Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Even Though I Knew the End

I’ve expressed my deep and abiding love for a deftly crafted novella before. I trace this love of short stories and novellas back to a course I took in community college, when we would take stories like these apart and analyze them to pieces. (In non-shocking news, that’s also where I got my love of literary analysis as a whole from). There’s just something so spectacular about authors who can master the art of economy of words. Who can tell a whole novel’s worth of story in 200 words or less. To leave you feeling as fulfilled by their story as you would if you had read a much longer one. You may think it’s an easy job, but many authors would be willing to tell you it’s not.

“Even Though I Knew the End” is a beautifully written example of genre mashup literature. By that, I mean that there are so many genres kneaded into this story that the bread of it is an amalgamation of historical fiction/romance/fantasy/mystery, occult fiction, and LGBT+ fiction/romance/fantasy. I tend to love when authors go wild like this, when they let their imaginations run free and their fingers out to play over theirs keyboards, not stopping to think too deeply about things like, “How can I make a sapphic romance in the 1930s if I add in occultism and some really wicked magic?” and just letting the words flow. I’m sure Polk had to reign herself in at some point to wrestle the book into submission and bring method to the madness, but short stories and novellas are a great place to let experimental pieces out to play.

The story itself is mostly a fantasy/occult mystery wound around a powerful private detective/magician (though that’s not the term they use for her in the book) who’s on a very tight schedule and is in a long-term relationship with a woman who she wants to protect at all costs. There’s a big bad in town, and a powerful demon client wants our protagonist to find it so it can be taken out. Problem is, the powers that be in Chicago don’t like our protagonist very much, considering she doesn’t have a soul. I’d tell you more, but there be spoilers, and I don’t deal in those.

The magic system isn’t explained in any real detail, but it’s not something that really could be explained unless you sat down and wrote a manual, because it’s based in things like phases of the moon, numerology, astrology, planetary hours (which is also known as the Chaldean order), sacred geometry, and prayers. It’s more fun just to roll with it, honestly, because why would you want to spend pages with magic system exposition when you could be spending time wrapped in lovely prose, an alternative version of 1930s Chicago, and a beautiful love story between two women who really just want to move to San Francisco someday?

It’s really a fabulous read. Entertaining, compelling, fun, and beautiful. I highly recommend it.

Thanks to NetGalley, MacMillan-Tor/Forge, and Tordotcom for granting me access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.

File Under: Novella/Genre Mashup/LGBTQ Fantasy/Historical Fantasy/Historical Fiction/Historical Romance/LGBTQ Fiction/Historical Mystery/Occult Fiction