Fevered Star

Book 2 in the Earth and Sky trilogy

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I liked this one less than the first. Some of the dialog seems stilted and corny, and I sometimes struggled to follow the geo-political machinations of shifting alliances, traitors, and fluctuating leadership.

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One of the major bummers of reading on a Kindle is that the reader can’t easily flip to the front of the book to see the map. And if we do wrestle with the clunky touch-responsive interface to go find the map, it’s illegible anyway. Because the Kindle only renders in black and white, the map designations are often white on light grey and it isn’t possible to zoom in to see things better.

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Worse, though, is that the map wasn’t included in the front pages of this book in the series - the one in which all the geo-political stuff is going on. All this to say, I was lost for some parts of this book. Which isn't the authors fault!

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“Sun Priest,” he hissed, the pain so dense his crow vision began to fail. He could not catch her, not like this, but there were other ways to follow. “Go!” he cried, thrusting his arm out. “Find her!” And this time, he willed himself to break, and his arm shattered into a half dozen crows.

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She ran, hurtling down the stairs and out of sight, and the crows pursued with one purpose. To kill.

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There is plenty of movement - the main character transports himself around a lot, his lady love is relocated to various places on foot and eagle back, etc. - but most of the book is scheming and plotting. The battle we were expecting to happen, between two individuals, happens but it is anti-climatic because the story is building to the larger war that the matrons are readying their clans for.

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The patterns were clear to him with his crow vision, lines of potential where the Odo Sedoh had left his carnage, where the shadow had eaten through and lay waiting below the surface. He took up his obsidian knife and cut across his arm. He let his blood fall, the blood that his old tutor had once coveted as an unimaginable source of power. And he fed the ground.

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It started as a low rumble, like a great beast in its den, roused. He held out his hand, and the bone, sinew, and blood of dead priests and scions rose at his command. He shaped it like wood, spinning and chipping and refining as he went, and around him a fortress grew.

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There are plenty of tense scenes in this and plot twists but we never really know where the major characters stand until the last few chapters. The Sun still sits on the horizon, eclipsed, which is an excellent visual reference to what forces are currently ruling the land.

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“We have a problem,” Balam said as Powageh entered the office he kept on the lower floor of his estate. He would have preferred to receive his cousin in his private rooms, if only to spare himself the labor of dragging his body downstairs. He was a man in his prime, physically fit and without injury, but his muscles ached from sitting still too long, and his head felt like it had been stuffed with the honey of dreams, sticky and thick.

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The major themes of this book are grand: knowing oneself, not based on where one is from but upon who one truly is, where one fits into the greater picture of clan and society, the power of family ties, and how love and kindness can shift the expectations of a era.

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