The Whitefire Crossing

In my eternal quest for queer men represented in non-Romantasy books, I’ve started to look back at books that I likely missed in my childhood. Published in 2011, this book would have come out right as I was transitioning to reading books for adults more regularly, still desperately closeted in a small town, and craving representation in any variety.

I didn’t quite find that in The Whitefire Crossing. Both male leads are entangled with women, though sequels very well reveal bisexual identities or add new lead characters. It’s tagged as LGBTQ+ in Goodreads though, which is a good indication that there’s something there. Time will tell I suppose. It didn’t blow me away, but had a lot of interesting things going for it.

Elevator Pitch:
Dev is a seasoned smuggler, who ferries magical goods across the mountains in trade caravans. Kiran is a mage on the run from his master, and will give up anything to escape. Dev takes him on as ‘one last job’, but the journey across the mountains is anything but the routine trip Dev is used to.

What Worked For Me
Travel-forward books tend to not work for me. I find that they end up falling into the trap of ‘go here, do this thing, go to the next place’ but lack the thematic depth or tight pacing that keeps me engaged in a book. It is a rare world that is interesting enough to be the main character. Schafer, thankfully, avoids that trap, instead choosing to keep a laser focus on Kiran and Dev’s competing needs and desires (along with their relationship dynamic shifting multiple times) as a way to keep the story grounded despite an endless stream of mountain passes, ridges, lakes, and bluffs.

This was helped by the well-written climbing sections. I know nothing about climbing, but this book certainly felt like a book written by someone who knows a good amount about climbing. It’s always nice when a book leaves me thinking about something in our real world differently than before I started, and the story had a lot of respect for what mountaineering is actually like, instead of casually brushing it off.

Finally, Kiaran and Dev were a great pair of characters to follow. They felt like real people reacting in realistic ways to less-than-ideal circumstances. You aren’t going to get the dialogue of Gentleman Bastards, but you are getting characters who feel like people. Since this story was so focused on their interactions, this really worked great.

What Didn’t Work for Me
My primary issue is that I found a lot of the big moments rather predictable. There were some backstory revelations that were over-foreshadowed. I think the author could have just been up front about a lot of these things at the start. Withholding key information about motivations and personal history of viewpoint characters can work, but it’s tough and oftentimes cheapens the writing for me. It wasn’t excessive here, but would have been an easy way to trim 10-15 pages off the story and give us more to latch onto with our lead characters right away.

I also struggled a little bit with representation. The two female characters who get significant screen time (one of which really only through reputation, not physical presence), one is a manipulative woman who uses sex as a tool, and the other is a woman who breaks her well-established rigid promises about sex with other caravan workers for one of our lead men. There’s also the fact that the only queer representation (for now) are rapey wizards who made me think a lot about Harkonnen from Dune.

In Conclusion: A good, but not great, book focusing on two men crossing the mountains on the run from some mages.

• Characters – 4
• Worldbuilding – 3
• Craft – 4
• Themes – 3
• Enjoyment – 4