowly put the picture together of what's going on with her birth family....even if she at the same time requires more than a bit of help to figure some things out because of how extraordinary and fantastical they are, but when she gets those tips she's able to put things together at a reasonable and understandable pace.  Hell, she even takes steps on her own at times to try and get such hints, such as contacting a professor of Greek Myth when she discovers ties to the Greek Myth of Medea in her new house, which is kind of impressive and more than many would do.  And her mixture of curiosity, her need for a friend, her romantic attraction to a mysterious young woman with an interest in her new property, and just genuine kindness towards people just makes her an easy character to root for....even as she also shares some of the genre-blindness that may make some readers facepalm quite a bit (more on this in a little bit).  

And again the setting works just as well - this is a small upstate town with its own quirks, a populace that might be a bit more magical than they let on, who also tries to put into effect certain liberal reforms we might wish for in real life...for example, rather than the authority figure Bri calls being a traditional cop, that authority figure is an alternative support (I forget the name sorry had to return the book before posting this review) figure who meets things with kindness and talk rather than guns blazing.  The house itself, and its magical gardens is often just creepy enough to intrigue and to keep one guessing as to what's really going on, and the book's spinning of the Greek myth of Medea is interesting if probably not ground in much reality.  This all lets there be a really strong plot that intrigues as things start getting more and more weird and things climax in a finale where it all comes together to some extent, leading up to a cliffhanger that definitely is interesting.  

Yet well....this book suffers a bit from the genre-blindness of its heroine, which will leave many readers frustrated that the heroine doesn't figure certain things out earlier than she does.  The potential love interest is a young woman with lots of secrets, for example, and one of those secrets is so overtly hinted at by her and another character that it will frustrate the reader that it isn't figured out sooner.  Meanwhile characters from the halfway point on start dropping hints that another side character is not what they seem, and Bri just never puts it together for like 100+ pages even as it's right in front of her.  None of this is unjustifiable for a genre-blind heroine, but well...for a reader who is familiar with tropes it might be a bit much.  (Bri's refusal to tell her mothers what might really be going on until near the end is also another frustrating bit that's less explicable by her lack of genre savvy).  

The result is a story that's enjoyable, with a setup and setting that intrigues, a likable heroine, and a cast full of characters who are often queer and don't quite fit the usual archetypes at every point.  That's worth your time.  

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