Genre: Sci-Fi, Fantasy
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Venser is to be a guest at his own wedding.
The eighth son of the High Priest of Aracoras, Venser was betrothed to the Leondra, daughter of Lunaria’s paramount leader. At the crux of the arrangement is the Tomb of the Almighty, a landmark in Aracoras that is the resting place of a divine protector, a figure who helped their people escape above the sea of clouds. Venser and Leondra’s impending marriage is so that Lunaria and its leaders can access the Tomb of the Almighty, a place forbidden to outsiders, and overse the opening of the Tomb.
While their fathers finalize the plans for their marriage, Venser and Leondra set out to unravel the mysteries of the Tomb of the Almighty, to answer the question of why they now seek to open the Tomb after it has remained sealed for generations. Information on the true nature of the Tomb has become scarce, and neither of them are willing to trust the lack of sources in Lunaria. Both also seek to escape the marriage neither of them wanted, and Venser hopes to escape the cage Aracoras has kept him in.
Venser’s journey sees him join with the crew of the airship Alamithea, visiting the other grand cities of the sky islands as he tries to escape his past and unravel the mysteries behind the Tomb of the Almighty and the sky islands themselves. With new companions and friends, like the jokester Matthias and the cantankerous Basch, Venser learns of the dark secrets underpinning the whole of their society, as well as the things about himself he never knew. But as they race across the sky, the darkness they don’t see swells, and it’s set on retaliation…
The Review
Reading a series in reverse order isn’t all bad. I read the second book in the series first, so I know what to expect reading this one. It’s a solid sci-fi fantasy, with a very interesting premise. The fact that its tone shifts from the banter in a Seinfeld episode to potential apocalypse is a little disconcerting, but somehow Honaker makes his characters appealing—sometimes in a quirky way, sometimes in a romantic way—and those characters kept me anchored in the story from start to finish.
This weird unnamed world consists of a bunch of island city-states that float above a seething ocean of dark clouds high over the surface of a ruined planet. An ancient disaster caused by some massive force of dark evil destroyed the planet below, resulting in the creation of the floating cities above the cloud cover that was intended to let the planet heal itself.
But the real point of the narrative is that the ancient history has been forgotten and/or purposefully twisted into obscurity. A rock tomb adjacent to the central city island, Aracoras, is called the Tomb of the Almighty, but nobody other than the people of Aracoras actually know or think much about it.
Venser, one of several one-name young characters, is the next-to-youngest son of the High Priest of Aracoras. He is slated to be married off to Leondra, a daughter of the supreme leader of Lunaria. Nobody quite knows why, except that Hessler, the father of the bride-to-be, is obsessed with the Tomb of the Almighty and the idea that what’s inside will give him eternal life.
Venser, browbeaten by his puritanical religious culture, has no idea of resisting this forced marriage, until he is befriended by Leondra and meets the crew of a cargo ship called the Alamithea. Together, they all set off to visit the other city-state islands and find out who knows what about the history of the Tomb.
Shonaker’s imagination is sometimes betrayed by his insistence on making his young characters feel like they live in Brooklyn, rather than on some distant fantasy solar system. Ultimately, it doesn’t really hurt the story, and the dramatic finale and cliffhanger left me hungry for book 2 (which I already read). On to book 3!
4 stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.