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A review by adityasundar
Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
3.0
One of my most-awaited reads of the year, this book was part enchanting and part underwhelming, and it left me with mixed feelings.
It's a tough feat to have the first book in a series deliver worldbuilding, magic, characters, and plot in equal footing. While the Son of the Storm is brilliant and evocative in its worldbuilding and magic system, it doesn’t reach that caliber in the other two categories.
I couldn't have asked for a richer setting to tell this story. The culture shines bright- everything from the clothes, festivals, cuisine, and even the customs leap off the pages in a cinematic sense. The social politics of the story is spellbinding, with the different castes and how characters from different castes interact.
The magic system is very inventive and puts its own spin on necromancy and body magic. One thing that did bother me was the costs of magic. We see one elderly character experimenting with the magic and the side-effects are brutal. But later on, we see Danso and Esheme use even rarer magical items and apart from exhaustion and fatigue, they're barely affected. And it's never explained why.
The characters have a lot of potential, especially Danso, Esheme, and Lilong, whom I see as the central drivers so far in the series. Each develops a distinct personality over the pages and by the end, you know where each of them stand. However, I also felt that they weren't used to their full potential. Danso, especially. You see, the magic is forbidden and Danso realizes early on that most of the truths he has believed in his life are actually false. We see how it changes him, but only in little flashes. We don’t see him in an existential limbo such a revelation would usually trigger, we don't see him deny the truth and fear it. In fact, he embraces it early on and acts curious, only questioning his motives on the surface. Which, for a scholar, is a little too bland.
The writing is decent for the most part. The author uses subtext in dialogues to convey character motivations and interests, which is awesome. But time and again, immediately after such a dialogue, we get an internal monologue that spells out the subtext for us and I found it tedious.
The book has great pacing for a majority of the story. There is a build-up to the climax, but it unravels too quick. In fact, all of the climax is shrunken into a 50 page window considering there were a lot of threads to tie. Action sequences were few and far between, which isn't a bad thing, but when they showed up, they ended quickly too. The enemies are defeated easily despite the tension they bring. This applies also to the final fight, which made the ending underwhelming.
If not for the execution of the ending and slightly flat characterization, this would've been a 5 star read. Nevertheless, this is a book that I'd recommend.
It's a tough feat to have the first book in a series deliver worldbuilding, magic, characters, and plot in equal footing. While the Son of the Storm is brilliant and evocative in its worldbuilding and magic system, it doesn’t reach that caliber in the other two categories.
I couldn't have asked for a richer setting to tell this story. The culture shines bright- everything from the clothes, festivals, cuisine, and even the customs leap off the pages in a cinematic sense. The social politics of the story is spellbinding, with the different castes and how characters from different castes interact.
The magic system is very inventive and puts its own spin on necromancy and body magic. One thing that did bother me was the costs of magic. We see one elderly character experimenting with the magic and the side-effects are brutal. But later on, we see Danso and Esheme use even rarer magical items and apart from exhaustion and fatigue, they're barely affected. And it's never explained why.
The characters have a lot of potential, especially Danso, Esheme, and Lilong, whom I see as the central drivers so far in the series. Each develops a distinct personality over the pages and by the end, you know where each of them stand. However, I also felt that they weren't used to their full potential. Danso, especially. You see, the magic is forbidden and Danso realizes early on that most of the truths he has believed in his life are actually false. We see how it changes him, but only in little flashes. We don’t see him in an existential limbo such a revelation would usually trigger, we don't see him deny the truth and fear it. In fact, he embraces it early on and acts curious, only questioning his motives on the surface. Which, for a scholar, is a little too bland.
The writing is decent for the most part. The author uses subtext in dialogues to convey character motivations and interests, which is awesome. But time and again, immediately after such a dialogue, we get an internal monologue that spells out the subtext for us and I found it tedious.
The book has great pacing for a majority of the story. There is a build-up to the climax, but it unravels too quick. In fact, all of the climax is shrunken into a 50 page window considering there were a lot of threads to tie. Action sequences were few and far between, which isn't a bad thing, but when they showed up, they ended quickly too. The enemies are defeated easily despite the tension they bring. This applies also to the final fight, which made the ending underwhelming.
If not for the execution of the ending and slightly flat characterization, this would've been a 5 star read. Nevertheless, this is a book that I'd recommend.