Book Review: SUN-DAUGHTERS, SEA-DAUGHTERS

TITLE: Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters

AUTHOR: Aimee Ogden

112 pages, TorDotCom Publishing, ISBN 9781250782120 (softcover)

DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): Gene-edited human clans have scattered throughout the galaxy, adapting themselves to environments as severe as the desert and the sea. Atuale, the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, sparked a war by choosing her land-dwelling love and rejecting her place among her people. Now her husband and his clan are dying of an incurable plague, and Atuale’s sole hope for finding a cure is to travel off-planet. The one person she can turn to for help is the black-market mercenary known as the World Witch—and Atuale’s former lover. Time, politics, bureaucracy, and her own conflicted desires stand between Atuale and the hope for her adopted clan.

Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters has all the wonder and romance of a classic sci-fi novel, with the timelessness of a beloved fairy tale.

MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: Aimee Ogden’s Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters may use The Little Mermaid as its base and starting point, transferring the action to a far-future interstellar setting, but I wouldn’t categorize this novella as a retelling of the fairy tale. Rather, I think it’s the sort of “what happened next” story that has always intrigued me (it’s not chance that of all the musicals based on fairy tales, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods is my favorite, or that I list Bill Willingham’s comic series Fables and the first season of the television series Once Upon a Time as favorites as well). I quite enjoy stories that explore the “happy ever after” (or not-so-happy, as the case may be), and Ogden delivers the goods.

Rather than start with a straight retelling of The Little Mermaid and progressing linearly from there, Ogden dumps us right into the “no longer so happily ever after” described in the back cover copy: in the very first scene, Atuale (the “mermaid” of the story) leaves her husband’s sick-bed to seek the aid of her former “pillow-friend” Yanja, known more commonly as “the World-Witch:” a smuggler/dealer/scientist who years before created the gene modifications that allowed Atuale to leave her controlling father’s sub-sea kingdom. Hints about those events, about Atuale’s relationships with Yanja, with husband Saareval and his family, and with her estranged father are dropped throughout the story but don’t dominate it. There’s just enough for us to recognize the basics of the original fairy tale, to see how science replaces magic in the narrative, and to understand just how much things have changed for Atuale and Yanja.

And things have changed: the World-Witch is not physically the person Atuale knew and is no longer disposed to acquiesce to Atuale’s needs just for old times’ sake. And of course Atuale is no longer the same person she was when she first left for the surface world. Through dialogue and quiet moments, Ogden explores the question of whether two people who used to love each other but have been estranged for a long time can find their way back to some kind of mutual respect and peaceful co-existence. It’s a beautifully told arc woven around all of the other stumbling blocks the pair encounter, both on-planet and off, attempting to reach Atuale’s goal. I don’t want to spoil any of those stumbling blocks in this review. Suffice to say, they varied from the personal to the societal and none of them felt contrived or forced.

I also must compliment Ogden on how, as someone else put it, “casually queer” the novella is. Atuale and the World-Witch’s former relationship isn’t played for shock or as anything outside of the societal norm, nor are the physical changes in Yanja. It’s always nice to read stories about alien cultures that do not have the prejudices we have here on Earth in the present day.

Although Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was written pre-pandemic, it came out during it, and it was hard not to see echoes (perhaps unintentional given the time) of it in how different the response to such a fast-spreading plague is from culture to culture across not just a planet but star-systems. This, and references to miscarriages as well as a bit of body horror, may make the novella a harder read for some folks.

In the end, Aimee Ogden delivers a fast-moving star-spanning adventure in which the lead characters discover/rediscover themselves during a quest to help others regardless of the personal repercussions, expanding on the questions of identity and belonging that are a part of any good retelling or expansion of The Little Mermaid.

I received an Advance Reading Copy from NetGalley/TorDotCom in exchange for an honest review, which is clearly being posted far later than anticipated. Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was released in February of 2021.

Sunday Shorts: Two Fairy Tales by P H Lee

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. Posts will range from flash to novellas. At some point, I might delve into individual stories/episodes of anthology formats in other media, like television and comics, but for the time being, I’m sticking to prose in print and audio.

