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A review by theshaggyshepherd
The Black Coast by Mike Brooks
4.0
The Black Coast // by Mike Brooks
The Black Coast is one of those books that all of a sudden popped up all over Twitter as my favorite SFF reviewers started to get their hands on it. Of course, I didn't want to be left out so I made sure to get in on the action as well. I'm really glad I did because even though it wasn't entirely perfect for me, it still had some very interesting aspects to it that I'm excited to explore more when the series continues.
The biggest thing that stands out about this book is the attention to detail when it came to the different cultures that we were introduced to. After reading an article about the world-building by the author himself, I realized that the big goal for this book for him was to write those different cultures with varying language structures that could be used in the English language but would be easy to tell apart from each other without having to resort to borrowing words from other languages or making up an entirely new one. One people, the Tjakorshi, use English the way we are used to ourselves. The Naridans, who feel strongly about identifying their own roles in relation to the people they are interacting with, do not use the personal pronouns "I" and "me." That in itself did not bother me so much but rather that someone would refer to themselves as "this man" but then in the same sentence use "we" as well. It didn't feel inclusive of themselves but rather as if they were talking about a man separate from the group referred to as we. This also though made a little more sense after reading the above mentioned article. The most interesting language device for me though was how he decided to distinguish between different genders in the city of Kiburu ce Alaba. The use of diacritics allows people to identify themselves on a spectrum of gender (or as non agender) or to keep their identity to themselves if they so wish. I don't want to take too much space to talk about the use of language here but this is definitely something I very much enjoyed once I thought about and evaluated it more in relation to the story itself.
Something else that was different about this story was the focus on finding similarities in each other's cultures and trying to live together in peace rather than conquering and destroying each other. While I wasn't 100% happy with its execution, it stills was a nice change of pace compared to a lot of other books lately. In some areas, this took away a little bit from the believability, for example when a previously much feared person showed a lot of unexpected mercy. Don't get me wrong. There is still a lot of violence in this book. We are after all talking about nations full of warriors and soldiers. But it really was nice to see an author attempt to reach a goal of unity rather conquest for once.
These two things really propelled the story forward for me and kept me glued to the pages. But there were a couple of things that I felt would've benefitted from some more fine-tuning. A language example that has nothing to do with the cultural differences but rather is something that probably stood out to me because English is my second language: Saana's speech patterns felt inconsistent. Most of the time, it is obvious that the Naridan language is new to her by the simple sentence structures she uses, but every once in a while she would use much more complicated words and sentence structures that stood out in a big contrast. In the same vein, for the most part, the languages felt like they often do in fantasy books: while not necessary medieval, definitely still older. Here and there though, very modern phrases found their way into the book, which just didn't seem to fit well. The dialogue overall felt a little choppy. It didn't always flow as well as it could have and it sometimes seemed to hinder the characters more than help. Their conversations really pulled me out of the story a few times, both due to their flow as well as their word choices.
The author tried to cover a lot of different things in his book. Some are popular fantasy genre-related things, such as dragons and honor, while others were current issues in our own society, such as LGBTQIA+ rights and gender identity. All of these are things I enjoy reading about but I felt as if they were covered mostly superficially and that it was more important to get them in there at all rather than explore their importance more deeply. I also sometimes felt that their priorities were a little... off? Two of the main characters seemed to enjoy arguing over little things while ignoring the big glaring issues that would've helped them prepare their peoples more for upcoming conflict. What I did find awesome though was that there wasn't one nation that was accepting of all kinds of people and therefore portrayed as "the best" out of the three. Each country had something they were accepting of but also biased against, showing that nobody is perfect and that there are things to learn for everybody.
Overall, I am really glad to have read this book. It took me a couple of days to really get my thoughts together. Reading up on the author's process also helped put things into perspective for me. It makes me want to look into more authors' writing processes because there are probably more things I have missed that may influence my opinion of their works. Contrary to popular belief, we reviewers aren't perfect either (I kid I kid). I do want to take this moment to point out though that I don't consider myself a member of the LGBTQIA+ community so take my opinion on those aspects of this book with a grain of salt. The plot for this book is really intriguing. The author has shown that he puts a lot of thought into his work and I am looking forward to see what he presents to us in the next book of this series!
Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.
The Black Coast is one of those books that all of a sudden popped up all over Twitter as my favorite SFF reviewers started to get their hands on it. Of course, I didn't want to be left out so I made sure to get in on the action as well. I'm really glad I did because even though it wasn't entirely perfect for me, it still had some very interesting aspects to it that I'm excited to explore more when the series continues.
The biggest thing that stands out about this book is the attention to detail when it came to the different cultures that we were introduced to. After reading an article about the world-building by the author himself, I realized that the big goal for this book for him was to write those different cultures with varying language structures that could be used in the English language but would be easy to tell apart from each other without having to resort to borrowing words from other languages or making up an entirely new one. One people, the Tjakorshi, use English the way we are used to ourselves. The Naridans, who feel strongly about identifying their own roles in relation to the people they are interacting with, do not use the personal pronouns "I" and "me." That in itself did not bother me so much but rather that someone would refer to themselves as "this man" but then in the same sentence use "we" as well. It didn't feel inclusive of themselves but rather as if they were talking about a man separate from the group referred to as we. This also though made a little more sense after reading the above mentioned article. The most interesting language device for me though was how he decided to distinguish between different genders in the city of Kiburu ce Alaba. The use of diacritics allows people to identify themselves on a spectrum of gender (or as non agender) or to keep their identity to themselves if they so wish. I don't want to take too much space to talk about the use of language here but this is definitely something I very much enjoyed once I thought about and evaluated it more in relation to the story itself.
Something else that was different about this story was the focus on finding similarities in each other's cultures and trying to live together in peace rather than conquering and destroying each other. While I wasn't 100% happy with its execution, it stills was a nice change of pace compared to a lot of other books lately. In some areas, this took away a little bit from the believability, for example when a previously much feared person showed a lot of unexpected mercy. Don't get me wrong. There is still a lot of violence in this book. We are after all talking about nations full of warriors and soldiers. But it really was nice to see an author attempt to reach a goal of unity rather conquest for once.
These two things really propelled the story forward for me and kept me glued to the pages. But there were a couple of things that I felt would've benefitted from some more fine-tuning. A language example that has nothing to do with the cultural differences but rather is something that probably stood out to me because English is my second language: Saana's speech patterns felt inconsistent. Most of the time, it is obvious that the Naridan language is new to her by the simple sentence structures she uses, but every once in a while she would use much more complicated words and sentence structures that stood out in a big contrast. In the same vein, for the most part, the languages felt like they often do in fantasy books: while not necessary medieval, definitely still older. Here and there though, very modern phrases found their way into the book, which just didn't seem to fit well. The dialogue overall felt a little choppy. It didn't always flow as well as it could have and it sometimes seemed to hinder the characters more than help. Their conversations really pulled me out of the story a few times, both due to their flow as well as their word choices.
The author tried to cover a lot of different things in his book. Some are popular fantasy genre-related things, such as dragons and honor, while others were current issues in our own society, such as LGBTQIA+ rights and gender identity. All of these are things I enjoy reading about but I felt as if they were covered mostly superficially and that it was more important to get them in there at all rather than explore their importance more deeply. I also sometimes felt that their priorities were a little... off? Two of the main characters seemed to enjoy arguing over little things while ignoring the big glaring issues that would've helped them prepare their peoples more for upcoming conflict. What I did find awesome though was that there wasn't one nation that was accepting of all kinds of people and therefore portrayed as "the best" out of the three. Each country had something they were accepting of but also biased against, showing that nobody is perfect and that there are things to learn for everybody.
Overall, I am really glad to have read this book. It took me a couple of days to really get my thoughts together. Reading up on the author's process also helped put things into perspective for me. It makes me want to look into more authors' writing processes because there are probably more things I have missed that may influence my opinion of their works. Contrary to popular belief, we reviewers aren't perfect either (I kid I kid). I do want to take this moment to point out though that I don't consider myself a member of the LGBTQIA+ community so take my opinion on those aspects of this book with a grain of salt. The plot for this book is really intriguing. The author has shown that he puts a lot of thought into his work and I am looking forward to see what he presents to us in the next book of this series!
Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.