Review - Court of Wanderers by Rin Chupeco

This review contains spoilers for the plot of Court of Wanderers and therefore its prequel, Silver Under Nightfall. You have been warned!

I was disappointed by this book. So I want to say: I was looking forward to this. I tried to like it. I clung to every moment I enjoyed. I really liked Silver Under Nightfall, liked it enough that I bought Court of Wanderers and specifically handed the first book to my partner and said 'you should read this next, you'll like it' when he asked for his next read. What I write here is not out of derision for the author, nor the subject matter, nor anything else separate from what I view as the quality of the book. (I sort of hate that I have to write this disclaimer, but I've seen the way people tear in to reviewers who have a negative opinion of something they've read.)

When I went into Court of Wanderers, I had but a single expectation: that there would be politically charged kink. I'm very hit or miss on explicit sex in books, as someone who's usually sex-repulsed, but I picked up the book with the understanding that there'd be some fun sex in it, because Silver Under Nightfall implied as much. There is... not really much politically charged kink. There are several politics-oriented conversations which suggest that everyone assumes there's kink going on, and then there's one scene where Remy eats out Xiaodan when asked to in public to prove a political point. For the most part, sex functions within the novel as a way to make jokes about how tired/sore Remy is and for people to make comments about what they heard. This is fine, just not really what I was hoping for. That's okay, I don't need a book to be everything I expect. I wouldn't have minded if the book was good.

Unfortunately, Court of Wanderers is not a good book. The issue, for me, came from a loss of faith in the idea that whatever it was doing, it was doing on purpose. Bluntly, the book was riddled with errors - formatting mistakes that shouldn't have survived a thorough editing pass. Misplaced words. Chronological errors. I'm fairly sure there was a missing scene at one point in which one supporting character died and another narrowly avoided death. This made me less forgiving of other perceived problems with the book: conversations that took abrupt pivots into another topic just to move along the plot, action scenes that near-explicitly followed video game logic, chronology that left me disoriented, over-reliance on just stating what every character was thinking or feeling.

I don't tend to publicly speculate on an author's professional relationships, but I got the distinct impression that this book had not been given the editorial attention it needed. While it evidently received a mostly competent copy edit, the developmental and line-level prose editing left a lot to be desired. It's been a little while since I read Silver Under Nightfall, but I find it hard to imagine that I could remember the book so fondly if it was anything like this one. There could be all kinds of reasons for this - the publisher bought two books at once when only one was written, and the second wasn't given enough time; Chupeco and their editors were working on a compressed timeline and the necessary editing rounds just didn't get done; with Court of Wanderers being the second book in a duology, any work to make the book good was regarded as a business cost that wouldn't pay off. I don't know. I can only really feel sympathy for Chupeco, as I suspect they were failed by a publisher who was all too happy to put out a sub-standard book.

(There was a point when I was reading that I quickly went to check if the author had been published since. They've had a book and at least two short stories out since Court of Wanderers, so I didn't feel too bad when not enjoying the book. I was wary, given that Chupeco is a nonbinary person of colour, that they'd been shafted by their publishers when they hit the midlist and locked out of the industry.)

At this point I really want to say something good about the book, so: I was really, really fascinated by the author's approach to writing a nonbinary character in a setting where no one seems to have any language for transness or any frame of reference for it. Remy is absolutely intended to be nonbinary, which is something I picked up on in Silver Under Nightfall and which intensified in this book - he rejects gendered titles and prefers a gender neutral, occupation-based title. In Court of Wanderers, this is definitely narratively treated as something that's specifically about Remy's gender, with Remy's partners alerting people to his preference for a specific gender neutral term before he meets new people, a scene where being referred to otherwise appears analogous to misgendering, and a scene where he talks through the matter with his mother in a way that felt distinctly like a 'this is in the wake of coming out' scene. I've never seen another piece of media ever approach nonbinary gender identity this way before and I think I quite liked it as an approach to fantasy transness.

On a more mixed front, this book is juggling a lot of balls. Political intrigue, a romantic relationship between three characters who are various levels of traumatised and chronically ill, a huge supporting cast, the emotional fallout of the previous book, familial relationships, the fallout of historical conflicts, colonialism... I could probably list a few more. I understand that not everything could receive all the attention it 'needed' to in the space the author had. As a consequence, however, some issues seemed almost slapdash, trivialised by the simple fact that the plot had to move on or it would drag forever. (I don't think this book dragged, for the record! If I had to give it a verb, lurch would be more accurate.) For me, the way action and threat were woven into the narrative was chief in that.

Every so often, the progression of the plot would either be halted or catapulted by the arrival of the Night Empress' forces. The power of these forces was seemingly limitless; they possessed poison that could kill people near-instantly. An infection that could spread nearly silently through any wound. Wherever they wanted to be, they would arrive within hours. They constantly evolved to become more and more dangerous. They were relentless and legion. The moment anyone ever put up any resistance to them, the Night Empress' forces always lost, but they always had ever-greater numbers. When I type it out, I can find plausible explanations for most of their power, but little for the reason they were infinitely defeatable; other than the fact that the plot of the book was such that if anyone lost, they would die, and they couldn't die until the plot wanted them to, so they couldn't lose.

The consequence of this was that I never really got the impression that anyone was threatened until they were already dead or dying in someone's arms. After the first couple of times that the main antagonist directly encountered Remy and never hurt any named characters, it was obvious she wasn't a serious danger - a fact that no one except Remy seemed to recognise, intentionally deferring one of the best aspects of the book to far later in the plot. I really liked that Ligaya was a complicated woman who had suffered due to the combination of colonialism and her lack of knowledge regarding her own vampirism. The scenes where she shared parts of her past were some of the best in the book, and large swathes of the book were dedicated to avoiding talking about it. When actually talking about it, I liked the complex notes that it added to Remy's father and his story, too. I wish more of the book had been about that.

