Book Review

Deal with the Devil by Kit Rocha

Content warning: It’s important to note that the speculative history the book is based on is very very plausible, some already happening in our world, things like energy wars, crumbling infrastructure, and inept government officials cutting off essential resources and services so they can continue grabbing at more power. There’s also mentions and descriptions of torture in the book. Take stock of your mental and emotional bandwidth before diving in if any of these subjects would stress you out.

If you love librarians, badasses, competence porn, post-apocalyptic road trips, hot sex, and can suspend some disbelief on some heavier issues (like race and trauma), then you’ll really enjoy Deal with the Devil. This is the first book in the Mercenary Librarians series, and it takes place in a different corner of the same world established in the Beyond series. The world as we know it has been gone for decades, ruined by wars fought over energy, rotting in decaying infrastructure, and finally offed by an unexpected solar flare, known as the Flares. All levels of government in what had been the United States splintered and seem to have dissolved into nothing. At least, that’s true for many cities and towns, including Atlanta.

Atlanta is also where Nina, Maya, and Dani run a community centre/library for their neighbourhood. They’ve been trying to wrangle enough money to purchase much-needed resources so people don’t freeze to death during winter, plus a whole host of other things they need to serve their community effectively as a library, resource hub, and shelter. TechCorps has become the defacto law and law enforcement in Atlanta, but they’re more interested in expanding their power than in upkeep of infrastructure and seeing to the needs of communities.

Knox, Rafe, Conall, and Gray, otherwise known as the Silver Devils, have been TechCorps bully boys for years, and have now cut themselves loose, with one problem. The implants TechCorps gave them to make them supersoldiers will degrade without constant maintenance. Left alone long enough, they will die. The biohacker they rely on to keep them alive has been kidnapped by a mysterious person, whose only demand in exchange for returning the only person they know who can save them is to deliver Nina to them. Complicating matters: Knox saw first hand that Nina is a motherfucking tank and is liable to bust out of any trunk they might try to tuck her in and proceed to beat them with it.

Worried for their biohacker and themselves, the Silver Devils ultimately resolve and succeed in tricking Nina and Co. to go on a wild goose chase with them in search for a fabled cache of books and knowledge preserved from pre-Flare days. Finding this cache means more books for the girls’ community as well as a bucket load of cash to help them achieve their goals. Thus they put the pedal to the metal on their highway to hell.

Readers who are familiar with the Beyond series will recognize that Mercenary Librarians is set in the same speculative future of America, but in another corner where things have developed slightly differently. It’s a lot of fun to see how another place developed after the same axis shifting event, but not necessary at all to have a blast with this book. The places Nina, Knox, and company travel through are ghost towns, or smaller settlements that still use the name of the town or city from before the Flares hit, like Atlanta has. It quickly becomes clear much of the old systemic power structures that led to this post-apocalyptic landscape, most notably capitalism and sexism, persist still.

However, it seems racism and homophobia have been eradicated. There was no explanation of any kind given as to what led to racism and homophobia evaporating where capitalism and sexism didn’t. As much as I appreciated an adventure in a world where race apparently defines nothing and people’s sexual orientation only matters as much as who they’d find attractive, this set-up makes no sense to me. Racism is in an inextricable part of capitalism, and homophobia is firmly entrenched in much of the world’s social fabric, ever since European countries’ gender binary was imposed on everywhere they could colonize.

Throughout history, and even now during the global pandemic, we see how marginalized communities face even more overt discrimination and even violence during times of great strife and unrest. For racism and homophobia to seemingly have collapsed in on themselves during an apocalypse with only wisps of their shadows lurking about in less than a century is the kind of impossible that jars me out of the story. There isn’t enough in the book to explain how the world came to be shaped as it was in this regard, and I hope that this is explored more deeply in the rest of this series.

Other bits of world building also confused me, such as production and manufacturing infrastructure. It sounded like thieving was a huge part of the economy, though people found work where they could. In a haunting scene where Knox found a pair of pretty but impractical sandals for little girls in a warehouse, he thinks about how it’s a relic from a softer time that didn’t have to worry about rusty nails. Yet later in the book, Maya thinks about how she used to have access to the latest fashions as a cosetted pet of TechCorps. Does Atlanta have manufacturing ability at all? If they do, who controls it? How are desires manufactured among the rich? Are there advertisements? If there are, who makes these advertisements, and who do they answer to? As small as these discrepancies are, they made it difficult for me to see and understand how this spot in the world functions.

