
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Gabe Cole Novoa brings us his latest dark YA fantasy, this time shifting away from his historical settings of the last few years (two books of piracy and magic, and his retelling of Pride and Prejudice with a transmasculine protagonist.) Now, he takes on the fantasy dystopian style, bringing in a lot of his stylistic hallmarks - queer-centric cast, Latin American inspired setting (not every character is Hispanic, but many of them are at least coded as such), sharp social commentary about class division and genocide (protagonist Crow being one of the last living descendants of Death, whom all the other gods betrayed out of fear), and also disabled rep, with Novoa incorporating elements of his own autoimmune disorder into Crow. I feel like this book will get a lot of comparisons to Aiden Thomas’s The Sunbearer Trials, but my comparison is that, having been disappointed with the second book of Thomas’s duology, this book gets right in one what Thomas couldn’t quite pull off in two. It’s a very worthy addition to Novoa’s bibliography, and while Crow is a new favorite of mine among his protagonists, Chaos takes the cake as my fave overall in this book, easily.
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