Borne with the Wind.

[razorsmile]

"It means there's normal people, like your mom. There's people like me who train, study, barter and bargain their way into certain skills and powers. And then there are liminal people. You and yours are born with some of the weirdest collections of gifts and curses ever assembled on this planet." - Entropy of Bones, Ayize Jama-Everett
The second

Comments

[__marcelo]

Without having read the book, I'd have said this is a Bat talking to a Super, but liminal people is a very suggestive phrase in a very different direction. I quite like it.

[razorsmile]

Heh. The speaker is the student of a wind god. The speak-ee is ironically a mute telepath and the badass martial arts student of an .... entropy elemental, I guess.

It's part of the Liminal People book series by Ayize-Jama Everett, prominently starring people of colour with, as above, varying degrees of (and reasons for) superpowers. The protagonist of the first two books (to which Entropy of Bones is a prequel-sidequel) is a black American healer-biomancer named Taggert. Starts out in service to a scary crime lord who operates out of North Africa (and is apparently older than same) then the dire straits of an old flame (heehee) lure him to London where he meets other Liminal People and others who are somehow empowered by barter or bargain. Things get bigger and stranger from there.

Bones stars Chabi, a half-black Cambodian-American girl who just wants to learn martial arts and revere her sensei (and maybe make her mom happy?) but soon bulls head-first into a world of ultra-wealthy, ultra-pretty and ultra-bad 'people', propelled by

[__marcelo]

Wow. Definitely interesting.

[razorsmile]

I highly recommend all three books, Entropy of Bones in particular. They're available on Kindle if you're into that (I am, because Amazon doesn't deliver dead tree books to Nigeria)