A Review of Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter (Orbit, 2020)

[lsobiesk]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

So, I’m getting up there, and I’ve finally learned the lesson: Complete the review of a series only after it’s done. Right now, I’m stressed out that there will never be a book three in Akemi Dawn Bowman’s Infinity Court series. What is up with that? Does anyone have the details? E-mail me: ssohn2@fordham.edu. Akemi-wan: you’re our only hope! The other one I got dunked on was Wesley Chu’s Time series, which unceremoniously ended after book 2 on a major cliffhanger. I actually slid into Chu’s DMs to ask him: what is up with book 3, only to find out there is no book 3. If I’m punchy it’s because it’s been a rough week. At the time of this writing, Los Angeles has been on fire all week; I have family members who have had to evacuate, and then obviously know a ton of others either (A) directly affected or (B) live in the area and understand all too well the stress and the sadness that comes with yet another devastating fire. To keep my mind off of things I started Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter (Orbit, 2020), which is the first in what I think is called the Drowning Empire trilogy. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “The emperor's reign has lasted for decades, his mastery of bone shard magic powering the animal-like constructs that maintain law and order. But now his rule is failing, and revolution is sweeping across the Empire's many islands. Lin is the emperor's daughter and spends her days trapped in a palace of locked doors and dark secrets. When her father refuses to recognise her as heir to the throne, she vows to prove her worth by mastering the forbidden art of bone shard magic. Yet such power carries a great cost, and when the revolution reaches the gates of the palace, Lin must decide how far she is willing to go to claim her birthright - and save her people.”

 

This pithy description does little to reveal that there are actually FOUR different perspectives basically covered throughout this novel. Lin gets a first person POV, and we’re obviously anchored to her storyline because she is the center of power, or at least her dad is. Lin’s memory is messed up, and so she questions whether or not she can ever ascend to being the heir to the Empire if she cannot remember who she is, but recovering her memory will reveal some SHOCKING secrets (spoiler warning, so you’ll see those below). The second is given to Jovis, a smuggler, who is still looking for his long-ago abducted wife Emhala (a spelling approximation). Jovis is on the run from a black-market organization called the Ioph Carn. He strikes up a lovable friendship with a sea creature who he names Mephi. Then there’s Phalue, who is the daughter of the governor of one of the islands within which is governed by the Empire. Phalue is trying to court Ramani, who is in cahoots with the Shardless Few, which is a rebel organization trying to take down the empire. The final is given to Sand, who is somebody trapped on an island without her memories. At first, I thought Sand might just be Lin in a different time period, but that guess was wrong, but not entirely wrong (I suppose). I was scared about all these POVs because sometimes you end up liking one more than the others. Jovis’s is also in first, but the other two are in third, so there was that discursive complication as well. Fortunately, Stewart knows how to craft a compelling story, and two of those storylines do converge. The other real treat about this high fantasy series is that there are some cool speculative world building elements. The first is the bone shard magic, which operates via the actual bones harvested from the empire’s citizens. Basically, these artificial cyborg constructs of various types are energized by the citizen’s bone shards at the cost of the shortening the lives of the individuals from which the bones were harvested. Each bone shard ends up being the source of a command for the construct, so when those commands initiate, the life force of the individual drains quicker. Because some commands are used more often than others, some citizens get unlucky and die far quicker than they normally would have. One of the other major energy sources is witstone, which seems to be a kind of fuel that enables people to travel across the water and each island. Then there seems to be some vague source of magical power inherent in certain people, the likes of which aren’t fully conveyed until book 2 possibly. The construct element is definitely one of the coolest magical novums I’ve seen, and this particular work is the very promising start of a high fantasy/ science fictional series with the so-called “Asian-inspired” elements.

 

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