A review by elderlingfool
Shadows Return by Lynn Flewelling

adventurous dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Welcome to my top favourite books of all time!

I didn’t have a book make me stay awake reading late at night just to make sure that the characters were alright ever since “Fool’s Fate”. It takes a lot for me to lose sleep over a book, but this one did it. It also made me cry in one scene so there is a pattern here.

This book involves a slavery plot. It starts with the characters in one of their fun missions reminiscent of the Rhíminee cat ones and turns into the darkest book in the series so far. The characters are kidnapped and sold as slaves to an alchemist that proceeds to make experiments with one of them. There are also glimpses into Seregil’s past again, before he became an exile. This book takes the prophecy presented in book 3 and rolls with it, which means that I got my wish about one of the characters wanting to have kids addressed.

There isn’t much I can say without spoiling many things, but this book was way more character focused and that is why it is currently my favourite in the series. I loved seeing the development of known characters and getting to know new ones that started out as complex already. 

The magic was a bit too convenient for a solution in the ending chapters, but I didn’t really care after the characters went through so much suffering. That aspect made sense to me either way. 

Even though I loved this book, there are two aspects I hate about it:

1 - The portrayal of the Zengati

They are presented as having dark skin, curly hair and are usually in striped clothes. They are also well known slavers. I don’t think I need to write about why the only dark skinned people being the ones capturing and selling slaves is a bad thing. Still, the main evil characters in this series seem to be the Plenimarans, who buy slaves, and in one scene Alec thinks “all of them dark-skinned with close-cropped hair and beards. These looked more like the Plenimaram marines Alec had known”. However, there were also Plenimarans described as having pale skin and the one shown before in the first two books had green eyes. The only common thing between Plenimarans seems to be the dark hair. That doesn’t make it as bad as the portrayal of the Zengati. At least they appear in just one or two chapters and are barely in the book. I do have hope that in the future books I can see that culture and that they are presented in a better light.

2 - A woman dies to advance the plot

There is a desperate slave woman that helps Seregil escape with the promise of him taking her too and when they are found out she kills herself. The thought of being a slave again was so painful that she took that way out. The worse thing is that there wasn’t enough information about this woman and she barely showed up in the story. Her purpose was to help Seregil escape and to make the revenge of the master of the house upon another slave worse. There are a lot of strong women in these books and the main place is even ruled by queens so the way this was handled was really disappointing.