A Hollow Mountain

The Brightest Shadow #2

by Sarah Lin

The arrival of the Hero was worse than anyone could have imagined.

The Hero's mad quest to purge the world continues beyond death, but a journey to the far north promises that knowledge might succeed where power could not. Allegedly there are wise sages who understand the Legend, though Tani fears that they have also been consumed by its light. As the group travels into fearsome mountains, they can only hope to prevent the Hero from destroying new lands.

Though the sage's mountain promises a simple destiny for everyone, it will test the earthly commitments of each individual. Tani will have her moral ideals challenged, Slaten will encounter a strange young woman among barbaric raiders, and Celivia will struggle with the demands of her military superiors. All will need to change as they meet the steel-clad errants of the far north, and their war that has been simmering for generations...

Genres: Fantasy

976 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 4, 2021

About the author

Hello! I'm Sarah Lin and I write various kinds of fantasy. If you want to keep up with my work, feel free to check out the following:

Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/dMSw2A
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sarahlin
Blog: http://sarahlinauthor.blogspot.com/

Join either list to get immediate access to illustrations of all my characters, plus bonus content and previews. If you've tried my work, I'd be happy to hear from you!

Reviews

[Rinaldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75/5

I read this book as a beta/ARC reader. The following review is an honest impression of the book.

A Hollow Mountain is a bigger, badder, and more exciting continuation of The Brightest Shadow. Shortly after the ending of the previous book, Tani and friends are still stuck with the current Hero. This time, they are trying to find the Sage somewhere in the north from the Chorhan Expanse. The Sage is rumoured to know the extents of the Legend and the prophecy, hence his knowledge could be a key to avoid the excessive bloodbath caused by the upcoming clash between the Hero and the Dark Lord.

This brings the Hero and his companions to the Sotunn Mountains where they encounter various raider clans with their unique sein and practices. Beyond there lays the trifecta of warrior cultures (Espal, Portant, and Wahleen), who are locked in a three-way standstill. Upon encountering different practices and values, the Hero and his companions constantly find their world view and martial arts challenged and tried.

A World Tour of Cultures
I personally find the strongest aspect of The Brighest Shadow series lays in its nuanced and rich depiction of various cultures. People live in different regions with their own unique customs. A lot of time the characters would travel around, and upon encountering new customs, they would sit down and exchange ideas and thoughts. In this way, they constantly reshape their way of thinking and consequently, their sein/martial art practice. Some characters also travel in some sort of world tour; gathering allies around the world with portals. So it's great to see more glimpses of different parts of the world in this book.

If the first book gives us insight to the steppe cultures in Chorhan Expanse, this book takes the reader to mountainous area up north where various tribes of raiding bandits live. Beyond there, the aforementioned warrior cultures of Espal, Portant, and Wahleen hold their own knight-errant martial art practices, in which tenets and principles are dramatically different from the ones back in the expanse. Sometimes these culture would offer opposite worldviews held by the main characters, sometimes they have completely different metrics to measure a warrior's worth, and it is absolutely fascinating to see how they navigate and develop through these encounters.

This book also gives us more insight into mansthein culture. We already learned from the first book (and to some degree the novella Blades Falling Softly) that their culture is not a monolithic one since there are unique subgroups with their own quirks and values. However, in this book, we learn more about their biology and how this impacts their social structure, the notion of privilege, and social hierarchy. Furthermore, a spectrum of grey morality is presented when we get introduced to higher-ups of the mansthein command chain (Zeitai): a group of elites with different styles of commanding and goals. Some of them are the ultimate pragmatists while others are conniving conspirators.

Of Mountain Peaks and Hollows
I think the title really captures some main themes and character arcs in this book, as well as the mountains and mines setting.

Myros, the world of TBS, features martial artists from different backgrounds racing and striving for the metaphorical peaks of their practice. My personal reading about A Hollow Mountain is that it contemplates the notion of a grand facade with a hollow core. For the main characters, this may reflect the futility of peak-climbing, or perhaps the nihilism and bleak inevitability of the Hero role in the grander scheme. People may fall and crash while climbing, or upon arriving on the peak, they might find that it is for nothing. It is quite a somber and fatalistic imagery. However, hollowness can also be filled with hope.

The Legend keeps drawing the main characters close to the Hero despite their attempts to escape, but in return, they also proactively try to bend and shape the Legend, being balancing weights to temper the mercurial Hero. There's a fascinating mix of futility and hope, powerlessness and agency in these dynamics which I really dig.

