PICK

AN ACCIDENT OF STARS is my favourite sort of fantasy: a story that takes all the elements that made Teenage Me fall in love with the genre and updates them for a modern audience. If you're after a portal fantasy brimming with politics and toothsome worldbuilding that challenges the white, hetero, patriarchal paradigm while it examines the darker realities of getting sucked into a magical world, you've gotta read this.

A fantasy written from a queer, female perspective that explores race and social justice featuring the common trope of multiple parallel worlds.

The basic plot is an intertwining of two common to fantasy: 1) there’s multiple parallel worlds 2) political intrigue warring societies etc… These are both done to a level I appreciate. They make sense without overwhelming me with world building and pages of explanations of how a society that doesn’t really exist works.

Both of these basic plots are used to explore queer viewpoints, feminism, and race, all through the lens of social justice. How much you’ll enjoy this lens depends upon the reader. I think the queer part is fairly well-done with a broad representation including: bisexual (by name!), lesbian, trans*, and polyamory. I’m not big on polyamory plots but I thought its inclusion in a parallel world made sense and was clearly not written from a perspective intended to purely titillate, rather, the emotional aspects of these relationships was explored. I do think the explorations of race lacked some of the subtlety present in the explorations of queerness. The white Australian girl being thrust into a parallel world where the majority race is black who is guided by another “worldwalker” who similarly fell through but decided to stay because she’s black and this world is better than Thatcher’s England struck me as a bit heavy-handed and overly simplistic. I’m also not sure how I felt about the black character being put into a secondary role as guide. I kept finding myself thinking how I would have preferred to have read her story. (You quickly find out she stayed in the world, gained some power, joined a polyamorous marriage, had a child, and more! What an interesting life!)

All of that said, I don’t often enjoy traditional style non-urban fantasy, and this one did keep me reading and interested. It’s fun to read a book about political intrigue and multiple worlds dominated by women, touched by dragons, and with no male gaze. I doubt I will seek out the second entry in the series, though, because I feel I’ve already got everything out of the story I’m going to get.

An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows is the first book of the Manifold Worlds series and, as the series title kind of suggests, is a portal fantasy novel. It, loosely speaking, follows the story of a teenaged Australian girl when she follows someone through a portal and into a world of magic.

When Saffron Coulter stumbles through a hole in reality, she finds herself trapped in Kena, a magical realm on the brink of civil war.

There, her fate becomes intertwined with that of three very different women: Zech, the fast-thinking acolyte of a cunning, powerful exile; Viya, the spoiled, runaway consort of the empire-building ruler, Vex Leoden; and Gwen, an Earth-born worldwalker whose greatest regret is putting Leoden on the throne. But Leoden has allies, too, chief among them the Vex’Mara Kadeja, a dangerous ex-priestess who shares his dreams of conquest.

Pursued by Leoden and aided by the Shavaktiin, a secretive order of storytellers and mystics, the rebels flee to Veksh, a neighboring matriarchy ruled by the fearsome Council of Queens. Saffron is out of her world and out of her depth, but the further she travels, the more she finds herself bound to her friends with ties of blood and magic.

Can one girl – an accidental worldwalker – really be the key to saving Kena? Or will she just die trying?

The most interesting thing about An Accident of Stars was the way in which the story is told both from the perspective of the teenaged Saffron going through a portal for the first time (and, of course, not finding what books like Narnia and Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz promised) and from the perspective of Gwen, a woman in her fifties who is now a veteran of "worldwalking" and people who travel between worlds are known in the book. On the one hand, Saffron has an almost standard reaction to being in a fantasy world, although her thoughts are more culturally sensitive than some of the older works would have been. On the other hand, Gwen understands what Saffron is going through but from a standing of "been there, done that" as well as a standing of much greater maturity and world experience, tells the story from a different view. If Saffron is the main character, Gwen is watching the story and putting things into context that Saffron can't (immediately).

That said, Gwen is certainly still one of the protagonists, watching the story while being a part of it. Which is ironic given the religious sect based around doing just that. And is kind of meta when you start to think about things which are spoilers.

The third protagonist is Zech, a girl more or less both Kenan and Vekshi (details being spoilers) who gets involved first with Saffron when the Earth girl is lost and alone in a strange world, and then in larger world events. Zech was cool and I liked that despite her being 14 and two years younger than Saffron, the two were able to be friends without age mattering too much (except for spoilers).

This was a very enjoyable read. I'm not sure I'd call it fun because a lot of bad things happen to Saffron. Bad things which are pretty par for the course in fantasy books, but which become extreme trauma when put into the context of happening to an average contemporary Earthling teenager. I liked the way the book highlighted how horrible some fantasy tropes are when not normalised by all the characters they're happening to. Like how traumatic a short battle can be, for example. Overall, I didn't have any complaints except maybe that sometimes Saffron's inner thoughts were more socially aware than I would have expected, but not implausibly so.

The book ended a little abruptly and with very little having been resolved. I am very keen to read the next book and I'm hoping I won't have to wait too long. The publisher's website indicates that it's coming in May, so not too long away. I highly recommend An Accident of Stars to fans of portal fantasy and to any readers looking for a feminist fantasy read.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2016, Angry Robot
Series: The Manifold Worlds book 1 of ?
Format read: eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Challenges: Australian Women Writers Challenge