Anne Bishop is someone whose novels I consider highly readable and engaging but I also don’t recommend her too often for a few reasons.
As I was reading this one, I was reminded of how much sexual abuse is a part of the worlds she writes. Now to be clear, the abusers always get punished and get what’s due to them but it’s a major component. There are also far more people who are decent and good, and do the right thing but violence against women is very much a theme through her novels, often showing that the humans are far worse than any monsters or other.
She also has struck me as someone that has a bit of a gender essentialist approach in her writing so I was at least reassured to see a transgender character introduced here though he is barely in the novel, only the friend of a side character.
This novel felt rather similar to her last series, The Others. The way the Arcana are described and are separate from society felt very much like the Others – while it was an entertaining read, I also wished it had been more distinct. You even have the townspeople getting riled up against the Arcana because they blame them for things when it was simply people not following rules or behaving badly.
As far as the plot, there doesn’t really seem to be one per se. It almost feels more like a series of vignettes about the world and a wide cast of characters, covering a year in the community and the weird things that happen. If I had to name a main character, it would be Beth, but I think that might be more accurate for the series going forward than this novel. Beth is new to the area, having been recently assigned to the police force, but she also is oddly comfortable with the Arcana and Wyld, leading her to question the truth of her origins and the parents she doesn’t remember.
Her character felt a bit bland, and I don’t think passive is quite the right word but it does feel like things are happening and she is getting swept up with them rather than her driving them. Still, she isn’t nearly as helpless or naive as some other Bishop heroines have started out so I appreciated that she was capable but the novel just didn’t give her too much to do.
There were a few other characters I enjoyed, especially Colin, and most of the stories wrapped up quickly and neatly though there are a few bigger threads left open for the future. I just didn’t expect some of the minor stories to close already.
Overall, I enjoyed seeing the character journeys and how everything interweaved but I also wouldn’t have minded one main plot that it all revolved around. Someone online said they saw Bishop had said in an interview that she approached it like the first episode of a TV show and that does make a certain amount of sense – ensemble cast, hints at a bigger story to come, but really this was designed to introduce the setting and players (like From or Carnivàle or something in that vein).
