booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

The worldbuilding unfolds slowly, with early mentions of the various kingdoms supplemented later on by more detailed descriptions once Xingyin actually travels there. The descriptions are evocative but not overwhelming, tending to focus more on her thoughts about what she observes. There’s a strong focus on Xingyin’s internal life, as her relationships get more complicated but she’s still keeping her parentage a secret. She’s the daughter of the moon goddess, having grown up in secret since her mother was exiled to the moon after claiming the immortality meant for her husband, Xingyin’s father. 

I like the first third and I love the second half, in between those sections the pacing gets a little weird though it’s still pretty good. Mid-book events which in some other story might be a training montage instead are collapsed into a very brief mention as several years are skipped at once. Xingyin ends up in the Celestial palace, surrounded by people who despise her for her class and who would detest her if they knew who her mother really was. After spending several years as the prince’s companion, she tries to make her own way by excelling at arms, becoming a formidable archer. Her goal is to earn a favor from the emperor in order to request her mother’s freedom. 

Once place where this excels is in relationships, specifically the way that Xingyin’s relationships with Prince Liwei and Captain Wenzhi change over time. It is a love triangle, but one which at each stage feels like there are good reasons for the choices Xingyin is making. She proceeds as well as she can while figuring out who she wants, if anyone. I love the ending, it pulls things together in a fantastic way and lays the ground for what the sequel might cover while still letting this first book feel complete.

This has a lot of story elements I’d normally like, but for some reason it’s just not working for me. I gave it a month and it started to feel like a chore.

I think I’m having trouble because of the size of the cast. It starts out with four main characters (with one more important one who isn’t a POV character) and then adds another one. They’re all in the same city and there’s a degree of redundancy as one character learns something and then one or two others figure it out separately. Whatever the reason, I’m not enjoying it and I’m stopping.

The plot follows Daine and Numair almost dying before being transported to the Divine Realms, where Daine meets her father and sees her mother again. They find out that Chaos is helping Ozorne or someone in his army, and set out across various sections of the Divine Realms to see if Skysong’s dragon relatives will transport them back home so they can help in the war. Along the way, Daine and Numair end up acknowledging their love for each other and start to figure out the next steps in their relationship. 

I hadn’t read this in a long time, and I’d forgotten that Daine isn’t yet an adult here. She’s sixteen to Numair’s thirty. Numair is completely aware that to pursue Daine romantically and/or sexually, due to their relationship as teacher and student and the fact that he’s almost twice her age, is likely to be unequal and mean he’s taking advantage of her trust and inexperience, even if he doesn’t intend it. After they kiss he has a short speech this effect. That sets up the idea that normally this would be a problem, but the fact that they do end up together throughout the rest of the book means that their relationship is treated as an exception to the general rule. It makes the this plot arc feel like grooming on Numair’s part, or at least not taking the necessary actions in support of his knowledge that he’s in a massive position of power over a literal child. No matter how much Numair does not want to be that kind of manipulative person as an idea, he ends up perfectly fine with continuing to pursue this relationship once Daine insists that she loves him and knows what she’s doing. I like a lot of their actual dynamic in ordinary scenes, but even if she was twenty or twenty-five when he’s thirty then there’s still the problem that he’s her magic teacher. Because of how the characters are written, things work out and he’s not screwing her over, but if he were a slightly shittier person she’d have a lot of trouble getting help or getting away.

As the final book in the quartet, this wraps up the fate of former emperor Ozorne and addresses the gods’ perspective on the former barrier between the Mortal Realm and the Divine Realms. We finally meet Skysong’s family and answer whether they’re fine with her remaining in Daine’s care. It also puts words to the attraction between Daine and Numair which has been subtly (and occasionally not-so-subtly) teased in the earlier books. At long last Daine meets her father, as well as finding out where her ma went after she died. This introduces and resolves Daine and Numair being transported to the Divine Realms. It’s the final book of the quartet but there clearly were plans for more Tortall books, so this leaves open whether or not Daine and Numair will stay together and maybe get married. 

It would not make sense to start here, as the point of this is to address things left open from previous books. Even something as simple as Daine’s parentage has been slowly teased for three previous books, so getting the answer almost immediately in this one would feel anticlimactic to anyone who hasn’t read the others. 

 This will either not feel like a lore dump at all, or feel like a stack of lore packets in a trench coat. Almost every moment is designed to show off something about the setting, the Gods, or various immortals. It’s so embedded in the story that it’s inescapable but manages to feel seamless for long stretches so it’s usually not bothersome. For a tour of the Divine realms it’s pretty cool. I’m a little thrown by the decision to make the Platypus god say “G’Day” like a cartoon of an Australian. Overall it's an interesting but ultimately skippable end to the quartet.

