Crocodiles and Moon-Eating Dragons: Daughters of Flood and Fury by Gabriella Buba

Daughters of Flood and Fury (Stormbringer #2) by Gabriella Buba
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Filipino-inspired cast and setting, bisexual MCs, lesbian MC, F/F
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: 1803367830
Goodreads

In this powerful sequel to Saints of Storm and Sorrow, Lunurin and Alon struggle to unify the archipelago against the returning Codícians, while Inez embraces her power and makes new allies among the ruthless pirates of the South Sea.

Enthralling Filipino-inspired fantasy for fans of The Hurricane Wars, R.F. Kuang and Tasha Suri.

Several years after the defeat of the Codicíans in Aynila, Lunurin and Alon are fighting to solidify their alliances across the archipelago. But petty rivalries, suspicion and conflicted loyalties threaten to undermine their efforts.

Inez has been training as a tide-touched healer with Alon, but the gentle side of Aman Sinaya's gift does not come naturally to her. When she hears a rumour that her sister Catalina is living among a group of missionaries on a nearby island, Inez embarks on a dangerous journey over the sea. Aboard a pirate ship, she meets Umali, the boat's fierce fire-tender captain. Umali has never been gentle, and she burns brighter than anyone Inez has ever known.

Lunurin and Alon are desperate to follow Inez, but the Codicíans are closing in with a powerful armada to retake Aynila. To stand any chance, Lunurin must unify the disparate factions of her forces before the festival of the eclipse, when the world's magic will be at its strongest.

Three goddesses stand behind them. But without human allies, even that power may not be enough to save their islands and the people they love.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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~don’t mess with the crocodiles
~the storm-goddess is Not Happy
~dragon out to eat the moon
~the girlfriends that slay together, stay together
~sometimes you’ve just got to bring the typhoon

:Read my review for book one, Saints of Storm and Sorrow, here!:

:implicit spoilers for Saints of Storm and Sorrow ahead!:

The first book in this duology, Saints of Storm and Sorrow, freaking rocked! Daughters isn’t quite up to the same standard – ‘just’ great, rather than gasp-out-loud phenomenal – but I had a wonderful time with it, and strongly recommend it for everyone who loved book one!

In Saints, our POV characters were Lunurin, a rare stormcaller, and Alon, one of her love interests; in Daughters, Inez gets a POV too. In the last book, Inez was a child; in this one, five years later, she’s just barely an adult, struggling to find her place in the world. Like Alon, Inez is a tidecaller, and in their society that means she ought to be a healer. But she can’t seem to work her magic like other tidecallers, with the result that she hasn’t progressed to the point other tidecallers her age have. Given that, like Lunurin, she’s biracial, on an island that is fighting hard to cast out the ways of the Codicían colonisers (half Inez’s heritage), she’s in a pretty uncomfortable position. And it was pretty heartbreaking, seeing her try so hard to Not Be A Problem – since Lunurin and Alon adopted her, and their family is the one ruling their island, Inez knows that everything she does reflects on them politically, which only adds to her fears and stress. She doesn’t understand why she isn’t like other tidecallers – and unfortunately, Alon and her other teachers all seem to think the issue is a lack of practice, or that Inez just isn’t trying hard enough. It reminded me of chronic illness, actually – the growing certainty that there is Something Wrong With You, but no one will listen because no one understands.

To all the ones who survived, but healed wrong.
They broke our halos so we grew teeth.

Inez is a spiky, difficult character, largely due to the trauma she went through in her early life, and the events of Saints particularly. Buba says in her dedication that Daughters is for those who ‘healed wrong’, everyone who went through hell and didn’t come out the other side Nice – everyone whose trauma makes them Difficult. IT WAS SO UNBELIEVABLY GREAT TO SEE! I can think of literally one other series where I’ve encountered a deeply traumatised character who was really, genuinely Difficult because of it (Hollow Folk by Gregory Ashe, if you’re curious). We need a lot more rep like this, honestly.

