CBR16 Bingo: Smash – This book combines elements of fantasy (dragons) and science fiction (steampunk). The cultures depicted also smash and clash together throughout the book.
All Anequs wants to do is live in peace with her tribe, content to be ignored by the Anglish conquerers who’ve taken over most of the continent. However, when she bonds with the first dragon to hatch on their island in generations, she must attend their academy and adapt to their ways if she hopes to keep her dragon.
This is a quite recently published book, and one can tell so in the diversity of the characters and the unapologetic way it grapples with the thorny issues of colonialism. However, as I read I felt a strong sense of nostalgia too, because the world-building and the main character Anequs reminded me of well-beloved YA fantasy novels of the kind published decades ago.
This is a good thing – sometimes you want to read an earnest, old-fashioned and adventurous fantasy novel, and this is definitely that, except with themes that I didn’t think so much about back then. I loved Anequs’s strong sense of identity and her insistence on doing things on her own terms, no matter the pressure upon her. I also really enjoyed how the author made good use of the distance that fantasy provides to place a magnifying glass on how Indigenous and colonizing cultures can coexist, clash, and sometimes cross-pollinate each other, which all the complications that entails.
However, this book does fall into some of the pitfalls of those old fantasy adventure novels. The characters sometimes felt thinly sketched, and while I enjoyed the romance between Anequs and Theod, I felt that the romance with Liberty was less developed, especially since we don’t see Liberty interact with many other characters in the book. The magic system gets clunky sometimes, especially where it is clearly transmuted from science in our world. I don’t need chemical bonds to be rehashed in so much detail – I did well at it in school!
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.