A while back on the Fantasy-Faction Facebook group, I posted a question asking people to name books with endings that were so good they raised the overall rating of the novel. At the time, I had just finished The Lost War by Justin Lee Anderson, which won the 6th Annual SPFBO and which has a fantastic twist that transformed my opinion of the novel (reviewed here). My favorite example, however, is Guy Gavriel Kay’s Lions of al-Rassan. I adore Kay’s work, but Lions was a middling read for me until I reached the end, which was so well constructed and had such a powerful emotional punch I still, roughly thirty years later, tear up when I think about it.
David Green’s debut novel, In Solitude’s Shadow, is another book with an ending so good it retroactively raised my opinion of the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong: I thoroughly enjoyed everything leading up to the conclusion, especially the fractious mother-daughter relationship, but it was the end that had me staying up well past bedtime on a work night, because I had to know how things would turn out.
Green builds to the ending in a deliberate way, but each chapter slowly ratchets up the tension. After a prologue that establishes a basis for the racial tensions, which underpin the book’s conflicts, we meet Zanna, a disgraced Sparker in exile at the fortress of Solitude. Equal parts sorcerer, cleric, and warrior, Sparkers serve as soldiers for the Haltveldt Empire, but they began as a religious order, a little like magic-using Knights Templar. Solitude is a military outpost used to defend Haltveldt against incursions from a people called the Banished, and Zanna serves out her days there as punishment for using a banned lethal spell.
Zanna used her world’s version of the Avada Kedavra to prevent her husband from harming their daughter Calene. Dear Old Dad may have turned out to be a bad guy, but Calene hasn’t forgiven Zanna for killing him, especially with an illegal spell, and mother and daughter haven’t spoken in years. That changes when both women uncover signs of invasion. A Sparker herself, Calene finds an injured Banished far to the south of Solitude, near the front of a vicious war between Haltveldt and the elves. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Banished begin amassing outside Solitude—not just warriors, but whole families. Using a psychic bond they share, mother and daughter share warnings and begin trying to stop trouble before it starts.
Mistrust and fear lie behind all the conflicts in the book, from the resentment and recrimination that divide Zanna and Calene to the racial biases that divide humans, elves, and Banished and the political differences that divide members of the Haltveldtian Emperor’s council. The use of Solitude to keep the Banished out of Haltveldt felt a lot like the Wall and the Wildlings in A Song of Ice and Fire (especially with another looming threat arising in the North), and the laws proscribing Sparkers’ magic use and limiting their power over ordinary people were nothing new either. However, Green’s use of these familiar ingredients still felt fresh, perhaps because all the characters believe they’re doing the right thing. Even the Emperor and his close allies, who are waging a genocidal campaign against the elves and won’t hesitate to murder political rivals, believe they’re making “the hard choices” to protect Haltveldt’s people.
I enjoyed how Green explored doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and the lasting consequences this has on individuals and societies. In Solitude’s Shadow is a dark fantasy that doesn’t flinch from gore and has its share of skullduggery, intrigue, and human foibles, but I wouldn’t call it grimdark. Oppression and slavery are everyday realities, and one character struggles with addiction, but there is still a bright, hopeful tone that lightens the reading experience. Zanna and Calene are heroic women who’d like to find a peaceful solution if they can. Zanna particularly regrets her husband’s death, and wishes she’d found a different way to stop him from hurting Calene. Her efforts to redeem herself form the most satisfying arc in the book.
The magic system, which involved siphoning off energy—aka, the Spark—from living things, was neat, especially given differences in how humans, elves, and Banished use this power and hints about why those differences exist. Sparkers put themselves and others in danger if they take in too much power, and there’s a suggestion that elves once had a closer connection to magic than they do in the time period of the story. One of the most intriguing mysteries, and the one that has me anxious to read the next book, is the threat to all three races glimpsed at the end of the novel. I wish other mysteries had been cleared up, however. For instance, it was never clear to me what, exactly, Calene’s father did to warrant his death. This event occurs many years before the novel starts, and we’re told the husband believed Sparkers were superior to non-magic users and that he wanted to use Calene’s power, but the how of it, and the consequences for Calene if he’d succeeded, were murky to me. In Solitude’s Shadow is a very short book, and I wish a little more time had been spent on this and some other backstory details.
These issues will likely be cleared up in later books, as our heroes unravel the core mystery surrounding the source of the Spark and how and why the Banished became that way. And again, the ending raised my appreciation of the entire novel. Looking back, even what seemed like a bit of a slow start was really just Green lighting a fuse, one that fizzes and sparks to an explosive conclusion.
Julia Kitvaria Sarene