No/mildest of spoilers included. No revelations, no particular plot events. Brings up the world as we learn about it early in the novel. Themes and qualities of the novel are chiefly discussed.

PREAMBLE

There is always a concern when buying, and starting, a book that isn’t by a tried-and-tested author. One that, if you don’t already have experience with them you at least have thousands of commendations to read from others. Starting any new author always possesses with it a certain degree of risk – picking up a debut novel only more so.

I will hold my hand up and say I am not usually one for taking risks on new books. This, of course, makes me a resounding hypocrite, as my entire career rests on people taking risks on me. Therefore I have been trying to do better. That doesn’t mean picking up any old thing. But if something really takes my interest, and I mean really does, then I ought to give it a go regardless of whether it is well-known to me or not.

I discovered Cradle of Sea & Soil, first in the Islandborn series by Bernie Anés Paz, on this sub. Reading that first post about it immediately . . . Well, to quote Django Unchained: “You had my curiosity. But now you have my attention.” I’ve always wanted more Caribbean fantasy (probably my favourite ever region to explore and fantasise about), something that, as anyone who regularly visits this sub knows, is repeatedly asked for. That it is less post-colonial but rather influenced much more by Taino and Carib indigenous cultures and peoples, inspired by Paz researching his own Puerto Rican heritage, makes it all the better. I am not being hyperbolic when I say this kind of book is not only wanted but important, maybe even necessary. How many other Taino fantasy books can you name?

So, see the featured image to this post: me holding the book on Christmas Day, that I had unwrapped as a present alongside a load of more well-known and established authors. It was (well okay, alongside Slaughterhouse Five, given its very short length), the one I picked up to read first.

The question, then, before I ramble so much in this review that I make it into another book of my own, is what is the book like?

I am beyond pleased to tell you that it is good. Great, in fact. Any doubts (born without cause) have been put to rest.

So let’s see why.

SETTING & INHABITANTS

The book is set on an archipelago, the islands connected to each other, and within themselves, by what are known as “root-roads”. These are what they sound like: twisting roots in all directions and elevations that the inhabitants can use to travel through the dangerous rainforest – jumping and climbing from one to another as needed. These root-roads – stretching out from massive “tree-lords” – are so ubiquitous that they seem to be a major part of the entire archipelago, creating the sense of this dense, tangled thicket of a landscape – until you get out from the forests, onto the beautiful beaches coasting the bright island sea, the nearest native village a sandy-footed walk away.

Unfortunately, this island world is not untainted. The very opposite. There has existed – as far back as anyone knows, and perhaps since Creation itself – the Primordial Wound, which creates corruption, an anti-life force called the Stillness. Whole areas of forest turned grey and decayed and lifeless, like post-nuclear ash. The never-ending fight against this little-understood Stillness – and its creations – forms the thrust of this novel, and probably the series as a whole.

Needless to say, I love the setting. The tropical forests, beaches, ocean, the tree-lords and their root-roads, the concept of the Stillness corrupting this dangerous paradise. Quite possibly this was not the author’s intention, but I felt that at times the Stillness was, for several reasons, some kind of dark metaphor for colonialism.

The worldbuilding is very natural and organically appearing, something I am very glad of. I like to explore the land and culture with the characters, not from info dumps. There never was a point where I felt frustrated either at being given too much information, or too little. We know what we need to know at the time, and other things are gradually revealed to us at a relaxed yet satisfying pace.

Though island life has much in the way of creatures (and plantlife) to it – moss wolves, deer-like carabaz, ghauctl shadow birds, singing coqui, leviathan umoths . . . – there are three main “races” to consider, those most important to the story.

There are the Islandborn, the indigenous tribal people of the islands. These can be divided into two: the Trueborn and the Halfborn. The Trueborn are those with full human souls. The Halfborn are those who share their souls with nature, animal or plantlife. Some time ago, all the Halfborn – who were most effective at fighting the Stillness – were maddened with an unleashing of inner fury and most violently betrayed the Trueborn. The Halfborn were then wiped out, with only one spared. Since then, any Halfborn have been distrusted, feared, hated and ostracised by the Trueborn.

