Dream with Our Eyes Open

The novel begins: “Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” But after the smashing opening chapter, the book settles down into an outline I seem to have read or heard about a number of times recently: characters from different backgrounds experience adventures and growth as their journeys bring them together for a magical crisis.

In this case, the characters are in general older than such protagonists usually are, and their background cultures are more expertly fleshed out and varied, as one might expect from Rebecca Roanhorse.

The nascent god, Serapio, was to me the most interesting and well-fleshed out of the characters. He's not very nice, but one couldn't expect a lot of human kindness from someone brought up as described. Child abuse figures prominently in the service of developing his godly powers. As the story hits its main plot thread, Serapio is traveling to the religious center of his world, apparently to take up his godhead properly.

His transportation has been entrusted to the notorious exiled sea captain Xiala, a skillful navigator and lusty lover of the good things in life (be they male, female, or drinkable) who turns out to have powers of her own because she is a member of a mysterious and often-reviled race called the Teek. I really could not get into Xiala. There was something hollow about her, for me. For one thing, she's weirdly naïve about what she's gotten herself into by accepting this mission.

Then we have a seemingly separate thread about Naranpa, a high priestess from an impoverished background. She has lofty humanitarian ambitions that are viewed askance by the other high clerics because these attempts challenge the existing power structure. All of the dirty politics in this section reminds me of a fictional depiction of power struggles in a pressure-cooker top high school, as might show up in a YA novel or manga series. There's something trivial and immature about the whole thing.

Entwined with this part of the story is the tale of Okoa, a warrior prince from the same community who has returned from an absence to find unsettling events occurring, many of them fallout from Naranpa's miscalculations and the expected arrival of Serapio.

As the shit hits the fan in the last few chapters, things finally started crystallize for me. It's as though Roanhorse wrote backward from that point and had trouble filling in some of the blank space.

It's great to see an epic fantasy derived from indigenous cultures instead of the typical European setup, and I liked the variety of genders and gender expressions among the characters. But the characters themselves didn't gel for me in most cases until near the end. It will be interesting to see whether this improves as the saga move on.