Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy
Representation: Major disabled MLM character, secondary MLM character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 8th October 2024
ISBN: 1837862400
Goodreads
Méka must capture a king dragon, or die trying.
War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.
A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.
The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions – defiant or compliant – that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her 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
~dragon cubs!
~don’t touch the swords
~maintaining eco-balance
~unexpected queerness
~the cosmos is definitely listening
I’ve been hearing Lowachee’s name for a long time, but never managed to read any of her books until Mountain Crown showed up on Netgalley. I figured a relatively short book + dragons would be a good introduction for an author I hadn’t tried before.
SUFFICE TO SAY, AFTER THIS NOVELLA I WILL BE DEVOURING LOWACHEE’S ENTIRE BACKLIST!
The plot is pretty well covered by the blurb, so I won’t go over that much, but the WORLD! Please picture me swooning. Lowachee wastes no time establishing her setting; the sense-of-place is so strong and clear, and rings unique, like not quite like anything I’ve seen before. Mostly in terms of the Ba’suon, the people Méka, our MC, belongs to: we learn about Méka’s – let’s call it psychic empathy, for lack of a better term – on the very first page, and it’s rapidly confirmed that this is an ability all Ba’suon have. It’s absolutely fascinating to see how this is clearly Méka’s primary sense – think of how humans are intensely visual creatures, and now imagine all that weight placed on a kind of psychic ability. Lowachee’s worldbuilding is phenomenal on every level, but I especially loved how this one detail – the Ba’suon’s empathy – informs and influences absolutely everything about Méka and her culture.
His energetic presence was a hollow clang to her, an empty bucket struck by the hammer of the cosmos.
But in a way, Méka’s empathy – magic? – is almost defined by absence, in Mountain Crown. Because non-Ba’suon don’t have this ability, and weirder and worse is the way that they feel dead to this sense. Ba’suon can sense each other, and animals and birds and so on…but not humans who are not Ba’suon. This is a direct reversal from the other times I’ve seen fictional cultures with this kind of magic – think the Lakewalkers from Bujold’s Sharing Knife quartet, where non-Lakewalkers don’t have this magic, but Lakewalkers can still see/sense them just fine. So I wonder what it was like, when the Ba’suon encountered other peoples for the first time? Like the Kattakans – imagine being invaded by people who look human, but ‘register’ as completely dead? That must have been horrifying, and it says a lot about the Ba’suon that they haven’t demonised outsiders because of that. It would have been very believable for a people in that situation to become intensely xenophobic…but they’re not.
(I mean, they’re not pro-Kattakan, with really good reason. But there’s no sense of only Ba’suon people are real people, you know?)
That’s important. What we can infer about the Ba’suon from that…almost, I think, gives us the heart of who they are. What defines them as a people.
That, and the dragons, of course. Which the Ba’suon call suon (and the way I flailed when I realised the Ba’suon named themselves after dragons! Or named the dragons after themselves! Again, tiny details which imply SO MUCH!)
larger adults flit back and forth like jeweled bats upon stalactites.
The characters are amazing. I loved Méka; I loved getting to know her, learning who she was. She’s so different from most of the main characters I see; practical but unyielding on the things that matter to her, with a pride that almost doesn’t seem like pride, compassionate without necessarily being forgiving, an unfamiliar kind of optimistic. Her…reverence is almost the right word, but not quite…for the natural world is a beautiful thing to witness, to be inside of for a while. She has a very non-individualistic outlook and attitude that is – pretty foreign to Western culture, really!
I don’t mean to suggest that she’s some perfect Enlightened being: far from it! In her POV the Kattakans are an ‘infestation’, and while she doesn’t offer violence to insults, she definitely invites idiots to Fuck Around And Find Out, with a mien of such steady, implacable surety in her ability to wipe the floor with anyone who tangles with her, that I had to go find a fan.
The two major secondary characters – Lilley, a disabled Kattakan Méka rescues from slavery, and Raka, a Ba’suon with that all-important empathy closed-off – are also fantastic. Just Lilley’s name helps drive home that we are Not Anywhere Familiar (‘Lily’ as a man’s name is not something you generally come across in the English-speaking world!), and both Lilley and Raka’s backstories have the same effect, giving us a glimpse into a history that feels subtly alien (mostly in its approach to queer love and fantasy gender roles). The two characters added a lot to the book; it would have been wildly different, and lesser, without them.
The dawn eked from the night in silver and rose with the sun pinned like a brooch on the hilly breast of the eastern horizon.
Lowachee manages to very quickly convey the ‘sense’ of the world she’s created in the opening pages, while still having plenty of surprises for you tucked into the worldbuilding. The tiniest details are hidden gems, and each one impressed me more than the last, had me falling more and more with this world – and mourning it, because Mountain Crown is set in the (not immediate) aftermath of a war that drove most of the Ba’suon, Méka’s people, from their homeland. We don’t get to see it unmarred, and the contrast between Méka’s inner reality and her outer one – her sense of self, her memories, and what the Kattakans have made of her home – is enraging and heartbreaking. There’s a streak of…not exactly environmentalism…that’s fundamental to the Ba’suon and also the plot, in that it drives the entire ‘rite’ that is Méka coming to collect a dragon/suon; and it hurts, because we see how connected the Ba’suon are to the natural world, and I can’t help wondering how different our world would be if we had the same kind of empathy/sensing-of-life that they do.
It’s things like calling baby dragons ‘cubs’ that reinforces, over and over, that we are Somewhere Else, that this isn’t our world, that the cultures we see are radically different from our own in some pretty intrinsic ways. I’ve never seen anyone call baby dragons cubs before! It’s a quick, easy way to divorce us from the genre expectations we bring with us from book to book, a way to bypass our thinking minds and get us right in the guts with the fact that we’re not in Kansas anymore. I realise I keep making this point, but it’s because I just can’t get over how effectively it’s done, and how efficiently! And how this alien-ness, this unfamiliarity, allows Lowachee to…take a not-quite-standard approach to the storytelling. Present us with some concepts and ideas that we don’t see that often, that challenge some of The Way Things Are in SFF. The approach to forgiveness; the strangely fluid pride; the resistance to violence which is not pacifism.
that fear and suspicion imbalanced the world into chaos, and they couldn’t be ignored or controlled by avoidance. That even the ones who betrayed you in love deserved a reckoning with love.
It delights me, and I hope we see more of that in the next book. Which, yes, I’m going straight off to pre-order, because gods DAMN do I need more of this world, this series, and Lowachee’s writing. HELLS TO THE YES!
The Mountain Crown is breathtaking, a book I wanted to reread the moment I finished it. It feels new, without being so challenging as to become off-putting or difficult. I loved the world, the dragons, the characters, and the prose; there’s nothing at all that I want to change or critique.
Instead, I’d like to push a copy into your hands and insist that you READ IT ASAP!
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