Since her half-brother Cameron’s attack on their father left him nearly dead, Adra has been on a revenge mission. Desperate to take back the treasure map Cameron stole from their father, she has spent the last year or so hunting him across the ocean. Their father had been the captain of the pirate ship Worldeater, but now instead of a life of piracy she spends most of her time daydreaming of all the different ways she could kill her half-brother. She’s a firecracker of rage ready to explode. Something else deep in the ocean is also furious, a monster so terrifying that the world quavers. When that monster, the Devourer, collides with Cameron’s ship, Adra finds herself caught in a quest she cannot refuse. Along the way she rescues Quinn, a young woman on Cameron’s crew, from a fleet of ships littered with the corpses of sailors killed by the Devourer, and the two spar like swords looking for a vulnerable place to strike.
As Adra and the Worldeater crew set off to do the Devourer’s bidding, her mettle is tested. Making matters worse, magic is boiling around in the background, increasingly uncontrollable and dangerous. Magic loose on the world and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Her quest and Cameron’s map are bound to the same ancient treasure. The real question is what (or who) is Adra willing to risk to get there first.
I’m an easy mark when it comes to pirate fantasy fiction. Is it queer? Are marginalized characters in the lead roles? Is there sea-magic? Then I’m sold. The Devourer sets up a world where what we would consider marginalizations in the real world are just part of the world in Adra’s. Characters are disabled—Adra lost an arm in a magic accident, her father is bedridden and requires a caregiver, another character goes blind—without also suffering from stigmatization or ostracization. Characters are queer and gender expansive without anyone commenting on it or questioning it. There are a variety of skin tones and body types as well. As much as I love it when characters defeat their oppressors, it’s also nice to read in a world where characters can be who they are without having to fight for their identities.
The most interesting aspect of this story is that at its heart it’s about women being betrayed by toxic men and how they process their anger. One woman lets that rage curdle into something violent and all-consuming. It takes Quinn a while to realize a lot of her anger isn’t just at the world but at Cameron. He used her, set her up, then abandoned her without a second thought, and now she’s faced with a choice about what to do with all those feelings. Adra’s own anger sits about halfway between the two women. Hers is a fury that has colonized her life, but she still has friends who can shine enough light in the darkness to pull her back. She also has a choice to make with Cameron. Does she want to let his actions against her drive her or is she ready to make her own path in life?
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The Devourer
There are a couple weak spots: secondary characters and plot structure. Adra and Quinn, and to a lesser extent Merrin, Toral, and Diana, are fully-fleshed out characters with inner lives and compelling personalities. Adra makes a great protagonist, more anti-hero than hero, and Quinn is a fierce foil. The girls are pushed to be better than who they think they should be by annoying the hell out of each other. Merrin and Diana get less depth out but have unique enough attributes that they stand out. Merrin is the most powerful magic-user in the crew and suffers the consequences of that. Toral does water magic that allows her to communicate with sea creatures, a skill that sets the plot in motion. After an encounter with a Circe-esque witch, Diana was turned into an osprey.
The rest of the cast are little more than names on a page. They function largely as plot devices or to give the main characters something to shout at or feel bad about the fate of. Adra’s entire reason for being on the sea in the first place is to avenge her father, but her father is rarely mentioned, never seen, and barely described. The person who she’s vowed to kill, Cameron, gets a bit more than their father, but not much. For an antagonist, he’s frustratingly flimsy. The Devourer gets a thin backstory, but most of her violence takes place off-page so to the reader she’s there mostly to talk and look creepy. Both suffer hasty resolutions to their arcs that I wish had been delved into more.
As for the plot, it’s basically Adra wandering around on a quest to stop a person we don’t know while also helping another person we don’t know. Much of the narrative is a series of paragraphs of “this happened and then that happened.” I dislike the advice “show, don’t tell,” but this swings too far the other way. At 400 pages, at least a third of it is “tell, don’t show.” I think that structure might have worked in another context, but for me it dragged the pacing down. Many of the moments rushed through in quick descriptions are scenes I would’ve liked to read or would’ve helped with character development.
Ultimately, I think both these issues are symptoms of a larger structural issue. The Devourer is a standalone, but it felt like it was books two and three of a trilogy that had been cut down and jammed together. The story starts in the middle and yet still has too much plot. Even at 400 pages it feels both too long and overstuffed. There are good bones here, and the story is engaging enough even with the weaker elements pulling on it. It’s not a wash, more like just not as great as it could’ve been.
I was so excited for Alison Ames’ The Devourer. Despite some structural issues, it’s an entertaining novel. This is a queer- and disability-normative world of high-stakes adventure and dark fantasy. Ames’ novel is full of pirates, witches, and sea monsters, with a touch of horror to keep things interesting. Here be queers getting into all kinds of sea-faring trouble.
The Devourer is published by Page Street YA.
