The premise was very intriguing and the book cover well made. The back cover:Sorykah Minuit is a scholar, an engineer, and the sole woman aboard the ice-drilling submarine in the frozen land of the Sigue. What no one knows is that she is also a Trader: one who can switch genders suddenly, a rare corporeal deviance universally met with fascination and superstition and all too often punished by harassment or death.
Sorykah's infant twins, Leander and Ayeda, have inherited their mother's Trader genes. When a wealthy, reclusive madman known as the Collector abducts the babies to use in his dreadful experiments, Sorykah and her male alter-ego, Soryk, must cross icy wastes and a primeval forest to get them back. Complicating the dangerous journey is the fact that Sorykah and Soryk do not share memories: Each disorienting transformation is like awakening with a jolt from a deep and dreamless sleep.
The world through which the alternating lives of Sorykah and Soryk travel is both familiar and surreal. Environmental degradation and genetic mutation run amok; humans have been distorted into animals and animal bodies cloaak a wild humanity. But it is also a world of unexpected beauty and wonder, where kindness and love endure amid the ruins. Alluring, intense, and gorgeously rendered, Ice Song is a remarkable debut by a fiercely original new writer.
The back cover blurb is pretty much the plot. Sorykah comes ashore and discovers that her children, under the care of a nanny, haven't arrived by train. She is told by somatics - people who have "mutated" into partly-human, partly-animal forms - that someone called the Collector has gotten a hold of them. The Collector is feared, as he is rumoured to kidnap somatics and use them for horrific experiments. The narrative switches between Soryk/ah (she and her male alter) and Dunya, a wolf/dog somatic who tries to conceal the children from the Collector.
The prose was positively ultraviolet, and I say this as a reader who has read hundreds of fantasy and sci-fi books. I spent almost the entire novel wanting to edit this novel - as though someone had handed me a nicely bound copy of a manuscript instead of the novel. In the descriptive portions, almost every noun was coupled with an adjective, and every verb with an adverb; the author, in what I think is an attempt to combine words in an original way, instead managed to make highly incongruous phrases. "Corporeal satisfaction" for "lust", really?
A random snippet, from page 165:
Winter clung fast with icy fingers, reluctant to relinquish its hold on the Erun. Spotty shafts of sunlight poked through the thick canopy of evergreens and cedars, deepening the shadows and doing little to dispel the constant chill. Frost crunched underfoot and frozen tussocks snapped apart as Queen Sidra led Soryk and his dog deeper into the primeval forest. The rain-blackened trunks of massive trees soared overhead. Soryk shivered to see claw marks raked across the bark, evidence of something fierce and terrible haunting the woods.
This is wonderful in small quantities. But it just never ends. Words that are esoteric, that are unusual and rare, were used all over the place, and made it hard to read through. It did make the places described very vivid - I could more or less imagine the settings - but really, it was far more than needed. There is no need to drown a reader in the setting. Kasai uses powerful words, but they are overused.
The other thing that really bothered me was the way the author handled the male/female switching. Kasai gave Sorykah (the female) "feminine" traits and Soryk "male" traits. There is no need to specifically pigeon-hole certain traits - characteristics, abilities, personality - as one or the other, thank you very much.
The novel went off in tangents, sometimes, and the specific events often felt like just events, not something as part of a whole. For example, a great deal was focussed on Rava, a octopus-woman, except she was ultimately completely useless as far as plot went, except to force Sorykah to another character. The plot reminds me somewhat of the plots that are stitched together: fill in an event here and here and here to flesh out it all.Elu's death, at random in the middle of the book, because of the grudge of another, felt like a hastily-added scene to make Sorykah's journey more difficult. (Elu is a passing, secondary character).
Characterization was wobbly in places, with Sorykah sometimes acting in control and anguished over the loss of her children, and then almost forgetting about her children and mission. I was disappointed to realize that really, apart from another sort of "roadblock" in Sorykah's mission, Soryk might as well not be a part of the plot; he plays a very small role and really doesn't do much. Her Trader status leads to some highly sexualized events - "tests" of her masculinity and femininity - which were very removed from the coldness of the beginning of the book.
Most characters, apart from Dunya and Sorykah (Soryk is not very significant) simply play peripheral roles. The villains were fleshed out, though, and even though the Collector was given his angsty past (ruined his wife and daughter, etc.) he remained horrifying still.
Furthermore, there were simple what on earth things: the names, for one. There's a Chen and a Tianxi, names which I automatically parsed as Chinese, and then a Dunya, who reminded me sharply of Dostoevsky's character, of the same spelling (depending on transliteration), and a whole bunch of random other names. Genetic mutation into half-animals? There was no lampshading to wave away what would be an absolutely prodigious change in DNA would be required. That much change might just as well kill someone as make them half-animal. I wouldn't have been nearly as bothered if the Kasai hadn't mentioned DNA in the first place. Little things like that - and the writing - jerked me out of the story repeatedly, and if I didn't hate to leave books unfinished, I would have chucked it within the first few pages.
I give this 5/10 on the premise and the trying - some of the writing was truly gorgeous, but it was drowned out in the excessive wordiness, inconsistent characterization, and unevenness of the plot. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.
edited to fix grammar.