Simon Jimenez’s second novel, The Spear Cuts Through Water, is a fascinating experiment in richly representing the experience, not of story-telling, but of story...It’s radically unlike anything else I’ve ever read, which is a bold enough statement to make of any novel, and even more astonishing given that this is technically, perhaps even classically, an epic fantasy...Jimenez’s stylistic choices don’t feel like bits, set-pieces, or interjections to an otherwise standard novel: its very material, at sentence and paragraph and chapter level, is densely, uniquely textured...Polyvocal and thematically intricate, The Spear Cuts Through Water never comes across as preachy or artificial: it has a story and tells it well...It’s just that its approach is so novel, on every page, that it challenges how we think about reading and writing these kinds of stories.
The Spear Cuts Through Water is beautifully, lovingly crafted...Simon Jimenez’s writing is dense and poetic, suffused with a sun-bleached elegance that is wholly at odds with the nightmarish and gruesome world it depicts...The Spear Cuts Through Water is, to be clear, a very disturbing book...Turning each page is more likely to reveal an abattoir than anything else—albeit one painted in mythic prose...But scattered throughout are moments of peace and realization, brief tableaux in which the love story that was promised peeks out...Despite this being a tale of gods and demons, of psychic tortoises and a Moonless sky, Jimenez never forgets the pair of humans struggling along at its heart.
The dying Moon goddess enlists two young warriors to kill her tyrannical sons and return her bones to the sea...You’re both Jimenez’s reader and 'you,' who’s listening to and remembering your lola (grandmother in Tagalog) tell tales of the Old Country when you are/were a child...In your lonely, adult present, your dreaming spirit watches those tales reenacted by dancers in the Inverted Theater...Yet you’re also living the stories as each character—from bit-player peasant to powerful goddess...You experience Jun’s PTSD, Keema’s disability—never explained, simply a part of him—and all the guilt, anger, pain, fear, joy, desire, and love that make Jimenez’s tapestry so beautiful...It’s both like nothing and everything you’ve ever read: a tale made from the threads that weave the world, and all of us, together...Lyrical, evocative, part poem, part prose—not to be missed by anyone, especially fans of historical fantasy and folktale.
Jimenez crafts an elusive, layered epic that thoroughly rewards its demands...The rapidly shifting perspectives and slippery plot make for a steep barrier to entry, but the beautiful prose and inventive worldbuilding pay dividends...Though this won’t be for everyone, committed readers who enjoy piecing together stories will be blown away.