Focused on descriptions of what everyone is wearing, too visual for me.

 *I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book. 

OCEAN’S ECHO is the mind-control version of a forced marriage/fake dating plot… in space. It’s fantastic. 

Tennal doesn’t want to be synced, Surit is affronted by the very idea that he’d be forced to mentally link for life with someone who’s unwilling. Together they hope to pretend the sync worked and fake it long enough for Tennal to get away and for Surit to keep his military career intact. The political intrigues are complex enough to imply a great deal of other stuff that’s happening while reducing the pieces Tennal and Surit have to track into a relatively small list. 

I love Tennal and Surit, they make a very interesting team. Tennal is an absolute mess, and Surit is grounded in a way that lets him notice Tennal’s antics without getting bowled over. The course of their relationship is affected early on by the circumstances of their meeting just as much as it is by their personalities, something which continues to matter right until the end of the book. It’s a character-focused story, centering their reactions to what’s happening whether or not one of them was the catalyst. They’re frequently buffeted by someone else’s moves, piecing together what’s going on and why while the adjust their course. It means that even though there’s a lot happening other than their relationship, everything is filtered through their processing of events, singly or together. 

Though technically not a sequel, this is in the same universe as WINTER'S ORBIT. The main way this matters is they share a galactic convention for gender-markers by way of jewelry material. Someone could read them in either order or even just read one or the other and have everything make sense. 

The ending leaves open the possibility that they’ll show up in later books, tying off major and minor plot threads so that this is a complete story on its own while giving an indication of what they’ll do next.

The worldbuilding focuses heavily on Carthak and almost completely ignores Tortall except when drawing some comparison between the two nations. It’s uncomfortably fascinated with slavery in Carthak, specifically with how it is carried out in the palace. It’s yet another white savior narrative (e.g. THE WOMAN WHO RIDES LIKE A MAN) in book three of a Tortall book. This is a bit subtler, since Daine had no intention of messing with the Carthaki way of life, slavery and all, but it turns out that some of the other characters have been actively involved at getting slaves out of the country. Daine’s goddess-driven involvement serves to mess things up for the Emperor, making Carthak much friendlier to Tortall than before their trip. Daine’s bonds with animals provide conversational opportunities for her to draw comparisons between slavery and the caging of animals. 

This finally addresses the mentions of the Carthaki Emperor’s involvement with the recent influx of immortals, but it mostly does so by introducing the Emperor himself at long last. It has a new storyline involving a Tortallan delegation to Carthak for peace talks, with Daine alone to heal the Emperor’s birds, if she can. A very major thing related to Daine is introduced and resolved here when the Badger passes along a temporary power at the behest of a Carthaki goddess. It leaves several things for later, such as Daine’s growing understanding of her parentage. The trick is that it doesn't really move anything forward (except for Daine almost beginning to understand how much Numair cares for her), so it's very skippable. I actually think that going straight from the first to the fourth book in the quartet might work well because then it wouldn't feel as weird with Numair being more attached to Daine as she grows up.

It can stand alone enough that someone could probably read just this book and have a good time, understanding almost all of what happened. It would help to have read either of the first two books in the quartet (benefitting more from the second book), but this is a very episodic series and doesn’t require the other stories in order to make sense.

The plot centers around Daine and a Tortallan delegation visiting Carthak for peace talks, but Daine gets some divine attention and is used to send a last-chance warning to the Emperor before things get very bad for him. There's also a persistent narrative about the presence and treatment of slaves in Carthak, since Tortall hasn't had slaves in a few centuries. At several points the narrative ends up just describing a bunch of dinosaurs, along with the magical means of learning about their lives based on fossils and the work of seers. This is a pretty strong self-contained narrative, it's just in the context of yet another instance of (very white but not homogenous) Tortall claiming moral/cultural superiority over another (primarily brown/black) country that this looks a bit off. I wish there were more named characters of color who aren't enslaved, since I'm pretty sure the only ones are the Emperor and his heir, and one of those two is a villain.

It's a very weird anti-slavery PSA with resurrected dinosaurs, completely skippable within the series.

I don't like any of the characters.

The very first chapter has misogyny and homophobic slurs in a density which makes me mistrust where the rest of this could possibly go.

This lost me when the main character teaches herself to read, including what words sound like, based on a random book and a dim recollection of playing with letter blocks as a small child. Maybe I’m just too used to English’s determination to demand use of common words which break every otherwise useful rule of pronunciation, but it broke my suspension of disbelief and I never quite got it back.