Ivory's Story by Eugen Bacon

There's a lot to unpack with Eugen Bacon's Ivory's Story, which is due out from NewCon Press which is due for release on December 8, 2020. First off, if you're expecting a narrative that will spoon feed you in stock-standard A-Z fantasy adventure, this is most likely not the novel for you.

Instead what we have is a vibrant, vital collection of threads that is part murder mystery, folk tale and out-and-out wild fantasy that segues into dream-like sequences. There's a bit of a heroine's journey here, as the main character police detective Ivory Tembo embarks on a quest to not only solve a real-life murder with inexplicable violence in Sydney, Australia, but she must unravel her heritage too.

I'm going to sing praises for Bacon's prose, because her style is colourful and lyrical, and lends itself to being read out loud since she carves out some beautiful imagery with her words. And yet by the same measure this does also obscure the meat and bones of the story so that it is at times difficult to immerse in the narrative, which is at times lost in the vast imaginative leaps that she takes. The short sections within each chapter do create a choppiness to the overall flow, but if each of these is savoured for what it is, it is possible to focus on the isolated cells within the whole that stand out.

Bacon draws heavily on various cultural heritages, blending her telling into a style that is flavoured with both Africa and Australia, in a gloriously culturally postmodern mix. If you're looking out for an epic tale that will certainly stand apart from your usual fare, that is written with great passion and feeling, this one may well hit the mark.