Author P H Lee has begun an intriguing series of “secondary world fairy tales” under the umbrella title of Tales from the Great Sweet Sea. I have no idea how many of these Lee is intending to write, but the two that have appeared so far (in the December 2020 and January 2021 issues of Lightspeed) have captured my interest and have me yearning for more. Mostly because these two stories are just that good, but also partly because I want to learn more about this secondary world the stories and their framing device are set in.

The narrator of both tales is a traveling storyteller named Dusty Boots, who hails from the valley of Erwhile and who is in love with a girl they can never have. In introducing each tale, Dusty Boots tells us that in the tale-spinners’ guild, half of the tale-spinner are pledged to never tell the truth and the other half to never tell a lie … and that Dusty Boots is one of those sworn to the Truth. So, each of these fairy tales he tells must be the truth, right?

One of the things I loved about both stories was the way Dusty Boots has of including other versions of the story, or other possible outcomes that follow the story, without breaking the vow to tell only the Truth. While Dusty Boots is not a participant in the stories they tell, they are also not complete cyphers. Bits and pieces of their history and personality filter through. And one wonders if, somewhere down the line, we’ll learn more about how and Dusty Boots became a tale-spinner (and why they swore to the Truth and not Lies).

“Ann-of-Rags” appeared in the December 2020 Lightspeed and is a reworking in part of Hansel and Gretel, with a few other tales filtered in in part. (And for this reader, at least, the name of the titular doll conjured images of Raggedy Ann, adding another layer to the story.) In “Ann-of-Rags,” a young girl wanders into the woods and gets lost. As night falls and goes on, her doll Ann offers several solutions to their predicament, encouraging the girl to follow the doll’s animal friends out of the woods. But to a young child, wild animals are scary, and so she refuses their help but accepts the help of an elderly woman wandering the woods at night because she looks kindly. One of the classic morals of fairy tales (especially “Hansel and Gretel”) is that appearances are often deceiving, and Lee illustrates that so well in this story. But that’s not all the story is about. Once in Bone Grandmother’s clutches, the story takes an even darker turn and started to remind me a little bit of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree: to get the young girl to safety, Ann-of-Rags offers to sacrifice more and more of herself. Thus, the story is also a heart-breaking look at how children don’t always realize, or even remember, the sacrifices loved ones are willing to make on their behalf. I don’t want to spoil the end of the story for anyone who might venture over to Lightspeed to read it (Here’s the Direct Link to the story), but I will say that it brought tears to my eyes.

“Frost’s Boy” is already available if you subscribe to the e-book edition of Lightspeed Magazine and have received the January 2021 issue. If you don’t subscribe, the story will be live on the Lightspeed website on January 28th. Dusty Boots is back to tell us another story, this one combining aspects of many “child left for dead in the woods gets adopted by someone else” tales. Except in this case, the adopting parent isn’t a human woodsman or lonely couple but rather a personification of a seasonal attribute: Frost itself. Naturally, the child grows up cold, controlling, basically heartless. Parts of this story may not be an easy read for some folks as the titular character is essentially a serial killer preying on young women – young women especially who have heard the legends and know they should just run away but somehow believe they will be the one to break the string and thaw Frost Boy’s heart. Eventually we are introduced to the girl who may very well succeed, with the help of her parents. Frost’s Boy reminds me a bit of Rumpelstiltskin: selfish, egotistical, and manipulative, a being who thinks he is so far beyond the mortals he’s dealing with that there’s no way they can get the better of him. And like the farmer’s daughter in Rumple’s tale, the farmer’s daughter in “Frost’s Boy” is the person we really end up rooting for. In a neat bit of subversion to the standard tale, we don’t meet Frost Boy’s farm girl until halfway through the story, where in so many other tales we meet the girl first. Again, I don’t want to ruin anything about the way the story plays out, but I can say that second half of the story is suspenseful in the way of fairy tales (using repeated phrases by the characters and by the talespinner, Dusty Boots) and I was satisfied with the way the whole thing ends.

Linking the tales together is a mention of Bone Grandmother, who here seems a bit more like a personification than the actual person we saw in “Ann-of-Rags.” I found this to be really effective in reminding us that these tales have been told and retold in this secondary world we are learning about, and that Dusty Boots’ versions are the True Versions insofar as the talespinner believes they are.

I’m really looking forward to reading more of these fairy tales by P H Lee, and I highly recommend seeking these two out via Lightspeed as soon as possible.