The Doors You Mark Are Your Own

Elliott and Clement waste no time obfuscating the ownership of this novel: the cover itself names them as translators and attributes authorship to the fictional Aleksandr Tuvim, a character assigned to write the story of Nikolas Kovalski. The omniscience afforded to Tuvim via access to key characters' journals makes it easy to forget that he only tells us what he believes we need—and his occasional first-person commentary makes us question what is true in his/their stories. In these moments of reflection, the realization that of at least a half-dozen main narrators, none is a woman diminishes the impact of the multiple-narrator device, and the voices sound too similar in retrospect. The fantasy readers and lovers of worldbuilding epic series can find better gender balance in multiple-viewpoint stories such as Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana or George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series.