The Sunforge (The Endsong, #2) by Sascha Stronach
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists, Science Fantasy
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC, sapphic MC, F/F, Māori-coded trans sapphic MC, trans MC, minor nonbinary characters
Published on: 6th August 2024
ISBN: 1982187085
Goodreads

Sascha Stronach returns in this queer, Maori-inspired Endsong series about a police officer back from the dead who will stop at nothing to save her city from the evil that threatens to destroy it, perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Black Sun.

The steel city of Radovan is consumed by fire, with survivors few and far between. Stranded in its harbor are Yat, Kiada, and Sen, whose Weaving powers are in a badly weakened state. Relying on only their wits, they must plot their way through the ruins of the capitol, which are patrolled by a hostile militia, and disable the technology that prevents them from escaping.

But to navigate the crew, Kiada will have to rely on her own history with Radovan—a place she first landed unwillingly, and one she only survived by falling in with Fort Tomorrow, a band of misfits and ne’er-do-wells led by Vanya, a charismatic pickpocket and a Weaver.

Vanya may hold the key not only to saving Radovan from complete annihilation, but an age-old fight between the gods that threatens their world.

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

~whatever you’re reading, I raise you: Māori-inspired science fantasy
~be watchful for tigers
~who needs linear time anyway?
~don’t fuck with aunts
~drown

:my review of book one!:

Whaaaaaaaaaat just happened?

What???

WHAT?!

That was pretty much my immediate reaction to turning the final page of Sunforge.

WHAT EVEN?!

But it’s so good! I definitely didn’t understand it all and I’m going to need to reread it at LEAST two more times to fully catch and process everything, but – IT’S SO GOOD!

I am fucking stunned at how much Stronach can fit into so few pages. I was a little disappointed when I loaded my arc onto my ereader and saw it didn’t quite hit 300 pages – I like my books chonky, and also, how much story can you really pack into 200+ pages?

A LOT. A WHOLE LOT. A FUCKTON, ONE MIGHT SAY. (That’s a joke that will make sense once you read the book.)

And I should have known that, because Dawnhounds, the first book in this series, was also super short, and yet was IMMENSE on the inside. These are books built like the Tardis – and OH MY, the things you’ll see once you step inside! The places it will take you! SAY GOODBYE TO LINEAR TIME AND YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF SPACE!

I thought (and still think)that Dawnhounds was an amazing sci-fantasy. But Sunforge proves that Stronach is a freaking GENIUS.

You want my help? I give you instead the strongest curse of my people: yeah nah, I’m good.”

We heard a bit about Radovan in Dawnhounds, and it’s the setting of this book – a setting that, at least at first, seems much less weird than Hainak! Hainak was a living city with mushroom houses; Radovan has, you know. Buildings that aren’t alive and people who haven’t modified their bodies with plants! It has a kind of Cold War vibe, except for the androids all over the place. Not too hard to wrap your head around!

Which is fortunate, because everything else is very hard to wrap your head around. You thought Dawnhounds was weird??? Yeah, not so much, it turns out. Sunforge makes Dawnhounds look like white surburbia with 2.5 kids and a dog – and if you’ve read Dawnhounds, that should give you an idea of what kind of oh shit levels of ABSOLUTELY OUT-THEREness we’re dealing with this time around.

I sprinkled it with sugar and ate it up with a SPOON, and my darlings, it is DELICIOUS.

“Bury me deep,” he spat, “wrap me in ten shrouds and twelve chains and throw me in the ocean; put my carcass in your largest cannon and fire it at the sun; put as much distance between me and your God as possible, because if you don’t, I will come back as a curse. I swear on my blood and the blood of my people, I will be there when your children are buried; I will be there when their children are buried; I will be there a thousand times over, until the stars lose their fires. I bestow my soul to whichever god or spirit is clever enough to find it; I bestow my curse upon Empire and all her vicious children. Now, hurry up and kill me–I’ve got places to be.”

That being said, I have no idea how to sell you on it without MASSIVE spoilers, so.

Hmm.

I guess we can start with: if you don’t like your SFF brain-breakingly odd, then you should probably quit while you’re ahead. Can you deal with a character whose name changes from sentence to sentence, because he’s existed for MILLIONS (if not billions?) of years and is – sort of – switching between the personas/people he’s been in different lifetimes? How about multiple characters sharing the same name for quite alarming reasons? Are you willing to dive into the nature of divinity and examine what gods might actually be (at least these ones)? Are you inextricably attached to your sense of time and reality? Because there really is a great deal of timey-wimey stuff going on here (but not, I hasten to assure you, time-travel. It’s so much weirder than time-travel!

