AMoRaR Book Review: Unfortunate

A Month of Rain and Reads Reviews4 months ago6 min readAdd comment

Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.

This is a guest review for Unfortunate by Ayrton Silva as written by Stephanie Caye.

Wealth, power, and an easy life. Vaz had it all, but nothing could satisfy him. He always wanted more.

When one of his plans makes his boss finally decide he is a threat, Vaz finds himself with only two options: to roll over and die, or to roll the dice. Literally. Due to an ancient pact between his people and a god of chaos, Vaz, like all citizens of his country, has a special die that grants wishes… if you get a 20. Anything else results in a grisly death.

Vaz knew there would be a price to pay, but he didn’t expect that, instead of getting his wish right away, he’d have to work for his own safety. Worse: that he’d have to work for the sake of another person.

Now a fugitive forced to prevent a young woman’s death, Vaz is confronted not just by the ugliness of his world, but by his own part in it.

I picked up Ayrton Silva’s UNFORTUNATE on a whim. The blurb was intriguing and, hey, I’m a sucker for a morally grey male protagonist in peril.

In this case, our MC is Vaz. It feels slightly unfair to call him a villain, as that would denote more thought given to his actions than he ever bothers with. He’s Not A Good Person, though—as a banker who specializes in tricking people into taking on crippling debts to advance his career. His hollow devotion to personal gain and lack of empathy allows him to spin his actions as ‘just’—the people he scams were ignorant enough to let him trick them, thus they’re getting what they deserve.

But despite this insidious, selfish cynicism, he’s not a one-dimensional monster. He has friends he cares about. He misses the province where he grew up. Trapping strangers under mountains of debt is a means to an end: Vaz wants to win a transfer to a bank branch in his hometown and get out of the harsh, faceless city where he feels adrift and lonely.

Does that make his actions noble? Hell no. Not even a little—but at least it makes them understandable.

An assassination attempt forces him to reckon with his narrow, narcissistic worldview and puts him on a reluctant path to adventure. Being pummeled by a hired killer and finding out why he was targeted in the first place leads him to the revelation that while he’s been seeing everybody around him as NPCs to be squeezed and tricked for his own ends, other, more powerful people might just see him that way too. Who’d have guessed this cynical lifestyle would lead into a spiral of “fuck you, got mine” turtles all the way down?

Luckily, his newfound empathy doesn’t flood him with exhausting, saccharine Goodness, or even searing, broody Guilt. As Vaz comes to terms with the idea that caring about and helping strangers might not be the scam he’s let himself believe, he remains an arch, skeptical jackass. In short, he’s a believable, three-dimensional protagonist who fucks up a lot and learns from his mistakes . . . sometimes.

I realize all of the above might make the book sound like a heavy, ponderous character study but it’s absolutely not. Vaz’s personality and his backstory are laid out deftly in a few short, handy scenes, and the bulk of the story is action, magic and banter with a cast of other entertaining and sometimes even compassionate characters. It’s a fast-paced, quick read that never sinks too hard into drama or exposition but also doesn’t feel strictly surface-level. It’s brisk, funny and surprising.

The magic system is also massively enjoyable. The main religion of the world dictates that everyone carries a die that they roll in desperate situations to summon a chaos god. (Like, say, if a hired killer is trying to riddle you with bullets…) Ninety-five percent of the time, the god will just kill you in some terrible way, but there’s always a sliver of hope for the bright, shiny five percent chance that if you roll the correct number, the god will both extricate you from the danger and give you a wish to improve your life. (I’m sure there’s some kind of real-world metaphor here but I’m too entertained to nail it down.)

The catch is, of course, that if you hit that jackpot, the god gives you a task to complete before you get your wish. It’s a unique idea that’s delightfully bonkers (chaos based, after all) and it could be confusing in the wrong hands, but here it holds together really well.

If Silva’s ever inspired to write a sequel or spin this into a series, I’m so there for it because UNFORTUNATE is my kind of chaos.

CW: Bloody violence, Capitalism.

About the Guest Reviewer

Stephanie Caye grew up in Michigan wanting to be a famed, reclusive novelist. Then she moved to Austin, Texas, got a job in tech, started volunteering with shelter cats and dropped both “famed” and “reclusive” from her childhood dream. Now she lives in Montreal, still working in tech, still volunteering with cats, still writing, and harbouring a deep love of both chilaquiles and poutine. A former recipient of a University of Michigan Hopwood award for writing, she published her first urban fantasy novel, THE FLAWS OF GRAVITY, in 2022 and followed it up with two more books in the GRAVITY’S DAUGHTER series…so far.