Daughters Of Chaos by Jen Fawkes

Oh dear. This book starts out so promisingly, as a woman on her deathbed makes her lover swear to speak with the daughters the latter gave up for adoption. A grief-stricken Sylvie Swift has no idea how to approach the two girls she gave up as babies, so decides to write them a series of letters instead, chronicling her own history and the events that led her to flee Kentucky for Tennessee before settling down with her lover in California.

Sylvie’s own mother died shortly after giving birth to her and her twin brother Silas. Their older sister Marina helps raise them, as their father Horatio has never been the most practical man. After the twins turn fourteen, Marina abruptly leaves for Nashville. Horatio is devastated, refusing to speak of her. Following his death, the twins grow more distant from one another. With the Civil War breaking out, Silas decides to enlist with the Confederacy while Sylvie chooses to follow Marina to Nashville from their Kentucky home.

Nashville has recently been captured by the United States government. The few clues Sylvie has as to where Marina might be now lead her to a high end brothel called the Land Of Sirens. The denizens take her in, encouraging her work in translating Apocrypha, the alleged final work of Aristophanes, from French to English. As she begins to learn more about her own roots, she’s recruited by a United States colonel to infiltrate the charitable Ladies’ Aid Society, which he suspects of sabotaging Union forces to provide for the Confederacy. But the more time she spends with the charity, and especially with the beautiful Hannah Holcombe, the more she becomes entangled in the machinations of the Cult of Chaos, an ancient society of women who believe that overthrowing the violent rule of men is the only way to save the world.

Okay, look, I’m a proud feminist, but I am not, crucially, a gender essentialist. Even before I became better educated about gender fluidity and trans rights, I was never the kind of person who believed that if women ruled the world, it would become some sort of utopia. Newsflash: women are human beings just as susceptible to anger and shame and fear and prejudice and poor judgment and self-justification as any man or nonbinary person. Social conditioning has made it easier to silo traits among genders, but it’s deeply silly to think that turning the tables of injustice so that one kind of people are on top is anything more than a) a power fantasy that also happens to be b) a continuance of injustice. The point of feminism is to make the world a better place for everyone. If you’re actually fighting for a better world, you should strive to be inclusive of those who have similar goals and values, no matter their background. People should always be judged by the content of their character, by what they deliberately do, not by how they look or the circumstances into which they were born.

Which, ofc, leads to my biggest beef with this novel: the absolutely wild choice to frame the Civil War as just men fighting for power. Yes, the United States government should have done a better job of providing for the newly emancipated, but the implication that no cause besides undermining patriarchy is worth warfare is a slap in the face not only to Black Americans but to anyone who’s ever fought back against injustice. It’s the kind of bullshit bootlicker thinking that seeks to appease tyrants and dictators, as if the people fighting for human rights are just as guilty as those violently oppressing them. And for a book rife with sex workers, the weird “well, she was only pretending to be a whore” attitude throughout feels very disdainful and classist.

Problematic social issues aside, this book felt like a series of set pieces looking for a plot. There’s so much cool stuff here that’s never explained, which irritates me as a fervent reader of speculative fiction. What’s the deal with the bloody package? How do the Sirens manage to enthrall all those men, or was that just a hallucination on Sylvie’s part? Throwing all these elements together isn’t clever without a throughline of logic, even if that logic relies on a magic system. You can’t just shoehorn inexplicable events into your historical novel and be all “well, it’s a fantasy novel.” That’s literally not how it works. All successful fantasy novels have rules, it’s not just whatever the author feels like shoehorning in because they’re too lazy to think up a logical explanation.

“Oh but Doreen,” I’m sure someone is thinking, “the point of the book is Chaos! Therefore–” Look, stfu. First off, the idea that women are inherently chaotic while men are inherently orderly is deeply insulting (see: my loathing of gender essentialism above.) Secondly, Chaos as a concept is fine as a plot device — the Leviathans are cool! — but a story without cohesion isn’t art, it’s just uninteresting rambling. People in general are interesting, but their day to day lives are filled with mundanity that doesn’t necessarily need to be shared with a wider audience for profit: threshing off the chaff makes it worth sharing with other people, especially if the story is trying to make a point. I know that this can seem hard to believe in a world obsessed with social media trivialities, but editing really does matter, whether self-imposed or otherwise. Order is what shapes a mass of potential into something with actual utility.

Also, as a book nerd, I was deeply offended at the slight to classicists throughout, as the author conveniently forgets that the Greeks, whose entire cosmology she bases this book on, had two gods of war, male and female, Ares and Athena respectively. Ares was, ironically, the embodiment of the chaos and brutality of war, whereas Athena was the embodiment of military order and strategy. This is, ofc, a much smaller complaint than the others but wow, it’s just the cherry on this disaster sundae otherwise.

I’m also annoyed because I really wanted this book to succeed, especially after the neat thoughts in the first few chapters about the act of translation. I spent two days on this when I could have been enjoying one of the dozens of other books on my TBR-mountain. I am genuinely resentful.

Daughters Of Chaos by Jen Fawkes was published July 9 2024 by Overlook Press and is available from all good booksellers, including