“Red City” by Marie Lu

This is the adult debut of YA author Marie Lu, and it’s a good one. Very intense.

This is a Romeo & Juliet re-imagining. Instead of being from rival noble families in Verona, or rival ethnic street gangs in New York, we’ve got rival magical drug cartels.

Alchemy has been around in this universe pretty much forever; many famous people of history were in fact alchemists. Alchemy is the magic of change, and lead into gold is only the beginning of it. Escape imprisonment by turning the walls of your cell into water. Climb a wall by making strategically placed footholds by turning the brick into air. Make dopamine in the bloodstream of someone if you want them to calm down, or adrenaline if you want to rile them up. Turn a piece of nearby wall into a knife if you’re in trouble, or into the steel, lead, and gunpowder of a handgun. Make a steel shield from the material of the floor to block the bullet the other alchemist just shot at you. You get the idea: the limitations are the energy, skill, and creativity of the alchemist (plus conservation of mass). And, crucially, drugs that cannot be made any other way.

Ari and Sam both grew up poor, but very different types of poor: Ari in the slums of Gujarat, Sam as the daughter of her Chinese immigrant single mother. Ari is taken from his family by a man who sees something in him, and brought to Fantasy Los Angeles to train as an alchemist, where he meets and is drawn to Sam. Sam herself finds her way to alchemy when her mother is injured in a gas explosion at the restaurant where she works. She goes to the socialite Diamond Taylor, who has a reputation for helping people, and who also happens to be the head of the Grand Central cartel.

And that’s where we get our conflict. Ari is part of the Lumines cartel, the up-and-coming challengers to the established, powerful Grand Central. Each finds out about the other - both their affiliation and their being alchemists at all - as tensions between the cartels are about to boil over.

Given that this is a book about conflict between supernatural drug cartels, things get brutal. Collaboration with the enemy, even (or perhaps especially) an enemy that was a childhood friend/crush, is not something to be tolerated. Things go in some very dark directions, and no one comes out of this unstained (though the two protagonists both manage - barely - to not take any leaps over the moral event horizon). It was, as I said at the beginning, extremely intense. But I definitely enjoyed the ride, and was satisfied with where the story ends up. 

That being said, I saw on Goodreads this is listed as the first in a series. I’m not certain I’m interested in reading a sequel; there’s certainly room for one, and things were left somewhat open ended, but I found it satisfying. I might prefer to let my own imagination fill in the events that come after the close. TBD.

Trigger warnings: Tons of violence; child abuse, both physical and emotional; some body horror; sex that borders on coercive.