Books

Michelle Sagara's Cast in Shadow

I love this book series. Keep that in mind as you read this: I adore what this author does with her world-building and character development. I'm rereading it instead of reading new books because it's comfort food for me. The main character is ADHD in ways I relate to. I've read ten books in the series, and eagerly await new releases whenever they drop. Currently, I'm in the middle of reading #2, Cast in Courtlight.

The name of the series is Chronicles of Elantra. It is currently eighteen books long, with a nineteeth coming in August 2024, and it has three spin-off novels alongside a novella. It is a bizarre fusion of urban fantasy with epic fantasy, written by a veteran fantasy author who normally writes doorstoppers. She has been writing one of these yearly since 2005, alongside her work on said doorstoppers. (I feel, in some ways, that I am describing Tad Williams, but his foray into urban fantasy was a four book set of doorstoppers, not an ongoing episodic serial series.) The general story structure is that you could technically pick up any novel in the series and read a self-contained standalone story, but this becomes less and less true as it goes on. The author has stated that she has an ending in mind for the series, but no actual ETA as to when she'll get there - only an estimate that the final arc will be two or three books. (That said, she's been notoriously bad at estimating story length in the past, as one of her series ballooned from six books to eight!) In other words: start reading this series with the expectation that you're going to finish reading it before it properly ends, even if you're a slow reader, and there's a slim chance it may never finish at all. Finally, as a general estimate, each book (paperback and mass-market paperback) has been about 300-500 pages; they're not short, but they're not as long as her epic fantasy, either.

The pitch of the series is: in a fantasy world, a dragon has won the preceding wars and become the Emperor, ruling over Elantra, the huge city that surrounds a mysterious inner ring of ancient structures and ruins. The city is populated by other dragons, elves, cat-people, angelic winged people, psychic alien-esque people, and humans. Our protagonist is a former street-rat turned police officer named Kaylin, and she is capital-S Special in that way of protagonists. Every book follows her adventures as she tries to stop serial killers, magical crime, elf nonsense, or other fantasy weirdness. Through her we meet and explore all kinds of fantasy weirdos and their cultures, and get to see the inner-workings of a fantasy police station.

Now, what are the stereotypes of these genres? I'll give a quick refresher in case you're new to them. Urban fantasy (henceforth UF) goes first as it's less broad a topic. In a nutshell, if you laid out every UF and picked one at random, you would read a mystery story set in an urban environment with supernatural elements, usually tinged with a noir flavoring. The hard-bitten private detective who has to solve why someone offed a guy, except that the guy in question is a werewolf, and the murderer is a vampire and the detective had to do magical stuff to find out whodunnit. Often the ending contains adventure and/or violence, as the vampire won't come quietly. Finally, most urban fantasy series devote a decent amount of time to world-building, as they want to explain why there are vampires in New York City. -- Now, there's more to the genre, but that's the quick and dirty. (Last minute edit: UF usually is published as series, with each book being a separate case.)

Epic fantasy (also known as high fantasy), by contrast, cannot be summarized in this manner. Too big and broad a genre. The plots and characters are all over the place. But the common elements are, generally speaking, these: first, set in a fantasy setting, i.e. not Earth. Second, a large scope - be it cast of characters or time scale or similar. Third, magic is present. Finally, the major conflict cannot be decided by force of arms alone. There are more common features, but you need those elements to qualify as epic fantasy - or rather, to differentiate it from low fantasy, or dark fantasy, or something else entirely. The most commonly referenced work in this genre is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Elantra does a fusion I don't normally see: it's structured like an urban fantasy, in that it's a serialized story (each book is a separate case), follows one POV character who acts as detective, in an urban environment, and there sure are supernatural elements. But at the same time, the world-building is aggressively fantasy (none of the fusion of 'why are there vampires in NYC', but instead it's not Earth at all), there's no noir flavoring, and as the story goes on, the cases evolve from somewhat standard UF fare to full blown fantasy adventures. There's even a book where Kaylin goes on a roadtrip with the elves, and it's just straight fantasy for that entire book, no urban about it. But - more importantly - because it is so episodic, unlike most fantasy settings you actually get to explore all the nooks and crannies of the setting. Most epic fantasy novels are either novels or trilogies, almost never long-running series.

This should explain part of the appeal: reading this series is a guided tour through an alien world, following a central cast I care about and get to watch develop. It's the Star Trek of fantasy novels, and I love it.

Now, enough high-level view of the series! Let's look at the people, specifically our lead, Kaylin! Kaylin is twenty when the series starts, ADHD as hell, and immature. I have seen a lot of reviews mention that they dropped the series because of her: she's too immature, too stupid, too much of a doofus to be worth putting up with. I don't entirely disagree!

Kaylin is infurating. She was born in the fiefs, the inner core of Elantra where the dragons do not go and there is no government outside of crime lords. She was orphaned young by a sick mom and raised by a slightly older child, and she is a street rat to her core. She's used to poverty, starvation, begging and thieving to survive, and holding no respect for high society. At some point in her early teens, she left the fiefs, was taken in by the Hawklord and effectively tamed in the way you'd tame a feral animal. Which is to say, weirdly enough, that she was raised by a police station? The Hawklord didn't treat her like a daughter, he basically told her that if she wants to be a Hawk, she'd have to complete these courses and do the training and join up, and she did... but only the bare minimum. When Cast in Shadow starts, I won't lie, she is effectively the station mascot and pet, not an actual officer, and she acts like a bratty teenager.

