Hen & Chick: A Mother-Daughter Duo Meets Swords, Sorcery, & Substance

The mother/daughter relationship is underrated in fiction, especially fantasy fiction, where the standard character seems to always be an orphan, or at least a person without a past. So when Hen & Chick, a fantasy novel by Black Nuyorican Tristan Tarwater, came through my inbox, I was both excited and ready to be disappointed. The title Hen & Chick promises a mother Hen and a daughter Chick. The cover promises brown-skinned mommy-daughter adventures and a boat. But does it deliver? It does. The setting is a fantasy archipelago, filled with a melange of tastes and smells taken from the tropical islands of the real world. The cast is lead by a teenage Azria, a young magic user who is graduating from the heavily bureaucratic mage school on the island of Miz. Like any other 16-year-old, Azria is thoroughly bored with her tutor Hiezh and is thoroughly tortured by her classmates. While living with her grandmother, the big rumor of the school swirls around Azria: Is her mother Apzana a pirate? Is her father a Mizian like her mother or is he…a foreigner? Azria doesn’t know, and these gaps in knowledge and family are what define her until the fateful day when her mother, who’s been gone since she was 10, returns as the captain of her own ship — The Hen & Chick. That’s when the story takes off and starts to deliver on the promised mother/daughter love, complicated as it is, and the promised adventures.

The descriptions are the best part of the first few episodes, each s…