The Liminal People, by Ayize Jama-Everett
Title: The Liminal People
Series: Stand-alone
Author: Ayize Jama-Everett
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Format: Advanced Reader Copy
Year: 2011
Pages: 205
Genre: Fantasy
Subgenre: Fantasy Thriller, Superhuman
Challenge Information: None.
Full Disclosure: I received this free through the Library Thing Early Reviewers program.
Jacket Description
Taggert is a confused mess of something more than a man.
Endowed with quizzical powers to both heal and hurt, Taggert spent much of his life trying to master these "things that lived inside of him." It was only with the help of Nordeen, an ancient drug dealing enigma of a man, ten times more powerful and a thousand times more mysterious than himself, that Taggert can even attempt to have a semi-normal life. But when Taggert's old love Yasmene calls to him from London, Taggert will have to shake the Moroccan coastal soil he's called home for so long off his feet and head into a world that has long forgotten him. Through violent and passionate encounters with people who have similar abilities, Taggert will face loss he's never seen before but gain what could only be described as hope. But a hopeful Taggert is a far more deadly adversary to those who would harm Yasmene and her family than even Nordeen can predict.
And Nordeen does not like to be surprised.
The Liminal People is an occult tale of struggle, hope, and commitment set in a world that dismisses such ideas as juvenile.
My Review
I really hesitated in requesting this book from the Early Reviewers program. This was partly because it's a debut novel, and I wasn't sure I had the patience for one of those right now; but it was mostly because, as I mentioned in my review of Zoo City, I'm getting a little burned out on the noir style, and I didn't know if I could give another noir-influenced SF/F novel a fair shot as a result.
The first half of the book went better than I expected. It was a very typical noir set-up, full of disconnected people carving out an existence on the fringes of society through the judicious application of violence and a relaxed (but not nonexistent) moral code. The hero, of course, gets drawn back into the world he gave up by a beautiful damsel in distress, and in trying to save her is forced to reexamine his life -- past and future. The nice thing about this familiar set-up was that despite some first-novel clunkiness in the exposition, the story was paced quite well; I would probably even describe it with all the appropriate t-words: taut, and tense, and thrilling.
It bogged down a little, for me, in the latter stages of the middle when it turned into a superhumans-with-powers novel, full of rhetoric about choosing sides in the coming war, a war in which mere humans are likely to be nothing more than pawns and casualties. I have liked noir in the past and am simply tired of its tropes at the moment; I've never liked the tropes of the superpower stories, so this turn of events made me wrinkle my nose a bit.
But the climax redeemed all, made me happy I requested the novel and happy to start pushing it on my friends. Because rather than playing the noir tropes straight, Jama-Everett neatly subverts them, proving the tag line of the jacket description accurate rather than a bunch of hot air. Ultimately, this is indeed a novel about hope and commitment, one about building communities rather than tearing them down. I suppose I should have suspected this from the beginning; Taggert is a healer, after all, not just a killer, and for the chance to read about that sort of hero (particularly a male one!) I'd put up with a great deal more than just some tropes I dislike.
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★★
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★★★
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★★
Read this for: The themes
Don't read this for: The prose
Bechdel Test: Fail
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: Nobody's Son, by Sean Stewart