We Ride the Storm

Here we follow multiple perspectives; Miko, the bastard princess of an empire. Rah, the exiled captain of a wandering people. Cassandra, assassin, whore, and host to some form of entity and power. Two of these perspectives (Miko and Cassandra) are interesting enough from the off to have lead a solo book. I disliked Rah's initial chapters as his character didn't feel like it acted with the principles and honour he spoke of – and he speaks constantly of principles and honour.

Despite my initial dislike of Rah, I'd say this book is full of strong characters (even without having read the preceding Vengeance Trilogy), with political machinations, both known and unknown, casting shadows over everyone's words and actions, leaving you guessing at people's true motivations and allegiances. I'd potentially even argue that not having read the previous trilogy strengthened the book in some way as I assume some of the accusations being thrown around were events in those books.

We're fairly quickly seeing cross-over amongst the main perspective characters, while not initially directly meeting, supporting cast members cross paths, the same names are mentioned, machinations are spoken about from multiple sides. Multiple perspectives can be a strength and a failing depending on how they're weaved together and here it's a treat. Rather than constantly yearning to move back to another perspective, there's always something interesting happening in each.

If I had to point to any factor in the book that I didn't like, it would be the way that sometimes action scenes were glossed over a bit. These tend to be the bigger battles and it makes some sense that they're less important than the direct conflicts between named characters, but still felt a bit weird for a battle to be done in a couple of lines.

Overall there was little I didn't like about this book as it provides a great opening state of affairs to be resolved in the rest of the quadrilogy and mysteries yet to reveal.