Instead, a lot of the book was about vampire politics. I'm so down for a good spot of fantasy politics. I think romantasy can and should mix with serious politics (in addition to politics that exist for sex and romance reasons). But pretty much the full extent of sexy politics was covered above, and the actual politics were comparatively lacking. Everyone knew everything about each other, except when it was important that they didn't. All political issues were fundamentally handled by a single conversation, where there was one winner (always Malekh) and no compromise or concerted intrigue or violence or shifting around. The interesting politics seemingly happened a few decades or centuries earlier, and I liked when the book went into those, but again - not the focus.

Compared to Silver Under Nightfall, all of this meant that the meat of what I loved in that first book was underserved. There were still really nice character moments, and I continued to enjoy the relationship between Remy, Xiaodan, and Malekh (my partner pointed out partway through his own read of Silver Under Nightfall that Malekh's first name is Zidan, but he's rarely if ever referred that way next to Xiaodan. Our theory is that the differentiation is for the benefit of the audiobook to better separate their names? Unsure). The problem was that with so much else going on, it felt almost shallow. Remy's characterisation seemingly increasingly relied on referencing events from Silver Under Nightfall, and development for Malekh in particular was nearly non-existent. Xiaodan fared a little better, though there was a moment I found quite uncomfortable when her partners discussed the best approach to her health without her being present, she heard what they were saying, got upset, and then decided later that they were both totally right about what she needed to do going forward and she was being unfair to them.

Beyond these three and Remy's parents, a lot of the characters were one-note. This one is earnest, this one is deceptive, this one is firm, this one is tragic, this one exists to have a lesbian thing with one of the other supporting characters. Characters who received a little more attention could be inconsistent; Elke, for instance, spent one scene telling Remy she never wanted to see anything sexual involving him again (after watching him eat Xiaodan out in public) and then in the next chapter jokes extensively about hearing him having sex. (This is a side point, but I never quite worked out how vampire hearing works in this book. Characters frequently take others aside for a private conversation, or have lengthy conversations about very secret things, but it's also often commented that vampires have such good hearing that they can hear what's going on at a distance. I think people could just hear things when it was plot convenient and not when it wasn't.) One-note supporting characters in a novel with a huge cast is fine, and with all credit to Chupeco I never lost track of who was who - it's this in combination with everything else I didn't like that lost me.

I promise I'm nearly done with ragging on this book, but I had one last thing I wanted to touch on: the prose. When there was prose in this book, it was often serviceable. Not particularly vivid or beautiful, but not all prose needs to be! I was totally fine with this approach. For large stretches, however, prose disappeared in favour of statements, or hefty pages of dialogue. Conversations stretched on forever with characters saying literally everything the reader needed to know, and it often felt less like they were having conversations and more like they were moving through the author's bullet pointed list of everything that particular scene needed to convey. The action prose in particular was noticeably lacking compared to Silver Under Nightfall; things were punched or stabbed and pretty much nothing else, and the detailed descriptions of Breaker that I remembered so vividly from the previous book were pretty much gone. Brief descriptions often summarised a single thought (frequently 'Remy thought about fighting vampire children, a traumatic moment from his past') or the general tide of battle before moving right back to the plot.

The most notable exception unfortunately stood out to me for a bad reason: a battle in which the seemingly indestructible enemy was taken down because a character discovered that the creature's distinguishing feature was actually vulnerable, and when they broke that feature, the creature was suddenly possible to harm. I had to put the book down for a moment in disbelief; I'd been switching, throughout the day, between a children's video game (Splatoon Raiders) and the book. In Splatoon Raiders, you fight hordes of enemies with different powers, and the strongest ones have single vulnerable spots which, when you break that feature or attack that spot (announced, as in the book, by a friendly sidekick) then you can defeat the enemy. Gone was Silver Under Nightfall's laboratory and investigations into the properties of the Rot. In Court of Wanderers, the Rot is a video game mechanic observed by a helpful friend so the characters can win the battle just before anyone gets hurt.

In some ways, I fear I should have expected this. The Reaper duology seemed, at least to me, to be heavily inspired by Netflix's Castlevania animated series, which is about vampires and vampire hunters and I'd definitely seen some people enthusing about some situations that had some charged poly feelings. The hunters of Castlevania (the show, but also the video game series it's based on) use a sort of scythe chain weapon thing that I recognised Breaker as. I'm not someone who likes to dismiss works that are inspired by other work or other media - it's the name of the game for the publishing industry to have comps and they're baked into how books are sold. I've not tended to put a huge amount of stock in the idea that work that is derived from something else is derivative, or that 'modern authors' are too [insert other media]-brained; I usually see that derision as the kind of grousing that means someone just picked up a book that wasn't for them, expected it to be, and took its failing to be so as a failing on the part of its author or the industry to be good.

In this case, I fear there's some accuracy to the accusation. Court of Wanderers is an underbaked sequel. It capitalises on almost none of what made the first book in the duology good and instead falls into almost every pitfall it can. No matter how strong the ideas underpinning it are, it under-delivers on its strengths in a way that only emphasises its weaknesses. If I recommend Silver Under Nightfall to the kind of reader I think it might appeal to again, I'd do so with the caveat that its sequel isn't worth the reader's time.