Despite working in the difficult and often-overlooked novella length,
Kai Ashante Wilson has been stirring up increasing excitement and praise from the top tiers of writers, editors, and readers. Last year's
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps blew readers people away with its inventiveness and energy, and
A Taste of Honey is an even greater achievement.
Set in the same world as
Wildeeps,
A Taste of Honey follows a young man of privilege who falls in love with a foreign soldier. Alternating chapters between the ten days of their frenetic romance and slices of Aqib's life years and decades afterwards, Wilson packs an astonishing amount of character and relationship into this slim volume, while also masterfully sketching the outline of a fantastic and magic-filled world. The world-building is delightful, the structure and plotting excellent, the characters immediately resonant, but what sticks with me most from
A Taste of Honey is Wilson's use of language, both narratively—where he moves from invisibly descriptive to concisely insightful—and in his dialog, which captures an energy and a believable complexity almost unmatched in fantasy.
I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers, but this is a pretty short work. Caution advised below if spoilers worry you:
