The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

[lightreads]

The Saint of Bright Doors

3/5. Extremely cool and weird fantasy about a boy with no shadow raised by his mother to kill his father, a walking god. Also support groups for the almost chosen ones, and immigration, and authoritarianism, and art as revolution, and observer effects, and liminal spaces, and queerness, and ten thousand other things.

One of those wildly creative books that casually tosses out something every few pages that could be its own novel. The world building here is top tier. To name just one, this book does the conjunction of the numinous with modern life – email – exactly right, which is not easy.

So why 3 stars? Well, it’s also got a decidedly literary bent, meaning I found the actual plot ultimately unsatisfying. Also, the twist end conceit of this book, which I will not spoil for you because it is interesting, requires a lot of lone wolf stuff from the protagonist, which ensures this will not be a favorite of mine.

So someone else won’t mind those things and be totally wowed by this, because there is a lot of wow here.

Content notes: State and mob violence, rewriting time as a kind of gaslighting, executions, colonization.