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.