By Andrea Stewart.
This one was a very exciting adventure. I loved the lore, and am looking forward to reading the next in this series. Once again, this one also balances the male/female narrative, and gives a really good sense of sailing and island culture and variation. It’s nicely creepy at times, combining magic and coding and ancient-powerful-ones myth, and combines to be very pleasant. Given all my current research, I had some concerns about all their conveniences with only island resources at their disposal (IE how did they get iron and learn how to shape it if it’s just a few islands strung together), but I realize that’s just a recent quirk of mine. As with others, even though one of the characters was older, I still didn’t get the sense of age variation like some other novels I’ve read. One way of describing it is, characters of different ages, circumstances and varying goals should be coming together to solve problems rather than a young person who does all the action and the middle age barely exists.
I’d love to use this as a comp title, but the sailing/island culture is so beautifully ingrained in this (and I don’t have islands in the world I created) that I’d have a hard time using it.
