Sigils: White Hat Dresden

   Hey look, it’s urban fantasy that I actually enjoyed. Notable, so I suppose I should review it.
   Upon the mighty river of books known as Amazon, innumerable tributaries great and small feed its vast flow to the sea. We call them “genres”, and those are how poor befuddled customers actually find their preferred types of books within the vast churn. Fiction-side, the main feeders have names like “Romance”, “Romantasy”, “YA”, and “LitRPG”, where demand is so vast and so indiscriminate that even the huge organic supply will never meet it; those are genres where AI will be used most heavily to pump out banal tripe by the bucket to satiate the hungry. On the other hand, there are tiny subgenres so specific that only a few dozen books are ever written to compete for two diehard readers and mom’s bridge club, things like “Dieselpunk” and “Historical Fiction” and “Epic Fantasy”. In between those extremes we have things like “cozy fantasy”, “shifter fiction”, “Mil SF”, and, of course, urban fantasy.
   Genre labels are sloppy things, of course. Urban fantasy doesn’t really mean fantasy that takes place in a city; one of the giants of the genre (non-smut edition) is Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International, which is all about fighting monsters in every possible terrain, with the eponymous company based out of rural Alabama. The true 800lb gorilla of the genre, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, do take place in a city, Chicago, but that’s because the series began in a noir detective frame, so of course it required the Windy City as its base. Urban fantasy mostly just means “it’s the present day but magic and monsters are real”. This has several advantages in terms of giving the reader immediate points of reference, with several disadvantages summed up in the classic question “would someone with a 12-gauge, a smartphone, and a Honda Accord be able to overcome this threat?” It used to also have a problem with the late-20th-century belief that everything supernatural had always been driven away forever by the light of science, but here in AD 2025 that view seems almost quaint. Everyone knows magic and monsters are real, we just want them to be understandable and defeatable.
   In Sam Robb’s Sigils, we are in the midsized urban milieu of Pittsburg, where magic is unleashed in the young protagonist’s life by the classic “oopsie, opened up a portal to the Fairy Realm”. Pretty soon we’re learning the rules of the supernatural, being hunted by a nightmare creature, and getting inducted into secret conspiracies. All well done, but what surprised me was how much I enjoyed the story of 18-year-old James’s “real world” life.
   It’s…really sweet. James is a senior in high school, lonely and shy, who wants to get into art school. He’s talented but lacks the funds to get into any art program worth a darn; realistic readers like myself will recognize the goal of “get into art school” isn’t typically a path that leads to happy life outcomes even if magic scholarship dollars do materialize, but it is to the writer’s credit that I cared about his thwarted dreams even though they’re not practical in the real world. This is fantasy, after all.
   Young adult, or “YA” is usually about a young female protagonist optimized for reader self-insert, heavy romantic focus, and more often than not, simply smut. That’s a pity because honestly Sigils is what Young Adult should mean. It’s a story about a young, well, adult, sympathetic to his concerns, closely invested in his story but not assuming we’re meant to be inserting ourselves into his head. Rather, the effect for this particular reader over two decades older than him is one of memory. I remember what it was like to be a high school senior, although my own experiences were a million years different from his. The passions, the sorrows, the intense seriousness and goodness of a young man who means well but lacks focus…we all knew this guy.
   The young protagonist has a good relationship with his mother, will wonders never cease. His teachers are, if not particularly helpful, at least professional and non-hostile. He encounters librarians, coffee baristas, art agents, and even Marine Corps recruiters who act like humans, warm and real. There’s a romantic subplot that might have some notes of manic pixie dream girl, but considering the girl is a pixie from a dream realm (maybe), well, that makes sense. This too is realistic to the experience of a certain type of chaste and goodly young man who falls hard for a girl. All of this wholesomeness can work because this is a fantasy story in the classic sense, with a genuine dragon to slay. There are Dresden Files hints here and there, but you have a white knight here, not a grey noir hero. His chief sin is that he is a tagger, which, while illegal, probably ranks somewhere below jaywalking in the moral universe of crime.
   I won’t spoil the book, but there is a satisfying confrontation with evil at the end. I mentioned it with other reviews of this publisher’s books, but the black-and-white art inside at chapter breaks really does add a lot to the overall experience, not nearly at graphic novel levels of illustration but about at the same density of the Hardy Boys books back in the day. Not only did I enjoy the novel, but it’s squeaky-clean with regard to language and sexual content; our 13-year-old and (notably, precocious) 11-year-old are also permitted to read it. (Parental note: Some definite intensity with monsters, your milage may vary) Like all the best fantasy, its appeal is ageless. Worth checking out, for anyone who enjoys fantasy in general.
   Found here, well worth your time. I really should look into setting up affiliate links one of these days...