And the Sky Bled
S. Hati
Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9781959411680
Bindery Press, October 15, 2024, 384 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re looking at the tragic intersection of three lives in a world on the brink of destruction, a nation staggering to keep hold of the last dregs of power, and the cost of love and heartbreak—that’s right, it’s And the Sky Bled by S. Hati.

And the Sky Bled is told from the perspective of three different residents of the city of Tejomaya: Zain, a woman trying to escape the shackles of her childhood in the slums; Iravan, one of the leaders of those very same slums who faces nothing but bad choices when it comes to protecting his people; and Anastasia, daughter of the ruling Council leader and caught between two worlds, belonging to neither. All three are tied together by a tragic incident from their past, and brought together once more by the search for a mythic reserve of power—one, that if found, could change the face of Tejomaya forever.

The first thing that leapt off the page to me in And the Sky Bled is the sheer otherness of the world Hati’s characters inhabit, yet how relatable to our own it is (it reminded me a lot of N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, and to a lesser extent some of China Mieville’s work). In Tejomaya, the sky literally does bleed, a remnant of the war between the colonizing Gehennese and the native Janmir, raining down caustic blood that contains the potent energy source calor, a dwindling resource that prompted Gehenna’s invasion in the first place. While I don’t want to say that calor is a one-to-one comparison to fossil fuels, it’s clearly very similar, and the single-minded focus the rulers of Tejomaya (both official and otherwise) put on extracting it while ignoring the dying world around them has some obvious parallels to the current climate change crisis. Hati does an excellent job of both making this a centerpiece of the overall story while also not letting it overshadow the characters.

This brings me to the second area I thought And the Sky Bled excelled at, which is the sheer vitality of the people who make up its world. Hati does phenomenal work balancing the feeling of living through the middle of a disaster, one with seemingly no good solution, with the human urge to survive and take care of those around you, even if it seems impossible to go on. Zain, Iravan, and Anastasia are wonderfully complex and multifaceted characters, who are surrounded by a secondary cast that’s equally fleshed out. And while it would have been easy to let the story devolve into grimdark disaster porn, there is a constant thread of hope and empathy winding all the way through to the ending. This is a book whose characters care about each other, even when it would be easier not to, and it invites you to do the same.

The last thing I want to highlight from And the Sky Bled is how many levels the story operates on. There is the obvious theme of climate change that I touched on earlier, but Hati also includes examinations of colonialism, class warfare, the difficulty of belonging to a culture that doesn’t include you, and some truly sharp observations on how grief can change a person, even years after the act itself. However, the real magic trick is that Hati fits all of these meta concepts naturally into the plot, which hums along at a brisk pace throughout the entire novel, and they all meshed together seamlessly with the world of Tejomaya (and should spark some reflections on our own world).

Overall, this was a book that I really enjoyed for its willingness to explore difficult topics, but more importantly, for its constant dedication to highlighting the human instinct of taking care of each other in an emergency. The world of Tejomaya may be harsh and dying, but as Hati shows over and over, there’s always the chance to do some good and lift someone else up.