Red Eye Reviews - Crystallization
Sequel time!
Book 2 of To Crack a Geode, Crystallization, on sale from Bad Dog Books here! Short version: better than the first but a very middle book. Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!
My favorite parts of Crystallization, a Korps novel, are the pissing matches.
Let me explain.
One of the view point characters is the Bradley Group Hero, Rockfall. Slate hasn't officially been declared missing by the TPA, so the Bradley Group sends in Rockfall, a reindeer with seemingly super human strength and flight powers, to investigate. Rockfall's superiors want him to find out if Slate is missing or defected, and to bring him in under federal custody. Which means that the TPA has to deal with a fed horning in on their turf, and since everyone involved is a public figure and therefore of interest to the press, we get public and private pissing matches where the TPA is trying to make Rockfall look bad and impede him in plausibly deniable ways while Rockfall is (mostly) trying to do his job and also make sure that only he brings Slate in to avoid further complications from the TPA. These sections made me grin because it combines the youthful exuberance and outlook of a rookie Hero with the messy reality of turf wars in law enforcement, and how protective the TPA is gonna be about their own internal mess that drew federal attention in the first place.
But there's also another protagonist! Jennifer Delver is a mild-mannered, divorced nutria health inspector who stumbles upon the aftermath of a cape fight. Except one of the people, shortly before dying, brands her with some kind of mysterious writing that might be making Heroes around her go mad and try to kill her? Jennifer's sections are quite a delight, as they show a regular person suddenly involved in caped adventures and trying, mostly, to survive.
Overall, the story moves at a very snappy pace, and bouncing between the three protagonists and a couple other characters that get viewpoints, one gets the sense that this is a middle book that takes the events of the first and starts tugging together threads to bring them together into a big, explosive conclusion. Hallmarks of a middle point aside, it is a very engrossing read and I definitely recommend folks pick it up. I'd say it's better than Dissolution, though it does require one to read Dissolution to understand what's going on here… which means we are now heading into spoiler territory.
If you want to protect yourself from late arriving spoilers for Dissolution, stop reading here. It's a great book, and I definitely recommend it and I'm glad I was able to read the two together since I bought the second right after I bought the first, and am now eagerly awaiting the third. Go read Crystallization, but read Dissolution first, they're good books. But I am warning people off because… well…
Geode is a mess.
Her sections are probably the ones that are going to be most resonant to trans people, trans women in particular. At the end of Dissolution, when Manifest Destiny pulled something from then-Slate to create more clones of himself, it opened a new avenue of power that then-Slate hadn't really tapped into before. And that, along with a few other things that the narrative had been hinting at for a while, become plain, and Slate discards their gender and then their name, as neither had suited them for a while, before going to explore what the Korps has to offer.
Upon arriving in the Korps, they gradually build up their identity from foundations up, taking the name of Geode and working through all the things that her previous life had inflicted upon her without her being able to name the things she felt, nevermind act upon them. Her sections are mostly her finding herself, who she wants to be, what she wants to look like, and how the Korps has helped others like her find their own way.
Meanwhile, Starshade starts the book mostly indisposed after having breathed in too much Manifest Dust-iny and has to have her lungs replaced. While her sections have the least to do with the overall plot, she acts as a nice support for Geode, and then we get day to day shenanigans as Geode exits the narrative early as she remakes herself, somewhat literally. I really enjoy following her story.
Again, Crystallization is good. Definitely a good read, and I again look forward to the next one, hoping it comes out soon to bring all these threads to a close. Worth a look!