Review: Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Mon Aug 16 20:59:54 PDT 2021


Black Sun
by Rebecca Roanhorse

Series:    Between Earth and Sky #1
Publisher: Saga Press
Copyright: October 2020
ISBN:      1-5344-3769-X
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     454

Serapio has been crafted and trained to be the vessel for a god. He
grew up in Obregi land, far from his ancestral home, but he will return
to Tova at the appropriate time and carry the hopes of the Carrion Crow
clan with him.

Xiala is a ship captain, a woman, and a Teek. That means she's a
target. Teek have magic, which makes them uncanny and dangerous.
They're also said to carry that magic in their bones, which makes them
valuable in ways that are not pleasant for the Teek. Running afoul of
the moral codes of Cuecola is therefore even more dangerous to her than
it would be to others, which is why she accepts a bargain to run
errands for a local lord for twelve years, paid at the end of that time
with ownership of a ship and crew. The first task: ferry a strange man
to the city of Tova.

Meanwhile, in Tova, the priestess Naranpa has clawed her way to the top
of the Sky Made hierarchy from an inauspicious beginning in the poor
district of Coyote's Maw. She's ruthlessly separated herself from her
despised beginnings and focused her attention on calming Tova in
advance of the convergence, a rare astronomical alignment at the same
time as the winter solstice. But Carrion Crow holds a deep-seated
grudge at their slaughter by the priesthood during the Night of Knives,
and Naranpa's position atop the religious order that partly rules
Tova's fractious politics is more precarious than she thinks.

I am delighted that more fantasy is drawing on mythologies and
histories other than the genre default of western European. It's long
overdue for numerous reasons and a trend to be rewarded. But do authors
writing fantasy in English who reach for Mesoamerican cultures have to
gleefully embrace the excuse to add more torture? I'm developing an
aversion to this setting (which I do not want to do!) because every
book seems to feature human sacrifice, dismemberment, or some other
horror show.

Roanhorse at least does not fill the book with that (there's lingering
child abuse but nothing as sickening as the first chapter), but that
makes the authorial choice to make the torture one's first impression
of this book even odder. Our introduction to Serapio is a scene that I
would have preferred to have never read, and I don't think it even adds
much to the plot. Huge warnings for people who don't want to read about
a mother torturing her son, or about eyes in that context.

Once past that introduction, Black Sun settles into a two-thread
fantasy, one following Xiala and Serapio's sea voyage and the other
following Naranpa and the political machinations in Tova. Both the
magic systems and the political systems are different enough to be
refreshing, and there are a few bits of world-building I enjoyed (a
city built on top of rocks separated by deep canyons and connected with
bridges, giant intelligent riding crows, everything about the Teek). My
problem was that I didn't care what happened to any of the characters.
Naranpa spends most of the book dithering and whining despite a
backstory that should have promised more dynamic and decisive
responses. The other character from Tova introduced somewhat later in
the book is clearly "character whose story will appear in the next
volume"; here, he's just station-keeping and representing the status
quo. And while it's realistic given the plot that Serapio is an abused
sociopath, that didn't mean I enjoyed reading his viewpoint or his
childhood abuse.

Xiala is the best character in the book by far and I was warming to the
careful work she has to do to win over an unknown crew, but apparently
Roanhorse was not interested in that. Instead, the focus of Xiala's
characterization turns to a bad-boy romance that did absolutely nothing
for me. This will be a matter of personal taste; I know this is a plot
feature for many readers. But it had me rolling my eyes and turning the
pages to get to something more interesting (which, sadly, was not
forthcoming). It also plays heavily on magical disabled person cliches,
like the blind man being the best fighter anyone has met.

I did not enjoy this book very much, but there were some neat bits of
world-building and I could see why other people might disagree. What
pushed me into actively recommending against it (at least for now) is
the publishing structure.

This is the first book of a duology, so one can expect the major plot
to not be resolved by the end of the book. But part of the contract
with the reader when publishing a book series is that each volume
should reach some sense of closure and catharsis. There will be
cliffhangers and unanswered questions, but there should also be enough
plot lines that are satisfactorily resolved to warrant publishing a
book as a separate novel.

There is none of that here. This is the first half of a novel. It
introduces a bunch of plot lines, pulls them together, describes an
intermediate crisis, and then simply stops. Not a single plot line is
resolved. This is made worse by the fact this series (presumably, as I
have only seen the first half) has a U-shaped plot: everything gets
worse and worse until some point of crisis, and then presumably the
protagonists will get their shit together and things will start to
improve. I have soured on U-shaped plots since the first half of the
story often feels like a tedious grind (eat your vegetables and then
you can have dessert), but it's made much worse by cutting the book off
at the bottom of the U. You get a volume, like Black Sun, that's all
setup and horror and collapse, with no payoff or optimism.

After two tries, I have concluded that Roanhorse is not for me. This is
clearly a me problem rather than a Roanhorse problem, given how many
other people love both Black Sun and her Sixth World series, but this
is the second book of hers where I mildly enjoyed the world building
but didn't care about any of the characters. Ah well, tastes will
differ. Even if you get along with Roanhorse, though, I recommend
against starting this book until the second half of it is published
(currently scheduled for 2022). As it stands, it's a wholly
unsatisfying reading experience.

Followed by the not-yet-published Fevered Star.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-08-16

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-5344-3769-X.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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