Details of world building aside, there is so much I love about this book. Its fierce emotional intelligence meant all the characters were messy, fallible people instead of plot paddles. Relationships of all kinds, friendship, family, romantic, are all fleshed out with loving detail that makes clear these connections are all equally valuable. I was able to appreciate the angst of the hard conversations they had to have, because the honesty of the story had earned every drop of heartache it wanted to squeeze from me.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

“No,” he repeated firmly. “You don’t get to make this call. Not this time, and not like this.”

Genuine hurt tightened Knox’s eyes. “So you don’t trust me to put my squad first anymore?”

The truth was even more damning, and it would hurt far worse. “There is no squad, Knox, and you’re not our captain. Not anymore. We left, remember? The Silver Devils are gone.”

“I have to be your captain,” Knox ground out. “I have to get you out. You’re not out until you can walk away free and clear.”

“Well, I didn’t agree to that. Pretty sure Rafe and Con didn’t, either.” Gray clasped Knox’s shoulder until the other man looked at him. “I’ll still follow you – as your friend. But not if you’re making bad calls. And this is a bad call.”

The heavier conversations happen later in the book, largely after the Dark Moment, but even here, the characters struggle, they support one another, and they work through their problems and improve.

The pace of the book was excellent. When Nina counted back the days and realized only eleven had passed, I also felt the rush of realizing so much had happened in so little time. Time is also different for Nina compared to Knox. After their falling out, Nina got more time to focus on decompressing and processing what happened. Knox had more time to grapple with his guilt and priorities, but had to bend the lion’s share of his energy and thoughts to surviving and ensuring the Silver Devil’s also survived.

To me, the two major themes are the question of how much agency is possible when you’re desperately living under an unjust system, and how hope is both an action and spirit to be nurtured. Throughout the book, the merry band of death defying reapers are constantly dealing with people trying to kill them for one reason or the other. As I sat in Nina and Knox’s heads, I saw how they cope with killing people. Knox largely drowns in guilt and frustration when he’s not compartmentalizing or lust-pining after Nina. Nina often declares to herself that, “They made their choice,” when they chose to hurt others or target her and her people.

It’s not clear whether the book was agreeing that once someone crosses a line, they must be killed, or if ambivalence is how Nina and the main cast cope when they kill people. Desperation is the breeding ground of monsters, and it feels simplistic to declare raiders and muggers ‘made their choice’ when Nina is standing right next to the Silver Devils, who used to actively uphold communities’ poverty and exploitation. They knew perfectly well that’s what they were doing when they did it, but did it anyway. Yet I got to know them, their stories, and came to root for them. It brings up the question of justice as punishment vs justice as reparations. It’s a very complex question with a lot to unpack, and I hope the rest of the series fleshes out the complexity of choice, responsibility, accountability, and reparations under the duress of desperation.

How hope was explored in the book simultaneously filled me with glee and made me weep. Nina, blessed with immense capabilities and support, lives her best life as archivist, community organizer, and part time superhero. If there are bad guys that need dealing with, she’s comfortable dealing with them. If there are fishy situations with potential rewards, she’s comfortable taking a risk, because she’s well aware that in most situations, she and her girls are easily the scariest shark in the tank. Nina is able to be hopeful for the future because she has such a wealth of ability, she’s able to make the majority of her wants a reality. Rarely are her values in conflict with her safety and survival. The Dark Moment shakes her faith in people and in hope, because it was one of the few times in her life when her abilities weren’t enough to prevent something bad from happening, and the first time when her trust was betrayed in such a thorough and intimate way.

Nina’s competence combined with her values means that the people around her are often inspired by her, their capacity to hope nurtured. When she’s told this, instead of feeling obliged to be everyone’s manic pixie dream girl, she demands that they nurture her hope, too. She asks them to step up and show her good things are possible by helping her make them happen. This is probably my favourite part of the book. Hope isn’t a blind faith that we ought to spew out relentlessly, but a part of our souls that needs to be nurtured by ourselves and our people. Everyone needs support. Nina recognized when she did and asked for the help she needed to both achieve what she wants and replenish herself. This is such an important thing to internalize, especially for women!!! Our emotional muscles need fuel, and it’s wrong to expect us to carry everyone’s distress and prop up their motivations as a matter of course.

