Cadwell Turnbull

The Publisher Says: In We Are the Crisis—the second book in the Convergence Saga from award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull—humans and monsters come into conflict in a magical and dangerous world as civil rights collide with preternatural forces.

In this highly anticipated sequel, set a few years after No Gods, No Monsters, humanity continues to grapple with the revelation that supernatural beings exist. A werewolf pack investigates the strange disappearances of former members and ends up unraveling a greater conspiracy, while back on St. Thomas, a hurricane approaches and a political debate over monster’s rights ignites tensions in the local community.

Meanwhile, New Era—a pro-monster activist group—works to build a network between monsters and humans, but their mission is threatened by hate crimes perpetrated by a human-supremacist group known as the Black Hand. And beneath it all two ancient orders escalate their conflict, revealing dangerous secrets about the gods and the very origins of magic in the universe.

Told backward and forward in time as events escalate and unravel, We Are the Crisis is a brilliant contemporary fantasy that takes readers on an immersive and thrilling journey.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think this series of novels that discuss the sources of Otherness and the artificiality of the idea of a permanent identity deserves all the praise I can heap on it. Using modern culture's delight in cryptids and monsters as real entities, Author Turnbull offers a wise and inclusive look at how identity can be imposed from outside and then used to oppress and persecute the recipient of that imposed "self". Horror fiction is supposed to scare us with the monsters, not FOR them. This subversion of the literary status quo is ideally suited to slide in under the resistant person's radar and make them think again about what a monster is, and who decides what that identity means. This is something that has needed doing since the days of myth...Beowulf is, at the end of the day, about a mother seeking vengeance for the harm done to her child...and what could be more subversive than that?

The very concept of debating rights is absurd on its face. You don't grant rights. Rights are, then they get denied by the controlling elites to serve their own purposes. Granting rights is best framed as removing impediments unjustly placed in the path of those attempting to exercise their natural rights. When that fact comes dangerously close to becoming part of the great mass of people's consciousness, a crisis must be manufactured to distract and re-Other the group that is deemed undesirable by the controlling elites.

The existence of Others is necessary for the forces of control to make the eternally useful and rouinely succesful lie of Us-vs-Them work to absorb the mass of humanity in fighting against those who have the most in common with them so the controlling elites don't have to worry about how they can keep their power, privilege, and prestige intact against the outrage and hatred of those they oppress to serve them, not their own needs.

Political fiction done so well that, unless you already knew it was political, you wouldn't know. For that reason, I encourage you to gift it to your videogame addicted teen boy. Anything we can do to wedge his mind open a wee tiny bit for non-authoritarian thoughts to enter is good.… (meer)

We Are the Crisis is the second book in the Convergence Saga by Cadwell Turnbull and takes places three years after No Gods No Monsters. The existence of monsters is no longer a secret and, although there are many humans who are allies and are willing to fight along with them for equal rights, there are also many who see them as a threat which much be at the very least contained or even obliterated. One of these groups is the Black Hand, a violent pro-human group that may be responsible for the disappearance of many monsters.

First, what I didn’t like. I will say right off that it would be very hard to jump into this book without having read the first book in the series. Even having read it, albeit a couple of years ago, I found it a bit hard to catch up. Add to that, there are some problems that seem inherent to a middle book in a series. It does not always seem as cohesive as the first as there are many storylines, the purpose of which are not always clear, so that much of the book seems just a set up for the next book, making the story occasionally confusing and a bit draggy in places.

What I did like. It is well-written and, even when I wasn’t sure of what was going on, it still kept me immersed in the story throughout. There are a lot of moving parts packed into the story that made it hard for me to put it down. I loved how Turnbull allowed his characters to grow and change as their circumstances changed and how he blends issues like race and class into the story. Overall, I wouldn’t say I liked this as much as the first book but that’s a pretty high bar to compare it to and it did what a really good second book should do ie. I can’t wait to read the third book to see how this all works out in the end.

I read the book while listening along with the audiobook version and I gotta say Dion Graham does an absolutely spot-on job as narrator. But whether you choose to read or listen or both, if you’ve read No Goods. No Monsters, you need this book. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

I received an arc and audiobook from Netgalley and Blackstone Publishing in exchange for an honest review… (meer)