Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1) in Into the Forest

Jul 29, 2020 Margaret rated it liked it

Shelves: aoc, fairytale-myth-inspired, 2nd-world-fantasy, native-american

Things I liked: the pre-Colombian inspired fantasy setting, LGBTQ+ rep, badass lady captain/mermaid.

Things I didn't like: Naranpa's character (who somehow made it as the high Sun priest yet has zero survival skills and doesn't seem particularly religious), a predictable plot, and a scene where there's a mass killing of a bunch of nameless people (it's one of my pet peeves in movies, when a bunch of people die in the background and we never knew who they were, and their deaths mean little to noth ...more

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Jun 05, 2022 Serena rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: arcs-or-giveaway

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley, I did receive a eARC in August 2020. I have between that time and now also purchased it in Kindle edition, still I apologize for the lateness of my review.

I did not plan to have read & reviewed so close to Fevered Star's April 2022 release rather than in 2020. I have to say these past two years of the pandemic I have worked in healthcare and now find I have little patience or taste for violence or death in books. So much so I had recently become frustra My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley, I did receive a eARC in August 2020. I have between that time and now also purchased it in Kindle edition, still I apologize for the lateness of my review.

I did not plan to have read & reviewed so close to Fevered Star's April 2022 release rather than in 2020. I have to say these past two years of the pandemic I have worked in healthcare and now find I have little patience or taste for violence or death in books. So much so I had recently become frustrated with myself and my rate of eARC tbr reading seemingly piling up with no results.

So the opening with a mother intent on sacrifice and blooding & blinding her son was put away until I felt I could get though it chapter by chapter if it was all violence. Yet I fell in love with the characters, especially Xiala and the fates of Serapio and Naranpa enthralled me, yesterday I was at 40% -and today I am finished! It feels so good to read again!

So Black Sun is a gift, I have a love of the ancient Americas that goes back to the beginning of my love of myth and it's so rarely done well or touched upon with respect or genuine kindness.

I would love a whole Teek spin off series, so fascinated was I with Xiala and her people who are mothered by the sea, are lovers to the fickle wind and siblings to the creatures of the sea, who are all women and strange eyed and sometimes gilled & fish tailed.

We get to know the cruel tutors who trained Serapio, who raised him to be the vessel of the Crow God, a sacrifice to vengeance, but Xiala sees him as more than a tool or a god.

Naranpa, Sun Priest, was raised not as one of the four nobles of the Sky Made, but in the Coyote's Maw of the Dry Earth, with her brother Denaochi - now a slum lord. She denies all ties to the past before she became a dedicant and walks a careful line of power as Sun Priest among her fellow priests and the clan matrons. It is her life Serapio was raised to end, even though she had as little to do with the massacre of his clan as he had.

Among the priests is her once lover Iktan, a knife or tsiyo, xie wants to spare Naranpa and is not bothered by using bloodshed to do so saving Naranpa from two assassination attempts. The Sun Priest is not the only one being targeted, when Crow matron Yatliza is killed, at her funeral her son Okoa the Shield of his sister who is the next matron to be, is nearly killed by Iktan.

So all is to be gambled and win or lose, the world will be changed after the convergence, a eclipse of the sun, the crow swallowing the sun, or the sun reborn anew through the fires of the Sun Priest. It's a game not all want to play, but prophecy has made patol players of them all. ...more

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