Thursday, April 7, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

 



Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on April 19, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


Fevered Star is the second book in Rebecca Roanhorse's Between Earth and Sky Epic Fantasy series, which began two years ago with her "Black Sun" (my review here).  The series (trilogy I believe) is an epic fantasy based upon Pre-Colombian Mesoamerican cultures, featuring a set of characters with various issues and dreams in a grey world of cultures on the edge of religious and cultural conflict.  The story very much felt like a lot of setup, as everything in the book closed in on a certain event that happened in the very climax, but the characters were really strong and really enjoyable, so I was very eager to see how things would move forward from the explosive shift in the status quo.  

Fevered Star is sort of a mixed bag, honestly, which very much suffers from second book in trilogy symptom - the tendency to lose some focus and resolution as the book expands its world to include new threats, characters and ideas.  Where Fevered Star continues the stories of our main characters from Book 1 - Naranpa, Okoa, Xiala, and Serapio mainly, but a few others who get extra prominence here - the book is really good, as each of their journeys, conflicts, and character arcs are really interesting, as they each try to deal with the new situation in which the ones they love are seemingly lost, the destiny they were meant for was suddenly not achieved, or the dreams they had for a better world are seemingly now impossible.  But where the story attempts to expand to new characters from new locations, it kind of failed to catch my interest, especially as the backgrounds of these peoples just never really was as interesting as the already introduced ones, even with the use of large infodumps to try and explain things further.  

Note:  Spoilers are inevitable below, so I'm not really going to try and avoid spoilers from Book 1.  
--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
The era of the Sun Priests is over.  The Year of the Crow has begun.  Or so most think, with the eclipse continuing to cover the sun, the Watchers slaughtered, and the Crow God's avatar, the Odo Sedoh, having arisen and flown off into Crow Lands.  But things aren't what they seem.  

For the conspiracy within the Watchers attempted a power play at the last moment, throwing Naranpa, the true Sun Priest, to the side, and never performed the ritual to invest her replacement with the Sun Priest's authority.  And so Serapio didn't kill the real Sun Priest...and the Crow God thus failed to fully manifest, leaving Serapio alive, weakened, and unsure of what to do next in the hands of the Carrion Crow clan that was supposed to be his family, but whom he has never known.  And the Crows, are split between worshipping and hating him, leaving Crow shield Okoa unsure of what to do with this strange powerful man his crow companion seems to trust beyond even Okoa himself.  

For Xiala, Serapio's actions and survival leaves her lost....until she sees an opportunity to chase after him into Carrion Crow Lands, to try and reunite with the man she grew to love.  But her chase will lead her into the conspiracy that tried to take control of Tova and into an uneven alliance with Iktan, the former Priest of Knives and deadly assassin.  

And Naranpa finds herself awake and glowing with magical sunlike power, as if she's an avatar of the Sun itself, and soon discovers that the role of Sun Priest wasn't simply a political one, but was secretly also a sorcerous one, and that her own power could allow her to rise and challenge the hierarchies that have seemingly fallen down.  

But while all of Tova struggles to find a new path forwards, fearing knives hidden behind every corner, outsiders have begun to make their moves on the City, now that the ancient treaty behind the status quo has been broken, each wanting to take powers and lands for their own.....And these outside powers are willing to wield ancient forbidden magic to achieve their objectives, magic that once nearly brought the entire world to its knees......
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So yeah, this is a substantially longer plot summary than I usually do in these books, because well, Fevered Star covers a lot of material.  Once again the story is split between four main point of view characters - Serapio, Xiala, Naranpa, and Okoa - whose stories pick up naturally from the last book.  However, a fifth point of view character is added in Balam, the magically powerful Lord who setup Xiala and Serapio's journey in the last book.  

This fifth point of view character is honestly at the core - but not the only aspect - of the book's weakest point.  Balam and his companions give this book what seems to be the first clearly evil antagonist, whereas previously we only had characters who all thought they were either doing the right thing or doing what they had to do, and were well meaning even when they committed horrifying actions.  And while that meant the book sometimes lacked direction, it also meant that the book was always really interesting as each of the characters was done so well, with you being able to care and be invested in their journeys, even without actually knowing whether to root for one rather than the other.  

And that's still the case with those four main characters here, each of whom is drastically upturned by the change in the status quo.  For Xiala, she finds herself adrift and desperate to save the man she loved and thought lost when she discovers him to be alive, even as that forces her to journey amongst his enemies and to confront aspects of her past - the events that led to her exile - that she would rather not remember, rooted in her feelings of love and the female only society on Teek.  For Serapio, that's finding himself alive somehow, still powerful but without the full power of the Crow God, among a people who don't care who he is and either want him as a symbol or as a bargaining piece...rather than understanding he's a person.  For Okoa, that's finding himself further struggling between his beloved crow's friendship of Serapio, the cult that worships Serapio, his sister who wants Serapio dead, and the feeling that he has to do something about his mother's murder.  And so Okoa struggles to figure out who he should help and aid, given it all, and that conflict is easy to understand and really strong.  And then there's Naranpa, who once wanted to lead the Watchers to renewed relevance and leadership through the status quo, but now finds herself with power and with truths about herself and her people that overturn what she believed.  And so she has to figure out what to do with that power, and whether her dream of uniting Tova is still attainable...or even worth the cost.  

These four characters' stories weave together really well, especially Serapio, Okoa, and Naranpa, and I eagerly anticipate how their stories conclude in the next volume.  

But Balam's story, and where Xiala's kind of intersect with it, doesn't really work as well.  Balam's story relies very much on infodumping to introduce the geo-political and magical history between the foreign powers and Tova, something that wasn't there last book (or only hinted at), and just feels like too much to really grapple at this point with everything else going on.  Balam is quite clearly evil, and so are some of those he conspires with - and I just never really found a reason to care about them and their peoples like I did the main four peoples.  These peoples are clearly important, but by being all introduced basically all at once, and with their history being introduced with two large infodumps, it just doesn't flow as naturally.  

And so Fevered Star doesn't quite live up to the expectation I had after book 1, even as it continues to promise interesting things with most of the pre-existing main characters.  Mind you, I liked it, I just didn't like it as much as I hoped.  Hopefully book 3 will return to that great promise, especially now that all the interested parties have now been introduced.  

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