Here's another novella from TorDotCom, this one shorter still than 'Navigational Entanglements'. It's also another cultural immersion, but instead of spacefaring pre-Communist Vietnamese in an overtly science fiction setting, it's Nigerian gods in an overtly fantasy setting. That means fewer accented characters but more ethnic vocabulary, which is fascinating. I found that I knew "orisha" or gods, from Suki Davies Okungbowa and others, along with "baobab" and "cowries" just from a lifetime of enjoying obscure words. However "idan", "kutu", "abgada" and many others were new to me. What matters is that they're all clear in context, which is ably provided.

This is the first in a duology called 'Guardians of the Gods' and it has quite the emotional arc for a young acolyte in the temple of Ifa by the name of Ashâke. She starts out notably behind her peers, who are five years into their careers as priests, all because she can't talk to orisha, or at least they don't talk to her, which amounts to much the same thing. So, she decides to cheat and summon one of them, Eshu, the lord of roads and crossroads. As you might expect, this goes horribly wrong and she's suddenly in an insane amount of trouble, enough for High Priestess Iyalawo to look into what she's been up to. That's a great first chapter.

The second one is pretty decent too, as she gives evidence, pretending to not remember what she did but failing at that too. And then we shift elsewhere to witness Yaruddin, a body stealer about to steal another body from an unwary thief. He follows the Teacher, Bahl'ul, and we'll soon learn a lot about that before these two characters meet. First, Ashâke decides to leave the temple that's clearly not her path and forge her own way. She stumbles into a community of griots, who keep an account of Nigerian history through the medium of song. And that's where our explanations come before everything goes completely pear-shaped.

The culture here is Yoruba and I learned quite a bit about that in Suki Davies Okungbowa's 'David Mogo, Godhunter', enough to know that both he and Tobi Ogundiran are creating new fantasies out of existing Yoruba mythology. The core myth involves what Okungbowa described as a failed revolt in Orun, the home of the orishas, but here a coup in which Bahl'ul assassinated Oludamare and prompted the fall of the orisha. The griots sing of how they're no more, which makes Ashâke wonder about her fellow acolytes. Maybe she can't talk to orisha because they died four-hundred years before, which means that her peers can't either, even if they've been promoted to priests.

Of course, Ogundiran has explanations coming and I'm not going to spoil any of them. What I'll say is that he handles the serious ramp-up in emotion at the end of this book magnificently. It's a lean and mean volume that packs a powerful punch from the outset, but it reserves the most power for the ending, ultimately reaching the scene that's depicted in the effective cover art. On the way, a lot happens, much of it dealing with loss in a variety of ways, and my favourite scene comes rather early, as a witchdoctor called Bo Fatai meets his end. It's not that he dies that matters, it's who he is and how that factors into how he dies. I felt that scene acutely, as both loss and accomplishment.

Given that this wraps up in under a hundred and fifty pages, I have to wonder why it was presented this way, as a duology, rather than as a traditional novel, which would run the usual sort of length for such. My guess is that the two halves are going to be notably different. Again, I won't spoil the direction this takes and the changes that happen, but as this is at heart a-coming-of-age story, it's pretty safe to say that Ashâke isn't remotely the same at the end of the book than she was at the beginning. She's very different and her worldview is even more so, meaning that what she means to the broader story is going to be very different in the second half.

I'm looking forward to that. I can only guess at how it's all going to play out, but I'm expecting less setup and less cultural backdrop but more action and more spectacular action at that. I reviewed the latest Max Gladstone this month and I have a feeling that how his first two 'Craft Wars' books differed might be mirrored in how these two 'Guardians of the Gods' books are going to differ. I'll be able to confirm or deny that sometime next year when TorDotCom issue a second half, 'At the Fount of Creation'.

For now, I'm very impressed. I don't know if I'd go so far as Mark Oshiro's effusive blurb at the top of the cover, proclaiming that "the novella of the year has arrived!" but I thoroughly enjoyed this beginning, as I've thoroughly enjoyed a surprising variety of Nigerian science fiction and fantasy books over the past few years, every one of them by an author whose surname begins with O: not merely Okungbowa, but also Nnedi Okorafor and Tochi Onyebuchi. Of course, this has far more in common with 'David Mogo, Godhunter' than it does the 'Binti' trilogy or 'War Girls', but there's a shared cultural heritage, even when the story's Himba, Fulani or Igbo rather than Yoruba. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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