On the flipside, considering the size, this book might be too glacial for some readers. Out of 2 books and 1 novella in the series so far, all share similar approach of slow-burning build-ups which end up in volatile and intense confrontations in the end of the book. There are multiple interesting fight scenes and fascinating dialogue throughout the book, but at the end of the day it is not the most fast-paced book.

Conclusion
A Hollow Mountain is a hefty continuation of The Brightest Shadow series. While it's quite heavy and on the slower side, it will reward the readers with rich depiction of cultures, satisfying character growth, high-stake actions, and various discourses on ethics and values.

[Sarah Lin]

Thanks for reading my book! I'm not going to rate my own work, so I'll use this review as an opportunity to highlight some things that may interest you. I made a series of lore posts on the TBS blog here, including maps and culture art:
https://thebrightestshadow.blogspot.com

Fans are trying to start up a subreddit here, which includes fanart for all my books:
https://reddit.com/r/TheBrightestShadow/

There's been discussion of Discord channels and wikis in the works, but I don't believe they're quite ready yet. I'll add anything here that might be of interest to a general audience.

[Ahuri3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

TLDR

I really loved this book, as much as the first one. The character development is as good as the worldbuilding and everyone should give this series a try !

Disclaimer : I have received an electronic ARC of this book. I also plan on buying the kindle version as soon as it comes out.

Also is almost a spoiler free review, what I mean by that is that I will talk about the general plot/structure of the book (which is known after the first chapter), I will also mention by name some new characters but will use spoiler tags when needed.



Synopsis

This book starts shortly after the first one ended. The characters depart for a quest to find a Sage that might be able to share some wisdom about the prophecy.
This quest takes them to new lands and new cultures they will have to navigate and learn from.

Highlights of what I liked

* This second book confirms that Sarah Lin is really good at meshing together worldbuilding and character development. The characters develop through the word building : by reacting to the new environment (steppes, forest, plains, mountains or rivers), responsibilities (like leadership and the associated politics) and the new cultures.

* One of the secondary characters Celivia from the first book is upgraded to main character status. All of those chapters were as interesting as Tani and Slaten's chapters.

* Celivia's crew and her handling of new responsibilities.

* How the main cast is making progress with their sein. I'm so proud of them.

* The epigraphs are great in this book as well. The first ones made me laugh out loud. The other, more serious ones, serve the story and worldbuilding like in the first book.

* Getting more information about the legend, but still keeping a lot of mystery around it.

* Natala (new character) is a great character and I really enjoyed her point of view.

* Hating the blood skins in particular and the clan culture in general they were horrible people and I was stressed out when our main characters were in their camp .

* Learning more about manstein politics !

Bonus

Can you believe the author commissions artists to make additional content/artwork for her worldbuilding ?

On her blog (https://sarahlinauthor.blogspot.com/2...) you can find more details about the cultures we meet in the books, with great illustrations (what do they look like, what do they eat, how do they cook, what do their go/chess boards look like).

There's even multiple versions of the same map, one for each culture and point of view, That's insane !

Also There is a recap of the previous novel at the start.

[LOLtohru · Rating 5 out of 5]

What fundamentally is a review of a sequel? For the biggest titles there might be a lot of people waiting for opinions but for less popular works people glancing at this might not have read the first. Instead of writing a review that tells you I think this book is good at doing book things (two people already did) I'm going to pick out several particulars I hope will be more memorable.

LAYERED PLOT CONSEQUENCES

One of the things I liked about the first book in The Brightest Shadow was that it was well-constructed but not in the ways you expect. For example a plot development would be completely undercut by a twist but later on you'd realize just how important that original development was to a character's emotional journey. A character's moment of insight might seem a bit hollow and later you'd realize that their mental state was actually a plot element. Everything was there for a reason but the book toyed with your expectations for what those reasons are.

I'm happy to say that the second book has some of the same construction but on a series level. There's a scene in the first book that I thought was a good fight scene that could have been cut without loss. Now as that element recurs I realized that it was definitely included in the first book for a reason. Time and time again I realized that a minor detail in the first book was actually more important than I thought.

My favorite instance of this is a case that requires a lot of context... basically a background character in the first book returns in a central way. I like their role in the first book but thought they were basically just supporting the theme of a chapter. Now I realize that the previous chapter's theme was actually supporting HER. These unexpected connections are a great parallel to the theme of unintended consequences.

TIGHT THIRD PERSON

When you read a sentence in AHM you aren't reading an artifact produced by an author. You're reading a thought from a character. The big important stuff is there like different cultural and moral views on what a character sees. But this extends to sentence structure, punctuation, and vocabulary in ways that kept surprising me.

