In Light’s Shadow

Love Under the Iron Heel
5 Stars
This dystopic urban fantasy blends a sweet m/m romance, a coming-of-age story, and a horrific alternate-history world. Magic and magical creatures exist, although throughout the history of this world’s United States, the Columbian Empire, they have been progressively more restricted and then criminalized. Even a hint of returning the “the Relaxation” is enough to ignite assassination attempts. Meanwhile, fairies are locked away in ghettoes or have gone into hiding, and magical beasts, such as gryphons and unicorns, are kept in zoos. Hand in hand with oppression of magical beings comes proscriptions against same-sex relationships and freedom of speech. Church, school, and state unite in systematic brainwashing and instilling fear and hatred for anyone who deviates from a rigidly conformist norm.
Gavin Booker has grown up in such an environment. His half-fairy mother was so traumatized by discrimination that she has become pathologically secretive. Although “passing” for human-normal by marriage, she imparts her paranoid to Gavin. He has always known he was different, but with the stirrings of his earliest childhood attraction to other boys, his very life is now at risk. His mother is terrified that such close friendships may cause them both to be revealed as hybrids, and she pressures him to “pass” as straight. At the same time, she takes him to a healer who dispenses medicines to suppress the beautiful golden glow of fairies and teaches him psychological suppression methods.
Gavin’s life becomes one of unending denial of his deepest feelings and his true nature. The price of exposure is not just immediate public execution without trial. It has consequences for the family and friends of the accused. Suicides by gay, fairy youth are rampant, and Gavin himself, a teenager drowning in despair, attempts to end his own life. One of the few consistent bright spots in his world is his relationship with a golden fairy boy who visits him in dreams. Their emerging love and sexual bonding sustain Gavin through the deaths and disappearances of every other boy he’s cared about.
The Columbian Empire is alarmingly like our own United States. Rochelle fleshes out Gavin’s daily life with details like news reports by Walter Conkrite, popular obsession with “the royals,” and almost-accurate bits like Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Summer” (my favorite)
Rochelle’s portrayal of the intense psychological devastation of unrelenting fear, the toxic nature of secrets, and the impact upon self-esteem is chillingly accurate. I grew up in the 1950s, when my father was the target of a McCarthy Era probe and a lawsuit brought by the Justice Department to take away his citizenship. Although I was too young to know about the FBI surveillance of our family or the relatives who went “underground,” I have vivid memories of the anxiety my family endured. Yet even in those dreadful times there were beacons of light: friends, family members, sympathetic and courageous attorneys, organizations like the ACLU, labor unions, and Quaker and other religious groups who, often at great risk to themselves, stood up for the rights of those under suspicion.
Although in Rochelle’s world, there is an underground of sorts, I found the absence of public resistance disappointing. The Columbian Empire arises from the same traditions of rights and limits on power as the United States today, dating back to the Magna Carta and earlier. At the same time, the unrelenting targeting of both gays and hybrids is an important dramatic element in how much it intensifies the pressure on Gavin and others.
One of the strengths of this book is how many different ways a reader can look at it. Certainly, it’s a gay love story. It’s also a psychological and political thriller. It’s an examination of the corrosive effects of ignorance and hatred. In all these areas, it has broad appeal.

**content warnings – attempted suicide, rape, slaughtering people in the street, brutality, death of main characters, kidnapping

I’m kind of at a loss for words on this one. I totally missed the first line of the second paragraph of the blurb and assumed this was a fantasy novel. Well, it wasn’t. Instead, it was a journey through an alternate history version of the United States where North and South America were named for Columbus instead of Amerigo Vespucci. Teddy Roosevelt was declared the first Emperor in the early 1900s and a church rose to power. The church being a fanatical, anti-anything but ‘normal’ individuals, meaning white straight church goers. Everyone else is marginalized. In this world, the mythological species are not myths, but they have been hunted to extinction (the vampires) or driven underground (the fairies and most others) or are in hiding.
Our hero in the story is a young man named Gavin Booker and the story bounces backwards and forwards through his life explaining his story. Gavin is a ¼ fairy through his mother who has been able to mask her ½ fairy self through drugs. Fairies glow when excited or several other things. When Gavin’s father (a normal) finds Gavin glowing, he grabs his other two sons and leaves. We discover shortly thereafter that the brothers both are also starting to glow, but we never again in the story hear what happened to them.
I put this book down a few times because it was truly disturbing in spots. If you were a ‘para’, the slang word for a part fairy, you could be killed on sight. One woman in the grocery store was glowing gray (which we learn means she was sick) and she is dragged out into the parking lot and shot. The rule is when one of ‘them’ is shot, leave the blood on the ground as a warning. Gavin, as he matures and grows, develops feelings and a relationship with another young ¼ fairy. What happens when that young man is unmasked as a para will haunt Gavin through the rest of the story. And trust me, it haunted me. That was one of the spots that I put the book down and read something else.
The brutal parts of the book really bothered me. I’m trying not to do spoilers, but the repeated disregard for life in regard to the part fairies, the prison/ghettos that the fairy folk are forced into, the wiping out of entire Native American tribes, the repeated attempted suicides, the off-page memory of the rape of a 12-year-old girl before she was murdered, and lest I forget to mention, homosexuality is of course against the rules, and you can be shot if even suspected of such a heinous crime. Those, and many other things made this book very difficult to read. But I kept picking the book back up and finally forced myself to read it because I had agreed to read it and give an honest review.
In my opinion, there are some parts of the story which didn’t really reach closure. I’m not sure if the author is contemplating a sequel or not. For example, there is another major character who is another love interest of Gavin who was taken away on a blacked-out bus with tons of other people mid-way through the story. We don’t know what happened to him. And there was that thing Gavin’s mother did… can she ever be forgiven? Is it even forgivable?
I really didn’t enjoy this book. It was disjointed with the forward and backwards jumping timelines. I didn’t like the brutality. The fact that there are notes at the end of the book directing interested individuals to suicide prevention sites, did not in any way make up for the on-page suicide attempts. When it comes to recommending a book, I think of whether I would tell a close friend to read it. This one I wouldn’t be able to recommend. Therefore, I’m giving it a 3.0 for an average book since it was well enough written and edited. It just isn’t anything I would want to read more of.
RATING:
3 Stars