Vicious Miscreations, queer-normative fantasy, and why a book doesn’t have to be for me to matter.

This is a three-star review. Sort of.

I finished Vicious Miscreations a few days ago, and I’ve deliberately sat with it before writing this review.

And after thinking about it, I’ve landed on three stars.

I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. I enjoyed parts of it, thought the setting was cool but the plot wasn’t really my thing. Well written, solid wee adventure.

Normally, that would be the beginning and end of the matter. Three stars. Decent book. Some good ideas. Not particularly for me.

Except I keep thinking about Vicious Miscreations.

Not necessarily because I loved the story, but because I think there are readers out there who could pick up the exact same book and give it five stars.

And I think that’s worth talking about.

I’ve been in this fantasy city before

Jenn Neal is a graphics queen and the promo for her book has been visually lovely. I’ll let her image do the blurb talking…

The world itself is pretty classic. There are urban districts, different factions, gods, magic, political tensions and carnivorous plants. There’s a crazy villain running the underworld (the Ripper district). There’s a ruling class who thinks they are better than everyone else (the Hunters). People have magic, but the types of magic differentiate them, at times creating an underclass.

The way certain magical people stuck to certain areas while fearing investigation particularly reminded me of Crescent City– the werewolves and angels come to mind. That’s not necessarily an accusation of imitation. These are established fantasy conventions, and the carnivorous plants give Neal’s world its own distinctive flavour of urban fantasy.

But as someone who has already read a lot of urban fantasy and tends to look for the grittier plots, there wasn’t much about this part of the novel that felt particularly new to me.

The plot was fairly slow to begin with, a lot of introduction and explaining why the different characters were enemies, which I understood as important but tended to drag. I was irked that this gloriously botanical world was set up only for the plants themselves to be contained to choice scenes. I wanted the threat of leaves! More branches! This all made the book a made the book a three-star read for me personally…

And yet.

The thing Vicious Miscreations does really well

This is where my feelings about the book get considerably more complicated.

Vicious Miscreations is queer-normative.

Not simply fantasy with queer characters in it. Not a story where queerness automatically comes packaged with a character having to have the traumatic explaination of sexual interest and inevitable tension of ‘will I be accepted for who I love’. No closets. No cliche.

It is simply part of the world.

Tayz and Lux are wonderful examples. Tayz flirts with everyone and anyone. He uses his charms to flirt with a male guard and lures him away for a cheeky peck which allows another character to slip on by. The innkeeper where Lux stays is non-binary.

Nobody stops the plot to explain it. The exception is Fletcher, who notably comes from modern day earth and a rural area where ‘coming out’ is a big deal. Internally he explains how he has never met people like Tayz or Lux. As such, he acts as a sort of bridge between our world, where coming out can still be A WHOLE THING, and this one, where queerness simply exists.

And within a sprawling fantasy world full of murderous plants, gods, factions, monsters and an unreasonable amount of knives, it was the sheer normality of queerness that stood out to me.

This is important. I’m not queer, so I’m not going to pretend I can speak to what that representation feels like from the inside. But I loved seeing a fantasy world where queer characters could exist without the narrative stopping to announce their queerness.

There’s also remarkably little sexual content.

The three POV characters have their own agendas and goals. Kiana is on the run and closed off to others, opening up slowly as she learns to trust. Lux positions himself as flippant rage incarnate, needing someone to call him out. Fletch is a magical green horn who has lived a sheltered and ostracised life and now finds himself with Tayz the good looking flirt machine. The three are not obvious allies never mind besties. But as the book progresses and the characters develop they open themselves up to the possibility of being with other people.

There’s chemistry. There’s the possibility of something more. But the relationships aren’t treated as something that inevitably needs to culminate in explicit sex.

I’m a teacher IRL, and I kept thinking about students I’ve taught who would benefit from having a high stakes, fantasy adventure in a queer normative world. I keep thinking about those who don’t conform to hetronormativity and need more than token representation.

Alongside that, this is fundamentally a story about people who don’t quite fit.

This is a story about people who have fundemental parts of themselves that others have been hostile towards, that they have been told to hate.

And that’s where I started thinking about the reader who might encounter this book very differently from me.

Maybe you’re the five-star reader

I don’t think Vicious Miscreations is my five-star book.

But maybe you’re queer, you’ve felt like you don’t fit in, you’ve experienced discrimination, or you’re simply bored of mainstream queer representation being funnelled through the same handful of stories and stereotypes. (No shade to RuPaul’s Drag Race. I love RPDR. But queer representation can’t begin and end there.)

Maybe you’ve spent years reading fantasy where characters like you are relegated to side plots- present when convenient and conspicuously absent when things might get complicated.

Maybe you want enormous fantasy worlds and ridiculous monsters and dangerous gods, but you also want queer characters who are allowed to simply exist inside them.

Maybe you’re tired of every fantasy recommendation apparently coming with a spice rating.

If that’s you?

Ignore my three stars.

Seriously.

Because the things that left me lukewarm about Vicious Miscreations might matter considerably less to you than the things it does exceptionally well.

So what does three stars actually mean?

My three stars don’t mean Vicious Miscreations is mediocre.

They mean my experience of reading it was three stars.

My stars will never be the same as your stars.

I consider In the Miso Soup a bloody wonderful read. That doesn’t make it a 5/5 suitable book for everyone.

Reviews are useful precisely because they’re subjective. The useful part isn’t necessarily knowing that I gave something three stars. It’s knowing why.

So, yes.

★★★☆☆ from me.

But if you crave a fantasy world that doesn’t reproduce all the bullshit expectations of our own, there’s every chance those same ingredients could add up very differently for you.

And I think Vicious Miscreations deserves the chance to find those readers.

Author Links

Website: http://jennifernealbooks.com/
Instagram: @jnealwrites

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