I haven't been moved to write a review in a while, and I don't know for sure whether Amazon will leave this review up, as their new policy is to be wary of authors leaving reviews on authors' novels (rightly so). So before I start, in full disclosure, I met Tl Morganfield on a historical fantasy panel at a convention two weeks ago and was so intrigued by what she had to say that I had to check out her novel, THE BONE FLOWER THRONE. We have no arrangement to write reciprocal reviews for each other, nor have I accepted any remuneration for this review, etc. This is just me telling you what I think of a newly released novel in my favorite genre: historical fantasy.
So here's the review: Come read this novel with me. Seriously. Get a copy; it's affordably priced. It's Aztec fantasy. It's passionate and interesting and good, and it's actually really well-researched, as in: it's a novel that will actually give you a window into the ancient Aztec world. It's the kind of historical fantasy I enjoy most -- not just a re-chronicling of events but a re-experiencing of events the way people in that culture might have experienced and understood them. Gene Wolfe does that with Greece in his "Soldier" series (the finest historical fantasy I have ever read), where gods, nymphs, and creatures are woven into the narrator's experience because members of his world would expect it so, and Mary Renault's novels perform similarly, if more conventionally; Morganfield's debut novel offers the Aztecs a similar treatment; she got inside their mythology and gives us that rare miracle of appearing as though she is telling their history from the inside rather than the outside. To me, that plus just a really good story are the things I most want out of historical fantasy. When I read a historical novel and it sounds on every page as though a modern man or modern woman is telling you the story, I get bored quickly. I want to see my ancestors (or someone's ancestors) experiencing their world. That's what I go to historical fiction FOR.
This novel has that.
It has some of the roughness of a first novel, but it also has the real magic.
It isn't what you expect, and it will make demands on you as a reader, because as soon as you think you grasp the formula, Morganfield will replace that formula with a different one -- almost as though you're shifting genres within the same novel. This is, I think, because it is a novel about reading and interpreting your world and its mythologies. The narrator is embedded in her world and yet also estranged from it, both by exile and by the visions she experiences. Unmoored from the shelter of her childhood home (and from the simple narrative formula with which the novel opens), she has to keep relearning her world, just as the reader does. It's a novel about refusing to let anyone's formula define you, even refusing to let your rejection of a formula define you. It's a novel about finding your path in a world that gets more complex as you age or as you read another fifty pages, finding your path in a world that keeps changing on you. So far it is keeping me on my toes and I am enjoying the ride. Come read this one with me.
Stant Litore
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