His father locked eyes with him and put down his mug. His face was expressionless. “I thought I told you to leave.”

“Father,” Davis said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “I’m a Shifter now.”

His father’s face didn’t change. “And who do you think you got those abilities from?”

Even shapeshifters, as it turns out, are not immune from generational trauma. Of Mountains and Seas is a multigenerational, multi-PoV urban fantasy told over a span of sixty-five years, with enough twists and turns and surprising revelations to keep the audience turning pages until the end. Beginning in 1935 with a Shifter politician and his “Static” (incapable of shapeshifting) son, Of Mountains and Seas branches out from there across several different points in time, following a half dozen characters across five points in time leading up to the climactic events in the year 2000, when decades of conspiring, scheming, and grudges collide all at once.

The multiple timelines are my favourite part of this book. Emily Renk Hawthorne has done a fantastic job of structuring this book that spans most of the twentieth century in such a way that it’s very easy to follow and very easy to keep reading. Through the eyes of different characters, we see the evolution of Shifter/Static relations in America (or at least in this region of California—it was not clear to me in general if the policies we see being put in place here are meant to be nationwide or just in this one community) as the topic of “integration” gets more and more contentious and the anti-integration politicians grow in power, creating fractures in the Shifter community and placing its members in danger.

I thought that the structure of the novel was really well done, and the characters all felt very distinct and the pacing is really rapid. I will say that if it weren’t for the timestamps at the beginning of every chapter I’m not sure I’d have realized when different parts of the book were set; while we get a lot of organic information in the story about the politics, there’s very little contextual information in how the characters act, dress or interact with their world to tell us what time period they live in, or where they live. For me, when a book is set in the modern, real world, I do think it’s important to know where it’s happening, and it wasn’t until chapter six that we’re told that the fictional town of Yuras is in California. This information doesn’t make or break the plot, but I did spend the first part of the book being very unsure where we were.

The reason why this felt important to know was that the characters are all ethnically Chinese (with some being mixed-race), and it’s clear that they’re not in China, so I wanted to know where they were because it’s very obvious that shapeshifting in Of Mountains and Seas (which share its title with the Chinese classic mythic geography compendium/bestiary) is not just a fantasy magic power, but a symbol of immigrant experiences with otherness. The tension of wanting to integrate into mainstream American culture versus wanting to maintain one’s own original culture is very felt throughout this book and is well done in my opinion (though I am white, so I would be very curious to know the perspective of someone in the Chinese diaspora on this book). The book’s other main social critique of misogyny, in its male villain who is going around stealing powers and longevity from other characters, most of whom are women, is similarly very clear and very well handled.

As I mentioned above, I often felt like there wasn’t enough context for what was going on in the environment, and for me that extended often to the characters’ feelings and thoughts. Lots of moments pass where someone learns really important or perspective-altering information, and most of their feelings that we get come through in their dialogue rather than narration showing how they actually feel, which left me feeling like they didn’t feel much. I felt really distant from a lot of the characters as a result, and it made some of them feel less robust than they are. Also distancing me from the characters was the narrative choice not to refer to certain characters by name, which I pinged pretty quickly as a trick to disguise the fact that they show up in other timelines and Hawthorne wanting it to be a dramatic reveal, but to me it felt artificial and distracting. I do like getting to see the characters across multiple timelines, and figuring out how they’re all related to each other, but there weren’t many points in the book where I felt rewarded for having to wait to get basic information about the characters.

One final observation is that Hawthorne’s avoidance of the past perfect tense strikes me as a problem in this book; when you’ve got multiple timelines and narrators referencing events that happened at various points in time throughout, everything being in the simple past really creates a lot of confusion about when events happened that didn’t need to be there.

Of Mountains and Seas is a strong YA urban fantasy that will have a lot of appeal, not just among racialized and othered groups but for anyone who’s interested in complex families, generational trauma, political urban fantasy or Chinese mythology. It has a sequel coming out in two weeks as well, so now is the time to get reading!