Our two POVs are Halfborn. One of them is the warrior Colibri, the one who was spared. The other is her son Narune. They share their spirits with that of the island coyote, with the ears and tail to match.

The Islandborn are, as you’d expect, pretty different from reading about some generic European-inspired culture. The societal culture is polygamous/polyamorous and LGBTQ-friendly, there is a clear and uncontested distinction between intimate relationships and sex, and nudity is both common and without sexualisation or shame. But there is much that is familiar and relatable; these are not aliens, they are people not unlike you or I.

The third inhabitants of note – and something I found pretty cool – are the halja, abominations continuously created by the Stillness. These usually take the forms of animals and plants – though sometimes more unique and nightmarish forms (my favourite so far is called the Empty Fury, but I won’t spoil it!) – yet are hollow and grey, made of desiccated sinews. Imagine a long dead, long decayed log you find in the woods, or some ancient skull in a catacombs. You step on it and it disintegrates in a shower of dust and death. The halja are like that, but worse.

Their bodies give way easy enough when you strike, but they have no life, and so are not so easily eradicated. You have to hammer and break them until they have collapsed to dust; then the forest itself can finish the job. The same applies to the patches of infected land.

Before I end this section, I want to add one more thing about the worldbuilding: Something that gets me going is evocative creations of things I don’t feel I’ve seen before, casually included in the story/world without fanfare. Two of my favourites here are the aforementioned moss wolves, the appearance of which is undescribed yet unnecessary – the name itself does all the work (I love it when that occurs), and coral lanterns, which are literally fed polyps and in response give off watery glows of different colours. I can just imagine how beautiful they look!

PLOT & CHARACTERS

So there are a few things going on in this book.

The Stillness is spreading, reaching out to infect more and more of the forest. There are other, new things going on with the Stillness and its corruptions too that nobody understands. These are mysteries to be unravelled.

Narune, the Halfborn son of Calibri, wants very much to wield magic, to be a spiritseer, against the strong wishes of, well, just about everyone. The question is how far will he go to achieve his dream.

The problem is the Jurakán, the “screaming storm” – an inner torment that constantly tries to compel our protagonists to violent, raging madness just like the Halfborn of old. So, while you always feel for the Halfborn and the prejudice they endure, everyone else, the Trueborn. . . y’know, they kinda have reason. It’s a difficult dynamic, one where you can understand both sides. Though, given our access to their internal thoughts (and the repulsion of bigotry and bullying), you’ll assuredly fall on the side of our sympathetic protagonists.

Then there is the Casteónese – Spanish-inspired foreigners who have their own base on the island and while not (at least for now) aggressive, and can be helpful, they nonetheless view the Islandborn as beneath them, as primitives.

The book is very people-centred. Filling the book are the trials and evolutions of friendships and family. Honour and loyalty to oneself and one’s loved ones conflicting with duty and oaths to a greater cause. The centre – and heart – of the book is the mother-son relationship between Colibri and Narune. This heartfelt, loving, caring, dynamic, and tested relationship is a pleasure to read, and possibly the most convincing positive parent-child relationship I’ve read in fantasy.

No character is just plain good or bad, which I like. They all feel like people and you care about them and what happens to them. Paz understands the truism that everyone is the hero of their own story. Flat out pointlessly evil characters – or even one-note bullies – are almost unheard of in reality, and are rarely that engaging to read about in fiction. Here, everyone is humanised; they all have their own motivations and desires, their own pushes and pulls that might cause them to shift perspectives, to cling to principles, to chase dreams, to protect others, to be afraid, to admonish themselves, to seek new alliances, to make mistakes, to lash out, to break oaths, to betray friends . . .

The book carries what I call an “island pace” – relaxed, almost leisurely at times, especially early on, but not feeling slow; unhurried, but with every page offering a sense of place and character. At no point did I feel you could excise or fast track a chapter. Gradually – and without any jarring leap – the novel evolves from feeling small-scale to something worthy of epic fantasy, without ever sacrificing that intrinsic personal focus. It’s a pleasure to read a novel that isn’t in a hurry to get where it’s going, but nor feel padded with filler. There’s no longwinded conversations or lore-dumps here.

