Black Sun

Deeply mixed feelings. Roanhorse's new world is imaginative, rich and vivid. Her pacing is excellent. The characters, unfortunately, fall completely flat. They're mere plot devices to move the story on: they have little agency of their own, no inner lives; the relationships between them are for the most part contrived and unsatisfying. The Doomsday Device guy docilely goes along with his preordained fate; the High Priestess is a sappy milquetoast consistently three moves behind everyone else; the Dashing Adventure Heroine — okay, she shows a lot of promise, but she has a lot of shit to get together first.

The story itself is disappointing: it all hinges on a Great Prophecy, and visions of revenge, and a lot of seriously unlikely events coming together in just the right way. There are hints of some Grandmaster-level scheming, but all of it predates the events in the book, those characters having set things in motion before dying, and then those events all happening decades later as planned. (The story clearly takes place before Murphy's Law was discovered). This leaves very little for the characters to do aside from move according to the script, which they do with an ad-lib here and there. And, too much is not adequately explained: they had years to get Doomsday Guy to his assigned place and time, why did they leave the sea trip for the very very absolute last minute? The priest society, what purpose do they serve? And, seriously, cacao beans as currency?