Review: The Eye of Night

The Eye of Night by Pauline J. Alama
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is going to rate very highly in my annual Year's Best list.

Bookbub's ad for it quoted Booklist as recommending it for fans of George R. R. Martin and Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion, so I wasn't sure whether I would like it or not; I strongly dislike Martin but love the Chalion novels deeply. Fortunately, it turned out to be more like the latter than the former.

I'm marking it as well-edited, with an asterisk: the ebook has apparently been scanned from a print book, and there are odd artifacts of the scanning process. For example, every time a sentence begins "Yet", there is a space before the "t". Mostly, though, it isn't bad, and there are only three or four typos apart from that. The language use is confident and capable throughout. Some reviewers are describing it as "wordy," but I didn't find it so, and I tend to be impatient with books that don't have much plot per thousand words, or bloated epic fantasies.

It's not just your standard epic fantasy, either. There are some tropes: a quest, an artifact of power, companions helping one another through it all, but the questers aren't your usual young blacksmith's apprentice who's secretly a prince. They're a merchant's son who joined a religious order after he was the sole survivor of a shipwreck that killed his whole family, and then became disillusioned before taking final vows; and a woman of no apparent consequence, small, her face distorted by old wounds, who is significant not because of who she secretly is but because of the choices she makes. They're both around 30.

There are meetings with people who seem kind and generous but aren't, or are only so conditionally, but also with people who actually are kind and generous. There are complex characters left and right, in fact, and certainly the central pair have a lot of depth to them. They aren't just a bunch of archetypes or stock characters.

And there's no delusion about being descended from nobility meaning that you have some kind of special claim on anything. The nobles are a scurvy lot, taken as a whole, and the simple people are much more worthwhile.

There are some heartwrenching decisions made selflessly, there's True Love, there are plot twists, there are realistic hardships on the journey. There's tension about what will happen next and if our heroes will make it through.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, and wish the author had written something else (longer than a short story) so I could immediately read it.

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