SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani

Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani

Sunbolt is an interesting story in its construction, at the very least.  It's a novella length (153 pages) work that has a sequel which is more clearly a novel in length, and very much feels like a prequel to a longer series.  It sets up its world reasonably well, with intrigue in various areas, as well as its main character and some side characters, but doesn't really end in a way that makes the book feel one-and-done - readers will be at best wondering what happens next, even if there isn't a big cliffhanger ending.  And even outside of the book's part of an ongoing series, Sunbolt is weirdly a book in two parts - its first part seems to follow a young thief try to aid a resistance group against a powerful dictator, while its second half suddenly features mages, vampires, and a plot that is incredibly similar to Robin McKinley's classic Sunshine.  The overall package is executed well enough that I will be taking a crack at its sequel, but the feeling of derivation from other works is kind of hard to shake.


Quick Plot Summary:  Hitomi is a teenage girl with a lot of secrets.  Her father died when she was very young, and her mother took her to the city of Karolene - ruled in essence by the evil Arch Mage known as Blackflame - only to disappear.  For the past few years she has served as a thief working for the underground Shadow League and its leader, The Ghost, to fight back against Blackflame.  But she possesses an even more hidden secret:  like her parents, Hitomi possesses a Promise, the capability to use magic, and if anyone was to find out she would be taken for her power.  But when a Shadow League mission to rescue a noble from the Blackflame goes wrong, Hitomi is forced to use not only her wits but her powers in order to escape....and the cost will be deadly.

Thoughts: If Sunbolt was the first fantasy story I'd ever read, I suspect I'd be quite positive about it outside of the incomplete ending - again, this novella feels like in the end a setup for a much larger narrative, which I assume is taken up by the sequel novel.  The world is interesting - filled with mages, supernatural creatures (at least two types of vampires, lycanthropes, etc) - and Hitomi is an excellent main character - charismatic (to the reader at least), quick thinking, easy to understand and relate to, and determined and feisty - I wouldn't call her fun (it's not that type of story), but she's very easy to root for as her situation gets more and more dire.

The problem is that Sunbolt is not the first story I've ever read, and the second half is incredibly derivative - not just of a type of story, but of a specific story: Robin McKinley's Sunshine.  For those unfamiliar with that novel, it begins with its heroine, a young woman (Rae) who is secretly from a powerful magic bloodline with her own magical powers, getting captured by vampires, who attempt to feed her to another vampire they've captured - only for Rae to use her powers to free both herself and that vampire, and the two then work together to eventually defeat their mutual foe.  In the second half of this story, that exact situation comes up with very very similar results (the titular "sunbolt" is even something that very easily could've been in Rae's toolset in Sunshine, kind of), until the last two chapters, where the ending goes in a very different direction.

In short, Sunbolt is a very solid novella and I'm very interested in the novel it has set up, but I can't help but be ambivalent about how closely it tracks McKinley's work in its second act, which leaves me a bit ambivalent about recommending it.