Aulkendale City, known as \u201cthe Sore of the Southern Continent,\u201d is home to drinking establishments, wealthy nobles, and a red tent community of vagrants and outcasts. Phyllis, who later goes by Phillip, has an uncanny, unexplained ability to snatch people\u2019s body parts without killing them. The angsty 17-year-old usually runs around with Lucent, a nearly-400-year-old grifter, haunted by the death of his sister, who stays alive by stealing the life force of others. Adeline, a dancer at the Bourbon Rose, has been kidnapped and gruesomely murdered (but later reanimated); her brother, Wycliff, also 17, is desperate to know what happened to her. The story\u2014told through the first person in the case of Phillip and the third person for other point-of-view characters\u2014has stakes that are complex and convoluted. The cast members\u2019 emotional motivations, Phillip\u2019s especially, are directly explained to readers rather than revealed through more intriguing or satisfying means, and the casual approach to worldbuilding makes it difficult to remain fully immersed in the world. The characters\u2019 skin is various shades of white (Phillip) and brown (Adeline, Wycliff, and Lucent) that don\u2019t seem to map onto any real-world racialized categories. Phillip\u2019s gender transition is realized through the fantasy world\u2019s magical means rather than referencing existing trans and queer communities or language; certain of his character traits may cue neurodivergence to some readers. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aulkendale City, known as \u201cthe Sore of the Southern Continent,\u201d is home to drinking establishments, wealthy nobles, and a red tent community of vagrants and outcasts. Phyllis, who later goes by Phillip, has an uncanny, unexplained ability to snatch people\u2019s body parts without killing them. The angsty 17-year-old usually runs around with Lucent, a nearly-400-year-old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}