A Day of Fallen Night
ISBN: 9781526619815
Description
Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation is starting to question the Priory's purpose. To the north, in the Queendom of Inys, Sabran the Ambitious has married the new King of Hróth, narrowly saving both realms from ruin. Their daughter, Glorian, trails in their shadow - exactly where she wants to be. The dragons of the East have slept for centuries. Dumai has spent her life in a Seiikinese mountain temple, trying to wake the gods from their long slumber. Now someone from her mother's past is coming to upend her fate. When the Dreadmount erupts, bringing with it an age of terror and violence, these women must find the strength to protect humankind from a devastating threat.
Reviewed on 22nd February 2024
The prequel to Shannon’s “The Priory of the Orange Tree” is possibly even better than the first novel. I picked it for a holiday as the length meant I wouldn’t need multiple books, but still it took me a good two weeks to race through the 850 pages of narrative.
Set hundreds of years earlier, we see a different political landscape across the world, with new cultures, new characters, and new beliefs. It’s an amazing piece of world building to set up something that so clearly can develop towards what we knew from the first book.
The characters are fascinating to follow, and the interaction or not between them makes for a really interested evolving dynamic as the story progresses. Several years pass over the course of the story, and Shannon does well to show the passage of time passing in a way that you feel in the tale.
I've found myself reflecting several times since finishing about the diversity of characters. There's a strong LGBT majority amongst the characters, and it's notable that this is an entire world where thats just the default. The conflict between the humans in the story doesn't stem from such petty interpersonal differences as in the real world, but is focussed on differences of opinion about how to face an external threat to the whole - and how those differences shape and are shaped by hundreds of years of society.
