https://blacknerdproblems.com/stone-and-steel-review/

An amuse-bouche of a novella, Eboni Dunbar’s Stone & Steel follows the path of General Aaliyah as she comes to grips with the fact that her queen may not be up to the task of ruling. The general finds that Queen Odessa, who is both lover and friend may have betrayed her ideals & the trust of the city. What follows is a quick tale of revenge and redemption that quickly grows on you as it rolls along.

To be honest, it took me a second to get into this novella. The first thirty pages or so were a bit rough. The names felt plucked from a random R&B name generator. There were obvious allusions to Avatar (Last Airbender not blue people) and the speech patterns threw me off. There were common cultural idioms mixed in which made it difficult to tell if they were intentional or an oversight. But as General Aaliyah left the border and enters Titus, the story and the writing both pick up considerably. It almost made me question whether the choppy writing toward the beginning was a conscious, intentional, rhetorical move to mirror Aaliyah’s own insecurities and issues with coming home.

This was a quick tale, and there were points where it came together too smoothly for my tastes, but to be fair I’ve been reading grimdarks lately so it could be that I’ve become a bit jaded when puzzle pieces fit together too seamlessly. If you’ve been drinking black Kenyan coffee, hot chocolate is going to taste shockingly sweet.

Once you get into page forty or so, you can see the author hit their stride and push some really good imagery and angst into the pages. I thought Stone & Steel did a good job at grabbing an interesting theme while simultaneously pushing and pairing it down to under a hundred pages. The McGuffin count was negligible and the deus ex machinas were minimal. Some of the plot points merged at the end in a way that seemed very convenient, but by the end of the book, I was on a fun ride that allowed me to immerse myself into the narrative without being jarred loose by any expedient plot points.  

I can’t help but wonder if some of the more raw parts were because of the straitjacket-level restrictions crafting a novella puts on writers. I wonder what would have happened if the author had another two-hundred pages to play with and how that could have bent or possibly broken the story. I will say this: at the end of the day I was curious as to what would happen next – and isn’t it the job of a writer? To keep a reader wanting more?

RATING 3/5

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