(My second favourite is the very fact that three badass women banded together to serve their community by providing a library. Obviously.)

Despite my confusion regarding some of the worldbuilding, the characters and their relationships are developed beautifully, and the entire story thrummed with the sort of vitality that you can only get from a post-apocalyptic road trip with suped-up BAMFs. I can’t rave enough about the emotional literacy this book is built on, which I find incredibly catnippy. Deal with the Devil is a strong start to a series, and I’m very excited to see how the rest of the series unfolds.

Oh, and:

What??? You were hearing it in your head too!!!

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Deal with the Devil by Kit Rocha

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  1. Judit says:

    Thanks for the review Sneezy! I struggle with romances that are built on trickery. Does the reason for the road trip come out, and if so, how soon into the relationship development?

  2. Ellie says:

    Atlanta has freezing temps after solar flares and another 80 years of global warming?

  3. chacha1 says:

    I like competence porn and badass women as much as the next girl, but I lived in Atlanta for seven years (in the state of Georgia for 22, inclusive). The whole Magically There’s No Racism or Homophobia thing would take this from ‘near-future thriller’ to ‘complete fantasy’ in about a second.

    Heck, I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 25 years now and there’s plenty of racism and homophobia here, despite it being a much less unwelcoming place to be non-white and non-straight. A believable near-future setting, *especially* one where resources are a) scarce b) controlled by corporate cabals, needs to account for the fact that minorities ALWAYS serve as the scapegoats.

  4. Darlynne says:

    I mentioned in another post my disappointment at the lack of mercenary librarians. Perhaps if I’d read other books set in this future, I’d have had a better idea of what to expect and not held so fiercely to the idea of a grand library with warrior librarians. A. J. Hackwith’s THE LIBRARY OF THE UNWRITTEN comes to mind, as does The Great Library series to a certain extent.

    Having said that, Sneezy’s review is a excellent example of how the book works in other ways and for other readers. The activism and competence of all the women is great and there’s real emotional work for both teams. I would probably read another book in this series, with different expectations.

  5. de Pizan says:

    Darlynne, Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey and the manga Read or Die feature warrior librarians. And then not librarian, but Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace is another one.

  6. seantheaussie says:

    Excellent book. I was pissed when I discovered that it had just come out so I would have to wait for the sequel.

  7. Caroline says:

    Yeah, I was concerned by the handwaved-away on the racism as well. I’m from Atlanta and we have some stuff other than racism (the food is good, the music is great!) but whenever I’m out and about and I see something really effed up like a poorly designed intersection or baby formula in locked cases, I’ll be like “What the . . . oh, racism.” It’s in the fabric and history and current times. I’d get pulled out of the story thinking, “No way the rich people are going to let clean water to the Westside of town.”
    I enjoyed it overall, though. And I’m always excited when Atlanta is a book’s setting. Except you,”A Man In Full,” Get on outta here!

  8. Quizer says:

    I found the pace of the book disappointing. I was drawn in by the promise of the team-up between the two groups, but then the story spent an excruciatingly long time building towards the big reveal where Nina learns that Knox hired the girls under false pretenses. With all the slow, fragile buildup of trust and the hormones leading to sex leading to actually kind of opening up to one another, and the fact that the main characters end up working so well as a team despite everything that goes unsaid between them, I was really hoping to have the expectation that the big reveal was going to be a huge betrayal for Nina be subverted.

    But no, despite the situation being obviously orchestrated by a manipulative third party, the book plays it absolutely straight and milks it for maximum drama and angst, with Nina feeling super betrayed and hurt and deciding she can’t be with Knox after that. Obviously that’s not going to stick, but I’m still pissed at having my time wasted and my emotions jerked about in such a ham-fisted manner.

    After all the hints Knox dropped and how much he tormented himself even while visible to and in conversation with Nina, I’m shocked and dismayed she didn’t see the “betrayal” coming and hadn’t already made her peace with it by the time they got to talking about it. Honestly, I expected better after all that came before. I enjoyed the worldbuilding and how the two teams worked together and slowly bonded, but as far as the romance angle goes, that scene turned the whole book into a big FAIL for me. If you hate “failure to communicate” and betrayal plots, stay away from this one.

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