But don’t worry, if you want action from your books, there are many great fight scenes . . . which leads me onto something that deserves a section all its own . . .

MAGIC

I have long been fussy with magic. Often I swear off it altogether. In every single RPG I play I’m always the warrior or knight or barbarian, grudgingly using a necessary healing spell but otherwise treating magic as something those silly-wizards-and-them-that-read-books-and-stuff do. While I have my exceptions, talk of wizardry and spells is more often than not a quick turn off for me. For me it is not about soft/hard magic. Rather it takes a sense of mystery, of originality, variety and inventiveness, colourfulness, otherworldliness, of rich imagination, of things little-understood, of total wonder conspiring with the natural, as well as internal cohesion/consistency, to draw me to magic. Or maybe it’s just whatever personally captures me. Because it can be enthralling. After all, it’s magic.

Cradle of Sea & Soil is a clear exception to my aversion. There are no pointy hats here. Here there are spiritseers, warrior-mystics wielding magical blades (as in the blades are literally nothing but coloured magical force, where only the hilt is “ordinary”, made of the heartwood of a tree-lord, and the magic spills out from it like a brushstroke of oil paint). This sorcery is thankfully known not as magic, but as the Flows of Creation. Currents of it, well, flow, through the land, and are drawn from and channelled. Excess channelled magic that does not immediately go into the sword and spells goes into a gourd at the waist, which can be drawn from like a reservoir.

I was happy to have the seven different Flows (to which different spiritseers can wield) described to me in the Appendix:

The Radiant Flow/Redflow – Light, heat, fire

The Celestial Flow/Amberflow – Sky, wind, lightning

The Unseen Flow/Violetflow – Illusion, deception, information, manipulation

The Unbound Flow/Blueflow – Water, blood, ice, cold

The Verdant Flow/Greenflow – Plants, growth, birth, natural healing/regeneration

The Deep Flow/Umberflow – Gravity, magnets, stone, soil, hardness

The Carrion Flow/Blackflow – Death, decay, repurposing

I really like the idea of the Flowing Blades, as the weapons of the spiritseers are called. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s just something slightly reminiscent of a lightsaber (and darksaber) about them, with the different colours that pour out from the hilts (I wonder if Paz was influenced at all by Star Wars). They’re a bit like if a lightsaber mixed with a magic wand. Which is amazing. But describing the blades that are formed like they are strokes of wet paint in the air sounds as unique as it does entrancing.

While Paz draws from familiar magic system tropes (i.e. differently coloured magics with different often elemental attributes – Magic the Gathering comes foremost to mind), he makes his feel original, vivid and evocative. The magic in this book is described in terms of liquid – ink, oil, paint, tides, blood. It’s always smearing and splattering and dripping and pooling and flooding and clotting – and flowing – only to lethally harden at the moment of attack. And I’m all here for it. I love the idea of visible coloured magic, a tangible, swirling, roiling, liquidic source that you can reach into and cast out. Honestly, this is the most I’ve been into a magic system since Harry Potter in my youth (which was less a system and more imaginative handwaving). I was enthused to follow Narune in learning about each new spell (my favourite so far being “Thousandth Sun”), as well as the different types of Flow. And it all makes for some cool, dynamic, inventive fight scenes.

It isn’t so simple as learning it and using it, either. The Flows are exhausting and draining – literally – and what’s more, they only encourage the screaming storm, making them even more risky for a Halfborn like Narune. On top of that, misusing or overusing it can allow Stillness into your body. Which, as you might imagine, isn’t something that’s good for you.

PROSE

Prose is something I can be pretty particular with. Even with the biggest and most beloved of books out there. There are those books where every sentence seems to have at least five commas in it, sometimes forming entire walls of text. Then there are those books where every sentence seems to contrive to put as few words in it as possible. Sometimes there’s just something off that it’s hard to put your finger on, that only be described as “clunkiness”.

