4.5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble.

Please note that this book is the sequel to A Book of Tongues, which I reviewed here. There will be spoilers for A Book of Tongues as a result.

In Gemma Files’ A Rope of Thorns, Chess Pargeter has a fresh new batch of problems in his life, as any new-minted demi-god is likely to have. As his old lover Reverend Asher Rook builds up “Hex City” as both a refuge for magicians (who are otherwise forced to feed on each other’s powers) and a place to sacrifice them to the newly-embodied goddess Ixchel to build her power, Chess goes on the run, Ed Morrow sticking to him fast and loyal. Soon joining them is a young spiritualist lady, Yancy Colder, whose temper and stubbornness is something even Chess can admire. But Chess himself, a hardened killer, is finding that even if his heart is gone, his heart might have survived more than he thought was possible.

First up, I want to say that this book definitely solved, for me, most of the concerns I had with the first one. It kept the strong writing and incredible characterization, but where there was a dearth of characters of color or female characters to narratively counter to the characters’ prejudices in book one, there are plenty more in this one (and only more upcoming, as I plunge headlong into book three even as I work on the review for book two). There are still characters’ casual slurs and assumptions in the narration, so fair warning to brace yourself for that if needed, but the narrative presentation of these characters supports them as individual characters with rich inner lives.

I don’t think it’s speaking lightly to say I loved this book. The narrative was clean and the story’s throughline was coherently built. The characters drove the plot, including those who weren’t point of view characters; every character had their own motivations for how they were acting, and this built the story, rather than outside events happening to shape it. This is by far my favorite thing to read, because everything fits together so perfectly.

And through this whole thing, bad and good decisions and damaged reactions and all, it’s an exciting Weird Wild West adventure with plenty of action, high stakes, revenge, bloodshed, sex, passion, and, yeah, the first strides toward redemption.

Normally I try to space my reviews for a series out, but this one came right after the first because I admit I literally just couldn’t stop reading. If that isn’t a rec, I don’t know what is.

4/5 Stars. Buy at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files is the first book in her Hexslinger series. Let me borrow some of the back cover’s excellent summary:Two years after the Civil War, Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow has gone undercover with one of the weird West’s most dangerous outlaw gangs—the troop led by “Reverend” Asher Rook, ex-Confederate chaplain turned “hexslinger”, and his notorious lieutenant (and lover) Chess Pargeter. […] Rook, driven by desperation, has a plan to shatter the natural law that prevents hexes from cooperation, and change the face of the world—a plan sealed by an unholy marriage-oath with the goddess Ixchel, mother of all hanged men. […] Caught between a passel of dead gods and monsters, hexes galore, Rook’s witchery, and the ruthless calculations of his own masters, Morrow’s only real hope of survival lies with the man without whom Rook cannot succeed: Chess Pargeter himself. But Morrow and Chess will have to literally ride through hell before the truth of Chess’s fate comes clear…

This book is fantastic in so many ways. The writing is incredible—relentlessly sharp prose, deeply believable characters, and a fascinating magic system. It’s very dark and gritty, full of violence, death, and swearing, but it’s not what I’d call “grimdark”, not nasty for the sake of lifting up nastiness. All three of the main characters are absolutely understandable, even while I found myself begging them not to make the bad decisions they invariably end up making. Morrow is a genuinely good man with a strong sense of loyalty, lying to those around him for the sake of his job. Chess is hot-headed, amoral, violent, and loves to kill; he’s also hurt, in love, and afraid to make himself vulnerable even for a moment. And Rook is a once-good man who believes himself damned to hell, and makes choices, these days, out of his trauma and loss and self-hate more than he makes them out of goodness. Call them the good, the bad, and the ugly!

Plus, the book starts with a Wild West shootout over some men insulting Chess’s in-your-face homosexuality, and quickly proceeds to him making out with Rook over the bodies while Morrow stares in disbelief, which I’ve got to say is a real quick sell for me.

I’d have rated this a five out of five, except that it’s also an intensely uncomfortable read, and not just because of the very real hurt these characters visit on each other as they make bad choices. The characters are products of their time and place and are damned racist and sexist; the narrative follows the voice of whichever character is on screen, which is a very strong narrative choice when selling a mood or setting—but means we do see anti-Chinese racial slurs repeatedly in the narrative text itself, depending on which character is the POV character at the time. This might not be as uncomfortable if, for the duration of the first book, the story itself showed more to the POCs and the ladies of the text—but unfortunately, we don’t have any POC characters who are not in some way tropey to the setting (opium dealers or users, prostitutes, mystics, etc), and I don’t believe there’s a single female character in this book who isn’t evil, doesn’t get hit in the face, and/or isn’t killed. Nor are any of them important to the story bar the main villainess.

Now, some of it is called out narratively, via a character’s condemnation of white people and some other references to their biases that crop out throughout, but it was still a big lack in the book, and I wavered for a long time over whether I should rate this 3 or 3.5 instead of 4/5 rating. I actually read partway into the next book before writing this review to check it was a continuing problem or one the author recognized, since that might tell me if the “hints” I was picking up were there or if I was just reading into it because I wanted to believe in this—and, at least halfway through the sequel (which is as far as I have read at this point), it no longer seems to a problem to the same degree. The Chinese wizard we have met previously gets an actual name rather than just the one white people use for her and we see some of her thoughts and feelings in the prologue; the protagonists are also joined by a new female POV protagonist (of Jewish descent!). Since it seems to me like the author was setting up the characters’ close-mindedness through the narration in order to deliberately open this up throughout the series (and here’s hoping it stays that way!), I settled on a higher rating—but even so, we don’t get it in this book, and I still want to mention it since there are definitely people to whom this will be more of a personal sore point, and I wouldn’t want them stumbling into it unawares.

That said aside, coming back to the good: The narrative frequently jumps around in time in a way that I think some people could find off-putting, but it worked for me because it tells a nonlinear story by creating the emotional storyline separately from the narrative timeline, and choosing to follow that emotional storyline instead. I think that it wasn’t always successful with these choices due to small flaws (for example, if Chess says “Don’t leave me” at x later point in time, and y earlier point of time that we read afterwards references those words, the first conclusion is it’s chronological, not that he’s said it more than once, so that’s a place I got tripped up in understanding when sections were set). But it was successful more often than it wasn’t, and seeing a story prioritize building the emotional story over a chronological one was a fascinating narrative  experiment.

I can’t stress enough how rich the text is, and how quickly I came to love these characters—massive warts and all. It was a fascinating, engaging read, and I’m very interested to keep reading; I’m completely caught up in the story and very, very excited to see how it resolves.