Time-travel I can understand. THIS MAGIC-MUSHROOM JAMBOREE, ON THE OTHER HAND, I STRUGGLE WITH.)

And hey – this book is…lots of painful things happen in this book. The plague in Hainak was nightmarish, but nobody we knew got caught in that; in Sunforge, not everybody makes it out alive, and it hurts. So as well as everything else, you need to be okay with books that gut you.

We like to pretend that pain is a crucible, but that’s just survivorship bias for the soul. Somehow we forgot a very simple truth: most pain just hurts.”

But if you ARE okay with that…then Sunforge is a domino-chain of awesome, with surprise lining up after surprise, with reveals you’ll never see coming and no safety-net anywhere and gods continuing to meddle. We have a living ship and Extremely Important toy cars and a spider I would not want to piss off, and a story split between the present day and glimpses of everything that’s led up to it. Radovan is infected with a growing tide of fascism, and wow is it uncomfortable how familiar and too-easy-to-believe it is, lots of pathetic little people deciding they’d rather burn the world down than let it be something they don’t like, and caught in the midst are a group of very cool people somewhere between activists and rebels, doing the best they can in a rapidly decaying system. I loved these new characters, all of them, I want to keep them all, and I couldn’t help grinning like a loon when I realised Stronach had gone ahead and made this series EVEN QUEERER. Yesssssssssssssssss!

It’s an amazing cast all-around, full of complicated people doing complicated things for complicated reasons. Everybody has a past, everybody has a motive, and everyone is fiercely and powerfully connected to the rest, points in this breathtaking, diamond-strong web of community that has these very different people working together, guarding each other’s backs, fighting for each other. Sibi’s band of misfits are even more misfiting in Sunforge, and I’m glad – it makes them feel human, feel like real people, all messy and full of mistakes and absolutely glorious. I loved that we got to dive deeper into so many of the characters we only glanced at in the previous book; Kiada, as you might guess from the blurb, but also Ajat, the trans woman with her people’s archive in her tattoos, and Luz, who is not to be trusted but has so much to share.

It’s not just the characters; Sunforge is a spiralling deep dive into the worldbuilding and the backstory, the backstory I didn’t even guess was there waiting for us, and if I had guessed I would have guessed wrong because gods, nobody was ever going to guess this.

*FLAILS*

So many sneaky sentences that hit me like an electric shock, tucked away in the middle of long paragraphs as if Stronach meant to slip them past me; so many tiny details planted in exactly the right place; so many lines that sang like poetry, that I want tattooed over my knuckles and up my wrists. Stronach isn’t playing nice; she goes for your throat, your heart, and there’s no beating the bush about it, no slow build-up: the (relatively) low page-count is a whole series’ worth of prose distilled down, so that every word burns on the inside of your eyelids and every scene strikes like lightning right on the bull’s eye. I’ve occasionally seen writing this powerful – but not this freaking efficiently, with zero wasted space because every syllable is vital and precise and perfect. It would have been so easy for someone trying to write this way to end up with a book that felt rushed, a story that felt cramped, but not Stronach, gods; Sunforge is, if there is such a thing, efficiently decadent – and if that’s not a thing well, Stronach has just invented it: moving at light-speed but still with so much time and room for exquisite description and lingering, aching emotion, gorgeous prose that crunches immensely satisfyingly between your teeth and goes down sweet as syrup.

My daughter is a poem written in blood. My daughter is a reckoning. My daughter burns like the sun and you will never catch her.

This book is so queer, and not just in its representation: it’s the found-family and the bared teeth and the absolute indifference to genre tradition and boundaries, gleefully queering space and time and religion and magic. It’s the huge middle-finger to fascism and Empire, especially the British Empire; is there any evil on earth that doesn’t trace back to Empire eventually? It is even, I would argue, the New Zealand-flavoured English, queering the freaking language to anyone used to British or American English – and that’s without even touching on the Māori influences in the worldbuilding, which continue to be absolutely intoxicating; yes, please, blow my mind open, show me something that is not yet another fake-Medieval cishet white-boy wet dream, make me think and double-take and see another point of view. Yes!

Is there anything to not love about Sunforge? No. I mean, it broke my heart multiple times – but this is the kind of book that makes having your heart broken feel like a privilege.

You’ll see what I mean if you read it.

So read it!

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