Mordew. 

What - and I cannot stress this enough - the hell did I just read? In the best possible way, I have absolutely no idea. I love a weird book, this is not a secret. This book? I think Mordew maybe takes the weird book cake for me. 

I expected something completely different than I ended up getting, but my expectations being torn asunder in a way I wasn’t prepared for is always a delight for me. This book was a lot of things and no things at once. Phelby is, truly in the best way, a madman. If we put him and Hiron Ennes in a room, I’m not sure which one of them would blow the room up first. His brain and how he conceived of this story is something I am going to be so curious about for years to come. 

The story follows Nathan Treeves through this gritty, gothic world full of stratification and grim and visceral forms of magic I can’t really explain. Nathan’s father is gravely ill with lungworms slowly killing him, his mother tries to ship him off to a mysterious man only ever called The Master. A dead God imbues magic into everything making it dead-yet-alive. There are flukes, creatures living in the dead mud that can become anything, including people. Ghosts are real and they have strong opinions about our behavior. We have gillmen who are these froglike guards and the sister city of Malarkoi and the Mistress and firebirds slamming into a sea wall held fast by magic. 

This is the story of a young boy who never, from the start of his life, has any agency. He is always doing what he must and always kept in the dark. There are things about him he wants to know, but nobody will tell him. When he has enough, we watch this boy’s anger manifest in total destruction as a way to cope with loneliness, betrayal, and being used by people who were supposed to love him. Yet somehow, he still desperately wants to remain kind.

I’d liken this to Oliver Twist meets Tim Burton meets Alice in Wonderland then dip it in mud and scream into the sky. It’s such a bizarre cluster of things that it’s many things and none of those things all at once. The first two parts build out how this wild city of Mordew is kept moving through the magic of the Master. We see Nathan struggle with his father's illness, the rejection of his mother, and his found family of friends give him purpose. Then, the third introduces a new character after an event I fully expected to be the end of the book, only for it to split into one final breathless catapulting part I did not anticipate. 

And I haven’t even talked about Anaxomander the talking dog and his brother, the loyal Sirius. 

Anaxomander was a fascinating inclusion in this story and probably the one I enjoyed following the most. His very direct, matter-of-fact way of thinking and the insight Phelby gives us into how we anthropomorphize animals was such a wild ride. Every twist he set up paid off and made me gasp - though half the time I couldn't explain it if I tried. When I realized how Phelby leveraged language? I thought my brain was going to fall out of my ears. I love when authors dive headfirst into such an inventive use of words and comprehension to add depth to the story. 

I will say that it being so out there and full of strangeness did make it occasionally hard to follow at parts. Some scenes felt longer than they needed to be and I never felt like I fully understood exactly what was going on. What I anticipated from the blurb ended up not really being as essential to the story as I thought it might be, but that’s alright because blurbs are rarely accurate to the full story anyway. This is the first in a trilogy, so I am trying not to say that I didn’t get answers to all my questions because that’s the point of the other two books in a series. 

What I did get, however, was exactly what I asked for. A wild, bizarre story with a character trying to be soft in a hard, gritty world. Witnessing Nathan’s constant betrayal, his effort to stay a good person, the conflict between wanting to do right and being compelled to not was so interesting. It was a fantastic tension between young men as they want to be and young men as the expectation of society forces them to be. 

Phelby brought in wealth disparity and how the ability to suffer is, in itself, a power that many well-off people do not learn and cannot survive when it comes for them. Not in a noble sacrifice way, either, which I loved. He spoke of this disconnection as the thing that gives a religion power and if the poor and struggling turned that ability to survive towards the oppression of the merchant class, they would be unstoppable against them. He writes in such an effervescent way that makes the world feel tongue in cheek, horrible, and grotesquely whimsical with a way of making the storytelling itself feel like it breaks the fourth wall at poignant, thoughtful moments.

I really got hit with the heartbreak Nathan endured at the betrayals he experienced and how those shaped him into what he became, then also opened the door to him becoming something new again. The Mistress was such a wild character and the designs for these people in this horrible world are unlike anything I’ve ever read. My favorite part, though, is that still I have no idea who I am rooting for or who is in the right. This is a world without heroes, only a small handful of people who are trying to do their best and survive.