20 Books of Summer, #1 and #2: Service and Lord of the Empty Isles

I’m belatedly kicking off 20 Books of Summer with two very different novels that are both out this month!

Service, Sarah Gilmartin’s second novel, is told from three perspectives and across two time periods. It moves between present-day Dublin and the Dublin of the mid-00s, before the financial crisis and the collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, but only one of its narrators spans both the before and the after: Hannah, who worked as a waitress at a high-end restaurant, T, while she was a student at Trinity, and is now in her thirties. Hannah remembers the frantic pace of waitressing at T, but it soon becomes clear that something much more traumatic happened to her there. Now, other members of female staff have come forward to accuse head chef Daniel Costello of rape. The case goes to trial, but Daniel, our second narrator, is adamant that he didn’t do it. His wife, Julie, our third narrator, uneasily stands by him.

I think I would have been won over by Service if it had stayed with Hannah throughout. Her sections are well-observed and beautifully measured in the way Gilmartin deals with both her trauma and the day-to-day experience of working in T. While I would have liked more of a sense of her as a person outside the restaurant, and for some members of the secondary cast, such as Mel, to have come into greater focus, she’s an interesting narrator. Sadly, I found Daniel’s and Julie’s sections two-dimensional in comparison. I couldn’t figure out what the point of them was – I can’t say that Gilmartin is playing with the reader’s sympathies, as what happened here is so blatantly obvious from the start. Daniel is a caricature, Julie bafflingly unsympathetic. It also feels like very, very familiar material after a wave of #MeToo novels. Because I was uninvested in two-thirds of the narration, I found this a slow read despite its short page count. Gilmartin can absolutely write, though.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

Jules Arbeaux’s debut, Lord of the Empty Isles, sits in that still-too-rare space between SF and fantasy. It’s set in a world where magical ‘tethers’ are central to everybody’s experience: you can be invisibly tethered through love, work, fate, intellectual interest or duty, and when deep-rooted tethers snap through death, you can end up with a ‘rotbond’ which causes you continuing pain unless you have it removed by a witherer. Nineteen-year-old Remy is one of these witherers, but he also has a rotbond of his own after the murder of his brother five years ago. He knows that his brother’s death was ordered by Idrian Delaciel, a space pirate who robs supplies for a group of outcast people living on a group of moons. When he gets hold of some of Idrian’s blood, he is finally able to take revenge by casting a death curse. Unfortunately, it has consequences he never imagined…

I obviously did not pay much attention to the blurb of this book before requesting it because I thought it was going to be a romance (I think the comp to Winter’s Orbit misled me there) and I missed that one early twist is actually revealed upfront. I was actually glad that I went into the story pretty blind, so I’d suggest skipping the publisher’s description if you can. (Also, absolutely no problem that there was no romance. I appreciated the focus on platonic ties.) Lord of the Empty Isles feels more like YA to me than the other adult SFF novels that are obvious comps (Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, for example) but it’s done very well, avoiding the usual issues I have with YA SFF. I loved that the plot basically centres on solving a magical problem, reminding me of old-school YA fantasy like Patricia C. Wrede’s Searching for Dragons and Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic and Circle Opens series – I always enjoy reading about the unseen mechanics of magic. And while these characters are not deeply individual nor complex, Arbeaux is very good at letting them inhabit a morally grey area; they all make mistakes and mess up, but they also have their priorities in order when it comes to dealing with death curses.

The fantasy elements of Lord of the Empty Isles are stronger than the SF. The SF bits are necessary to set up the situation Idrian and his crew confront, but don’t feel quite fleshed out, and the resolution of the novel makes this world feel even more like a game than a genuine political system. Nevertheless, I loved the system of tethers, there’s loads more to explore here, and I’d love to see Arbeaux write further novels set in this universe, though ideally not with the same cast, as I think their story is done.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.