Every year for the past 5, I’ve tried to a reading challenge over on Goodreads. It’s just a total of ‘works’, read. Goodreads doesn’t know how to differentiate between novels and novellas and comic trades, or even single comics issues. I try to clean it up through the year; I only count novels and novellas.
Last year I got back into novellas in a big way after about two decades of the largest fantasy novels I could lay hands on. It was a huge relief. I’m in love with the format now!
This week I read The Black God’s Drums, by P. Djèlí Clark. It’s currently nominated for a Hugo for Best Novella.
Creeper is the star of our show, a pre-teen street vagrant orphan on the streets of a fantastic New Orleans, where airships haul cargo and smuggle weapons and the orisha hold sway. Creeper (nee Jacqueline, but she won’t come to it) is a pickpocket and a talented climber, ridden by Oya, goddess of wind. Oya sends her apocalyptic visions, drawing her to act to protect her home town from the violence of the Confederate States.
The characters of Drums speak in a local polyglot vernacular, mixing French and English and others. Clark is kind enough to use phonetic spelling to keep things easy to read and occasionally amusing. I smiled every time someone said ‘Wi.’
Like a lot of novellas, the pacing is a little erratic. While taking the time to introduce the two main characters and the plot fully, the action moves to climax so quickly that the end of the tale seems abrupt. Also there’s a character introduced around the 2/3 mark who is a critical actor for the climax, and I always find that a bit of a trick.
Still, it’s very good and I gave it four stars.
westerburg high 