Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp

3.5 stars. Tags for multiple queer and gender queer characters, multiple disabled characters, alternate fantasy history, vampires, ghosts, were-creatures of all types, etc. Potentially a fun verse to play in. Really well drawn protagonist and cast of central characters. At its best it reminds me somewhat of the best parts of Buffy, especially once Buffy was finally playing by her own rules. At its worst, well, there's some completely gratuitous kink shoehorned in here to no purpose at all, and I just...if you're going to bother with memorably weird kink, it should at least be a plot point.

tl;dr version: Read this book. If you love the places where speculative fictions overlap, this is the place for you. A lil weird west, a lil steampunk, a little alt-history, entirely delicious read. It really took me back to that place of the essential joy in reading.

Excerpted from my blog @ jenna-bird.blogspot.com:

Vermilion is the story of Elouise Merriwether - Lou for short. Lou is half-Chinese and lives in San Francisco in the late 1800s, but on an alt-Earth. Here, alchemy is real and ghosts are a problem with legislation in place to solve. A problem Lou is plenty capable of handling as a Psychopomp (she guides the souls of the dead into the afterlife, but she’s not a ferryman - she only opens the way). She also gets by in many show more situations by letting people assume she’s “Mr. Merriwether” – Tanzer touches on some gender fluidity topics in what I considered a graceful and engaging manner.

Here, the railroad expansion into the West has been halted by political complications in the post-Civil War era. In this world, the Bears and some other creatures are sentient members of the world, with their own influences and power. This situation overlaps with Lou’s life when young men from within her community go missing after answering the call for railroad work that no longer exists.

This is where and how Lou’s adventure really begins.

...

Molly Tanzer’s writing really pulled me in. The writing perspective is third person, but limited and very close to Lou. There’s an attitude in the prose that reflects Lou and helps connect the reader to her. I’m an empathetic reader, so when Lou was frustrated, I was frustrated for her. When she was confused, I felt that confusion. It was easy and enjoyable to connect with Lou. She has a healthy amount of cynicism and sarcasm, with just the right amount of sass and stubbornness, and rounds those aspects out by being a generally good human being with a decently strong sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.

...

Lou is a strong presence on the page. There’s a lot of mystery about her, on a deeply personal level, and it’s not all unraveled for the reader. This is to say - in the same way that you can know almost everything about your best friend, there will always be a layer of mystery to them, as they are constantly figuring themselves out. Lou is faced with a lot of decisions that speak to and shape the very core of who she is. This is something I enjoyed, immensely, and I’m hopeful there are future adventures for Lou that I can join in on as a reader.

Even better than this level of wordsmithing was the crafting of the plot. Initially, I had some very strong ideas about where the story was going to go - the “what’s going on” of it all. If you read enough books, watch enough movies, you start to get ideas about where a story is going. Sometimes predictable isn’t a bad thing (and had Vermilion been predictable for me, the writing was still good enough I would not have cared). It turned out though, that I was wrong in a pretty big way! Despite this, where another story might’ve not read true to itself (I drew my conclusion based on what I thought were clues in the story), Vermilion unfolds as though this were the only path the story could have taken, and it was the most perfect one.

I won’t tell what I thought was going on, nor what was really going on; what I will say is that it is amazing to see this sort of craftsmanship in a debut novel.

...

Vermilion is a wonderful read with just the right amount of strangeness and a whole lot of heart. It is engaging and delightful with a good balance of ups and downs, and a lot of interesting turns in plot that I never saw coming, but was excited to discover.

*Please note: I received an advanced review copy of this text from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. show less

I don't know why I'd been dragging my feet over reading Tanzer. Once I immersed myself in Vermilion (audio and ebook in tandem) I was hooked. I loved the character of Lou and was intrigued by her work, the mystery, and her various relationships with the other characters. And one of the most intriguing things about the story is that no one, not even Lou, is exactly what they seem to be.

The character flim-flamery is deftly done, so it never feels forced, and there's a big reveal that honestly took me by surprise even though I suppose it ought not to have done. In particular I found Lou's character fascinating, irritating, amusing, and ultimately endearing. She's a (reasonably) competent psychopomp (someone who helps the dead cross over) show more but once she's outside of her home turf, the cracks show. She's not nearly as tough or smart or resourceful as she seemed at home in San Francisco, but by the time we find all this out, we're with her, we're rooting for her even as we're shaking our heads and muttering "Oh Lou, for heaven's sake!"

