The Spear Cuts Through Water, a 2022 fantasy novel by Simon Jimenez, is a creative and beautifully written tale of the five days in which an ancient goddess and her two companions take down an empire.

Jimenez’s storytelling is incredibly clever: when first starting the book, you will find that the narrator is not either of the boys described on the back cover, Keema and Jun. Instead, it is an unnamed, undescribed character listening to their lola (Filipino term for grandmother) tell a story of the Moon goddess and Sea god, and how they made the magical Inverted Theater that can only be accessed when dreaming. This sets the stage for Keema’s and Jun’s story –the historical play that the Inverted Theater is putting on. The majority of the tale is then told in third person omniscient narration, following Keema and Jun over the course of their pilgrimage. However, the narrative will occasionally strategically pull back to the theater, to let the actors do the storytelling. Even further than that, it sometimes will pull back completely to the physical world, where the story is being told by the unnamed character’s lola, and sometimes by the unnamed character themself.

The narrative brilliance doesn’t end there. While following Keema and Jun, the book will make quick jumps into the minds of surrounding characters, emphasized by italics, turning the window we have of the story into a strained-glass mosaic of perspectives. Seeing through the eyes of an innocent man before he is wrongly executed, through the eyes of a troop of apes, and through the eyes of an entire martyred village, paints the story in a multi-dimensional tale of not just Keema and Jun but of the entire collapsing empire.The Spear Cuts Through Water masterfully balances tragedy and humor in a captivating narrative that refuses to let you set it down. Keema, one part outcast orphan and two parts cave gremlin, will dance himself straight into your heart while Jun, the guilty masked boy, will make you love him just by his virtue of not wanting to be loved. You will also quickly find that the unnamed character, anonymous as they may be, will have a larger impact on you and the story than you thought possible. This is a romance, this is an epic fantasy, but most of all, it is a book worth reading.

Article by Theodore Hennings