Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Brown bi/pan sapphic MC, secondary brown trans character, minor brown nonbinary characters
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; dual PoVs
ISBN: 1960189042
Goodreads
Zaya Shearwater has found a dragon, a partner, and a cause.
Her dragon is Bandit’s Breath, stolen from her former employers in a moment of desperation, now her inseparable ally. Her partner in racing Bandit is her daughter, Vanako, as fierce and proud as ever but now committed to the family. And her cause is the legalization of yliaster, the substance that will protect her son — and tens of thousands of others like him, who are being slowly hunted by voracious entities that can’t be killed.
But the fight isn’t going well. Captains of industry want to see yliaster regulated for their own profit; everyday people are afraid of some of the things it can do. The police are dead set against it, and even Zaya’s political allies are inconstant. And as she’s throwing all her cash and time at a better world for the hunted tomorrow, every today could be her son’s last.
That’s where Zaya begins. But, as the election draws near, where will she go?
Highlights
~a most important mural
~fuck the police
~dragons > demons
~local politics are INTENSE
~family is what you make it
My review of book one, Brimstone Slipstream
My review of book two, Windburn Whiplash
:this review contains some spoilers for the previous books in the series!:
I AM NOT FREAKING OKAY.
*piteous wailing*
Heatstroke Heartbeat is fairly different from the previous book, Windburn Whiplash, in that this one, alas, has significantly less dragon-racing in it. I can imagine some readers being disappointed.
I WAS NOT. And not because I don’t love the dragon-racing – I do!!! Extremely much!!! But I am here for a lot more than the dragon-racing, at this point: I’m here for Zaya and her incredible family, for Jaliki and the treatment he needs to survive his ker, for the amazing worldbuilding and the massively addictive prose. I am in love with the city of Yemareir, with its colour-coded districts and its dragon broodspires, and I am happy to read any story set in it – even if some, perhaps, might have less dragon-racing.
I AM GOOD WITH THAT!
And after Zaya discovered what yliaster is and what it can do at the end of the previous book, it’s not at all strange that she immediately dedicates her every waking moment to getting it legalised so it can save, not just her son Jaliki, but the tens of thousands of other people with kers. Heatstroke Heartbeat, then, is a book about Yemareir’s politics, about campaigning to get supporters of legalisation elected and convincing more candidates to be those supporters, using Zaya’s fame/notoriety to get eyes and ears on the issue.
Not one single second of it is boring. The stakes are too damned high for it to be dull; and besides the politics meaning we’re digging even further into the setting (which as previously mentioned I adore utterly and will read anything at all about) this is such a character-rich book. Maybe even more so than Windburn Whiplash was. House Shearwater is as vividly real as ever, and the growing secondary and tertiary casts leap off the page as well, every last one of them. Weber just has a gift for crafting characters you forget are fictional – characters you can’t not care about. Even if you think community campaigning sounds like a yawnfest, I don’t know how anyone could fail to be invested, when the force of how much Zaya cares emanates from the pages like light from the sun. How are you supposed to avoid getting swept up in that? Especially since we’re walking in after having read the previous books; walking in already loving this cast.
It makes me think that even readers who are here for the dragon-racing will find themselves turning pages as fast as they can.
And then frantically trying to slow down, because damn it the ending is coming too fast I DON’T WANT THIS TO END!
(Also, to be clear, there IS still dragon-racing! And it is very important and plot-relevant! But we do see fewer races than we did in the last book.)
In half a dozen different ways, this is a book about community – the poverty-locked Kayalim rallying behind Zaya because she’s Kayalim too; the lower classes who don’t own property and therefore, in Yemareir, have no vote; the ‘streamers, aka dragon-racers; those hunted by ker, plus those who’ve lost loved ones to ker; the cops, very much their own fucked-up demographic; and smaller, closer communities like House Shearwater itself, its allies, and its potential allies. And obviously, all of those groups overlap and intersect in a bunch of different ways! Which is fascinating and nerve-wracking, and sometimes painful – especially when some people have very different ideas about community than others; who belongs with who, what the rules and requirements of belonging are, who is Us and who is Them. In that way, Heatstroke Heartbeat feels like a very natural evolution from Windburn Whiplash: that was very much focused on the found/forged-family that is House Shearwater, but in this book, that concept of family sort of…expands, flowing into the idea of wider community. We get to see more of the community around House Shearwater, and the ways in which Shearwater interacts with and influences that community; that’s very literally what they’re doing by making Zaya the poster woman of the legalise-yliaster movement. It’s like, if Windburn Whiplash was a zoomed-in story, then Heatstroke Heartbeat is zoomed out a fair bit more, showing us more of the bigger picture, letting us see how these elements we very much care about fit into it all. It’s wonderful to experience, and very cool, and I feel like a lot of storytellers should be taking notes on how Weber does it.
This one hurts, though. It hurts because it’s too fucking believable; because the need-need-please of all these characters we love is so strong, makes you hope so hard…and at every turn, there are the rich or the cops or both (mostly both) who are stamping on everyone else. And we have a lot of that in our world! I can understand not everyone is going to want to read fiction about this when the news is full of the same!
I can only say that I was so sucked in that it was functionally escapist. I wasn’t reminded of real-life stuff at all; all my attention was on Zaya and her family. I very much forgot the real world existed. And it’s not all bleak! I loved getting to see the House Shearwater teens working together in this book; I loved their friendship, and they made me laugh plenty. It’s just…there is a lot of injustice, a lot of rich assholery, a lot of cops who really need to take a long walk into the ocean. We did get that in Windburn Whiplash too, but the dial is turned up to 11 here. And being so invested meant that I felt a whole lot of fury and outrage alongside Zaya and the others.
I felt a lot, really. Weber is very good at making me feel things.
Which is probably a big part of why I love this book, and this series. It’s just so VIVID. Realer-than-real, larger-than-life, bright technicolour when the real world is all grey. Heatstroke Heartbeat is never boring; I never didn’t-care; I was never able to put it down. I am ride-or-die for House Shearwater; I am in this till the end.
EVEN AFTER THAT ENDING.
WEBER, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.
I loved it. It hurt me, so bad, and I still love it. I am going to reread these books over and over and over; I fully intend to have them memorised by the time we get the next instalment.
WHO’S WITH ME?
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