The Black Tides of Heaven

This was a pretty fun, wuxia-inspired fantasy world about carving out a destiny for yourself. I picked up this book because I'd like to support more LGBTQ+ authors from Singapore, and I'm very happy to find that this is a series that I'd definitely want to read more of in the future.

Mokoya and Akeha are twins born to the cruel, ruthless Protector, leader of the Protectorate. They grow up discovering that they each have their own talents, though it is Mokoya's gift of prophetic dreams that catches their mother's attention. No longer willing to be a part of their mother's machinations, Akeha strikes out on his own, aligning himself with the Machinists, the rebels fighting against the Protectorate, and realises that he can swim against the black tides of heaven.

This book is largely told from Akeha's perspective and is very much a coming-of-age story. In this world, all children are gender-neutral until they are old enough to be “confirmed”, that is, choose their gender identity. When Mokoya eventually decides to be confirmed as a woman, Akeha feels a sense of loss and struggles with their own gender identity until they eventually decide to be confirmed as a man. I suspect that some of the struggles that Akeha goes through might also have been a bit of an authorial self-insert, given that they are queer and non-binary in a society which is largely ignorant of such movements.

Then there's also the question of how far one should go to carve out an identity and a path for oneself, even when one is bound so intimately with a twin who is more like a soulmate. Akeha is always treated as the spare, the one who isn't even a disappointment because his mother does not have any expectations of him at all. This might be any journey of self-growth but I read in this specifically the journey of a LGBTQ+ person trying to break away from the status quo and deciding to go against the grain.

Overall, definitely a series I'd like to continue and would recommend to anyone looking for wuxia fantasy or just simply a bildungsroman with a gender-fluid protagonist.