145 pages
Published 2019
Read September 22
Rating: 3 out of 5
You never know what you’ll get with self-published (and, to an extent, small press) books. Sometimes you’ll get a fully polished and professional-grade novel like Exodus 20:3 or Robbergirl. Sometimes you’ll get something full of potential, but needing just a tad more editorial nurturing, like The Worm and His Kings. Sometimes, yes, you’ll get something borderline unreadable. I always DNF those and never review them, because I’m not in the business of tearing down anyone just trying to make a buck from their words. (Capitalism does enough of that for everyone.)
The Long Walk falls around the middle of the self-pubbed spectrum, a bracing story and a fascinating world relayed in flat prose. The writing isn’t bad, by any means, but it serves merely to pull us from A to B. We rarely get the chance to linger, to experience, to feel. Even character deaths pass by in a blink.
Twelve year old Patience de Verteuil leaves Trinidad in the company of her father, Maurice, a scholar and a soldier in a supernatural war. They’ve been summoned to Nicodemus, the Black-founded town in Kansas, at the behest of Harriet Tubman. But things quickly go wrong, and Patience finds herself in the company of other fighters, forced to wield her family’s ancestral bois in the fight against a vast evil. With her new companions, Patience must fight her way across the Reconstruction-era South, pursued by hell hounds, a ghoulish hunter named Cain, and a sinister figure called Jedediah Green.
The story feels a bit like a quest fantasy, with an adventuring party composed of a bard, a healer, and a dance-fighter, and a bit like a superhero narrative, all of it suffused with the righteous fury of history. I think if this were to be remade as a graphic novel, it would be outstanding.
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