themadpoker

Julie Kelleher's The Sea-Glass Shore is a book by friend, but also I think a book that a number of you would be interested in, if you like selkie stories, and community work, and the call of the sea.

The Sea-Glass Shore is a selkie storie that emphatically knows how selkie stories work: when local librarian Jack starts meets the selkie Rona off the coast of his Pacific Northwest town, he clings to the idea that rip to other selkie husbands but I'm different like a mantra. This is a consensual relationship! No skins will be stolen this day! And Rona, herself, is thrilled to be part of the human world, to have company and clothing and a safe place where she feels like she belongs, after a childhood fully shaped by her mother's fear of humanity.

Then Jack and Rona settle down, buy a house, have kids -- and the presence of the kids, two new individuals who have their own distinct relationships to their selkie heritage, destabilizes everything. Living in a two-person idyll and foraging from the sea for food was fine when they did indeed have a two-person idyll, but children come with increased scrutiny, and schooling requirements, and a whole new range of responsibilities. Suddenly Rona can't just be a blithe tourist in the human world anymore; the woman from the sea with no identity and no driver's license now has to keep track of time, and days, and get her children to and from school.

And meanwhile, Jack has built his life and self-image on the bedrock of his trust in Rona -- but does he trust an adventurous child? A dissatisfied teenager?

The kids aren't the only destabilizing force in Jack and Rona's world; the cove where they've built their home between the sea and the shore is also being threatened by the forces of development, and Rona gets recruited into a sort of Charles de Lint-inflected storyline of the battle between a local crow and a sort of sinister Paul Bunyan, as refracted through small-scale community activism. But the book is most interested in exploring internal threats, not external ones, and climax it's building to is about the choices that each member of the family have to make in regards to the ways they relate to each other, and the kind of life they want to live, and the places they feel like they belong.

It's not that I disliked Caitlin Starling's The Starving Saints, but the thing I am finding about The Caitlin Starling Experience is that it often sort of feels to me like she's always joyously building the book out of a set of trope lists someone gave her for a lesfic original prompt-a-thon towards some sort of romantic equilibrium.

And the trope lists are juicy, as tropes go! It's not a boring bingo card! The Starving Saints is set in a castle that's been under siege for months, and is on the verge of running out of supplies, with the spectre of cannibalism hovering ever-nearer. Our protagonists are Phosyne, an ex-nun with a mad sciencist magic lab who's been given the impossible task of conjuring up food out of nothing; Trella, a scheming serving girl who's secretly the daughter of an executed traitor to the kingdom; and Ser Voyne, the lady knight who executed Trella's father and has now been tasked with guarding Phosyne for the king.

In the midst of this stressful situation, the gods suddenly appear with food and succor to kick off a massive party! Only it's quite clear from the start that whatever these beings are, they are probably not the gods they claim to be; the food they are is not what it appears to be either; and the longer the castle stays under their hallucinatory influence, the Weirder and Worse things are going to get.

Of the three protagonists, I think Trella probably feels the most like a real character and the least like a prompt, due to the fact that she has two conflicting goals: survive and escape, and get sexy revenge on Ser Voyne. Phosyne's job is to be an alternate source of power, and Ser Voyne's job is to be a walking, talking locus of various iterations on fealty kink, and they have a lot of intensely charged scenes together based on this combination of factors and events, which, to be fair, there is a Lot going on with the Factors and Events. Some of the other folks on the castle also get to have personalities -- the character I was most interested in throughout the whole book was the prioress of the religious order that Phosyne left, who has a complex relationship with her faith and is having an interestingly unpleasant time in the couple of glimpses of her we get -- but the starving peasantry largely do not have names and mostly exist to be an undifferentiated Bacchanalian mob, which I think is a little unfortunate. I would be more affected by the horrors of the book if they felt like they were happening to a real community.

Still, if the book is less a deep exploration of the messy intersections between loyalty and faith and fear and hunger than a sort of fever dream that uses these concepts as flavor text for a series of Fraught Lesbian Situations, still, I think it's important to have someone out there checking those fraught, weird lesbian situation boxes. I've seen this book criticized as vibes only, which isn't wrong but there aren't many people out there putting out these particular vibes with this particular dedication to the bit, and I'm glad Caitlin Starling is out here filling that crucial niche in the ecosystem.