Thumbs up for The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. Fantasy.
If you’d said “Emma, you will stay up way too late riveted to this sword-and-sorcery (except actually science fiction) adventure/romance/tragedy about love, compassion and brotherhood told in a bizarre and somehow exquisite mishmash voice that bops around from sentence to sentence between fairytale, elegant classicism, and (inexplicably but gorgeously) African-American vernacular”…I would have shrugged and sighed because weirder things have happened. I don’t know if there’s a way to describe it that gets across how beautiful it is. You like fantasy? You like unique and lovely writing? Read it.
[Saprogenic possession], [antibiotic exorcism], the perils of [sepsis and necrotizing tissues]…Demane had perhaps doomed Faedou, in speaking such terms without knowing them in the common language. To superstitious ears, nothing distinguished those untranslated words from the veriest babble of demon worship. “If that leg get too bad, old man, the only thing will save you is chopping it off.”
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