“Daughter of the Sun” is a dark fantasy novel about the village misfit, her mysterious past and her precarious future. Elena is a candle-maker whose mother left her a mysterious amulet, and a legacy of dangerous and forbidden powers. Johan is her drunken, former-hero husband. Jocelyn is their daughter. Duke Giden Kaebal is a magic-user searching for special children to use for his own nefarious purposes.
I found “Daughter of the Sun” to be a frustrating read. The action was fast, which kept the story moving, but the fast pace left little room for explanations. There was, I believe, a rich backstory to this novel but it was doled out in painfully small amounts, mostly through the dialogue. A character would refer to a past event or a person, but give no details. Sometimes the other character obviously knew what was being referred to, leaving the reader feeling like an outsider, or someone coming in halfway through a conversation. Sometimes the speaker was only giving their listener part of what they knew. The listener was obviously as frustrated as this reader was. I felt like I was being led around by the nose, just like some of the characters. The effect was heightened by the fact that the narration was third person. The narrator could have been used to fill in some of the details and backstory for the reader. There were times I had to backtrack and re-read a section to figure out what was going on. By the end of the novel I still had unanswered questions.
The fast pace would have been easier to read if the mood wasn’t so dark, or if the characters were more engaging. The feel of the piece was dark and it stayed relentlessly dark throughout. The lack of change in mood for so long was depressing and rather tiring.
The characters were distinct but they never really developed much beyond stereotypes. There’s the outsider struggling to fit in by pretending to be like everyone else. Of course she’s called on to quickly accept the gifts she’s spent a lifetime denying, and to learn to use them against seasoned practitioners. There’s the peasant hero who crawled into a tankard for 12 years but is called into action once again. And there’s the arrogant, cruel nobleman who treats everyone around him as livestock, to be used as he chooses. There wasn’t enough of their personalities developed through the dialogue and narration to make them three dimensional. I felt distanced from them.
On a technical note, I also had a few problems with the novel’s formatting. The html link on the home page leads to one very long page containing the entire novel, instead of the first chapter. This would have been fine if I was able to read it in one sitting, but 118,000 words is a bit long for that. I also had problems with the formatting of the text. A sentence in a paragraph would sometimes break in the middle and then continue in the next paragraph. Some sentences came right after each other without any spaces. There were spelling mistakes that could easily have been caught by an editor. Missing quotation marks, too. There was also a very critical plot flaw, near the end, when someone parried with a sword that had just bounced away.
None of these problems would have sunk the novel on their own, but together they pull the novel down, not letting it develop into something strong and unique. The story feels derivative, like it’s trying for the sweep and mood of Barbara Hambly’s “Dragonsbane” series but can’t pull off the execution. If you’re a fan of dark, quest fantasy and have the patience to pull the details out of the action, or wait until the end, you might want to check it out. Otherwise, there’s a lot of fantasy out there . . .
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