There are a set of questions that students often ask me. How long does this paper need to be? How many sources do I need? What’s a good length for a paragraph? After the first couple of years of college, professors tend to take off the training wheels and just give students a target range to aim for. I can’t do much better than to tell students “as many sources and as many pages as you need to get your point across.” It’s an aggravating response because, without experience, it’s hard to know how to pace yourself. Authors, of course, don’t even have target ranges to aim for. The divisions between novel, novella, and short story are notoriously subjective. The reason I bring all this up is because I think Naseem Jamnia shorted themselves with The Bruising of Qilwa. They have invented such a fascinating world and such interesting characters that I was left wanting a lot more after a scant 176 pages.
Due to supernatural and political violence, the city-state of Qilwa has become the uneasy home of thousands of refugees. Firuz-e Jafari and their family are among them. Firuz is a half-trained blood adept (a magically-powered physician) who manages to support their family by finding work at the last independent clinic in the city. All of the others are under orders from the city government and medical academy to extract payment from patients and, even worse, turn away refugees. From the perspective of Firuz and their boss, Kofi, this is not only inhumane but also incredibly stupid because there is a plague making its way through the population.
For most of The Bruising of Qilwa, Firuz keeps their light under a bushel. Firuz has the ability to use their blood and the blood of patients to diagnose and heal. But blood adepts are poorly understood in the city and, like so many other poorly understood things, they are feared. Not only does it mean that they have to do their job with a metaphorical hand tied behind their back, it also means that they can’t openly research how to help their brother align his body with his gender identity. Interestingly, while Firuz has to hide their magical abilities, Qilwans are so accepting of transgender and nonbinary identities that the only hiccups Firuz and her brother seem to experience are linguistic ones as the characters share their preferred pronouns. No one bats an eye at LGBTQ+ relationships. I love this trend in fantasy and science fiction literature.
My major complaint about this engrossing story is that it’s much too short. Firuz and their family’s past hints at a fascinating history, one that I very much want to know more about. I also wanted to know more about, well, everything. How did Qilwa, Dilmun, and other countries come to be? What does the larger world look like? More specifically, why does the medical academy have so much power in Qilwa? Why is the government so involved in the running of Kofi and Firuz’s clinic? How does blood magic work and what can it do? I really enjoyed the touches of Zoroastrianism and other real-world faiths and cultures that appears in The Bruising of Qilwa. I just wanted a lot more of it. At not even 200 pages, this book is shockingly short. I really hope Jamnia picks up their keyboard and gives us more of this world. They could have easily taken a couple hundred more pages for their assignment of telling Firuz et al.’s story.