Paz’s prose is good. It is neither too florid and exhausting nor too sparse and brief. It is confident, generally smooth, both easy to read and rich with imagination and conveyance. Sometimes it is simply doing its job, allowing your own imagination to fill in the gaps, othertimes it comes alive with its choice of words and turns of phrase, with brilliantly evocative sentences, and an immediacy to its imagery. The dialogue is emotional and realistic. Don’t expect anyone going on long, dry philosophical spiels here.

I don’t have much of a bad word to say about the prose. I suppose I’d say I’d prefer more description, but this is only personal preference. It’s certainly not lacking in description, I just wanted as much of the world as I could cram into my head!

I guess (seeing as this review is a bit too glowing) I could add that there is the occasional sentence that stumbles a little, maybe even a little unclear at first glance, and could perhaps be written more smoothly or phrased better? Maybe sometimes there’s a less than necessary comma? But this is nitpicking. I doubt most readers will notice. (And I’m hardly one to talk.)

That this is a debut novel makes the quality of the prose all the more impressive. Especially if I consider that Paz can only go up from here. I know my first novel wasn’t anything like this calibre.

Regardless of its unique elements, the story is not unconventionally told, same with the prose. I get the sense that Paz grew up on and has a lot of love for western fantasy. I’m not as well read as many on this sub, so the comparison could be much better, but this book has more in common stylistically with, say, Robin Hobb, than with something like N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season or Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf (both of which are PoC-by-PoC books I also enjoy, but narratively and stylistically very different). My impression is that Cradle of Sea & Soil doesn’t appear like a reaction to conventional western fantasy, but a friendship with it. A proposed alliance. It’s not countering the mainstream Eurocentric-by-default high fantasy paradigm with something purposefully against-the-grain and challenging, but eagerly asking to be part of the club. It’s saying, “Hey, I can write this kinda thing too, just like you – but maybe this time it’s in a setting you haven’t seen before. Now, will you let me party with you guys? By the way, I brought magic lightsabers. Oh, now you want me to join . . .”

CLOSING

If I was to describe the book as anything, it’s a labour of love. Seriously, there’s so much love in this book. I don’t mean in any kind of schmaltzy sense, but something more intrinsic, rooted in every character, every page, every sentence. Despite the horrors that appear, grimdark this is not. It is warm and rich and determined, despite all the tides of corruption and death that seem impossible to stop. This is a book where, despite all the conflicts, people come together, comfort and protect each other, where they dream and desire, where they care about each other as well as themselves. This is a book about people doing everything they can do to preserve their way of life. And not giving up, even when all seems hopeless.

The book was not just a great read, but personally inspiring. I was already interested in Taino and otherwise indigenous Caribbean peoples, culture and language some time before reading this book, and starting to include them in my own work, but there’s a big difference between researching them in online articles and exploring Taino dictionaries and with exploring a living, breathing fantasy world inspired by them. While reading Paz’s novel it encouraged me to resume my Taino research, jotting down words, phrases and ideas for use in future books (even though I’m supposed to be working on something completely different!).

I read this book faster than I’ve read another book in a long time (which, I admit, isn’t that fast). Although I suppose a good part of that is me looking forward to writing this review and thinking of all the stuff I wanted to say, haha.

I want to tell you that Bernie Anés Paz is an author to watch. But, as with telling you a debut is “promising”, there is that soft implication that the book cannot stand on its own two feet, that we must, instead, wait for the author to improve. Here this would be unjustified. Cradle of Sea & Soil is a bold, exciting, imaginative, confident, vivid, heartfelt, diverse, different debut, better than a great deal of mainstream bestsellers in the genre. You shouldn’t wait. You should read it – and soon.

I wish Bernie Anés Paz all the best in his continuing career. And I look forward to the sequel.

Addendum: If you read this book, I want to suggest leave reading the ‘Terms & Names’ Glossary until the end of the book. It seemed better to me to explore and understand things naturally over the course of the novel rather than have things revealed to you ahead of their time. Some of which could be considered mild spoilers.