[Book Review] Fighting Nightmares in Wonderland: A Blade So Black Review

“What if Buffy went down the hole to Wonderland instead of Alice? What if she was a Bi Black girl from Atlanta?”

After reading these two sentences on a Twitter thread highlighting Black young adult authors, I immediately hopped onto my public library’s e-book rental platform and placed myself in line to check out A Blade So Black from L.L. McKinney. After a short 3 weeks I finally got my copy, and then proceeded to read through it in about 2 days. Honestly, my sleep schedule got so messed up because I couldn’t put it down that it might have been longer than two days. Or shorter. I don’t know.

But what I do know is that this book is everything I wanted it to be and more.

The story opens with Alice Kingston, your average 17-year-old girl in high school. She hangs out with her two best friends, previously loved to cosplay all the time, and has a semi-strained relationship with her mother due, in part, to her father’s recent passing. The only difference between Alice and most other girls her age is that in her free time, she fights and kills the living embodiment of bad dreams known as Nightmares.

These Nightmares are bad dreams that have taken a physical form and whose sole goal is to hurt people. Only Alice, and a select few other humans, can destroy these Nightmares permanently and save the world from their influence. With the training of her mentor, Addison Hatta, Alice is able to cross over into Wonderland and kill the creatures before they get into our world. This all changes though when Alice is attacked on her way back home by someone calling himself the Black Knight.

He’s creepy, flirty, and can make and control Nightmares with the help of his Vorpal Blade. After the Black Knight leaves Alice wounded as a message to Hatta, she is barely able to make it home before passing out. When she wakes up, Hatta is worried and seems to be not telling Alice everything she needs to know. As Alice realizes that she won’t get any help from her mentor, she decides to take care of everything herself. Now all she has to do is find a way to keep her loved ones safe, keep her mom in the dark about her side-gig fighting monsters, and still find time to figure out what exactly the Black Knight wants and how Hatta is caught up in all of this.

This is the barest bones of a summary I could give without spoiling anything, and usually I’m the queen of spoiling stuff so this took me a few days alone to write without spilling everything out. So, before we go any further, I want you to picture that Bill Hader/Stefon meme from SNL when I say this:

A Blade So Black has it all! Epic battles, spooky monsters, heroic lady knights in beautiful but practical armor, people of various skin tones and sexual orientations, and excellent writing. It’s a quick read that’s action packed, filled with realistic characters. Most importantly, it’s a lot of fun. That’s something we need, especially right now, and if we can do it while supporting interesting stories with diverse casts of characters written by BIPOC authors, then that’s an added bonus.

First and foremost, the hallmark of any good story is how your audience can relate to characters even if they have virtually nothing in common. In A Blade So Black, Alice tries to be a good friend, a good daughter, and a good monster killer all at the same time. Most everyone can relate to the first two, but it’s certain moments that really put us in Alice’s shoes that shine the most. It’s Alice’s micro-crushes whenever a person (regardless of gender) is nice or flirty with her. Or dealing with a mother who just doesn’t understand what Alice is going through. A best friend who gets mad whenever Alice has to flake out to save the world.

It’s these moments that you can relate to your own life. The kind that will have you remembering, “Ah yes... I too was going through it when my high school BFF called me an asshole because I wasn’t there for them cause I was dealing with something more important” or, “hmm, I was also a queer teen who also had crushes on anyone who was nice.” These little human pieces, interwoven with fantastical moments of traveling through magical lands and fighting monsters, stand out and help make sure that anyone can relate to Alice’s struggles.

Beyond a lead character that feels like a real person, something that stood out to me was the relationship between Alice and her mother. It’s written in such an authentic and sincere way that a few particularly touching moments left me tearing up. We get little snippets throughout the book that lead me to think that before Alice’s father’s death, she was closer to him than her mother. With his passing though, Alice feels like she was alone as her mother tried to cope by herself for a while with the loss of her husband. But when the book picks up, a young Black girl has just been killed by the police in Alice’s community. This act of violence against a girl who was like Alice has her mother worried and on Alice’s case more than ever.

She’s scared for her daughter, and so when she grounds her for not answering her calls, or coming home late, you can’t really be mad at her like Alice is. She wants to protect her child, and if that means keeping her grounded in her room until she’s 18, then that’s what she’ll do. We as the reader know that Alice is  trying to save the world, and everyone she loves, but her mother doesn’t. It makes it that more impactful when they actually do talk and share their feelings with one another.

Now let’s get to the spookiness: I pitched this to Gayly Dreadful, not just for the queer content but also because of the horror elements. I want to say this though, don’t go into this novel thinking it’s going to be fright-city, filled to the brim with terror. A Blade So Black is first and foremost a YA urban fantasy novel with some horrific moments. The Nightmares are straight up body horror abominations, each one a little different than the rest, and the descriptions of the monsters are creepy as hell to imagine. You cna’t help but tense up when Alice and her colleagues battle the demonic creatures.

Miss McKinney does not give a single damn about your feelings and isn’t afraid to hurt or even kill characters you like, but not in a gratuitous way or anything like how people are pissed off with certain shows when they kill off fan favorite characters. It’s one of those things where you read along and she has you caring about all these fictional people, showing that even the characters you think are one dimensional are shown to be more than that. It’s due to her writing that when the characters are scared or they’re in peril, you get worried and scared right there along with. You hope that they’re going to be okay, but you know that at any time something could happen and take one of them out.

A Blade So Black is a great book, and I think that if you made it this far into my review and you’ve enjoyed what I’ve said, go ahead and loan it and the sequel (A Dream So Dark) from your library or buy it from your local bookstore. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to want to start the next book immediately. Without getting into spoilers, the climax and epilogue are dramatic, gut wrenching, and everything a well written final act is supposed to be.

While at a certain point things felt like they were going too fast leading up to the epilogue, I’d rather a book leave me wanting more than have me checking every few pages to see how much longer until I was done with it. L.L. McKinney has me hooked, and I’m glad I enjoyed my visit to a Wonderland that’s landscapes are as beautiful and diverse as it’s people.

I hope you will, too.