Trail of Lightning

Trail of Lightning

By Rebecca Roanhorse

While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters—and it is up to one young woman to unravel the mysteries of the past before they destroy the future.

Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine.

Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology.

As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive.

Welcome to the Sixth World.

I had this on my list for SO LONG, and I was excited to read it, I swear, but then I read some mishegas about the author being decried as appropriating Navajo culture and mashing things together, which s a shame, since it doesn't affect the quality of the book, but did, perhaps undeservedly, dampen my enthusiasm. I would describe it as akin to Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series, in tone and style, and I also fell off that series after just a few books, so who knows but that I wouldn't have gone much further anyway.  

The idea is still very cool, and it sounds like the second book explores the Big Water disaster that resulted in the setting, which sounds cool, but execution-wise, the pieces just didn't gel for me.  It may have been my fault, for assuming, for example, that Neizghání was like a mentor/father figure to her (since he found her at age 16 and taught her how to fight monsters), so the incorporation of her being in love with him and being heartbroken at his departure was weird and never gained my sympathy.  Maybe the first book should have been her fighting monsters with Neizghání, and the ending being his departure.  That seems like it would have had a lot more emotional resonance (plus maybe Coyote's beef with Neizghání would have made more sense). 

Here's an early example: Maggie is sent off to track down a monster which has abducted a little girl.  She finds the monster, but the girl is too far gone to save.  She brings back the girl's head for the family, but then just drops it off at the front of the compound, so we never see the family's reaction to either (a) her "rescue" or (b) their child's head. It's like we have to rush along to the next plot point so fast that we don't have time to explore Maggie's life or her interactions with people.  We've lost out on building that connection.

And I couldn't figure out why she ever trusted Coyote, since she says in the beginning that he's tricked her before.  Without actually knowing their background and previous interactions, her conversations with him just felt like I was missing a bunch of context and subtext. I still don't understand what the point of Coyote's mission to Canyon de Chelly was in the first place.  Was that supposed to lead her to Neizghání sooner?

And I don't get why Kai's death was necessary or useful.  Perhaps there's some part of Navajo lore that would have explained it to me, but why would she assume that Kai would be reborn? Or that Tah would be brought back because of Kai's death?

I really liked the monster hunting at the beginning - the trade sequence, the desperation of the locals and the lost little girl.  But it starts to feel a little underbaked soon after she meets up with Kai.   Without the relationship with either Neizghání or Tah, there's very little emotional underpinning here.  When I should be anticipating her fight with Neizghání with dread, all I feel is confusion that she ever agreed in the first place and disdain for her choices (especially since it's "to the death" and Neizghání... can't... die... right?).  I mean, even if we accept that they had a lover-quality relationship, him leaving her spurs her on in a fight to the death in a cage match? Girl, look at your life. 

I just couldn't get into Maggie's head or heart enough to ride along with her decisions or feelings. It's like listening to a friend who constantly makes bad choices, and eventually you get impatient that you're still hearing this hard luck story all over again. I like the setting, I like the background, I like the details, but the characters lacked depth and the book lacked an emotional hook, for me. 

I don't think I'll be getting the next book in the series. This is certainly more of an episodic series than her other, so the plots are all pretty well tied off, even though we're waiting on Kai's rebirth and there's a looming threat of Neizghání breaking out of the hoops.  But I just didn't want to spend more time with Maggie or the other characters.  

39: An #OwnVoices SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) Book

Fevered Star

Fevered Star

By Rebecca Roanhorse

The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent.

The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded?

As sea captain Xiala is swept up in the chaos and currents of change, she finds an unexpected ally in the former Priest of Knives. For the Clan Matriarchs of Tova, tense alliances form as far-flung enemies gather and the war in the heavens is reflected upon the earth.

And for Serapio and Naranpa, both now living avatars, the struggle for free will and personhood in the face of destiny rages. How will Serapio stay human when he is steeped in prophecy and surrounded by those who desire only his power? Is there a future for Naranpa in a transformed Tova without her total destruction?

So, I was pretty jazzed about the first book in the series, Black Sun, yes?  But I'm struggling with Fevered Star because the same issues I had with Black Sun? I have all over again with Fevered Star. Mainly, Fevered Star has all the same problems of too much build up, not enough release.  Both books have various deaths and betrayals and stuff, and there's a clash between gods to keep the readers busy, but it still feels a lot like place-setting.  

