Genres: Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: MLM MC, nonbinary secondary character
PoV: Third-person past-tense, multiple PoVs
ISBN: 0356518701
Goodreads
'A firework of a fantasy vibrant, explosive, deliciously dangerous and impossibly fun. A must-read debut' Tasha Suri, author of The Jasmine Throne
Siyon Velo might be acknowledged as the Alchemist. He may have even stabilized the planes and stopped Bezim from ever shaking into the sea again. But that doesn't mean he has any idea what's he doing-and it won't be long before everyone knows it.
Then mythical creatures once confined to operas and myths are spotted around Bezim. A djinn invades one of Zagiri's garden parties, and whispers of a naga slithering through the Flower District are all Anahid hears at the card table.
Magic is waking up in the Mundane. It's up to Siyon to figure out a way to stop it, or everything he's worked hard to save will come crashing down.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~literally all of the crime lords
~a named blade
~there’s something under the earth
~life-changing card games
~is magic coming back a good thing?
:this review contains spoilers for book one, Notorious Sorcerer!:
Middle books are hard. So many storytellers fumble the aftermath of big events – events that usually go down in book one of a series. They don’t quite see, or explore, all the ramifications of The Events, all the changes, all the ways people will respond to those changes – and the fact that, inevitably, any Event, even one the reader was cheering for in the previous book, is going to have negative, or at least troublesome, repercussions as well as positive ones.
Evans, on the other hand, has gleefully dived into all of this – which means Shadow Baron goes in so many directions I had no idea to expect, and absolutely all of them delighted me!
Siyon’s ignorance of traditional alchemy turned out to be an advantage in Notorious Sorcerer, where not knowing what was meant to be impossible allowed him to pull off the impossible. But he has no frame of reference at all for being a Power, and wow are the azatani (Bezim’s nobility) unhappy about that. Specifically, they’re Not Happy about the effect having a Power is having on the Mundane plane – beings from other planes delving into the human world the way Siyon used to delve into theirs; superstitions manifesting into reality; and all alchemical processes and workings becoming much, much stronger than they used to be.
No one (including me) really thought about what having a Power would mean, what it would do.
The answer turns out to be, ‘a lot’.
I get why some readers were disappointed by Shadow Baron; it’s much less action-y than the first book, and Siyon spends most of his time experimenting and trying to figure out how his magic works, how to make it do what he wants. I can see why this would bore some people. I, however, was delighted; I love digging into lore, I love experimenting with magic, so this was a FEAST for me. And Evans has not done the thing that annoys me so much, and forgotten about the rest of her world; what Siyon accomplished in the last book has had an effect outside of Bezim too, and getting to see just a little of that – mostly via the various travellers who’ve come to Bezim from elsewhere – as well as what other cultures have thought of magic, in the past and now – all of it is marvellous. (Without, in my humble opinion, drowning the reader in worldbuilding; I would have been happy if Evans had gone into a lot more detail, but I don’t think it was the wrong call to keep the writing…not ‘light’, exactly, but very readable, rather than heavy and dense.)
All that being said, I was not expecting Anahid’s arc to be the one I was most invested in! I was actually very confused by her being given a POV in book one, and didn’t find her plotline very interesting – but all the groundwork it laid coheres beautifully in Shadow Baron! It’s kind of hard to talk about without spoilers, but it was wonderful, and such a relief, to see Anahid really and truly come into her own, discovering that she’s much more than she thought she was, much more capable than she thought she was. I would never in a million years have guessed that her learning a new card game in Notorious Sorcerer would lead to THIS!
If I had one critique, it might be the revolution plotline, which was mostly Zagiri’s. While I really liked seeing more of Bezim, digging into the parts of it that are not wealthy, like the azatani, or exciting, like the bravi – Shadow Baron does do That Thing which SFF so often does: offering a bloodless revolution. Other parts of the book have violence, but Zagiri is determined to get more rights for workers without killing anybody, and while I admire that in theory… I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. I think I’m tired of overcoming-evil/capitalism/the 1% plotlines that decry violence; it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t like violence, but it feels very wrong to tell off oppressed groups for using it when violence is being enacted against them. And I think that’s where this trope in Fantasy especially comes from.
(Also the fact that Fantasy authors are not good, as a general rule of thumb, at writing revolutions in general. It’s too tempting to have one villain, or one small group of villains, when in reality oppression is baked into the system/society, which is much, much harder to fix than overthrowing a single bad guy. I’ve not seen many Fantasy stories that tackle that, and even fewer that do it well.)
I’m sure that wasn’t Evans’ intent, though, and considering that Violence Is Bad is pretty endemic to the genre, I’m not willing to deduct points for it. Especially since the plan Zagiri comes up with (meaning, the plan Evans came up with) is an excellent one that I do think would have worked in the real world too, probably.
And that’s it – really my only critique, which isn’t quite a critique. Everything else? Was great!
Rather than having Middle Book Syndrome, I’d argue that Shadow Baron is bucking expectations in a quietly challenging way: Siyon’s love interest is MIA, so there’s not much of the queer romance that was a draw in Notorious Sorcerer (although that doesn’t mean we get no mentions of Izmirlian, and what we did get were some of my favourite passages); after making us fall in love with Bezim in book one, our MCs spend this book upending that city; and the cinematic magic moments, while present, take a back seat to digging into how magic works. The result is a quieter, more introspective book than its predecessor, and I loved it.
I can’t wait for book three!
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