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A review by yak_attak
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
2.5
An exciting premise undermined left and right, Roanhorse's multi-cultural fantasy just ends up not being my jam. It starts out with a bang - a mother mutiliating her child, turning him into an avatar of a god of a forgotten cult. A drunken half-mermaid pirate getting recruited to go on a life or death journey. And an elderly priestess desperately trying to hang onto her power as those around her scheme to bring her down - the core here is strong, and by mixing in a wealth of non-eurocentric details, Black Sun's world has the veneer of being strong, dazzling, exciting.
Unfortunately, I think Roanhorse mostly gets in her own way - a lot of the introduced elements are almost ignored in favor of doing the more standard thing. If you spend your time trying to figure out what's going to happen next it's pretty likely you're going to come up with something more interesting than the very straightforward plot that we do get. And though I don't want to judge a book necessarily based on how *I* think it should have gone, we're just not given a lot else to do in the meantime. The writing is basic and unflashy - never actively bad, but dull to the point it might as well be - in a world this vibrant, it should be lush with detail, instead we get basically most any other fantasy with the edges sanded off.
The strong character backgrounds are reduced when, inevitably, the characters become endlessly irritating - the elderly priest acts just as young and inept as does the drunken pirate. She has a background from a criminal area, but you'd not know this until of course it's revealled, because it has no bearing on her character at all. The mutiliated man has been groomed and trained his entire life to become a walking time bomb of violent revolution, but of course he's also just a misunderstood small bean who is just so nice that we can't take our eyes off of. Our main characters are as flawless and unjudgmental as the side characters are nasty - every single one of them is needlessly terrible, no one aside from the central four (far too many PoVs for this short a book) is generally reasonable in any way, and not one person listens to our (good, smart, correct) main heroes.
The plot degrades until you're just nitpicking details because that's all that's left. Why the hell does Xiala get described as "only having the clothes on her back" minutes after selling an entire ship's cargo? Who knows. Things are just presented as the plot needs it and we leave anything that could've been interesting behind. The romance is terrible, the character's reactions bizarre, the epigraphs are inane, and the books ends without any interesting or meaningful resolution at all whatsoever. I don't mind an open ending, but this is so clearly half of a book as to be a waste of your time unless you're going on to book 2.
I dunno. I was excited in the beginning, there's a lot of promise here, but it just didn't at all hold up to that. Your mileage may certainly vary, there's a fun breezy read in here with some cool Mesoamerican flavor that *could* go on to have some cool stuff to say about cultural in-group violence, but if it does, it's not in *this* book.
Also: unless I'm confused by the identity of a character, Roanhorse has included two (and only two!) characters who are a third gender who use neo-pronouns, both of which are nearly identical evil religious assassins. ...w...w...why? What a bizarre choice!
Unfortunately, I think Roanhorse mostly gets in her own way - a lot of the introduced elements are almost ignored in favor of doing the more standard thing. If you spend your time trying to figure out what's going to happen next it's pretty likely you're going to come up with something more interesting than the very straightforward plot that we do get. And though I don't want to judge a book necessarily based on how *I* think it should have gone, we're just not given a lot else to do in the meantime. The writing is basic and unflashy - never actively bad, but dull to the point it might as well be - in a world this vibrant, it should be lush with detail, instead we get basically most any other fantasy with the edges sanded off.
The strong character backgrounds are reduced when, inevitably, the characters become endlessly irritating - the elderly priest acts just as young and inept as does the drunken pirate. She has a background from a criminal area, but you'd not know this until of course it's revealled, because it has no bearing on her character at all. The mutiliated man has been groomed and trained his entire life to become a walking time bomb of violent revolution, but of course he's also just a misunderstood small bean who is just so nice that we can't take our eyes off of. Our main characters are as flawless and unjudgmental as the side characters are nasty - every single one of them is needlessly terrible, no one aside from the central four (far too many PoVs for this short a book) is generally reasonable in any way, and not one person listens to our (good, smart, correct) main heroes.
The plot degrades until you're just nitpicking details because that's all that's left. Why the hell does Xiala get described as "only having the clothes on her back" minutes after selling an entire ship's cargo? Who knows. Things are just presented as the plot needs it and we leave anything that could've been interesting behind. The romance is terrible, the character's reactions bizarre, the epigraphs are inane, and the books ends without any interesting or meaningful resolution at all whatsoever. I don't mind an open ending, but this is so clearly half of a book as to be a waste of your time unless you're going on to book 2.
I dunno. I was excited in the beginning, there's a lot of promise here, but it just didn't at all hold up to that. Your mileage may certainly vary, there's a fun breezy read in here with some cool Mesoamerican flavor that *could* go on to have some cool stuff to say about cultural in-group violence, but if it does, it's not in *this* book.
Also: unless I'm confused by the identity of a character, Roanhorse has included two (and only two!) characters who are a third gender who use neo-pronouns, both of which are nearly identical evil religious assassins. ...w...w...why? What a bizarre choice!