Defiant Hope: A. M. Tuomala’s Drakon Giveaway

drakonfront-alt-dark2a sm “…there’s some good in this world //. And it’s worth fighting for.”
— Sam Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings

“ …like amnesiacs
in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.”
— Olga Broumas, “Artemis”
(from Beginning with O)

 

Sometimes it’s hard to keep believing that what we’re doing matters. What’s the use, the worth of trying to to sculpt and polish a story, to keep speaking of myth, poetry and strange stars when this world, the only one that’s real, is off its hinges?

Yet in most cultures songs and stories shape politics; bards and troubadours are often among the first to be arrested alongside cartoonists and satirists. And though today’s world is not the universe I worked so hard to bring about or had hoped to inhabit, I and my chosen family won’t fall silent or be distracted from our quests. Prominent among them is to make SFF the burnished precision instrument and imagination gateway we believe it is.

In this spirit, we’ve launched a month-long GoodReads giveaway of A. M. Tuomala’s Drakon. The novel received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and BookList. The latter is embargoed till Tuesday; we’ll add the link at that time, but we can already share that they recognized the fully realized world and great writing.

However, Drakon is not merely a stunning historical fantasy; it has much to say about the struggles and dilemmas we’re facing today. Here’s the ending of Drakon, to feed the feathered thing that perches in the soul:

“I brought you here because the world we know has changed, and you and your brothers have the power to break it or to map it. // To remind you that we are more than our grief. To tell you, at my brother’s grave and my father’s, that we have a capacity to love at least as powerful as our capacity to destroy—and to beg for your mercy for a few exiles under strange stars.”