This month, journalist and public intellectual Stan Grant published his fifth book, The Queen is Dead. And last week, he abruptly stepped away from his career in the public realm, citing toxic racism enabled by social media, and betrayal on the part of his employer, the ABC. Raven is not too happy to be starting her life off married to the very popular Greg. Raven would like to go to Bloodshed Academy herself but has been told all her life that only alphas are allowed in and females can not be an alpha. Raven’s boyfriend Greg is awaiting an invitation to the very elite Bloodshed Academy. The recruiter is expected to show up at the school the next day. Greg being the self center person that he is so excited about going to the academy. And it came to pass that the Lamanites came with their thousands; and they came into the land of aAntionum, which is the land of the Zoramites; and a man by the name of bZerahemnah was their leader.

Grant reminds us that people of colour now dominate the globe. Race, as we now know, is a flexible and slippery made-up idea, changing opportunistically to include and exclude groups, to dominate and possess. Gary Younge is a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and author of Another Day in the Death of America. And the Nephites would not suffer that they should be destroyed; therefore they gave them lands for their inheritance. In this work and in others, exploration of the world of ideas to understand the past and future sits alongside accounts of the everyday; of the always place-based realities of Aboriginal accounts of self. And Moroni took all the command, and the government of their wars. And he was only twenty and five years old when he was appointed chief captain over the armies of the Nephites.Imagine everyone's surprise when the recruiter shows up the next day and announces that he is there for Raven and not Greg. Raven’s parents refuse to let her go but have not choice in the matter as there would be dire consequences for anyone who refused. Poor, poor Greg is mortified as he was so looking forward to attending the elite academy. In this story he explains himself, as an Indigenous person, “an outsider, in the middle”; “an exile, living in exile, struggling with belonging”; living with the “very real threat of erasure”. For they knew that if they should fall into the hands of the Lamanites, that whosoever should aworship God in bspirit and in truth, the true and the living God, the Lamanites would cdestroy.

Violence isn’t typically this Murakami’s style—he’s more a magical ears and talking cats kind of guy, but if you’ve read this novel, you know exactly what I’m talking about: a single scene in an otherwise nonviolent novel that is so viscerally upsetting that anyone who reads it is unlikely to forget. It begins like this: “His men held Yamamoto down with their hands and knees while he began skinning Yamamoto with the utmost care. It truly was like skinning a peach.” Equally, Quinn's narrator I found a little too shrill at times but overall I found her different interpretations of the 'scream for us' text interesting, and enjoyed the different inflections. And it came to pass that they turned upon the Lamanites, and they acried with one voice bunto the Lord their God, for their cliberty and their freedom from bondage. He asks “how do we live with the weight of this history?” And he explains the questions that have dominated his thinking: what is whiteness, and what is it to live with catastrophe? The death of the white queen

Let me just say, the spice is NEXT LEVEL. Almost to the point where I was craving more plot and less spice lol. I had not read the novella before this, so the whole storyline was new to me. I was eagerly awaiting more character development or more explanation to the mystery of Quin to the society….but don’t expect any real answers in this book. Now Moroni, leaving a part of his army in the land of Jershon, lest by any means a part of the Lamanites should come into that land and take possession of the city, took the remaining part of his army and marched over into the land of Manti.