Moonshine

More cool stuff from my People I Saw At Readercon list! I will be doing this for a long time, y'all.

Anyway, the people in question is Alaya Dawn Johnson, who I saw speak on... uh... four panels, I think, but who I was not able to meet in person, which is a bummer, because she was pretty awesome on all her panels. Her newest book, and first YA book, is The Summer Prince, which I was sort of intending to buy until I saw she wrote vampire books as well, so I bought those instead for now, because I am predictable. (I fully intend to read The Summer Prince too, hopefully sooner rather than later; I have heard nothing but good things about it.)

Moonshine takes place in Prohibition-era Manhattan, which is always a fun time, in a universe where vampires and various other forms of nonhumans, known as "Others", are openly known to exist, but generally denied most rights like the vote and a living wage. Our protagonist is Zephyr Hollis, a night school teacher for immigrants and Others and chronic social-justice activist—often to the detriment of her own health—and the daughter of a famous Other-hunter from Montana. The plot happens when Zephyr, short on money, agrees to find notorious mob boss, bootlegger, and suspected vampire Rinaldo, for a very handsome Other of unspecified kind named Amir, who is one of her night school students. Amir turns out to be a djinn, and the main love interest, which is pretty cool; I don't believe I've ever read a djinn romance before.

Secondary characters include a just-turned vampire boy named Judah with no memory of who he was before he was turned, Amir's ponderously djinn-y older brother, a gang of teenage mobster vampires called the Turn Boys, Zephyr's Irish roommate Aileen who may or may not be a Seer, and a lady reporter called Lily who is (a) a fabulous lady reporter and (b) also kind of an upper-class twit at the same time. Lily is possibly the most interesting character, to me. Amir is somewhat less so; the djinn thing is cool and it is nice to have a mixed-race lead couple (Amir is clearly Arab when he is not a pillar of smoke, apparently), but he's kind of got the "feckless bad boy" thing going on and generally I don't care that much about his personality.

The plot gets plottier when a new street drug made from cloned pig's blood and ergot hits the streets, resulting in a rash of blood-mad, drugged-up vampires running around doing stupid things like mobbing the blood bank and staying out past daybreak. Rinaldo is trafficking the drug, so figuring out the drug situations becomes important for finding Rinaldo. Also, Zephyr's bigoted Other-hunting daddy shows up with a contract on the Turn Boys, at this point Zephyr's most important sources of information, so then there is family conflict and daddy issues and stuff.

This book may not have been a deep work of literature but it was a ton of fun, and it was aware of and sensitive to both the social issues of the 1920s and with the current issues about diversity in fantasy, and seriously GANGSTER VAMPIRES IN PROHIBITION NEW YORK WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT.

Originally posted at http://bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com/33818.html