Living in the walled city of Santeria, one of the caged
Supernatural denizens within, Cameo scratches a living as a reviled mixed-breed,
but one with a unique power: she can change her shape to look like anyone.
Working with Wiz, her partner and long term crush, she
manages to make considerable cash with this skill, especially for a homeless
street kid; but as her reputation becomes known, the risks grow ever harder
Especially when a person from Wiz’s past appears – old
debts become due and there’s far more to their history than ever Cameo guessed.
This is set in the same world setting as the Santeria Habitat series and I love that
series. I love the world building. I love the concept of the various kind of
supernaturals living in their caged cities and the different societies and
cultures they have had to bring together and build. It’s intriguing to see a
word where everyone is a supernatural of one kind or other and what that means,
as well as the closed in setting caused by the closed city. It’s a really
excellent and truly original world setting that I have never see anything close
to it anywhere else.
I also love that the foundation of this book is Santeria.
Each of the Habitat walled cites are designed around a particular faith and the
supernaturals within are either adherents or sympathetic to that fait (or
recognise that their particular supernatural nature will be tolerated within
that faith). So the buildings, the districts the rituals, the expressions and
the customs of this city all evolved around Santeria. It’s a rich and diverse
element of the story and world that I love.
The plot itself is gloriously twisty but not that focused
on the Habitat as much as the main series is. This draws on a lot of the
history and believe of the fae
Cameo’s shapeshifting powers are also excellent as
there’s a lot of imagination gone into exploring how this would be marketable
and useful beyond the obvious. But this also mixes into this series’ excellent
class analysis and the treatment of Mixedbreed supernaturals like Cameo.
Exploited and shunned, her useful talents make her in demand, but being
mixedbreed also makes her vulnerable. She can be easily used or scapegoated
with little consequence which makes accepting jobs fraught
Cameo herself is a very fragile character. Her nature has
left her physically very different and her abusive mother filled her with a
vast amount of self-loathing. Her body image issues re interestingly confused
still further with her ability to change her appearance so completely. It’s
hard to tell her appearance doesn’t matter when her whole livelihood centres
aound imitating other’s. It’s hard when she can assume the form of beautiful
people for her not to notice how people treat he differently and how they react
to her real form. It’s hard to tell her to love herself when she can change her
appearance and set change as some kind of permanent goal. Why learn to see the
beauty in herself when she can imitate the beauty in others?
I have a couple of stand out criticisms about this book
First of all the mystery goes on for far too long. There
is a lot of investigating which I appreciate because too many urban fantasy
protagonists interpret “investigation” as hanging around and doing nothing
until someone hands them all the answers they want on a platter. So I do
appreciate that Cameo always investigated, kept hammering at the answers, kept
trying to find the answer. And she’s creative ad intelligent and capable in
finding those answers
But, at the same time, I do think she may have seized on
clues that appeared only a little relevant or coincidental. They turned out to
be super-duper relevant, certainly – but don’t see entirely how Cameo could
have known that when she seized on them as something vital to investigate.
From a storytelling standpoint, I was also a little
frustrated that all the answers were so packed at the end of the book with
little actually linking the clues to them. This meant we kept revisiting these
same histories over and over, poring over them, investigating them but, far too
often, with me having no real idea why these clues are relevant, why we’re
spending so much time on them and why I am supposed to be engaged on them –
right until he very end of the book. That’ a long time to be dumping
information on me without giving me a reason to care about it
Still, these elements are relatively minor problems. What
wasn’t minor to me were the relationships in this book. Any of the
relationships really. Even a somewhat background relationship like Rich with
his crush on Finn is shown by him repeatedly pushing on her while she
continually tells him to stop, back up and generally cut it out. And he gets
ridiculously snippy and jealous with another guy he thinks Finn likes. There’s
a whole lot of ownership and boundary pushing
And that’s the background relationship. When we get to Cameo and Wiz we have a trainwreck of awful romance tropes. Because of woo-woo, Wiz cannot be with Cameo despite having watched her since she was a baby and being deeply in love with her (can we not with this? Seriously there is no way that the sentence “I’ve watched you since you were born and always loved you, let’s have sex” can ever be anything other than creepy and awful). This means he tells he repeatedly that they can never be together which hits her low self-esteem like a sledgehammer while at the same time saying how hot she is (so she keeps thinking she has a chance). Despite not being in a relationship, both feel the need to be super possessive and jealous – with Cameo being furious about Wiz sleeping with another woman (and that woman is treated to a truly epic level of slut shaming by just about everyone for this) and Wiz threatening to outright murder the guy who shows any instance in Cameo along with some severe threats against her as well
The possessive violent jealousy thing is disgusting, awful and generally sexist when it raises it’s ugly head in any context. But to do so when both parties are quite clear they are NOT in a relationship AND where both of them are a least open to the possibility of seeking relationships elsewhere just adds an extra layer of fail.
Added to this is Cameo’s relationship with Eight which is
a combination of, again, him not respecting boundaries very well and her using
him as a convenient research tool. All of this I crowned with Wiz, the sexy bad
boy, threatening… well, everyone. I don’t think there’s a character in this
book he hasn’t threatened at some point. And he imprisons Cameo “for her own
good.”
We have several POC as background characters, there’s
good backdrop diversity (something I appreciate if there’s also good foreground
diversity – so you don’t get the feeling that the one POC is the only one in a
gazillion miles around) and 2 of the side characters are Black – Sasha and
Rich. I won’t say they’re major important characters – because beyond Cameo and
Wiz I’m not sure there are major important characters. If there were they would
be Rich and Finn; Finn is the more active participant but Rich is more integral
to the plot line.
It’s also a nice touch that the fae royal family is
Black.
Finn also has some nice little insights about how being
homeless intersects differently with her as a woman, especially an attractive
woman, making her more wary and aware of her safety.
There are 2 trans women in this book which is excellent
to see given the paucity of trans characters in the genre. I don’t think either
are ideal tough. One exists just to show how invasive Cameo’s power is – see
assumes the woman’s body and realises “this woman has a huge penis” basically.
That’s her purpose for inclusion
The second. Sasha, is a more constant presence, a
homeless vampire who Cameo befriends. She’s hardly part of the main group, but
she is present and she’s liked and she’s generally a good character. But she
also spends much of her “screen” time cooking or providing fashion advice which
is servile and somewhat shaky for a Black trans woman. Cameo also noticed she
was trans on first meeting – mentioning the standard tropes of big hands,
adam’s apple etc; she even demanded to know if Sasha was “born male” with
absolutely zero reason she would ask that question or why Sasha should answer
it.
There’s a lesbian character mentioned in passing
I’ll add again that this was a relatively high number of
minority characters considering that the book only really had two main
characters.
In all I love that we have another book and possibly
another series in this wonderful world setting, I love this setting, I love the
potential of it, I love the history of it, I love the characters that can and
do grow within it. There is a lot of excellent there
I’m just not as excited about these particular characters
– and certainly not their relationships.
