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May. 25th, 2020 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsC.L. Polk's Witchmark is another one of those books that's, like, right next to what I want out of a fantasy about the aftermath of WWI.
... which is fair because it's not actually about World War I in any way; it's set in a gaslamp fantasy world - post-gaslamp? right on the borderline between gaslamp and dieselpunk? - in the aftermath of a war that hits approximately WWI-ish in cultural impact on this vaguely-British fantasy nation (though less messy and more directly Imperialist) and has resulted in a generation of young men coming home from the war feeling Real Bad.
Our protagonist, Dr. Miles Singer, is a psychiatrist working with returning vets; secretly he is also a magic-user on the run from his powerful magical aristocrat family, part of a secret organization of magic elites, who want him to bind his power up to the service of his more powerful sister like all the other good little low-key magic users in the secret magical aristocrat families. As a result of all this, he is officially keeping a low profile and not using his magic at all to try and investigate why so many returning vets feel like they're besieged by intrusive thoughts to the degree that they're not safe to go home, and, relatedly, why the papers are reporting a rising number of murder-suicides of veterans and their families.
However! after a patient dies in his arms in the first chapter, Miles finds himself investigating a different and yet perhaps related murder + magical conspiracy with a hot, mysterious, and potentially otherworldly gentleman, as well as accidentally reconnecting with his sister, who's in a political bid for leadership of the secret magical elite. Romance, fraught sibling dynamics, and rising consciousness of the atrocities that elite will cheerfully commit in the name of protecting the status quo ensue!
I enjoyed the experience and the shape of the book overall - some echoes in the worldbuilding of both certain bits of Fullmetal Alchemist and DWJ's Witch Week, both stories near and dear to my heart - with some caveats. Mostly, I really wish that a book that stars a psychiatrist in the aftermath of a terrible war did more than pay lip service to the existence of actual PTSD around the magical conspiracy disguised as PTSD ...
... actually, between the possession spell that's cast on all the returning soldiers, and the fake asylums to contain and channel the power of unjustly committed witches, there's a lot of magical conspiracy in this book disguised as mental illness without much discussion of actual mental illness and the ways those things might interrelate, though the PTSD thing bothered me personally more because at heart I want all books even vaguely thematically adjacent to Pat Barker's Regeneration to just be Regeneration. That's probably a me problem. And, like, the literalized metaphor of possession-by-dead-enemy-soldiers is a solid metaphor (much as the criminalization and draining of the witches is a solid analogy for the prison-industrial complex), it's just I would also like the PTSD to not be one hundred percent a magical metaphor. You know.
On another note, I also do not have any kind of grasp on the worldbuilding around the place that Tristan comes from ... fairyland? Heaven? Fairy heaven? ... which made him feel very slippery to me and the eight-day romance somewhat difficult to invest in fully. Very cute, though!
... which is fair because it's not actually about World War I in any way; it's set in a gaslamp fantasy world - post-gaslamp? right on the borderline between gaslamp and dieselpunk? - in the aftermath of a war that hits approximately WWI-ish in cultural impact on this vaguely-British fantasy nation (though less messy and more directly Imperialist) and has resulted in a generation of young men coming home from the war feeling Real Bad.
Our protagonist, Dr. Miles Singer, is a psychiatrist working with returning vets; secretly he is also a magic-user on the run from his powerful magical aristocrat family, part of a secret organization of magic elites, who want him to bind his power up to the service of his more powerful sister like all the other good little low-key magic users in the secret magical aristocrat families. As a result of all this, he is officially keeping a low profile and not using his magic at all to try and investigate why so many returning vets feel like they're besieged by intrusive thoughts to the degree that they're not safe to go home, and, relatedly, why the papers are reporting a rising number of murder-suicides of veterans and their families.
However! after a patient dies in his arms in the first chapter, Miles finds himself investigating a different and yet perhaps related murder + magical conspiracy with a hot, mysterious, and potentially otherworldly gentleman, as well as accidentally reconnecting with his sister, who's in a political bid for leadership of the secret magical elite. Romance, fraught sibling dynamics, and rising consciousness of the atrocities that elite will cheerfully commit in the name of protecting the status quo ensue!
I enjoyed the experience and the shape of the book overall - some echoes in the worldbuilding of both certain bits of Fullmetal Alchemist and DWJ's Witch Week, both stories near and dear to my heart - with some caveats. Mostly, I really wish that a book that stars a psychiatrist in the aftermath of a terrible war did more than pay lip service to the existence of actual PTSD around the magical conspiracy disguised as PTSD ...
... actually, between the possession spell that's cast on all the returning soldiers, and the fake asylums to contain and channel the power of unjustly committed witches, there's a lot of magical conspiracy in this book disguised as mental illness without much discussion of actual mental illness and the ways those things might interrelate, though the PTSD thing bothered me personally more because at heart I want all books even vaguely thematically adjacent to Pat Barker's Regeneration to just be Regeneration. That's probably a me problem. And, like, the literalized metaphor of possession-by-dead-enemy-soldiers is a solid metaphor (much as the criminalization and draining of the witches is a solid analogy for the prison-industrial complex), it's just I would also like the PTSD to not be one hundred percent a magical metaphor. You know.
On another note, I also do not have any kind of grasp on the worldbuilding around the place that Tristan comes from ... fairyland? Heaven? Fairy heaven? ... which made him feel very slippery to me and the eight-day romance somewhat difficult to invest in fully. Very cute, though!
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Date: 2020-05-26 12:22 pm (UTC)I'm glad to know those hints of latent protagonisthood in Robin are going to be realized!
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Date: 2020-05-26 12:36 pm (UTC)I would say there's more work for Grace to do - but much progress since the beginning of Witchmark and there needs to be enough plot ends for Soulstar.