Winter Tide

This is a quiet historical fantasy which is also a meditation on Lovecraft's work. I think it would be misleading to classify it with other Lovecraft-inspired works I'm familiar with, because while I did feel some foreboding, it really isn't creepy. Primarily, this book is very thoughtful, humanizing the types of people who were Lovecraft's villains. So it is an unsettling book, but not in the ways that I expect from Lovecraftian works.

There is definitely some cosmic horror going on, such as the creature with a mind vaster than humans can comprehend, the Outsider creature, and the forbidden mathematics. But none of those things feel nearly as unsettling as the recurring theme of humanity's great capacity for evil. Real-life atrocities, such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese internment camps, are important in this story. There are also invented atrocities: Aphra and her brother are the only land-dwelling survivors of their people, because the US government imprisoned or killed everyone in Innsmouth. The book also spends a decent amount of time on everyday evils, such as Miskatonic preventing women from getting full educations.

Lovecraft's stories were incredibly racist, and it's very easy to find echoes of his work in today's white supremacy / anti-Semitism. I think it's pretty common in Lovecraftian transformative works to sort of thumb one's nose at that fact by adding in a lot of diversity, without actually addressing the problems in the source material. This book is also quite inclusive, but it never feels like tokenism; instead, the characters are all multi-layered, and there are meaningful explorations of everyone's identity. But this novel also goes much deeper, taking on the unfortunate truth of just how racist Lovecraft was, with repeated references to the “rumors” and “libel” that led to the government's genocide against Aphra's people. It's these kinds of whispers which were in his actual stories, and I'm sure they did contribute to real genocide.

So all of that is the background to this story, and it has definitely shaped the woman Aphra has become. The actual plot, though, surprised me; there are a lot of plot threads introduced, which I imagine will be resolved in future books, but the conflict that the characters resolve here is a fairly standard fantasy kind of thing. I didn't feel it was trite, mainly because the only point-of-view character is Aphra, an adult woman who has confidence in her own abilities, although she is still learning to use them. It seems that we usually see this type of tale from the point-of-view of a character like Audrey, a magic student who is young and a bit overpowered. It was refreshing to see it from her teacher's perspective instead. I enjoyed the focus on Aphra and Audrey's friendship, as well as the strong family-of-choice theme.

Most of the important characters in this story are female, and the book places a heavy emphasis on the importance of women making their own choices. There are also many mentions of challenges women face due to sexism, not only in the 1940s, but in any time and place, and these felt very true to my own experience. My only real complaint about the book is that I would've liked more time spent on Aphra's friendship with Charlie, and just more about Charlie in general. I like that this is mainly a book about women, but because of the first few chapters, I expected to see more of him.

I look forward to finding out what happens next in this world. I received a free copy of this book from the author, but her generosity did not influence my review.