Moon Witch, Spider King

September 1, 2021

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Man Booker Prize-winning James's first foray into fantasy, had the epic sweep, intensely layered structure, and raw if luscious language his readers have come to expect, and it was a National Book Award finalist and New York Times best seller. That book gave the backstory of the Tracker, engaged by a slaver to find a kidnapped child--reputedly the son of a North Kingdom elder--and the companions/adversaries the Tracker gathers in his search. One of them is the 177-year-old Moon Witch, Sogolon, who tells what happened to the child from her perspective. Paramount here is Sogolon's ancient feud with the king's chancellor, who works so closely with the king that they are said to be like a spider--a single creature with eight limbs. For readers of fantasy and literary fiction alike, this should be another grand thrill.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 10, 2022
Sogolon, the antagonist of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, tells her side of the story in Booker Prize winner James’s brilliant second Dark Star fantasy, which chronicles Sogolon’s life from childhood through to the search for the lost boy at the center of the first book. Furtive Sogolon, the Moon Witch, manages to live far longer than most expect for a girl of “little use” with no family ties. She witnesses mad kings rise and fall and women suffer at their hands, all while the Aesi, or the king’s chancellor, remains a constant at the right side of the throne. Sogolon becomes a living record of all the kingdom has been through—and to the Aesi, this makes her a threat. Now each works against the other as they try to find the lost boy for their own purposes. If book one centers on the nature of storytelling, this volume turns its focus to memory, archiving, and history as Sogolon works to correct the record. The two stories run parallel to and contradict each other, and James mines the distance between them to raise powerful questions about whether truth is possible when the power of storytelling is available only to a few. This is a tour de force. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media.

January 1, 2022
In this second installment of the Dark Star Trilogy, James returns to Iron Age Africa with the story of Sogolon, introduced in Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) as a sometime antagonist, sometime ally of Tracker. The first part Sogolon's story is told in third person as she recounts the days of a youth more than 150 years in the past, where she encounters the Aesi, the sinister chancellor in the court of Fasisi, and discovers the uses of her own fickle magic. Shifting to first person, James describes the family Sogolon makes with a shapeshifting lion, which is devastatingly disrupted by an attack from the Aesi. Spending most of the ensuing century in the bush, Sogolon becomes the "Moon Witch," a self-appointed vigilante for hire. Sogolon is possibly immortal, but she is also deeply human and filled with rage and bitterness, searching for a purpose as history swirls around her. If Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a penciled comic panel, Moon Witch, Spider King is the version rendered by James the inker: the geography, myth, magic, and people of this epic setting are revisited to add shading and detail in a recursive procedure that results in a vibrant tapestry begging for infinite return trips. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Fans are clamoring for the second in a trilogy that is described as an Afrocentric Game of Thrones.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from December 15, 2021
Stories as ambitiously made up as this aren't expected to so intensely engage the shifting natures of truth and reality. This one does. A chorus of enthusiastic comparisons to George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice greeted James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) upon its publication. This second volume in a projected trilogy set in a boldly imagined, opulently apportioned ancient Africa shows that the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist is building something deeper and more profoundly innovative within the swords-and-sorcery genre. In this middle installment, James doesn't advance his narrative from the first volume so much as approach its main story, Rashomon-like, from a different perspective. This, then, is the story of Sogolon, the 177-year-old Moon Witch, whose path crosses in Black Leopard with those of the one-eyed Tracker and his motley entourage in a far-flung and fraught search for a mysterious young boy who's been missing for three years. This novel, told in the main character's patois, which is as witty, richly textured, and musically captivating as the story it tells, begins decades and decades before, back when Sogolon is an orphaned child and indentured servant who first becomes aware of her dark powers when she repels her master's violent sexual advances with some involuntary--and deadly--violence of her own. From then on, a force she identifies throughout the narrative as "wind (not wind)" is summoned to carry her (and often rescue her) through years of travail and adventure across several kingdoms and wildernesses, encountering such wonders as a city that levitates at sunset and such perils as the witch-hunting Sangomin gangs. Through calm and stormy times, she's always aware of being stalked by the Aesi, known from the previous installment as chancellor to Kwash Dara, alias the Spider King, but here Aesi exists mostly as a demonic spirit that can dispatch invisible assassins and manipulate people's minds for its own ends. There's barely enough space to talk about James' many inventions, from children capable of changing into lions to a river dragon known as a "ninki nanka." So much is densely packed into this narrative that it sometimes threatens to leave the reader gasping for breath, especially at the start. But once Sogolon's painful, tumultuous initiation ends and the Moon Witch's legend takes hold, James' tale picks up speed with beautifully orchestrated (and ferociously violent) set pieces and language both vivid and poetic. The second part of this trilogy is darker and, in many ways, more moving than its predecessor.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.