2010 fantasy, second of its trilogy. Both Darkborn (burned by light)
and Lightborn (dissolved by darkness) are having political upheavals,
with assassination only another tool in the kit. Someone seems to be
trying to set them at war with each other. But will anyone listen in
time?
Well, alas, this is a middle volume, and nothing is really
resolved here. There are immediate perils, and even alliances among
the diverse members of Team Let's Not Start A Pointless War are
fraught and untrusting (tragedy being the conflict of good versus
good, and all that). That's great stuff as far as it goes, but it goes
only far enough to move people into place for the final book, rather
than to come to even the brief pause in the action that ended the
first one.
One of the things I most enjoyed about that first book was that it
showed Balthasar and Telmaine, doctor and secret mage, as a solid
married couple, each having their own adventures and emotional lives
but succeeding in part because they were prepared to share information
across the separate parts of society they were living in. This time
Balthasar is almost entirely off-stage, and much as I enjoy reading
about everyone else's adventures the book's made distinctly weaker
without that central relationship. We spend a great deal of time with
Telmaine, trying to keep her magic secret not only from Darkborn
society (which frowns on mages) but from its mages (because it's not
"pure" Darkborn magic but is influenced by something else). There's
more of the Lightborn Floria White Hand, food-taster to their Prince
and possibly involved in his assassination, but because she's on the
run as a result (and then imprisoned for a while) the Lightborn story
is split between her and the new Prince, and then the rogue mage he
brings in to try to break the power of the mages' organisation which
may be part of one of the many conspiracies… it all loses a bit of
focus, which is unfortunate. Each of these stories is interesting in
itself, and taken together they make a better story as events in one
feed into events in another, but by constantly flipping between them
each one loses its own force. This sort of multiple narrative is a
very hard thing to do well, and Sinclair almost pulls it off.
The politics work well, though one's – deliberately – never clear how
much is being influenced by the still-mysterious Shadowborn and how
much is normal greed. The sense of everyone being driven into a war
that most of them don't want is solid. But it's a very talky book in
spite of some fine moments of action.
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