Tag: lgbt+

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Spiritual Toe Dipping, Pt 1 of 2

Or How Dionysus Shoulder Tapped Me

Lastly, and most importantly, thank you to Dionysus. Life has been much stranger since I invited you inside.

Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand

I have spent a very long time being a lapsed Pagan: Falling off the sabbat wagon, letting monotheistic epithets sneak into my lexicon, letting our child periodically destroy the altar space, tucked away as it was on a pull out keyboard tray. I did not expect a random chunk of polished amethyst to both re-establish my entire spiritual practice and then lead me into personal beef with fifth dimensional parole officers.

Let me start at the beginning. I grew up in a house where both my older sister and mother were in the same coven. It was not unusual for me to pull back a curtain and see warding pentagrams drawn on the windowsills. We had an extraordinarily robust lavender bush that I was not allowed to cut under any circumstances, and my daily experiences included the smokey incense flavor of the month wafting through the house or walking in on my sister talking to a jar of moon water. This was my life and my prized possessions as a pre teen were a tiny leather pouch of rocks (Botswana banded agate, amethyst, malachite and falcon’s eye) that would live under my pillow, a bag of terra cotta runestones, and the pentacle medallion I got stamped at my first Renaissance Faire.

Insert a vicious divorce, high school, a long bout with depression, a desperate need to leave home and escape to any college that would take me, and a long stint with poverty.

Eventually I came out the other side with a fantastic partner and a residency in a multigenerational household in the suburbs, complete with a rescued pit bull that I adored, even after she ate the aforementioned leather pouch and those prized stones and waning spirituality vanished from my life completely. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to becoming a parent, a Saturn return I didn’t even know was a thing until I was far beyond it, and a blue collar career path after going to college for a pre-med degree.
Now throw in the Pandemic and reconstructing sixty percent of a fifty year old house during lockdown while seven adults, a dog, and a five year old were living in it. The detritus of our lives and the two generations preceding it were rapidly cleared from affected rooms, tucked away, reshuffled, and then crammed into every shelf, corner, and flat surface available to us.

COVID raged and as an immunocompromised essential worker I kept my head down and my mask up and hoped every day I wouldn’t be the one to bring home the virus and infect our family pod. Vaccines rolled out, the construction finished, and I began a sourdough culture free semblance of life.

It was fairly empty facsimile. I realized my friends had all been inherited from activities with my wife and that I myself had not acquired a new friend of my own in….
Years, it had been years, and my very dear internet pen pal had been lost in a flurry of 5G paranoia and tinfoil hats as my five years of daily emails transformed into empty, aching silence.

So I did what any lonely queer person would do, I turned to fanfiction.

Sweet sweet hyperfixations, I have not tasted thee since A Dance with Dragons fell from the nearest Barnes and Noble (because in 2014 Amazon had not yet become the monopoly it is today and we weren’t smart enough to understand how important it was to always buy from local independent bookstores, or local independent anything, for that matter…). Nothing had touched the razed earth ground of my fandom soul since the travesty of Game of Thrones Season 8, and then came Motherland: Fort Salem.

Witches with deep, lore heavy world building and alternate US military history? Sign me TF up.
And that was before I knew it was queer.

It kept me rivetted, and deep in the bowels of our collective lockdown trauma, it gave me back my words.

Those words gave me a community, a community of likeminded neurodivergent genderqueer weirdos (most of that likeminded-ness I have just figured out for myself in the last year, thank you, Discord and Betterhelp).

And it just so happened that these weirdos like to pull Tarot cards…

Review: The Priory of the Orange Tree

8.5 out of 10

So I’m not entirely sure how I Amazon click stumbled onto Samantha Shannon’s, The Priory of the Orange Tree, but I’m very glad that I did.

It’s a one book, self contained epic fantasy with very strong queer and feminist overtones with fully fleshed out characters, including characters of color with their very own plotlines and no sidekick tropes.

Yet the fight against the status quo for queer love is not the centerpiece for this tale. No, it is far more epic than that, and Shannon gives us not just one but two distinct groups of dragons (yes, dragons) with multiple subtypes and a menagerie of draconic creatures to inhabit this world. When the cover image scene hit on my commute home, I was glued to my seat until it finished, which happened to be ten additional minutes in my driveway with the engine off, but it was really that riveting.

The worldbuilding itself is lush in Act 1, and the individual chapters of character viewpoints are divided across the East and West continents of the world. She does a great job of making storylines and characters collide unexpectedly, and oh what characters they are. I find myself with a soft spot for grumpy gay alchemist Niclays Roos, and loved it every time his POV or character showed up in a plotline. This seemed odd, since there is one queer female canon relationship and one other that is implied, but I found myself rooting the most for Niclays out of everyone.

I listened to the Audible version and Liyah Summers does a fantastic job with the character voices and making the world of the Priory come alive off the pages. That said, a friend of mine picked up the hardcover edition and it seems large enough to use as a self defense object or a weapon to annihilate small mammals. It is, however, 26 hours on Audible and I believe one of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive books clocks in at 55 hours on Oathbringer, so size is relative when it comes to epic fantasy.

Now for the Cons:

Act 2 was slow, gruelingly slow, with no real foreshadowing. One of the characters has depression, which makes for a more realistic character, but is exhausting to read on the page and makes for a very inactive storyline. This act was also riddled with random worldbuilding stories and anecdotes that were only relevant so that a character could make an idiom. My biggest gripe was with the introduction of the ichneumon, which is a bear sized mongoose (yes, a gigantic mongoose) which characters can ride upon. This would have been AWESOME to figure out as a reader, if the Mother that slayed the first, most evil dragon called The Nameless One that we heard so much about (and really, there were multiple versions of this tale in Act 1) had been mentioned riding a gigantic mongoose across the desert, I would have been salivating in wait to point at an upcoming part of the story and say “OMG! There’s the giant mongoose!”

I never got the chance. When the ichneumon showed up, we got a description of a bear sized mongoose and then the story of how they fit into the world, which showed up as an info dump that broke the tension of that particular plotline. The rest of Act 2 was like that, with the reader unable to figure out any puzzles because they were given none of the pieces and then just handed the whole picture. Luckily Shannon ramped it back up and the Act 1 foreshadowing and Act 2 info dumping actually made for some pretty good reveals in Act 3 that really kept me engaged. 

Overall, for how much of an epic fantasy world she crammed into this book, I’m shocked Shannon managed to pull off as much plot and character arc fulfilments as she did. It’s a fantastic read, and it has its weak points, as any work does, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, literally.

Final Score: 8.5 out of 10, I just couldn’t get over the frustration of the Act 2 foreshadowing, but the rest of the book is as good as the genre gets for all of us that cheer for queer fantasy characters.