Aneiress Torian lives a tragically normal life. Black and gay, both his fellow high school students and his own family constantly remind him that he is not like the majority-white population; fundamentally set apart, he must meet impossibly-high standards to receive less recognition than his most mediocre peers. But Aneiress is only alienated further when a talking cat named Dilemma arrives and insists that he’s the reincarnation of an ancient divine – and he has a responsibility to defeat the supernatural evil which has come to overturn his life.
ATHENS OPHELIA THE PARTITIONER is immediately gripping. Told in the first person by a young, black, queer voice, it paints a damning picture of American social life – particularly in the context of high school, where cliques baldly organize by race and class, and colorism stratifies relationships. Sometimes these meditations are surprisingly funny: reflecting on some nugget of wisdom, Aneiress assumes it’s from either the Bible or a Tyler Perry movie, all the same when you’re black and living in the Bible Belt. At others it’s both funny and sad: every time a queer black person is killed in town, his high school peers all assume it was him. These meditations can also be pure and bitter, in some of the darkest and most powerful moments. The main plot – reincarnation, destiny, magical powers, supernatural forces – is fairly conventional, but the meat of the text is its perspectival discussion of race, and that much lands powerfully.
Unfortunately, the text itself is deeply marred by typographic and grammatical errors. Although there are definite issues with sentence construction and consistent punctuation, the majority of the problems are homophonic. The prose is actually quite confident, with a clear sense of diction and tone, but this confidence is undercut by the frequent misuse of words. A particularly brutal dressing-down of a student is described as a court-martial, but spelled “court marshal;” a mysterious smirk is not a Cheshire-cat smile but a “Chester cat smile;” high school has not a hierarchy but a “high archery.” The result is simply frustrating; the text has a clear, sophisticated conceptual vocabulary, but its power is dissipated in easily-resolved copyedits. Even without cleaning up some of the sentence structure, correcting spelling and standardizing punctuation would make ATHENS OPHELIA a more compelling read.
Although boldly-imagined and lyrically-narrated, ATHENS OPHELIA’s thin plotting and persistent typographic errors frustrate its ability to grab and hold a reader.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader