TOGETHER WE MAKE TEAL

In Ho’s debut YA SF novel, a teenager struggles with mental illness while performing at the highest level of a popular gaming competition.

In the near future, esports have become a major pastime, with specially designed, community-based fantasy characters called Combatants participating in fighting competitions. The biggest competition of them all is called the Fraye—a national tournament with players from all 50 states—and Daylark is the group, called a Guilde, tasked with creating Hawaii’s Combatant. Luka Lan is a recent high school graduate and merely a fan of esports when he learns that he’s won a place as the fifth member of Daylark. He becomes a local celebrity almost overnight. The creators in the most prestigious Guildes receive “scholarships to universities and job opportunities with companies like Disney and Nintendo.” But being a member of Daylark isn’t a walk in the park, especially for someone like Luka, who suffers from symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Almost immediately after he joins the Guilde, he begins suffering from delusions, which make it difficult for him to know what’s real and what isn’t. Luka struggles to keep his condition from affecting the Guilde’s work—but then he learns that his condition might be the reason he was chosen in the first place. Ho’s prose is tense and often dreamy, painting surreal images from both the gaming world and from Luka’s own psyche: “The games surrounding me are no longer comforting. They turn into pictures that speak of violence and blood, changing the comforts of my childhood into strange images drawn by a demon.” There’s a sword-and-sorcery element to the gaming, but the book explores issues of content creation and workplace dynamics in a way that one might not expect from the story’s outset. It’s an intense psychological thriller that also presents a sympathetic treatment of mental illness. In addition, it’s an inspired choice to set the story in a world where so much is imagined or generated, which feels, in some ways, like a reflection of our increasingly digital world.

A cerebral and engrossing work of speculative fiction.