And even aside from that, I just loved that Inez gets to be vicious. One of the things I dearly loved about Saints was the utter rejection of ‘violence is never an option’, and in Daughters Inez gets to be as monstrous as she wants – murdering, quite awfully, Codicíans and slavers and anyone else who wants to hurt her, her friends/family, or her people. IT WAS GREAT. A++ revenge fantasy, very cathartic, 10/10 for Inez getting to feed slave-traders to hungry crocodiles! Like – even if she HADN’T had trauma, I would have been delighted to get a heroine (anti-heroine?) who gets to be this angry and powerful and murderous!

she murmured her way through an Ave Maria. Silence. Nothing. Only the nagging feeling Catalina would be disappointed in her for not saying at least ten, with how long it had been since she’d attended confession. They sat on her tongue, waiting for her to finish her penance.

Penance for what? She’d always wanted to ask. They should be asking penance of her, begging on their knees, and it would never be enough.

Buba’s messaging re violence and trauma and survivors, specifically with regards colonisation – and also healing, and rebuilding/recreating, because you can never get the past back but you can build a future – isn’t just powerful and well-done: it’s woven into the worldbuilding! Tidecallers are almost universally healers – but Inez isn’t, and that feels extremely important in a world where magic comes from being chosen by a goddess. What does it mean, that Inez is a tidecaller, but more crocodile than healer? Is the ocean goddess sending a message to her people? Very possibly! I especially loved how this was woven into the myth of the laho, an ocean-dwelling serpent-dragon being who tries to eat the moon every once in a while. This is a real Filipino myth (specifically Tagalog, according to Wikipedia) and it was just so freaking COOL that Inez’s arc brought her to the laho – the laho is a real being in Inez’s world, but it was also a symbol, a different way of relating to the sea and to Inez’s tidecalling powers. Through the laho (and a badass fire-tender girlfriend) Inez learns that there’s nothing wrong with her – that she doesn’t have to be gentle. That she is what she’s supposed to be. I WAS SO VERY HAPPY FOR HER!

The laho is also pivotal to Lunurin’s half of the book; she and Alon are gathering their allies and potential-allies together for an event during which the laho will try to eat the moon, and Lunurin, Alon, and all their people must drive it away to stop that happening. No one is expecting this to be a problem – the laho regularly tries to do this, and humans regularly prevent it from succeeding – but there are immense tensions around this event: those who follow the indigenous faith of the islands are not super happy with those who’ve converted to Christianity under Codicían influence, and too many of the Christians think Lunurin and her mother-in-law (the leader of the island) should be assassinated. It doesn’t help that one of Alon’s brothers is (albeit understandably) virulently anti-Christian and keeps making things worse, including casting aspersions against the island’s allies.

Running beneath all the political and religious intrigue is Alon’s plotline, which mostly concerns him not telling Lunurin a Very Important Thing because he knows it’ll upset her, and this is an extremely bad time for her to be distracted. He knows he’s in the wrong, keeping this secret from her, but… I have to admit, this annoyed me – I hate this kind of nonsense, I always do. It felt less contrived in this book than many other examples I’ve come across, and I was cautiously pleased with how it was resolved, but it felt very unnecessary to me.

I think the main reason this didn’t end up another five-star read like Saints is that it was too much crammed into one book. I wish this duology had been a trilogy instead; Daughters felt very rushed, with a lot of very big happenings not really given enough time to breathe and have the impact they were clearly supposed to have. Inez’s romance with her fire-tender is a pretty good example; it wasn’t insta-love or anything, but we also didn’t really get to see the relationship develop – most of it happened off-page. The tensions between Aynila (Lunurin and Alon’s island) and the Stormfleet also needed a lot more room; especially given that those tensions involved family drama, with Lunurin’s biological family being very highly placed in the fleet, and bringing past hurts and the like into the politics. I loved how much page-time went to Lunurin’s relationship with her goddess, and what she, the stormcaller goddess, thought about the archipelago’s other stormcallers – but I wish we could have had the same kind of exploration and depth going into the relationship between all the tidecallers and their goddess, and what Inez’s unique tidecaller powers meant for that.

That being said, the final showdown was gloriously cinematic and gave me everything I wanted! Every plotline was resolved, every question was answered. And over the course of the whole book, there were plenty of wonderfully indulgent moments and scenes; there were so many surprises; there were so many THRILLS. I had shivers running down my spine multiple times; I gasped and I cheered and I might have teared up once or twice. (Or three times, but you’ll never prove it.) Books that make you feel things are priceless, and Daughters made me feel EVER SO MUCH.

I love these characters. I love this world. I will pounce on anything Buba writes in the future. I am so happy this series exists!!!

So if you haven’t read it already? GET ON THAT!

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