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A review by justabean_reads
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson
5.0
This book is so good, y'all! I'd previously bounced off Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring because it was very sexual violence forward, and kept meaning to try her again. Then she didn't publish for ten years! So I'm glad that my wanting to read her and my Hugo reading and her new book all happened at the same time.
In a secondary-world Caribbean-island setting, a young man tries to save his country, prove that magic is just science, and not completely sink his relationship with his fiance(e)s and every other part of his life. Also, the magic he doesn't believe in might be happening at an accelerated rate. I really enjoyed our hero, who was such an ADHD chaos child, in a way that showed up both the brilliance and hazards of that. I kept thinking, "Oh. My. God. Do better!" but at the same time really understanding what he was thinking, and why his life kept folding out the way it was.
Hopkinson also did a great job around building a collectivist society with very different gender and relationship norms than ours (also using thee/thou for informal second-person pronouns), while not making it a utopia, but rather that it's a real(ish) world, with slightly different problems and kinds of inequity than the one we live in. There were times where "Okay, they're just all prejudiced against this group, instead," which felt a little on the nose sometimes, especially as the hero was upper class and oblivious, and clearly a lot of people just wanted to clue-by-four him into the next world, though in the end, it worked out into an interesting critique of newbie allies. Always nice to casually get non-binary and trans characters as part of a story, as well.
I also liked the way the book played with reality bending and magic, and ideas around how memory is mailable, and what founding myths could mean. We get a lot of folk stories dropped in, playing with the first hand accounts we get later. I thought they could've been a bit more variable and unreliable, but it made sense with the worldbuilding that they weren't, too.
Probably the best SF/F book I've read this year. Going on the nomination list for sure.
I'd rec getting this on audiobook for those that can do them, as a lot of the book is in patois, and having a Caribbean-born narrator really helped me out with the patterns and rhythms of speech.
In a secondary-world Caribbean-island setting, a young man tries to save his country, prove that magic is just science, and not completely sink his relationship with his fiance(e)s and every other part of his life. Also, the magic he doesn't believe in might be happening at an accelerated rate. I really enjoyed our hero, who was such an ADHD chaos child, in a way that showed up both the brilliance and hazards of that. I kept thinking, "Oh. My. God. Do better!" but at the same time really understanding what he was thinking, and why his life kept folding out the way it was.
Hopkinson also did a great job around building a collectivist society with very different gender and relationship norms than ours (also using thee/thou for informal second-person pronouns), while not making it a utopia, but rather that it's a real(ish) world, with slightly different problems and kinds of inequity than the one we live in. There were times where "Okay, they're just all prejudiced against this group, instead," which felt a little on the nose sometimes, especially as the hero was upper class and oblivious, and clearly a lot of people just wanted to clue-by-four him into the next world, though in the end, it worked out into an interesting critique of newbie allies. Always nice to casually get non-binary and trans characters as part of a story, as well.
I also liked the way the book played with reality bending and magic, and ideas around how memory is mailable, and what founding myths could mean. We get a lot of folk stories dropped in, playing with the first hand accounts we get later. I thought they could've been a bit more variable and unreliable, but it made sense with the worldbuilding that they weren't, too.
Probably the best SF/F book I've read this year. Going on the nomination list for sure.
I'd rec getting this on audiobook for those that can do them, as a lot of the book is in patois, and having a Caribbean-born narrator really helped me out with the patterns and rhythms of speech.