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language: English
country: Aotearoa
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, science fiction
series: The Endsong, #2
dates read: 22.9.24-1.10.24
I found Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds a bit frustrating when I read it — good overall, but the writing wasn’t amazing and there were some structural issues that made it not work as well for me as I wanted it to.
the sequel, The Sunforge, blows it out of the water. it’s so fucking good.
now, the caveat is that I did not reread The Dawnhounds beforehand, and frankly my recollection of the plot is a bit hazy. but that didn’t matter, honestly — this book worked extremely well even with my memory of the first book being vague. first, the writing is better (though there are still a bunch of comma splices). second, the structure is better — where The Dawnhounds threw a second POV in partway through in a very clunky way, The Sunforge is multivocal from the get-go, and the movement between both characters and times felt very natural. the world-building is no longer riddled with infodumps. nothing made me go “oh, that was clunky” the way some things in The Dawnhounds did.
this also addressed some of my frustrations with the first book, though the unchanged use of te reo Māori after what we learn are thousands of years and [SPOILER REDACTED] continues to make me roll my eyes a bit. it does somewhat suffer from classic fantasy timescale exaggeration, but there are some in-universe (as it were) justifications for this that are moderately convincing. it was weird to me at the time that people were comparing The Dawnhounds to The Locked Tomb, but this one actually does have some resonances with The Locked Tomb in the way it’s thinking about what people with enormous power and thousands of years in which to exercise it and also to develop complicated and fucked up psychosexual relationships with one another might end up like.
much as I felt about Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky, I’m still not sure I’m convinced this is precisely “Māori-inspired”. if anything, I would say Filipino history is more prominent in terms of the structure and plot of the novel (and used to powerful effect in a critique of US imperialism), though obviously there are Māori aesthetic details within the world-building. this isn’t really a criticism, though — just an observation.
I would say the book’s one real flaw is the tendency of characters to make slightly cliché speeches about Found Family and Redemption and whatnot. some of them are quite good, to be fair — Yat’s speech about redemption is good. it’s just a bit overwrought, I’d say. this did not, however, detract from my enjoyment of the book overall. this book governs, and it’s definitely worth reading The Dawnhounds to get to it.
moods: dark, emotional, hopeful, reflective, tense