Jasmine Gower
Jasmine Gower is an American fantasy author whose debut novel combined the aesthetics of the Jazz Age with a richly imagined secondary world to create a fantasy that stands somewhat apart from the mainstream of contemporary epic or urban fantasy. She is based in the United States and brings to her fiction a deep enthusiasm for the visual and musical culture of the 1920s — the flappers, speakeasies, jazz clubs, and Art Deco architecture of the interwar period — transplanted into a world with its own internal logic and history. Her debut was published by Angry Robot Books, a publisher with a particular appetite for genre fiction that crosses and blends conventions.
Moonshine (2018), available on WritersReview, is set in a secondary world city whose social structure and cultural moment are clearly informed by Prohibition-era America, in which a young woman with a gift for a form of magic tied to sugar and sweetness is drawn into the criminal underworld of a city where magic is being suppressed by authoritarian forces. The novel has the atmosphere and energy of a classic noir thriller — glamorous, dangerous, morally ambiguous — combined with a fantasy magic system of genuine originality and a protagonist whose voice is engaging and distinctive. Gower handles the period atmosphere with affection rather than nostalgia, and her world feels lived-in and specific rather than merely decorative.
The novel’s politics — its engagement with prohibition as an allegory for the suppression of marginalised communities, its interest in how criminal economies develop in response to authoritarian overreach — give it more substance than its breezy surface initially suggests. This is fantasy that uses its genre setting to think about power, community, and resistance, and it does so without sacrificing the pleasures of atmosphere, character, and plot.
Gower represents a strand of contemporary fantasy that is drawing on the visual and cultural richness of the twentieth century rather than the medieval templates that have dominated the genre, and her work joins other recent books in demonstrating the imaginative potential of twentieth-century settings as fantasy backdrops. Moonshine is an accomplished and entertaining debut that marked her as an author with a clear and distinctive vision.
