Wednesday, July 22, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Hunted by the Sky by Tanaz Bhathena



Hunted by the Sky is the debut novel by Tanaz Bhathena and the first in a new YA fantasy series (trilogy I think).  It's a novel with a setting inspired by medieval India and features a world with magical beings, gods, magic in general as well as a class divide based upon whether someone has or doesn't have magic.  It also features a pair of protagonists - a boy and a girl - whose childhoods have been shaped by the oppressive nature of this world and who have opposite dispositions as to what to do about it...but find their fates tied together anyhow.

And it works for the most part, with both of the main characters being very enjoyable and easy to like, and the plot providing an excellent amount of tension to keep everything moving.  It isn't a perfect debut - I didn't quite buy the romance between the two protagonists - but it's a solid first novel in a series and it ends with a cliffhanger that tantalizes more than enough to make me want more.


------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Gul's childhood has always kept her family on the run.  For Gul is a mage-born child with a star-shaped birthmark, and prophecy has proclaimed that such a girl would result in the death of the cruel tyrant king Lohar.  But one day, her family's constant running fails, and her parents are slaughtered by the King's agents for harboring her.  Gul's own magic is inconsistent at best - she can never call on it at will - but somehow it keeps her from discovery long enough for her to find a group of rebel women called the Sisters of the Golden Lotus who take her in.  And for the next two years, all Gul can think about and wish for is to take vengeance upon the King and his cruel agent, Major Shayla.

Two years later, as Gul is about to turn 16, she is growing impatient with her newfound family's refusal to let her try to take her revenge, no matter how futile.  But when her mentor and new mother figure tries to organize a plot to gain her the access she'd need to fulfill it - entry into the castle - she finds herself connected to a strange boy - Cavas - who she can't stop thinking about.

For Cavas, the only thing that matters is trying to preserve his father's fading health.  Both Cavas and his father are non-magi, and under the last two tyrant rulers, people like them are condemned to worse jobs and to living in segregated poisoned housing - the tenements, which are responsible for his father's fading health.  Cavas works in the palace stables and has been giving palace secrets to a strange specter in exchange for money to pay for his father's medicine.

But when his contact insists he pay attention to Gul and Gul requires his aid to enter the palace, Cavas finds himself conflicted: after all Gul could jeopardize everything he cares about - including his father's life.  But try as he might, he cannot escape Gul in his mind or body, and soon Gul and Cavas are entangled in a dangerous game of infiltration, politics, and vengeance that has implications for the entire world......
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After its prologue, Hunted by the Sky is a story told from two perspectives: Gul's and Cavas'.  It also doesn't fully alternate these perspectives, so you will have multiple chapters in a row told from the same character's perspective, but still both characters are essentially co-protagonists here, even if the prologue tells Gul's origins and Cavas doesn't show up till later.

And both these characters are interesting enough to merit their status as co-protagonists.  Gul is perhaps the more typical of the two, the supposedly prophesied girl who is supposed to kill the king - a prophecy she would love to reject given what it did to her parents and to all the other girls with similar birthmarks.  But at the same time, she's dedicated to revenge, and she's still a 15-16 year old girl, immature and reckless and often getting into trouble by not thinking things through or just plain acting with impatience.  She's kindhearted enough to know when she has made a horrible mistake in doing so, but you can easily understand her need for vengeance and why that drives her.

Cavas is similarly rash at times, but he's a lot more measured because unlike Gul, his view of the world is that it is what it is - an oppressive one in which people without magic like him and his father are forced into poverty and sickness - and there's only so much he can do to survive.  He doesn't have grand schemes of vengeance, he just wants to help his father - even if that means going through methods his father doesn't approve of.  So when his ghostly "friend" and his father suggest that he should help Gul with her scheme, he's totally against it - after all, it could jeopardize his already-slim hopes of helping his father and for what?  It's not like she's likely to succeed!  This isn't quite the reluctant hero trope, because Cavas never wants to be a hero and his reluctance has good cause.

Circumstances of course prevent Cavas from walking away from Gul.  For one, the ghostly man he's been getting money from for his father's medicine - as well as other such beings - keep pushing him to help Gul.  For another, he starts falling a little bit for Gul, and the feeling is mutual.  If there's a big flaw in this novel, it's honestly that I didn't quite buy this romance much - from either perspective there really isn't enough writing to support it sprouting based upon appearance or actions, and the book tries to act like it comes about in both characters' heads from the inception.  Cavas being pushed to help Gul by the spirits keeps this relationship from being a major problem, and this isn't exactly a romance, so the plot still works.  But it's a flaw that I hope is remedied in the next novel.

The rest of the plot and setting however works really well.  The Medieval-India inspired setting is really well done, with the book setting up a world with a scope much larger than we get to see here, with three other kingdoms on the periphery as well as other non-human races who have seemingly been subjugated to the current big bad.  And then you have the oppression of those without magic by those with it, which in a very nice touch was NOT started by the current King and big bad, but by the mother he supposedly unjustly assassinated (the idea that evil systemic problems can't simply be cured by killing a single person is a theme in this book).  And then there are the questions about whether gods exist and whether people have free will - long story short (Too Late!), it's a really fascinating world with a lot of complex issues all packed nicely into a not too long novel.

It adds up to a plot that actually does take a number of surprising turns, finishes on a satisfying ending and still contains a fairly big cliffhanger to whet my appetite for the next novel in this series, scheduled for next year.  I'll be back to see if that one takes a leap from this, but if it doesn't, it'd still be a more than solid YA novel, like this one.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)