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reviewed King of the Rising by Kacen Callender (Islands of Blood and Storm, #2)

Kacen Callender: King of the Rising (EBook, 2020, Orbit) 4 stars

King of the Rising is the searing conclusion to an unflinching and powerful Caribbean-inspired fantasy …

A deeply flawed must-read

3 stars

On the face of it, writing a (notionally fantasy) novel from the inside view point of slave rebellion is a laudable endeavour. Though recent fantasy has tackled topics of colonialism and the oppression and estrangement of the peoples suffering from it, the viewpoint has mostly been one of its eventual subversion (with the poster child probably being Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant series), which tends to neatly evade the fact that, historically, resistance has mostly been successfully repressed (for a time, at the very least), often violently. This is especially true of slave uprisings, most of which have been drowned in blood, from Antiquity to the antebellum US South. The fantastic literature I am aware of has done little to address this horrific leitmotif of history, beyond using it as a foil for its plots.

Callender attempts to change that in the second and final instalment of their Islands of Blood …