The Liminal War

April 27, 2015
It’s been a long wait since Jama-Everett’s 2009 debut, The Liminal People, but the same raw wattage that lit up healer/killer Taggert’s epic introduction to his daughter, Tamara, and his split with his sociopathic mentor, Nordeen, is at work in this rich, dense sequel. This episode opens with a characteristic blast of pure psychic chaos from Tamara, who’s discovered that Prentis, a child Taggert calls “mine by choice,” has disappeared from the sensory realm commanded by superpowered liminals like Taggert’s family. Taggert’s sure that Prentis isn’t dead, but beyond that he’s stumped. His lover, Samantha, guides him to the Rasta-tinged commune of London’s Eel Pie Island, where he encounters the avatar of a four-billion-year-old vegetable god who allies with him in the search. And that’s just the first 30 pages. Jama-Everett writes with such cyclonic energy and verbal legerdemain that occasionally the plot has to be taken on faith, but the noir-infused verve of the telling makes it all work.

May 1, 2015
In a sequel to his first novel (The Liminal People, 2012), Jama-Everett offers a story about a scrappy group of people with superpowers who careen through a criminal underground, the space-time continuum, and frequently outrageous battles to rescue a young woman who's gone missing. Taggert, a former criminal, can "read bodies" and manipulate them on a molecular level. He's lying low in London, working a shadowy business of healing people with terminal diseases and keeping an eye on his teenage daughter, Tamara, and adopted daughter, Prentis. Both Tamara and Prentis are also "liminals"-people with supernatural abilities-and survivors of Taggert's criminal past. When Prentis vanishes from the planet, invisible even to Tamara's powerful telepathy, Taggert and Tamara set out to look for her. They find themselves thrown into alliances with legendary musicians and the worshipers of a strange god and pitted against viciously ruthless nonhuman entities called "alters." The plot moves swiftly, cramming incident after incident into a novel that seems surprisingly slim for this breed of action-adventure, and while the speed and lack of cumbersome worldbuilding is refreshing, certain elements (including giant praying mantises, a ghost ship, and time travel) feel like sketches that would have benefited from more generous exploration. The characters are refreshingly diverse, however, and the novel digs into the perspectives of the members of its multiracial cast in a way that encourages the reader to question the homogeneity of many stories that give characters the world-altering gift of superpowers. An engaging sequel that sets its likable cast of characters against a fast-paced sequence of dangers while making an admirable effort to offer a more diverse vision of the superpower narrative.

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