Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: In Lights Shadow
AUTHOR: Warren Rochelle
PUBLISHER: JMS Books LLC
LENGTH: 330 Pages
RELEASE DATE: August 31, 2022
BLURB:
Gavin Booker, a school librarian, leads an orderly, normal life. Work, jogging, friends from work, his son every other weekend. Gavin is also a secret. He is a hybrid, or part-fairy. And in the Columbian Empire, hybrids are under an automatic death sentence.
In this alternate version of the USA, magic is illegal. So is loving another man. Fairies are locked away in ghettoes, and magical beasts, such as gryphons, unicorns, and pegasi, are kept in zoos. The others, tree and water spirits, talking beasts, fauns, and the rest, are in hiding.
This is the world in which Gavin grew up. He survived, thanks to his mother. He can never forget he is different: ministers preach against people like him constantly. Hating the other is a part of every school’s curriculum.
But things are changing fast, and seemingly for the worst. Earthquakes, volcanoes, killer storms are frequent occurrences. The medicine Gavin takes to suppress his body’s glow isn’t working. The spells cast by his doctor, a witch, are losing their power. If anyone finds out what Gavin is, he is dead.
The Empire always goes after its marginalized people. Can Gavin survive the coming catastrophe? Will he ever recover from losing the boys he loved earlier in life? Can he find the fairy man who has haunted his dreams before it is too late?
REVIEW:
**content warnings – attempted suicide, rape, slaughtering people in the street, brutality, death of main characters, kidnapping
I’m kind of at a loss for words on this one. I totally missed the first line of the second paragraph of the blurb and assumed this was a fantasy novel. Well, it wasn’t. Instead, it was a journey through an alternate history version of the United States where North and South America were named for Columbus instead of Amerigo Vespucci. Teddy Roosevelt was declared the first Emperor in the early 1900s and a church rose to power. The church being a fanatical, anti-anything but ‘normal’ individuals, meaning white straight church goers. Everyone else is marginalized. In this world, the mythological species are not myths, but they have been hunted to extinction (the vampires) or driven underground (the fairies and most others) or are in hiding.
Our hero in the story is a young man named Gavin Booker and the story bounces backwards and forwards through his life explaining his story. Gavin is a ¼ fairy through his mother who has been able to mask her ½ fairy self through drugs. Fairies glow when excited or several other things. When Gavin’s father (a normal) finds Gavin glowing, he grabs his other two sons and leaves. We discover shortly thereafter that the brothers both are also starting to glow, but we never again in the story hear what happened to them.
I put this book down a few times because it was truly disturbing in spots. If you were a ‘para’, the slang word for a part fairy, you could be killed on sight. One woman in the grocery store was glowing gray (which we learn means she was sick) and she is dragged out into the parking lot and shot. The rule is when one of ‘them’ is shot, leave the blood on the ground as a warning. Gavin, as he matures and grows, develops feelings and a relationship with another young ¼ fairy. What happens when that young man is unmasked as a para will haunt Gavin through the rest of the story. And trust me, it haunted me. That was one of the spots that I put the book down and read something else.
The brutal parts of the book really bothered me. I’m trying not to do spoilers, but the repeated disregard for life in regard to the part fairies, the prison/ghettos that the fairy folk are forced into, the wiping out of entire Native American tribes, the repeated attempted suicides, the off-page memory of the rape of a 12-year-old girl before she was murdered, and lest I forget to mention, homosexuality is of course against the rules, and you can be shot if even suspected of such a heinous crime. Those, and many other things made this book very difficult to read. But I kept picking the book back up and finally forced myself to read it because I had agreed to read it and give an honest review.
In my opinion, there are some parts of the story which didn’t really reach closure. I’m not sure if the author is contemplating a sequel or not. For example, there is another major character who is another love interest of Gavin who was taken away on a blacked-out bus with tons of other people mid-way through the story. We don’t know what happened to him. And there was that thing Gavin’s mother did… can she ever be forgiven? Is it even forgivable?
I really didn’t enjoy this book. It was disjointed with the forward and backwards jumping timelines. I didn’t like the brutality. The fact that there are notes at the end of the book directing interested individuals to suicide prevention sites, did not in any way make up for the on-page suicide attempts. When it comes to recommending a book, I think of whether I would tell a close friend to read it. This one I wouldn’t be able to recommend. Therefore, I’m giving it a 3.0 for an average book since it was well enough written and edited. It just isn’t anything I would want to read more of.
RATING: 
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