Shadow Baron by Davinia Evans
Rating: 
Nothing is perfect, and as such, the reviews in this blog are chaotic. My main aim is to share my thoughts, joy and opinions on a book, not make a publication perfect review. This blog endorses authenticity, showing up and joy over perfection.
Now on to book two of this series. Now, this one took me much longer to finish, partly because I was reading other books alongside it and some of those were pretty epic and therefore I had to take a break from fantasy. But still enjoyed it.
This time I will start with the parts that were less positive. We are still suffering with pacing and world building issues. Though you can see that some of the plot is driving the need to fill in those gaps, but also some of those “fixes” are creating new areas and things that again, struggle with that fleshing out. And for me one of the biggest things was that we keep having a “mystery” for Siyon to fix, and that mystery is left too vague and then all of a sudden boom,the vague hints suddenly all align, but not in a satisfying way, they feel a bit clunky and sometimes a bit forced or just faceless, like they weren’t defined enough.
Out of this particular book’s plots, my favourite was Anahid’s. Look, she is going around betting with some semi unsavoury characters, visiting the Flower District (sex workers are called flowers here), and she’s somehow balancing her stifling social needs (barely) with her groiwng interest into the Flower Disctrict and the games she plays. The fact she ends up winning a Flower House out of one of the main gang bosses (who are some of the big baddies socially), and then ends up having somewhat of a feud with the gang since they feel offended of her not giving them the house back. Somehow they didn’t expect her to want to take her of the flowers and start changing things and their quality of life. I loved her taking on this challenge and using her social skills and all her training to be a perfect wife in high society, for making a flower house work more smoothly, even when she’s suddenly chit chats with some of the other gangs and their bosses and trying to defend herself and come out winning from the boss she won the house from (fairly).
Zagiri’s plot advances much more here, as she realises that the best way to make use of her privilege is to go into politics to try to change things inside the system. But as she finds a position that lets her start making small waves, she also starts accidentally being pulled into a rebellion that is brewing, because people remember her efforts before and how she used privilege to save lives. The story is still challenging her on how she intends to use her privilege but also the definition of what violence is and what paths are chosen for each side and why for some sides violence is not so bad but from the other, anything even close to it is considered bad. Lots of challenges for Zagiri, while also trying to maintain the facade of beign part fo the high society to keep using that privilege.
And finally Siyon, for me in this book his story was the most frustrating. He is missing Izmirlian, which fully understandable, and still trying to understand his new responsibilities, while trying to catch up on this new system and new rules of high society that he doesn’t know how to navigate and now has to figure out on the go. And then there is one of the gang bosses keeps appearing to him and doing cryptic messages (this “mystery” was the one I spoke about that is vague and tries to set itself up but doesn’t do it well enough). , plus the fact mythical creatures are suddenly appearing and people are upset about how the big magic changes in the planes are having cascade effects on their perfectly constructed life and can we please have a fixed world but no consequences thankyou very much. Which is very mcuh how sociery feels like, so this was done well. Siyon’s story here is about how to fit into a new world that demands of you to fix it when you don’t even know what’s broken.
AS we delve deepr into the specifics of each character’s arc, then we do get a slightly more fleshed out wrold for each of their pieces, but they feel a bit too disconnected form each other except when the characters interact or join them in their own way, but it isn’t enough still.
Oh and there is a naga, a djinn, and a dragon, so pretty cool story! Still worth reading and I will see what the last book brings. Hoping for some closure on many items.