The Spear Cuts Through Water

The Spear Cuts Through Water is a fantasy story: two boys -- one an outcast, the other of royal blood -- are on the run, escorting the nearly deceased body of a goddess trying to escape her husband, a despotic Emperor, and their monstrous sons, the Three Terrors.

The biggest delight of reading Spear was the wonder Jimenez offers. His worldbuilding and the details of the story offered a fairly consistent stream of the new -- like psychic tortoises being used as telecommunication, just to name one thing. Not that Jimenez veers into Weird territory: there is no weirdness or otherness just for the sake of it in this novel.

The result is a story that delivers the unexpected and fantastic regularly, surprising the reader with things they never read about before, but still in a consistent, solid secondary world. For me, reading fantasy is generally about that: invoking awe and escapism through the power of an author's imagination. Jimenez also describes a fair amount of violence and action. As such, for me this was a book about sets and scenes, and Jimenez excels at it.

There is another layer to this book, a meta one. The story is partially told in the second person (a you that's a descendant of one of the characters), and some of the story is told to him by his grandmother, and he also sees big parts of the story performed as a dance in some kind of dream theater. That latter mode is the bulk of the novel, and as such Spear mostly reads as a regular 3rd person narrator.

Much is made of this formal structure in other reviews -- some even calling the book an experimental triumph. I don't fully agree.

It's clear some readers are confused or put off by the formal choices Jimenez made, judging by some Goodreads reviews -- mind you, the book still has an excellent rating. Others, like Jake Casella Brookings in the Chicago Review of Books go full on with their praise.

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