Review: The Summer War

The Summer War by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Naomi Novik is what Neil Gaiman calls an "otter" author; unlike a dolphin, an otter won't do the same trick each time. So her stuff is sometimes very much to my taste ( Spinning Silver ), sometimes very much not (the Scholomance books), and sometimes somewhere in between (Temeraire).

Happily, this one worked very well for me, even though it's about the Fae (the word is never used, but that's clearly what the Summerlings are), and I'm wary of Fae books because... well, because there are too many of them, and some are not good.

This version of the Fae is very much like the legends. They're bound by their word, they have a completely different set of values from humans, they have a completely different sense of time and will hold a grudge for human generations and seek to wipe out an insult in all human blood, they're beautiful and mysterious and closely linked with nature. These particular ones are linked, in particular, with summer, and it's only in summer - very generously defined - that the Green Bridge from their country to the human lands exists. Which is fine when they're trading, not so great when they are invading every year that they remember that a human king insulted the sister of the Summerling prince when he married her, causing her to commit suicide. (They don't always remember. Their memory is different from that of humans too.)

This war went on for a hundred years, and was ended by the protagonist's father before she was born (to an illegitimate daughter of the king, whose hand he obtained as a reward for winning the war through the same cunning that got him a fox as his emblem).

The protagonist, Celia, is, therefore, a descendant of a Sorceress Queen from long before, and manifests sorcery herself for the first time in many generations - accidentally cursing her brother in the process. She then sets about trying to fix her mistake, with the help of their disregarded middle brother, and ends up caught in the continuing aftermath of the original grievance of the summerling prince and also the complications ensuing from the way the war was ended.

Celia makes an excellent protagonist. She's intelligent, level-headed and creative, like her father. She's also good-hearted, and wants the best outcome for everyone, if she can just figure out how to get it.

Along the way she discovers, by allying with the middle brother, that you can choose to love someone, and that doing so is generally the best move. There's some wonderful family-dynamics stuff in general: father/son misunderstandings, and siblings not understanding each other either, admiring or being jealous of or ignoring each other, and eventually communicating.

It's beautifully written, with evocative descriptions of a well-imagined summer court, but not to the point of being overwritten or showing off. The plot is well conceived; it drew me along because I wanted to know, and couldn't imagine, how Celia (and her brothers) could possibly manage to bring about a good outcome for all concerned.

I've marked it as YA, mainly because Celia is 12 at the start of the book and 15 by the end, but it's like T. Kingfisher's young protagonists in that it's fully enjoyable by an adult reader. In fact, it's very like T. Kingfisher in general.

Good stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was nominated for a few awards. It has enough depth and originality, too, that I'm putting it in the Gold tier of my annual best books list.

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