So I finally dug myself out of the long reads I've been engaged in since mid-February, and returned to a couple shorter, fictional works, and one of them was Krystle Matar's Legacy of the Brightwash. Minor spoilers, friends.The entirety of the book takes place in the city of Yaelsmuir, in the Dominion, through which the river called the Brightwash runs. The setting is what's called gaslamp fantasy: there are guns, there are cameras, there are newspapers. Our protagonists are Tashué Blackwood and Stella Whiterock, with a handful of chapters focusing on secondary characters.
Tashué is a Regulation Officer at the Tainted Authority, and the story effectively spins out of this crucial fact (though there is an important past that leads to this fact, so please take that as a simplification) and so we open with the discovery of a mutilated child discovered on the shores of the Brightwash with three strings of numbers tattooed on the back of her neck.
This is not a cheerful book.
The mystery of the mutilated child takes a backseat while the book dives into the politics of the Dominion and the pasts of our main characters, and while these are not as initially interesting as the mystery, Matar's attention to making her characters three-dimensional pays dividends as it soon becomes compelling in its own right.
Most compelling is Tashué. Legacy takes place over the course of thirty days, and on day one he's a full-throated believer in the rightness of the Authority. By day thirty, this is not the case at all. His evolution as a character is the most interesting part of the book, and it's at its best when it's focusing on him and/or Stella.
(Before continuing, a shout to Stella: a middle-aged woman with an adopted child is not the traditional character for a protagonist to romance, and that her and Tashué's romance forms such a significant part of this book [it would not be unfair to say that this book is half-romance] is refreshing.)
The first third of the book is one of the only places where it stumbles, with clunky exposition to introduce us to the Authority and to the (not all complicated) idea of the tainted and somewhat stilted setups as characters have conversations that one finds difficult to believe they'd not had before. In a way, during this first third, the book is caught between two things: a compelling and immersive experience in a fantasy world, and introducing the reader to its characters and its concept. It doesn't quite thread the needle successfully early on and I think the book would've been better had it not tried to force explanations in. Later on, however, with the characters firmly established, the rest of the world is not nearly so forcibly explained: there are wars, cultures, any number of things implied without being exposited, and that goes a long in making it feel truly lived-in.
The other area where it stumbles is the ending. It's not that it's forced - it's the natural and inevitable culmination of everything that precedes it - so much as the book seemed to be building towards a different and larger-scale ending (this despite the intimacy of the scope, the tightness of the focus on character) and so the ending of the book feels like the cliffhanger at the end of a chapter.
With those out of the way, though? It's also very thematically compelling, touching upon colonization, imperialism, prejudice, and power structures. It leaves one with a lot to chew on. And, setting aside that first third of the book, it's beautifully written, with smooth-like-silk prose. It's a strong debut and I'm looking forward to the next book.
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