Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

I loved the first book in this series Black Sun and have been waiting excitedly for more than 1 year to get a ebook copy of Fevered Sun. Sadly, on its own, its not really worth the wait. It suffers a solid case of second / middle book syndrome; it exists only to link books one and three.

Its Just Filler

Part of my problem with this book is that I went into it convinced that this was meant to be a duology (I’m sure that’s how the series was marketed when I read Black Sun), so you can imagine my confusion when the story just kept getting bigger. The book’s plot basically works out to war preparations. Chapter after chapter of war preparations. It positively dragged through the middle.

It is only in this book that we get the background for understanding the God War and the Treaty of Hokaia (and that they were not the same thing. Think I was more than half way through before I grasped that). It is also the first time we really get to know some of the major players in the war (like the spearmaidens and the Jaguar Prince). Ideally this kind of detail needed to be setup in book one.

It also needs to be remembered that the first book ended with Serapio wiping out the watchers in a single spurt of wild violence. Fevered Sun repeatedly tells the reader that Serapio is this all-powerful force of nature, this intensely driven man – who spends the whole book NOT doing the thing he was created for. There is a sense of urgency being conveyed, that is not being matched by the plot.

Losing the Protagonist

The protagonist of the first book, Serapio, becomes a cut-out villain in this one. He comes off as villainous because we see him almost entirely through the eyes of other characters. And it’s a real loss of opportunity by the author, because it’s a period of real emotion drama for this character. He has lost his purpose, and is looking for family, for some kind of connection and getting repeated rejection. The lack of his POV takes away a character the reader had come to love and leaves them no place for understanding what he is doing, why he is not following through on his mission and how the rejections by the clan affect him.

Of the rest of the ensemble, Narampa had a good arc, although the character of her brother needed a lot more development (his death is supposed to be sad but I spend far too much of his page time thinking him a villain). I found her rather whiny in the first book, but she comes into her own in this one. Xiala is just kicking her heels until she arrives at her place on the board (book 3) and Okoa vacillates wildly in his opinions and motivations. Swinging from trust and connection with Serapio to distrust and fear and back again, until the reader’s head is spinning; finally falling out on fear and betrayal. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the irony that the Carrion Crow authorities have created the monster they feared (by their dismissals and betrayals), but Okoa’s journey needed some smoothing out.

Setting

I liked the Meso-American setting but I would have liked it to come alive more. The entire book could do with more sensory details that capture the physical world, the small attributes of culture better.
Still its awesome to see a unique period of history coming alive in fantasy.