Let's recap, since I guess I'm committing to the next book in the series.  Serapio lives (this is apparently Not Part Of The Plan, which is uh, news to me.  Guess my last recap should have been more detailed), and he winds up falling with Okoa and Carrion Crow, before getting overwhelmed by zealots, disbursing himself into birds, and then basically biding time until he can confront Naranpa again. 

Naranpa is also alive (not a surprise, thanks recap!) and comes to in the crypts over at Coyote's Maw. There's some back and forth with her brother, but eventually he convinces her to put herself out there as the Coyote Matron (he does this by promising on her behalf, without talking to her about it first, and then when she says no, his punishment consists of thorns through his dick, which I think is totally unnecessary. Surely there was another way to arrive at this plot point).  She does, and also finds new powers as the actual sun god avatar, and ends up confronting Serapio and telling him instead of trying to kill each other, he needs to unite the whole city to save it from the other enemies, while she goes to learn more about her new god powers, which include turning into a big bird. Oh, and her brother dies, and Naranpa makes his ex-girlfriend the new Coyote Matron.

Xiala wanders around trying to find Serapio, once she realizes he's alive, and ends up falling in, semi-accidentally, with Iktan (who is also alive, but that's only a surprise to some people, I think). Iktan is spying on Carrion Crow when we meet him (I guess he had a sub in at the great deathening, and he's mad that Naranpa "died" so he wants revenge or something) but he and Xiala quickly fall in with a Golden Eagle contingent marching around on the plains.  Xiala gets landsick, the Golden Eagle commander lies to Iktan about Naranpa being alive, and we find out that Xiala left Teek because she thought she killed her mother who (in a surprise to Xiala but definitely not to the readers) is not dead, but in fact shows up in the third act at Hokaia as the queen of Teek (even though they don't have queens, just go with it).  Her mom claps her in irons to take her back to Teek.  Note: I am not entirely sure how this is justified, since the murder she thought she committed clearly wasn't. So what crime was she guilty of? Unclear.  Also, I'm lovin' all these people who are alive when they're not supposed to be.  It's thrilling!

Anyway, also converging on Hokaia is Balam and a contingent from Cuecola.  Now Balam is the plotting one, I guess he set up the Serapio thing to... make Tova vulnerable? And then he was also planning to like, take over the world? All I know is that he's devious and plotting, and chewing on god parts so he can dreamwalk, and he's both committed to another politician that he's going to raze Teek, while also promising to Xiala he'll get her back on a ship if she'll be his spy on the inside.  I assume he did not tell her what happened to his last spy (tortured).  Anyway, Hokaia is where all these random factions are meeting up, Golden Eagle, the Teek contingent, the Cuecola plotters and the new ladies leading Hokaia, after an internal coup. Again, I'm not really sure what everyone's initial plans were or what they're all trying to accomplish now, but I like the energy! 

Oh and Okoa: he fiddle faddles around, feeling bad for himself, torn about helping Serapio (who leads the zealot crows) versus his sister, who leads the normal crows, and then he finds out who in Carrion Crow betrayed his mother but that person is like, immediately murdered, so it's not really a big thing.

Again - we're doing a lot of moving people around with not a lot of results here.  There's machinations out the wazoo, but very little payoff.   The stuff I understood the most, i.e., the attempted coup by Golden Eagle, the clash with the Carrion Crow zealots, all the Tova stuff basically, which is the whole first book, turned out to be sort of pointless, since all the main action now centers around the players meeting in Hokaia.  It's honestly frustrating, not to mention that the MAP is COMPLETELY USELESS.  I have always taken issue with the way Tova, an ostensible inland river city, is made of up islands that are like, perpendicular to each other, not to mention all the mentions of canyons and bridges and borders between zones, which are NOT on the map, and now Naranpa can get from the Maw into the celestial tower, which is three zones over, go through a bunch of books in the library, confront Serapio and get back in nine hours, total??? Is this town like, a town for ants? Irrelevant tangent, sorry, but anyway, we get outside of Tova and the first place we go is NORTH, which is nowhere to be found. Like sure, it's boring and doesn't really matter, but seriously, if you make a map, you need to put the places on it where your characters go!  

So this whole thing is actually pretty frustrating.  That being said, as I mentioned before, I am committed and planning to read the next one, but Roanhorse better start resolving threads, if not outright finishing the series, or I may find myself falling off. This is an exciting world, but my patience is not limitless.  There's no single character that I'm hooked by, so the book itself has to hook me. Let's see if she can stick the landing. 

