The Bone Shard Daughter

There is a wonderful sense of decay and menace in The Bone Shard Daughter. Everything in this world feels like it is on the edge of breaking down. The image of palace, peopled by Frankenstein-like animal constructs, but hardly any living things is an intriguing one. The paranoia generated by the environment is palpable too.

Essentially the book follows four main characters: the daughter of the emperor who is not all she seems, the daughter of a governor of one of the empires outposts who is in love with the leader of a popular uprising, a smuggler who frees children from the controlling influence of the empire, and someone living on an island full of people who have forgotten their past who is slowly clearing the fog in her mind.

A lot of things here are not quite what they seem. The islands that make up the empire move around, the emperor's palace is full of mysterious doors that require keys to unlock their secrets, four master constructs seem to control most of the operation of the empire, there is a vicious caste system that provides extreme repression, there are magical creatures (familiars?) that seem to grant powers, there is some mysterious previous group of oppressors who ruled the area before the current empire (but they are only ever really hinted at without to much explicit interaction). This is a rich and layered world with many nuances and hidden secrets that are alluded to.

Finally we have this somewhat twisted magic system with the Bone Shard Magic. Essentially, small pieces of bone are harvested from the children of the empire and these bone shards are used to power the constructs that enforce the oppression. The power from these bone shards slowly drains the life force of the person they were harvested from, resulting in a premature death...

A supremely successful character and world building exercise, this is some truly immersive and unique fantasy.