This makes all narrators unreliable in interesting ways. There's a major new POV character in this book who is extremely confident and his sections reflect this deeply. At one point I thought there was a continuity error (a character's name spelled wrong) but I later realized that it was entirely intentional: he got the name wrong and just didn't question it. This goes beyond details to the core issues of the story: it's not unreliable in the sense of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but it's a constant reminder that there is no single story. Only character vantage points of it.

There are tons of authors out there doing brilliant characterization and voicing but I think Sarah's style delves into a method that's used less frequently.

DECONSTRUCTION OF RANKINGS

If you've read any progression fantasy you know that it often has lots of ranks/ratings and that these are generally ontologically true. The fundamental laws of the world are set up into an elaborate hierarchy that's easily accessible to humans and can be taken as doctrine.

AHM gives us a ranking system... and also the cultural blindspots that created it. The way these characters view power could absolutely be a hard magic system on its own but here it's only an artificial framework forced on something more nebulous. It's simultaneously fun and a reinforcement of the series theme that even the most objective facts of reality come to us in a subjective way.

Anyway those are just three things that I liked about the book. If any of them interest you please consider the series so I will have more people to talk to. :)

Bonus Analytics

There's a TBS wiki that is not very useful yet because it's pretty much just me and one other person. But for the TBS fans clicking on this review you may be interested in all the work I put into doing a bit of statistical analysis of POVs: https://thebrightestshadow.miraheze.o...

The numbers confirmed my intuition that the first book is really Tani's while the second book is evenly balanced between her, Slaten, and Celivia. It's also interesting to see a relatively even tier of secondary characters getting lower wordcounts than they did in the first book. I'm very interested in seeing how this will be balanced in the long term.

[Seka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was privileged to obtain an earlier copy of this book before it’s release. You are in for a real treat!

This series has real depth in the way the personal agendas of characters and the political positions evolve becoming increasingly complex. I really appreciate the brilliant skill with which Sarah Lin does her world building in The Hollow Mountain. It continues to build intrigue and leaves one puzzling over how the plot will unfold.

Lin does an exceptional job of adding interest through characters who are facing difficult decisions in the ongoing conflicts. The interplay in which they are calculating and outsmarting their opponent usually is a life and death situation. We learn more about their cultures and what drives them to make the decisions they do. As a reader I agree with some, and cheer the character on in the ways they are choosing paths that will move forward. I also have characters I don’t like and disagree with. One can’t help but look at both ends of the continuum on some of the issues presented, and then place themselves somewhere between the two extremes. Lin’s insight in writing these choices out through characters then helps us to give serious thought to different stands we take and behaviors we choose. Readers ask what we value and what strategies we use to achieve our goals.

Lin displays a wide comprehension of subjects in the way characters and ideas continue to expand, and doesn’t have shallow perceptions we can find in books in this genre. This book may seem long, but is well worth it in the details which enrich the conversations and plot twists. You will be left waiting for the next novel to see what happens next.

[AQ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Hollow Mountain is an improvement on The Brightest Shadow in almost every aspect.

The plot follows the old "Find the wise sage in the mountains" story, but subverts almost every accompanying trope. The result is amazing.

The progression of the main cast is also done wonderfully, both when concerned with power and character. Some of the new powers introduced are just plain cool.

The book also offers a deeper dive into the Mansthein mystery through the eyes of a returning character. This is melded almost seamlessly into the story.

Sarah Lin also doesn't disappoint when it comes to the new cultures introduced, they feel so vibrant and the way cultures interact does too.

Overall, a brilliant and very enjoyable read for fans of the first book.

