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In the last decade I've read several of Alaya Dawn Johnson's paranormal romances and YAs and enjoyed them very much, and The Summer Prince is still probably my actual favorite book of hers in terms of direct appeal to me personally -- but Trouble the Saints, her new book this year, has a richness to it that's not like anything else she's written before and it didn't work for me one hundred percent but I think it's going to stick in my head for a really long time. Trouble the Saints is an adult fantasy, in every sense of the word: about and for adults, about lives that continue after the kind of major events that would act as the climax and resolution of a different book. It's about the weight of history and trauma, personal and general and racial, and what happens when you discover the life you've been living and the choices you've made are not tenable for you anymore, and the consequences of any attempt to escape those choices.

The time is the 1940s; the place is New York and its surroundings; the world is more or less ours with a little more magic, manifested most directly in the saints' hands -- random gifts that come by way of a dream to a few blessed or cursed individuals (but not to white people, at least not as far as anybody in the America of this book has ever heard.)

The book's first protagonist is Phyllis, whose hands have a supernatural prowess with knives, which she's been using for ten white-passing years to work as a vigilante assassin for a mobster who promised he would only send her after targets who really deserved it. (( Small spoiler )

) At the point the book begins, Phyllis is exhausted, tired of killing, and starting to get lose her touch -- her hands don't seem to think she's using them right, and she wants a way out. By the end of the first section of the book, she gets it. The rest of the book is the aftermath, and the long fallout of consequence.

The second protagonist is Dev, Phyllis' love interest -- and, as I said on Twitter, 'broke up over moral qualms re: assassination, but continued as coworkers in the same criminal empire watching each other drift in and out of meaningless relationships for the next 10 years' is such a next-level premise for romantic pining! Truly a power move! And I wrote that Tweet before I got to the additional spoilers about Dev's identity, which is that ( more spoilers! )

I hope to see a thousand fanfic AUs based on this premise immediately. That said, to be honest, Dev's POV is my least favorite of the three, but nonetheless the way the book presents his entanglements with the cops and the mob -- two sides of the same coin -- as he desperately tries to figure out if there's a way to use either of them to escape being drafted into WWII is really meaty and complex, as is the messy situation that he and Phyllis (both capable of walking the uneasy tightrope of 'just white enough' on their own, definitely not when together) run into in his hometown when they try for a second chance there.

And then there's the third protagonist, and POV character for the finale: Tamara, Phyllis' favorite coworker and Dev's soon-to-be-ex, a snake-dancer who's been leveraging her position to curate avant-garde events at the mafia speakeasy where they all work, and doing her level best to ignore all the violence that's happening alongside her jazz and liquor and artistic expression. Unlike Dev and Phyllis, Tamara lucked out of the saints' hands, and as far as she'd like to believe, her own hands are cleaner than theirs -- but she does have a deck of cards inherited from her enslaved great-grandmother that let her see a certain amount of her friends' futures, and that certain amount of the future is enough to present her with her own impossible choices, and consequences she absolutely cannot ignore.

( Full book spoilers, conflicted feelings about the ending )