Let's Talk Books

Huge thank you to NetGalley, Pan MacMillan, and Alexandra Rowland for a copy in this in return for an honest review!

Running Close to the Wind was a fun, fantastical, humorous romp of a book! Based on the blurb I was expecting something a bit more serious, but I was delighted to discover I was wrong. Took me a little while to get into the swing of it, but I was entirely won over by the wild, fun, and obscene characters that litter this book!

Rowland has an entirely unique, and deeply amusing, style of writing. Her world, and the world building she establishes throughout, treads an unusual line; on one hand a serious, anti-colonial, and politically charged setting, on the other a place where men are called ‘Eel-Faced Yusin’, carve skulls in cliff-faces, and occasionally languish seductively on the top of wardrobes… whilst fighting friends off with tiny knives.

This book was also one filled with relationships, both romantic and familial. It is easy to fall in love with these characters, because you can see why those around them do. That being said, I think this is a rare example of a work that talks about sex a lot, and I do mean a lot, but is in fact closed door. An unusual. but not unpleasant, dichotomy.

I also really enjoyed the framing devices Rowland uses, including defining the tarot-like Heralds cards, and giving us snippets of Tev’s Captain’s log. This novel is wholly it’s own. For some this will be an immediate 5 stars, it looses marks from me, just because it was so far from what I think the cover, and blurb suggest, and it definitely threw me off for a few chapters.

Overall, a really well thought-out and unique adventure story, rife with emotion and excitement. If there is a sequel, I will be reading it!