[Decarabia Dehuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like this series! I can't write beautiful reviews so I'll just rant with my experience.
The worldbuilding is perhaps the best so far. I wasn't that keen on the mountain setting at first, but it was all handled masterfully. I did not expect to actually learn the lives of the raiders, as a sort of anthropological immersion. I definitely enjoy the subversions.
Slaten and Natala's interactions were amazing. I feel they were a good example of my favorite thing from the author: dialogue concerning life philosophies.
Learning more about the "maenhu" and the mansthein societies were also great. I like the care put into it. Also thought that the gender themes were well explored.
The Legend stuff is important, but I feel that it is in an awkward position. I've been given more and more reasons to just believe it is a real driving force that should be acknowledged. Yet, I found myself deeply affected by Tani's encounter with the sage, her managing to peel off the veil of mysticism and realizing, allegedly, that it is just an old man. I'm a fan of subversion of magical or "destiny" elements, but at this stage of the game, I'm doubtful it could ever occur - not without messing up many pieces on the board!
I enjoyed seeing the growth of all characters, though I may have a nitpick with all of them. Tani's new sein threads technique is an interesting one, yet it still boils down to her knives mostly being deflected, with maybe a few of them landing surprise hits. I understand that she either lands critical hits or distracts the opponent while another ally attacks, and I do appreciate the unusual fighting style of the protagonist, but perhaps it is becoming a bit repetitive. Nevertheless I trust the author. Slaten is entertaining to accompany as always. With me jumping from one academic area of study to another, I kind of relate to Slaten's "many wolves" problem :sob: ... Laeri doesn't grow that often, but I was satisfied by her tackling of difficult moral decisions. I feel she could have had more moments of introspection or dialogue with the other bloodskin women. As for Veron, I was not too fond of her this book, but to be fair I'm not super on her character in general. Celivia is a character I didn't imagine myself liking that much, her POV were very interesting. I do feel that her band members could have been more distinct or had more singular scenes, or perhaps I'm just dumb, because I had some trouble memorizing them all.
I won't give it 5 stars because despite it all, I think her writing of fighting scenes isn't very entertaining for me. Well, save her magnificient work on Blade's Falling Softly. Maybe that's a me thing, maybe the action could be described more vividly. I read this series on the bed at night and I definitely slept more in fighting scenes, which is crazy to think about. Maybe it's a style she is using specifically on TBS, I don't know, I haven't read TWC, for example. Anyway, because of that, I feel that it was all built up to an ending with a battle that, in the grand scheme of things, wasn't all that important (not necessarily a bad thing) and one I enjoyed reading less than the rest. It gave me the impression that the climax, or perhaps last 10% of the book, was kind of rushed. This is something I also felt in TBS1, so I will be reading TBS3 with already an skeptical expectation of the ending.
Still, a great experience overall.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

The more I read this story the more it feels like the entire Legend aspect of the plot was a mistake.

To me, a epic fantasy following the sociopolitical difficulties of creating peace between various nations and peoples when some factions are actively sowing conflict would have been sufficient.
There was no need for some reality warping prophecy to be involved.

It's especially frustrating because said prophecy isn't in focus that often for all that it apparently rules the plot. We've spent far more time so far on characters wandering around than trying to discover anything about this vast, apparently inexplicable force. There's also a high degree of focus on gender dynamics within various cultures, notably the mansthein. Again, far more than on the legend or the hero.

Also, rather disappointed at how Kolanin was just aborted. He's literally mentioned 4 times in this book and has had no apparent lasting impact on the story, either on characters or setting. Why did we spend so much time with him then?

Melal is effectively dead, not that it wasn't obvious what would happen with him. The hero is effectively not even a character at this point.

Slaten is basically the same character that he was at the end of book 1.

Tani had some slight growth.

Veron . . . exists. In the background usually save for like two chapters.

Celivia getting a more detailed POV was nice. But based on what we know of the legend she's also irrelevant because after two rather large books there's still zero information about it, so I can only assume it actually is unstoppable in universe. So we're just going to keep watching the hero kicking teeth in for the foreseeable future while the main characters whine and wring their hands behind him.


P.S. Marikia hating Tani more than the hero is stupid. "Yes, I actually hate the human who was clearly outmatched against my husband rather than the one who literally stabbed him in the back." Based on current trends that plotline will either be completely forgotten or end with Marikia being killed by Slaten, Melal, or Celivia in what would be a tragic fashion if that wasn't already the modus operandi of most side characters.

[Paul Cristina · Rating 3 out of 5]

It didn't feel like it had the same quality as first book, it felt more like a filler book. A lot of details regarding sein techniques and insights from barbarian tribes that for me were too much. The new character introduced, Natalia, is bland doesn't add anything good to the story. I would had liked more action/progress into the legend instead of very detailed descriptions from Celivia/Natalia (for me both characters look similar).

[Alec Argyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Marked Improvement

I enjoyed this second book much more than the first. The overarching story of this series has always intrigued me, but the moment to moment storytelling in the first book felt a little slow and disjointed. This book continues to build on the fantastic story while keeping a much more cohesive pacing.

[Freddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing Series highly recommended

The second book in this series surpassed the first one which was great. The second book has great world building, great development, training and action scenes.

[Andrew Wentzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This says a lot about society.