Review: A Taste of Honey and Sorceror of the Wildeeps

The Books:

A taste of honey and The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson.

The Rating: I loved both these odes to queer love and lives, but in different ways.

To Note : Though A taste of honey is marketed as a sequel, the novellas are hardly related to each other, other than being set in the same world of magicians practicing sciences whose origins have been so lost to time that they are indecipherable from sorcery or divinity.

The plot of Honey, in 20 words or less: A nobleman falls in love with a foreign (male) soldier.  Will love or family duty prevail?

Why I loved it: My queer bleeding heart was pulled deep into the heartbreak of this tale as old as time; where either choice brings as much sorrow and loss as the other.  And Wilson excelled in bringing me into the heart of his character's triumphs and foibles while also making clear how family and society shape the hero to be as simultaneously naive and good hearted as he is.
Because this novella is a meditation on the vagaries of choice, it is also more driven by character study than by action.  For this reason, I see it as occupying a unique space rarely tread in the action focused world of sci-fi and fantasy.
Some call it a romance, but to me it is more a philosophical inquiry into not only how the ties that bind us constrain individual choice but also how our choices leave ripples in the lives of all those around us.  It is a novella that forces us to set aside notions of good or bad and merely wrestle with the implications of our decisions, deeply bringing us into the bitterweet heart of both love and loss.

The Sorceror plot, in 20 words or less:  While love compells the Sorceror to journey with his Captain's band of mercenaries across the Wildeeps, dangers hunt them.

Why I loved it:
More action driven than Honey, The Sorceror is a study on class, race, and the ethics of violence in a world recovering from a long ago apocalypse.   These background textures are exquisitely rendered through the dialogue between the mercenaries and the Sorceror's personal observations, deepening the fast moving plot with complex questions on how to make moral choices in a violent world, and how love itself is both fool hardy and redeeming.