The Pomegranate Gate

[psocoptera]

The Pomegranate Gate, Ariel Kaplan, 2023 fantasy novel. It's the Inquisition and the Jews are getting expelled from (mildly-fantasy) Spain, but two young adults get entangled with the (definitely-fantasy) parallel magical universe and their own magical heritage. I felt like this had a lot of potential, and overall I did like it and hope to read the rest of the trilogy, but it also had a number of problems which I am now going to complain about as is my way. It was really long and slow, and was the kind of plot that is more driven by the slow reveal of epic backstory than a sense of forward momentum, only I felt like I was having a lot of trouble even connecting that, like, characters A and B in one POV were the same people as characters C and D in another POV, so I'm not sure if I figured out that they were the same people at the right time or really belatedly or what. And there were sometimes reveals that, like, F was actually G! Only I had no idea why that mattered. Or, there's a couple of macguffins, only it took most of the book to even figure out what they were or why anyone cared, and then, like, now someone we've never heard of has one of them, what am I even supposed to make of this? I don't know. There was maybe something interesting going on with the full-magic people doing magic intuitively, but part-human magic users needing to use words and breath and writing (which felt relevant to it being a specifically Jewish fantasy) and I wanted to go back and reread some bits related to that but my ebook expired. In other ways, the magic-item and magic-court-intrigue parts felt like a weird fit with the moments of real Sephardic history where the human Jewish characters were trying to figure out where they could go, making choices about seizing possible chances for safety vs trying to reunite with loved ones, and seeing their homes and possessions taken from them. Like, that stuff all had some real weight, and then you're back to the magic people, who I think Kaplan cared a lot more about than I did. I did like that there were a couple of older women with some interesting complexity of character and interesting conflict between them; I suspect my feelings about the next book may depend a lot on how much of them we get, and how much the plot is able to take off now that the whole stage is set.