No Gods, No Monsters

There's so much I appreciated in this novel. The diverse characters, commentary on social justice, terrifying events, and beautiful prose came together in a satisfying but unsettling book. The on-the-sleeve anarchism found throughout echoed the best of Ursula K. Le Guin, but Turnbull clearly has love for and influence from speculative fiction more broadly, creating a rich, complex new experience.

Really enjoyed this, despite some occasional confusion as a first-person narrator crops up only occasionally (for reasons that are later made clear), exacerbated by devouring this while recovering from Covid. The ways in which Turnbull tells us barely enough about his characters is thoroughly enticing and the otherness-yet-normality of both the queer characters and the monsters is entirely convincing and familiar to me as a queer reader. And the way Turnbull ratchets up the tension leading in towards the climax of this first book had me entirely gripped. I’m definitely looking forward to the continuation of The Convergence Saga.

I really loved this one! Turnbull has a gift for creating vivid characters with deeply interconnected lives and a rich world whose glimpses leave me really wanting to know more.

That said, despite being 400 pages long, for a character-driven book the characters were hard to keep track of. I had to read it twice to fully appreciate the first half of the book as I had trouble keeping up with who was who and how they were all related to one another. Then again, I suppose there's something to be said for a book that made me want to read it twice; the characters were hard to keep up not despite being such a rich, well connected-story, but because the writing was so good.