Raven, a trans girl from south London, wakes on a piece of ice floating on a frozen ocean. Adap, who has lived his whole life in a dying village just off the coast, finds her and brings her home. When she is told she must travel to the Golie Mountains, at the center of the world, Adap volunteers to take her. Together they navigate around a resurgent soviet-esque state that is at war with an ancient culture of gender-wild shamans. As they travel, she realizes that there is no one in this magical world who is not black, like her, and that every place they go seems uncannily familiar. Paris debuts with an insightful but overlong coming-of-age fantasy highlighting the intersections of identity. The reader is abruptly dropped into the story as Raven, a Black trans woman from modern-day London, awakens on an iceberg in a fantasy land. A man named Adap rescues her from the ocean and brings her to the safety of his village—but then soldiers arrive, seeking to capture and imprison “crossovers,” or trans people. Raven and Adap flee for the Golie Mountains, hoping to find a shaman who will help them. Though the ponderous pacing occasionally causes the story to drag, Paris successfully builds the tension with descriptions of the strange, monstrous creatures populating this off-kilter world and moments of high-stakes danger for the protagonists—as when a nefarious shaman drugs Raven and Adep. The worldbuilding boasts well-developed political structures and intercultural conflict, and the all-Black cast shines. Paris’s sensitive approach to both race and gender is sure to impress; readers will be excited to see what this promising author does next. — Publishers Weekly October 2020 Raven Nothing is a portal story desperately needed for our times. Raven, the protagonist, is a “crossover” in more ways than one, and the novel reveals how these different crossings—with gender, space, and psychology—intersect. Urgent, poignant, and lyrical, Raven Nothing expands the possibilities of fantasy literature. —Anya Johanna DeNiro, author of Tyrannia and Total Oblivion, More or Less