Did you ever have the experience of falling so hard for a book that when you found out the author had a whole bunch of other books, you wanted to stand up and cheer—except you were way too busy buying and starting the next book to take a cheer break? That was my recent experience with the work of Daniel Jose Older. I wish I’d been more on the ball when his first books were released in 2015, but it’s hard to regret getting to binge-read through a difficult week.
Older’s five novels (he also has several novellas and a collection of short fiction) are divided between two series—the protagonist of the two Shadowshaper books is Sierra Santiago, a Brooklyn teen discovering her magical inheritance, while in the three Bone Street Rumba books (which kick off with Half-Resurrection Blues) a half-dead man, Carlos Delacruz, takes the lead. The supernatural plots are strong, but what really sets Older apart—aside from the diversity of his characters, which are deftly rendered and heroic black and brown and LGBT and living and dead and half-dead—is that the supernatural world is layered with a compelling, funny, tragic everyday world, an everyday world viewed through a sharply political lens. He could write a novel about mundane life in gentrifying Brooklyn and I guarantee you it would sparkle. That’s not a hard guarantee to make, because he sort of already has. The teens in Shadowshaper send spirits into drawings and tattoos and murals and use them as weapons, sure, but they also date and play music and do each other’s hair for parties and sit around talking in coffee shops:
“Imma write a book,” Tee announced. “It’s gonna be about white people.”
Izzy scowled. “Seriously, Tee: Shut up. Everyone can hear you.”
“I’m being serious,” Tee said. “If this Wick cat do all this research about Sierra’s grandpa and all his Puerto Rican spirits, I don’t see why I can’t write a book about his people. Imma call it Hipster vs. Yuppie: A Culturalpological Study.”
“But there’s black and Latin hipsters,” Sierra said. “Look at my brother Juan.”
“And my uncle is most definitely a bluppy,” Izzy put in.
Tee rolled her eyes. “There’ll be an appendix, guys. Sheesh.”
If Shadowshaper has racial politics and gentrification as a constant context, its sequel, Shadowhouse Fall, takes it to the next level with a significant police brutality plot (or, arguably, two of them).
Through the course of Older’s two series it becomes clearer—often in glancing, amusing references—that they inhabit the same world. But they look in different directions. Bone Street Rumba centers on the supernatural world—its internal dramas, its politics, its very human relationships—while Shadowshaper’s engagement with the spirit world amplifies its take on the mundane world. The characters in both books walk the same streets, but in important ways they live on different sides of a supernatural line. The authorities in Sierra Santiago’s life are police, teachers, parents. The authorities in Carlos Delacruz’s life are at the Council of the Dead, his employer and a sort of government for the spirit world.
It would be difficult to talk about Older’s work without talking about politics, and I have no desire to try. But it’s important to emphasize, to insist, that they are well-written novels, powerful stories, finely drawn characters. Diversity and stories of struggle and justice aren’t worth much if you don’t want to read them. They aren’t worth much if they don’t engage your attention, if they don’t make you care. Older’s books are gripping—inspiring, funny, sad, thrilling.