Reviewed by Phoebe Bush
What if characters decided not to play their parts, and could choose a different path, instead?
Content Warnings: Blood/violence, loss of control and autonomy, racism/xenophobia, sexism, confinement, grief/loss, torture.
Have you ever wondered about the purpose of stories, and why characters are the way that they are? If so, that is what this galaxy brained book attempts to untangle.
It begins with a simple concept: a Knight and a Witch. The knight and the witch are set to play out the same story again and again, across generations.
That is, until Vina and Simran.
In this story, we follow the latest incarnates, as they run towards and away from the impending doom of their story. First and foremost, the characters have my heart. I love how both protagonists explore their multilayered identities, and this interplays with the characters that they are meant to embody. This also makes for a rather complicated, but intriguing love story.
And, really, this is a story all about layers. About identity, what is socially acceptable and can be kept, versus what is ignored for the sake of history. What is self, what is culture, what is a story and why have these stories been passed down, whilst others have been lost to time?
This story asks a lot of really big questions, especially for the times that we are all living through, and it does not provide answers. What it does, instead, is explore and allow the reader to find whatever answers that they want to find, within a magical world.
The world itself is one constantly in flux. Jumps from Elizabethan Courts, to wild faerie forests and Victorian back alleys can be a little confusing, but it all soon merges into a world that doesn’t need to make sense to be exactly what it is. This is also evident in the plot, something that manages to snag and tangle against other stories, and fights for its own agency against the story that it is meant to be telling, but obviously does not want to.
This, in my opinion, requires some huge storytelling skill.
That being said, I do recommend that all readers go in with no expectations, and just let themselves be tossed around like a small boat on the waves of the plot – with its many meandering twists and turns, across two distinct sections.
For some, there may be too many twists and turns, and it may even try to do a little too much. This may leave it feeling tonally inconsistent, with leaps in both travel and plot logic, and an ending that struggles to tie itself into too neat knots.
That being said, this is a unique and stunning take on stories, one that I shall enjoy rereading until the spine is cracked and the pages are yellowed with time.