Review: Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe

I’ve noticed a couple of mini-trends in YA lately. One is necromancy. Another is cross-dimensional lesbians (can we have some cross-dimensional gay boys for variety?)

C.B. Lee’s version puns off of the fanfic trope of the coffeeshop AU. Brenda first meets Kat in a coffeeshop…without knowing she’s fallen through a portal into the world of magic.

The parallel worlds in this book appear to be that trope; the world of magic, and the world of technology. Thankfully, Lee is actually more subtle than that.

The story is set in Los Angeles, and has a strong Pacific Rim flavor. Kat Woo is Chinese, and Brenda Nguyen is Vietnamese, and I can feel the mixing of various Asian identities that tends to happen in California.

Yes, this is a romance. There’s also a lot of magical hijinks, such as when they use the size of a cat as an anchor to shrink down a dragon. You can probably guess what goes wrong. D&D also plays a role (or maybe a roll ;)). As does friendship, love as a power stronger than magic, and dreams.

This book is a lot about dreams, by which I mean the going-to-college or saving-the-world variety of dreams, not the kind you have at night. Dreams delayed, denied, shifted, and adjusted.

People finding the place they want to be, even if it doesn’t, at first sight, seem to be the best place.

Oh, and it’s a bit of an indictment of factory work and mass production.

I don’t buy all of the differences between the two worlds, but the ending is not the resolution you quite expect, and perfect nonetheless.

Give this one to your kids…especially your queer daughters…but read it yourself first.

I received a copy of this book for award consideration.

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

This is far from the author’s debut novel, but her previous work is in historical mystery. It’s perhaps not as big a step from that to epic, secondary world fantasy as some might think. Both genres require an understanding of how people lived in a different world. (The past, after all, is another country).

The Raven Scholar is a doorstopper - in my reader it was over 500 pages, and I found the denouement a little long. I think Hodgson should have perhaps stopped a little sooner, especially as this is only the first book.

Which is pretty much the only big flaw. Hodgson does use a peculiarly eastern motif (animal-themed monasteries) for a white English lady (born, it turns out, not so far from me). That said, she does it very well, and it’s not based, exactly, on any real culture to offend. Our protagonist, Neema, is the raven scholar of the title - a devotee of the Raven monastery…the scribes and scholars of this world. But the narrator is the Raven themselves (themself?), which is an interesting device and leads to segments of the book being told in first person plural.

The characters are mostly sympathetic, albeit with a true moustache-twirling villain in the mix. There’s a lot here about how people fall into evil, about the effect of power. And about how while a hereditary monarchy is pretty bad, one you have to compete for may not be much better. There’s also a lot about the nature of spirits and gods.

I found this a quite enjoyable read. Hodgson may be new to fantasy, but she certainly knows how to write and how to build a world. She avoids several debut traps by confining the entire action of the story to a single citadel (many novice fantasy writers make us suffer with their worldbuilding. By essentially banning herself from going all over, Hodgson avoids this).

Recommended.

I received a copy of this book for award consideration.