I picked up this book as part of a book club I was in. We wanted to read something with aromantic representation for Aro Week, and this came up as a book with aromantic and asexual characters in a fantasy setting.
The book opens with a police woman, Adele, being robbed by Claire, a purple-haired thief. Claire has taken Adele’s exocore, a sort of generator or power source. As a new officer, Adele makes it her personal goal to get onto this case as soon as she learns that this is a repeat crime. Meanwhile, Claude is the baker at a local pastry chain who is befriending Adele. His twin is in town, and he is anxious to show her a stack of exocores that he recently stole under his female name, Claire. (Claude/Claire is gender-fluid so I’m going to try and use whatever name is appropriate for him/her, but I’ll swap back and forth.) His twin senses that these are people, that those with powers (witches) are inside the exocores. Witches have been persecuted in this society for ages, Claude keeps his powers secret, but this is a new level of hate. Claire and her twin start investigating together, but when Claire’s twin disappears, Claude is distraught.
Meanwhile, Adele has not been making much headway in the case. She’s assisting a more senior officer and frustrated that she cannot lead it. A separate journalist puts the pieces together that Claire is stealing exocores, so she also turns her attention to the source of them. Adele also starts up a budding romance with Claude the baker, Claude is aromantic but they have a good time together. Things get kicked up a notch when Adele follows a lead to a manufacturing plant for the exocores and finds many abused witches trapped there. Claire followed and helped her get everyone out, as well as plenty of exocores. They set up base in Adele’s sister’s house for the time being.
Claire then follows a lead right to the manufacturers and gets captured, learning in the process that there’s a witch who betrayed the community and has been kidnapping witches to make into exocores and that the lead officer on the case is behind the whole thing. Adele comes to rescue her, they start kissing, and then Claire reveals her identity as also Claude. Adele is captured, but Claire makes it away. After Adele’s co-workers save her, they all come up with a plan to stop the opening ceremony of a brightly lit bridge that’ll be directly powered by Claude’s twin. They pull it off, everyone ends up ok, and the book ends with Adele and Claude figuring out what a relationship between then could look like.
So the best aspect of the book is the world-building. The characters speak a kind of modified French, with a lot of French words and some messed with a little. The neighborhoods are also very fleshed out and developed, you get a sense of where the characters are throughout the city. Because of what the book gets into, the politics and the political climate are also very present and accounted for as well. It feels very grounded in place as a result.
To get this out of the way though, I do think that the choice of having a cop as the main character is a little odd. For a book that aims to highlight queer experiences and has a pretty diverse cast, it feels out of place. This was published in 2018, so a little before ACAB really took off in the US, but recent enough that I’m thrown off by the inclusion of it. Related, so the characters are pretty diverse, but that doesn’t seem to go too deep when it comes to race. There are characters who are mentioned to have darker skin, but that is all that their race really impacts. There is no discussion of what Black culture looks like in this world, or is there is any racism. So, I don’t know, I’m hesitant to give the book that level of diversity.
There is diversity in terms of queer representation. Claude is aromantic, and Adele is demisexual. Many characters are referenced as wearing binders (including Claude), and Claude’s twin even talks about questioning her romantic identity towards the end. Plus there are instances of neo-pronouns (some that I didn’t even realize were pronouns at first) which highlights the gender diversity as well. And all of these are very natural, there isn’t any real homophobia or transphobia present. There is some explaining in practical terms what the orientations mean, but it doesn’t feel like the book is trying to teach us something.
The relationship between Claire and Adele is a good example. They have a conversation about what a relationship could look like between an aromantic individual and a demisexual (not aromantic) individual. And it is really cool to see that conversation played out! What I don’t love about it so much is that it seems like the relationship is based on adrenaline from them saving each other and things like that. I don’t know if I actually believe that the characters have any chemistry between them. And then also, this is a book that is supposed to highlight aromantic experiences. Why do the protagonists end up in a relationship? It seems to contradict the main point where aro experiences are all about celebrating not wanting a romantic relationship.
Overall it’s a pretty good book, I likely would read a
sequel. I would say though that there’s a few too many ideas in it and it could
benefit from some focus as well as cleaning up the relationship that for some
reason the characters are in. And rethinking the cop thing. Ugh. But we will
see if anything else ever comes from this series, right now it’s the only one
she’s written.
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