More map rants: Why is Tova so far upriver? Why aren't the big towns at the deltas, for both Tova and Hokaia? How big is this world supposed to be? It's winter in Tova while it's spring in Hokaia, and apparently Teek is warm all the time, but like, Tova and Hokaia look like they're at the same latitude. I know I was pretty pissed about The Cartographers, but their initial idea to do a bunch of fantasy maps like real places and vice versa was super cool. I wish Fevered Star had a realistic map. 

03: A Book About or Set In A Non-Patriarchal Society

Black Sun

Black Sun

By Rebecca Roanhorse

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.

Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

I am trying to balance the necessity of getting down in writing my thoughts on a book, before it (or more likely, its plot points and characters names) is erased from my memory, against the beneficial impact of letting a story percolate for a time before deciding on the impression it's made.  In this case, I literally just put Black Sun down, its spine not yet cold, and have taken up the keyboard.  Of course, it's also 4:30 in the morning, and I'm not able to sleep, so I have time to kill.  

The real tragedy of Black Sun is that it's the first in a trilogy, and reads that way: we spend the entire book (with the exception of several Serapio flashback chapters) in the three weeks leading up to the Convergence, a day when the moon eclipses the sun on the winter solstice, paving the way for a tool of the Carrion Crow tribe to return to the city to kill the Sun Priest (now a young outsider named Naranpa who is also not beloved by various factions within the priesthood), and reclaim power for the Crows as vengeance for a semi long-ago Night of Knives, in which Crow tribe members were murdered to prevent their ascendancy in power.

We follow Serapio, the blinded vessel for the Crow god, Xiala, a "Teek" sailing captain who has to get him back to the city in time and who is also a mermaid/selkie mix, and Naranpa, who came from the slums and was escalated to the position of Sun Priest to the dissatisfaction of the current ruling tribes and is in the midst of being deposed (even before all the Crow stuff).   We also get a couple chapters from the perspective of Okoa, the warrior trainee son of a recently murdered Crow tribe leader. It's a 450 page book, and the climax is the last thirty pages.   Like this review, the blood is still warm on the ground when the book ends, setting everything up for a much faster paced second installment.  

 The two storylines also have a very different pace - the journey of Serapio and Xiala to the city feels very leisurely (although they do encounter a storm which leads to a mutiny on the boat), since they're basically out on the water for two whole weeks, whereas the internal politics and betrayal within the priesthood moves a lot faster, what with the Crow leader's death, several assassination attempts, the usurpation of the sun priest position, traveling back down to ask her gangster brother for help, and then getting kidnapped (and another assassination attempt).  You have to have them both for part of the climax to make sense (SPOILER: Serapio is supposed to kill the sun priest, but she's not there in the end because she's jumped off a bridge in order to avoid being murdered) but other than that, the two have very little to do with each other, and I'm not sure how to fix that problem.  That's how you get this first in a trilogy problem: yes, you have to prep the scene, but this feels like all prep, no payoff.

However, the other benefit to a long lead in is the opportunity to spend getting used to the world that Roanhorse has created, although Roanhorse makes clear in the book (and the author's note) that she's really just ganked much of the culture from Pre-Colombian America, as opposed to medieval/renaissance Europe, which is where most fantasy epics have been set to date. I like the change of scenery!  It's vivid and because I (and I hope other readers) am somewhat familiar with meso-American cultures, allows the author to springboard off that familiarity when adding her own elements, without making the world so foreign that it's a headache to try to comprehend.  I don't know if that came out the way I meant it, but basically: because the basics are familiar, Roanhorse can spend more time on the fantastical portions without losing the readers.  It also allows Roanhorse to set up the various factions and power struggles from a different perspective than the usual "the king/queen is in danger!" trope.

There's still too much machinations going on though.  None of them are resolved, either, so we have a bunch of dangling ends and I don't know if that's really ideal.  Take the Star Wars movies (the original trilogy, at least): we set up people and places, yes, but there's also the scene at the end where they get medals for blowing up the death star (I assume this is not a spoiler, assuming you've been on the internet for more than half an hour) so it feels like a complete storyline, or chapter in the saga.  They left the cliffhangers for the second movie, when people are invested and 2/3rds of the way in.  I don't know if that's an objectively better way to do trilogies, but I think that's more common than this method, which really relies on the patience of the readers to see this through without having the emotional release from the first book to keep them on the hook for the next two. 

All I will say is that Roanhorse's earlier series, starting with Trail of Lightning, has been on my reading list for some time, but Black Sun might bump it up the list.  Definitely talent, but unsure whether it can be sustained for the series.