The villain is a surprisingly engaging one, at least in part because Tanzer has kept us off balance over exactly how bad or good he might be. Though there's no sex, sexuality is a primary focus of the narrative, and it's thoughtful and adult. I did think that some passages dragged a bit, and repeated information and ideas we'd already been given, but given how much fun I had reading the book, it was a minor problem.

I was honestly disappointed when the book ended, and I want more of Lou's adventures, more of the characters of Coriander and Miss Foxglove, Bo and Thurlow, and Lou's mother, Ailien, and her business partner, Vilhelm. I want to know more about the bears and the sea lions, and all the magical creatures Bo and Thurlow hunt. This universe, and its characters are a rich source of untapped stories, in my opinion. And that could be good for all of us. show less

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, which for some reason I wasn't expecting to like. It is set in an alternate version of the Old West, where ghosts, vampires, and werewolves exist, bears and sea lions are intelligent and talk, and professional psychopomps are employed to routinely usher the dead into the next world. Lou Merriweather is one of them, a Chinese-American 19-year-old girl who often passes as a boy, who travels from San Francisco to the wilderness in Colorado in search of some young Chinese men who have disappeared, and runs into a lot more than bargained on. Good characters, a fun story, a light and entertaining read that really hit the spot right now.

I loved the idea of this book, and I loved Lou. What I didn't love is how Lou didn't really do much? Mostly, stuff just happened to her. Yes, she did embark on a mystery journey (awesome!), meets interesting folks (lots of queer representation! gay dudes! lesbian chicks! an intersex person! Lou is also kinda genderqueer!). There were talking bears and also sea lions! The story also speaks about gross racism and xenophobia without feeling preachy! Lou seemed like she was fairly competent at her job, but also not perfect at it. But jesus, she stumbled into everything. And didn't really solve a mystery, so much make it explode

I'm rating it up to 4 stars, because I thought it was weird and interesting, but Lou really wasn't a good show more detective. I'll read her other adventures, like for real, if Molly Tanzer decides to keep exploring with her.

And I'd like to shout out Word Horde for packaging the e-book with the paperback. I bought the trade paperback because I love that cover and also to support small presses, but not having to cart the book around is awesome. My carpal tunnel syndrome is appreciative. show less

I gave up on this book about 90% of the way through. It's really rare for me to ditch a book so close to the end, but I just got to a point where I didn't care any more.

The book has a lot of things going for it. It's a fun mash-up of a whole bunch of things: a cross-dressing mixed-race exorcist, sentient talkative bears, vampires, Wild West urban fantasy. There's a lot of humor and even more suspense, and a generally engaging story.

But the more I read, the more problems I had.... First of all, one of the things that really bugs me about alternate history is when the "alternate" part only starts right before the book starts. I mean, this is a world with ghosts, talking animals (and they seem to broker more treaties with the talking show more animals than with the Native Americans - what's up with that?), vampires, magic.... and yet as far as the reader can tell, all of history up until right before the action of the book isn't significantly different. The only apparent difference is that the bears won't let humans build more railroads. But given a would like this, wouldn't race relations be different? Wouldn't the entire history of the Wild West be dramatically different?

So, okay, I try not to take the book to seriously and move on.... but then the characters have such a modern view of things like race and sexuality. The main character is constantly griping about things that amount to micro-aggressions, yet in a culture where the Chinese are barely considered human, micro-aggressions wouldn't even register. And everyone is really accepting of the fact that homosexuality is a thing that happens (even if some characters think it is immoral). They exhibit a very 21st-century acceptance of homosexuality and non-binary gender identity.

I was mostly able to ignore these things for the sake of a good story, but towards the end, some things just went too far, some other things that could have been interesting turned out to not be interesting, and I just couldn't bring myself to care any more. show less

A "Weird West" book, I suppose. It's a bit hard to categorize with a mix of supernatural, wild west, Chinese folk/mythology, & noir-ish mystery. Loved the main character Lou & some of the descriptions of psychopompery. Other parts were less enchanting but, overall, the story rolled along & kept my interest to the end.

A beach read for people who hate typical beach reads & want something different.