The Island of Manticura

Picked up Nuraliah Norasid's 'The Gatekeeper' (2017). A fantasy world 3000 years into the future where humans and non-humans of Cayanese, Feleenese, Scereans, Tuyuns, live together in seeming harmony on the island of Manticura.

Two medusas with writhing snakes for hair- younger sister Ria and older sister Barani, live with their human grandmother in the farthest part of a village in Krow City. Attending a regular school doesn't turn out so well, and the boy Barani likes betrays her, never actually wanting to marry her. Tragedy happens when the grandmother die, and the villagers want to take their land. In confusion and anger, 10-year-old Ria turns the entire village into stone. The sisters flee to an underground city of Nelroote which accepts them, since every resident is a non-human, and after a war and 50 years later, Nelroote and its entrance are shrouded by a cemetery.

Almost predictably, in this time of 50 years later, a human-minora, a Changer (who can shapeshift from his usual human form into his animal form, is hard to kill and has talons for fingernails) model Eedric (Jonathan) Shuen comes along to move Ria's heart. Eedric Shuen's fancy urban cosmopolitan world is completely different from Ria's. Since medusas age differently, now a young lady still, Ria is the gatekeeper of Nelroote. This is more than a romantic development. There's a raid on Nelroote, prisoners taken, and the medusas hunted down, and how a pregnant Ria is captured and used for scientific research, or as a weapon.

I like the ending, in how Ria couldn't escape the demons of her past, and is still very much manipulated by her circumstances and politics. As in all fantasy, there're lessons in there, of races and how people deal with others who are different. But let's not consider that in the context of Singapore or her social construct, or that it's written by a Singaporean, or that it won a local book award. I simply read it as it should be- a debut fantasy novel by a newly minted author.

More prisoners had by then emerged from their cells and all of them were looking at her. There was uncertainty in a lot of their expressions; puzzlement as to what she was doing there. Perhaps a few were eyeing her a little too eagerly—too hungrily—and she knew it was a dangerous place for her, me-tura or not. She cast a final glance up at the window and thought she could make out the forms of people watching her from behind it. 

She did not expect the announcement at all when it blared from an invisible sound system: "Attention, wards. The first to kill the medusa will earn a president's pardon." 

This brought new life to the eyes that now cast themselves upon her, even in those who were resigned to their capital fate. She found herself feeling disgusted by this new sport. She had thought, from the clean streets and the ordered stacks of homes, that this country, this Manticura that others had once fought for, that still more had trusted—that this country would have in it a sense of justice, if not for people like her, then at least for the full-bellied people of their middles and those on top. 

Yet, at the same time, she was not surprised. She understood. She was not to die that day. In that moment, it felt as if she was no more than a severed head stuck upon the shield that the nation-state sought to build. For what? Against who? Ria realised she was no longer in any position to ask.