Sean

Blood Over Bright Haven was an enjoyable read, with fast-pacing, an interesting magic system, and some important themes, but lacked some of the nuance and character work that could have really elevated it. The ending of this book carried it by making some early moral debates tangible through Sciona’s actions.

Sciona is one of the most frustrating main characters I’ve read. Despite being a brilliant mage, she doesn’t have any sense of logic or emotional intelligence. At times she had me wanting to rip my hair out. I know her naïveté was necessary to enable her journey and it pays off in the end, I just didn’t enjoy the experience of reading about it. Thomil on the other hand, was a very solid side character, mostly because of the way he would argue with Sciona. I even found myself rooting for them to have a romance in a way I rarely do.

This may not be ML Wangs best work (it’s hard to live up to sword of kaigen), but it solidified her as an author I’ll be eagerly awaiting more from, and is a book I would definitely recommend.

Boys in the Boat had a huge impact on me when I first read it almost ten years ago. It was a big part of the reason I started rowing and taught me a lot when I was in a very impressionable stage of life. Coming back to it now, at the same stage of life as the guys in the book, I look at the stories in a new light and hope that they can have a similarly positive influence on me now. That may not mean picking rowing back up, but at its core The Boys in the Boat is a story of being a young man finding his way through tough times and whether I go to the Olympics or not (probably not lol), I can still apply lessons from Joe and the gang to my current situation.

Disquiet Gods is quintessential Suneater at its best. It is the first book in the series that retraces the events of earlier books, but does it in a way that makes those events all the more impactful in reflection. The politics brought back memories of Demon in White, and are an aspect of the series I wish was more prominent. The second act of the book, on Sabratha, gave me all the supernatural worldbuilding I’ve come to love about this series, combined with a bit of horror through contact with The Watchers and the Cielcin. It felt like a combination of Demon in White and Kingdoms of Death. And the ending was a direct callback to the last third of Howling Dark, when this series really started to have an impact on me. I’d been waiting for that to happen and worried that the foreshadowing of it might reduce the impact. Boy was I wrong. While I’d say this is my third favorite book in the series, the ending of it was probably the best. We’re so close now to the fateful events on Gododdin that are revealed on page 1 and have been built up to for six books. November can’t come soon enough…

Ashes of Man was a letdown as far as Suneater books go. Each of the last four books have expanded upon the world, plot, and characters in major ways. This one felt like replaying the hits. It’s the same characters, with even Hadrian not undergoing much development (until maybe the very end), same plot devices, an impossible mission, followed by a huge culminating battle, and mostly planets and groups of people that have made appearances already.

🚨SPOILERS🚨

What really disappointed me was Valkas death. Valka had grown into a character I absolutely loved. Her relationship with Hadrian, her cool half-computer brain and everything she could do with it, even the way she connected with Gibson and other side characters were some of my favorite parts of the series. It’s foreshadowed throughout the book that she’s probably gonna die at the end, so I was ready for a massive emotional impact or a dramatic death. It didn’t give me either of those. She just kinda dies. It felt like a disrespectful write-off of a key character. In the manner of her death she gets reduced to little more than any other side character Hadrian cared about, which is not what she’d been at all. The fallout from her death, specifically hadrians reaction, ended up as the part with big stakes and impact on the story. Ultimately, setting up what feels like the very end of this long saga, now that Hadrian truly has no one left.