A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham

Given how much I've enjoyed James S.A. Corey's The Expanse series, it was not a hard sell to get me to want to try one of the fantasy series of one of the authors who writes those books. I didn't make any real moves to do so, though, until I was helped along when Tor.com's book club offered the first in a series by Daniel Abraham for free. So I downloaded it, and it languished for a while on my ereader while I was busily finishing up reading Hugo nominees.

Finally, I got around to picking it up, and this was a book that it took me a while to get into. I never minded reading it, but it didn't really grab me for quite a while. There were a few moments where I considered putting it aside, at least temporarily. Then one reveal happened, about halfway through, and suddenly things started to fall more clearly into place, and I was more eager to get back to it. The book still feels a little weirdly paced, but in the end, I quite enjoyed it.

Not so much that I'm jumping right on the bandwagon of seeking out every book after this one, but I'm definitely in a place where I'm open to reading more of Abraham's fantasy, and I'll be interested to see where this goes, because he's created a neatly twisty tale of ethics and, particularly, ethics in teaching, that I do find fascinating. 

And in that, it felt like there were some deliberate subversions of stories so subtle I hadn't really noticed them at all. Near the beginning, there is a young man studying, who discovers that, although the teaching is harsh, and he suffered from it as well as a boy, it is the act of compassion when he is the one in charge that qualifies him to study to become a poet. (I'll get to what that means in a few minutes.)  This is something that feels rather familiar, but what he does next is not - to point out that relying on such a system, that encourages cruelty towards real people, real children, in order to find the few who reject such training is to condone the cruelty, to make it a tool they use in education, and that the few who break it do does not excuse the abuse of the rest. He leaves.

I was very caught by this, but then the story turns away from that character to a city, to the machinations of a trading company in the court of someone with power of life and death (I don't remember the exact title, I'm terrible at both titles and names.) But I guess to make this make sense, I need to explain what I understand of poets.

Poets are not quite that, although they may also write poetry. What they are is someone who was able to fashion a metaphor in a way that never previously existed, and, by so doing, capture the spirit of that metaphor, to enslave them to their will, to make them part of their own self. It does seem to be a profession of men, and there are not many. The metaphor/spirit that is bound to the poet in this town and this court hates the poet, and plots to destroy his captor. Again, we are getting comments on how cruelty is built in to systems, and excused because it is said to create.

A plot develops, to destroy the spirit of the poet, and it's interesting, but I did find my attention start to wander. Right up until it is revealed that one of the characters in this town was the young man who rejected the teaching of the school of poets, and at that moment, I was all in again. I had already liked the older woman who was chief accountant/bookkeeper of the merchant company, and her younger apprentice, but it took the moment of tying it all back together to make the book really sing.

I am not going to relate the rest of what happens, but there are such interesting thoughts here, such a rejection of systems that have stood for so long that they are worn smooth, and yet that smoothness obscures the pain that sustains them. I do want to see where the series goes from here. In writing this review, in trying to put my thoughts in order, I've realized how much I do want to know what happens next. I guess Abraham goes on my "writers to follow" list after all.