Blood over Bright Haven

Thinking back over this novel, I had to dig around internally to discover why i didn’t love it. The plot is interesting, the characters are well-defined, and the ending isn’t happily-ever-after (which I appreciate). But, there is a baseline condition that I am tired of, a literary trope used that is not original, and the writing is mediocre.

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Arras turned back to his wife, and Thomil had never seen such terror in those steel eyes. The hunter’s roar was barely recognizable as words. “Take Carra!”

Primal maternal desperation animated Maeva’s body in an impossible acceleration over the last few feet of snow to her husband. She snatched Carra from Arras’s great arms just as he came apart in a spiral of light, blood, and unfurling muscle.

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The baseline condition that I’m tired of is a female protagonist set amongst a racist, sexist society. Like in other novels and modern societies, the subjugation of women has been written in to their religion.

I recognize that authors who do this are trying to bring awareness to how men use religion to put themselves in positions of power and keep women out of rooms where the real decision making happens, but I’m bored of this baseline choice.

I understand it creates a considerable amount of tension as the protagonist has to wrestle with and overcome her own conditioning in addition to the conditioning of everyone else, but this baseline condition hits so close to reality that I’d prefer not also having to deal with it also in my private reading moments.

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Kwen were dangerous beasts when it meant tightening control over Tiranish women. Tiranish women were damsels when it meant tightening control over Kwen. They were all hapless children when it meant denying them access to power—and it was that lack of power that made them helpless, made them monstrous, made them subject to the benevolent Tiranishman, who would save them from their deficiencies.

Each gear turned tidily into its neighbor in a soul-grinding system designed to sustain the men who had named the pieces and made them so: damsel, devil, servant, wife.

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The trope this author utilizes that is used frequently is the presenting of passages from the fictional society’s religious text before each chapter. By showing us the passages that every child in that society has had to read and perhaps memorize we understand the conditioning of a society. I get it. But it’s a literary technique that is used a lot.

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While the plot is interesting and there are passages in which the author goes deep to explore the changing of a characters mind or the way a character feels, overall, the writing is nothing special. In the hands of a more skilled wordsmith, this novel could have been exceptional. It was challenging to find passages noteworthy enough to share in this review.

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Because Sciona’s conundrum was hardly unique. Is it better to be safe and broken or dead? This was a question every Kwen had to ask themselves.

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The story follows a woman who is so good at magic that the exclusive boy’s club of Highmages has no choice but to let her in. We learn that there is a reason this society has been keeping women down and not allowing them to join the club: woman have more integrity. If a woman were to discover how the magic really works they would immediately put a stop to it (or seek to discover alternatives).

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The meat of this book relates to the way the protagonist comes to grips with her own conditioning, with the truth of the source of magic, and then what she wants to do about it. One thing that I appreciate about this story is how it doesn’t have a happy ending. It takes guts to write a novel that ends with nobody winning. Kudos to the author for that.

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