Tattoo: Back to Kasai’s ravaged yet eerily beautiful world

Tattoo by Kirsten Imani Kasai

Tattoo, the sequel to Ice Song, takes readers back into Kirsten Imani Kasai’s ravaged yet eerily beautiful world, picking up Sorykah’s story just after her rescue of her twin babies from the mad Matuk the Collector. She’d love to return to normal life, but fate has other plans.

Kasai’s prose is as beautiful as ever. In the haunting prologue, she once again evokes a fairy-tale atmosphere as she tells the creation myth of the octameroons: human/octopus hybrids like Sorykah’s acquaintance Rava. Then we move back into the present, where Tirai Industries is exploiting the octameroons for their ink. This ink is used in addictive tattoos that destroy the bodies and minds of their wearers, just as surely as the harvesting process destroys the octameroons and the ice fields in which they live. Sorykah learns that the very submarine she works on, the Nimbus, is involved in this trade.

Meanwhile, Sorykah has another problem. During her quest to defeat Matuk, she gained the ability to switch more easily between her female primary self and her male alter, Soryk. Now, any extreme of emotion can make her switch involuntarily. This leads to poignant conflicts. Soryk doesn’t care about the babies as Sorykah does, and Sorykah doesn’t care about Soryk’s lover the way he does, and so each of them has the potential to thwart the other’s purposes while the other is dormant.

Sorykah is then manipulated into participating in a scheme that doesn’t really serve her goals or Soryk’s, and in which she is essentially a figurehead. As a result, the plot of Tattoo loses some emotional urgency as compared to Ice Song. Whatever your opinion of the cause itself, it’s not Sorykah’s cause in the same way that rescuing her children was. In Ice Song, she was a player. Here, she’s more of a pawn, and a pair of eyes through which to show us more of the setting. Several of the other point-of-view characters are unsympathetic, and my other favorite from Ice Song — Dunya the dog-faced girl — gets a sweet resolution but not enough page time.

Post-prologue, the plot itself is less fairy-tale-ish than that of its predecessor, which is also a little disappointing. I don’t mind reading about corporate sabotage and drugs and organized crime, but there was a mythic quality to Ice Song that is less evident here.

Ice Song is a self-contained gem that didn’t need a sequel to feel complete — though I was definitely thrilled to see one! By contrast, Tattoo needs a sequel. It raises as many questions as it answers and leaves several plotlines on uncertain notes. I’m curious what will happen next in the intriguing world Kasai has created, and I hope the mythic aspects stick around.