But, weirdly, this also works? Kaylin is incredibly earnest about what she does and doesn't want. She wants, above all else, to protect children. Due to watching other orphans like herself get murdered in the fiefs when she was a kid, she has devoted herself to the Hawks specifically so she can protect and stop murderers. But she's also selfish about her life? Or short-sighted, shall we say, which is ironic given what she is. Kaylin wants to be a beat cop, effectively. She wants to patrol the city and stop criminals and go drinking with her friends and gamble and help out at the local orphanage. This is all she aspires to in life, and if not for the plot frantically dragging her into things, she would happily spend the rest of her life being a helpful presence in her community. She does not care about the history of Elantra, she doesn't care about magic, she doesn't care about elf politics, none of that.

So the plot screams into her life over and over in multiple ways, and through Kaylin's proximity to the plot, she is forced to learn everything she's been ignoring: history, culture, magic, more. We, the audience, benefit from this as we get interesting infodumps from other characters telling Kaylin about the world she lives in, that she should know.

In Cast in Shadow, this plot takes the form of serial murders targeting children and leaving evidence that directly ties it to the murders from her childhood. All the cliche elements are here: Kaylin is assigned to the investigation despite her personal ties to the case. The other two officers assigned are, well, similarly compromised (and Kaylin wants to kill one of them, for personal reasons.) They visit the scene of the crime, they interview the crimelord in charge of that area of the fiefs, they watch an autopsy, and so on. But while it has the structure of a police procedural, it doesn't have the heart of one. Kaylin's unprofessional as hell and basically unfit for this investigation. She's trying, bless her, but the book doesn't apologize about it: she's not on the case because of her skills, but because she is tied to the murders and her presence helps them figure out whodunnit.

Yet, despite all of this, you're not reading this scoffing at her. You're reading it like a fantasy novel, rooting her on as she navigates this. Another angle that I've neglected is that Kaylin is a healer. She's one of the four people in all of Elantra who can use magic to heal as an innate gift, and it is only through the Hawklord's influence that she isn't chained up in the Emperor's court, waiting to heal him if he ever gets hurt. What she's doing instead - alongside working as a Hawk - is secretly-not-secretly working with the Midwives. She is always on call for any emergency, ready to drop everything and run to personally heal births gone wrong. Healing drains her, but she never ever turns someone down.

The precinct treats her like a kid sister tagging along; the sarge is soft on her, the boss is soft on her, everyone likes her and supports her when they can, and in some ways this reinforces the image of her as a child. But it also creates a home-like atmosphere, where you know she's safe here, with these people, and she works damn hard, walking her beat or healing people or trying to keep up in the investigations. And, in a lot of ways, their gentleness with her pays off: when the stakes go high, she steps up. So - yeah, you as a reader are going to gel with her or you're going to run screaming. She's always late! She's rude! She's deliberately ignorant! Hell, she's even racist towards one of the species in Elantra, and it's an ongoing arc of her working through that and being a better person.

In case you can't tell, I like Kaylin. I adore her arc as she grows into herself. Cast in Shadow is only the beginning, but even this mess is fascinating to me. Especially her ADHD things: she struggles to apply herself to subjects that don't interest her, she loses track of time, yet hyper-focuses on things she cares about. Things other people find easy frustrate her. At no point does the author diagnose her in or out of universe, but I can't help but see some of myself in her and want to root for her.

The other big thing in the book I need to address are the elves. Ahem, they're called Barrani. Barrani are immortal people with beautiful white skin and black hair and they're stuck-up and fancy as hell. They disdain mortals for having such short lives, and they're so damn beautiful in the process of being massive dicks. Elves! I think the series has a cool take on elves, and I'm always a sucker for the pointy-eared bastards, so that's my bias. But, crucially to this book, early on we get a case of the plot reaching out to Kaylin and forcing her to learn.

The fieflord is an outcaste Barrani named Nightshade, and he lives in a fancy magical castle and deploys his servants to kill his enemies and put them in hanging cages outside. He is a big ol' goth edgelord, and he inserts himself into the plot by marking Kaylin's cheek with a magical tattoo that she can never remove, even if she skinned herself. Kaylin hates this! Everyone around her hates this! But she winds up magically linked to Nightshade, and he is - through the rest of the series too - a fascinating, cruel ally.

I'm going to just say it: the series has very very minor shades of romance, and the ghost of a love triangle, but it never really pursues this. Kaylin doesn't think about romance, she thinks about work, and she never really loses this. I appreciate it. It's a nice change of pace from what I usually read.

Last bits: every non-human in this series has magical moodring eyes. Why? I don't know. The author likes it. When dragons are mad their eyes turn red, or some color, and the author will bring this up, but never provide a moodring chart. I just take it as colorful flavor text and keep going.

Dragons are surprisingly prevalent in this series, in shapeshifted human form and as big ol' lizards. They're fascinating, old, powerful. I like how they're written.

Okay that's everything short of a whole slew of spoilers! Cast in Shadow, and by extension the series it begins, is a personal favorite and I fucking love it. It's weird and doing its own thing and in some ways clearly wish-fulfillment, but in a very earnest and wholesome way. Kaylin is special and kind of a mary sue but charming about it, and the world is filled with interesting people - and it becomes very funny that these fancy-ass elves/dragons/etc have to lower themselves from their proper high fantasy lives to interact with this ratty-ass street rat cop who failed all of her classes and refuses to respect them. I cannot wait until even more of these books come out. - 1/5/2024