I did it, I read Sun Warrior. It was a book I picked up with a great deal of trepidation and no small amount of dread. The House of Night Series remains one of the worst I have ever endured and Moon Chosen manages to plum still deeper depths. I did not have high expectations for Sun Warrior
Which made reading Sun
Warrior, almost a pleasant surprise. Oh, not because it was good. Not
because it came even close to good. Not because it could even see good on a
clear day with a telescope. Because it wasn’t remotely. Nor was it not
deeply problematic in many many ways (especially dwelling on a lot of rape as
well as some really terrible treatment of the former slaves the Companions
controlled) But it managed to avoid a whole lot of the most awful traits of the
first book by… basically pretending they never happened or by retconning or by
brushing over them super quickly.
Like the book tries
to emphasise what a wonderful caring healer Mari is… we’re all completely
avoiding the way she just abandoned her people and listened to them scream. At
best we have a brief nod while everyone rallies round Mari to tell her she’s
amazing and we spend the rest of this book with just about everyone treating
Mari like the second coming. Or there’s the racial coding and Blackface of the
last book which is just ignored in this book. The description of Earth Walkers
as ugly vs the “refined” features of the Companions has been dropped entirely.
The Nightfever is there, but handwaved and we’re all far more concerned
by the new plague from the Skin Stealers. She even develops a whole new load of
traditions about Clan Weaver weaving - which sounds simplistic, but last book
Mari didn’t think her people were capable of art.
It’s not that the
book has changed, dispensed with or otherwise redeemed the badness of the last
book: it’s just pretended none of it ever happened.
It does have its own
problematic elements which largely stem from the writing: it’s horribly slow
pace, the endless telling-with-no-showing and the Mary Sue omniscience of the
main characters held together with a whole lot
of magical plot glue.
This book, this
oh-so-long-book, covers about a week, maybe a fortnight. And in that time Mari
and Nik decide to create a whole new society called the Pack where all people
come together in mutual love and tolerance. Which sounds nice - except remember
like 2 days ago these Earth Walker women were imprisoned and enslaved by the
Companions. They were enslaved for generations as a people and some of these
women had literally spent many years in captivity. It is REASONABLE for these
women to be at least a little wary of the Companions. It is reasonable for
these women to be more than a little concerned when Mari decides to host
several Companions in their BIRTHING BURROW. The place where pregnant women of
the Clan give birth. And some of these Companions were literally among the
raiding party that kidnapped several Clan women AND killed Leda, Mari’s mother
and pretty much destroyed the Clan, a few weeks ago. Hey, y’know, it’s not
exactly an act of vicious bigotry for the these women to think that they’d
rather their enslavers not camp in the most sensitive parts of their home. But
Mari treats them as grossly intolerant and drives some of the women out for not
embracing them men who hunted and owned them 2 days before - and no-one
challenges her on this
This follows Mari, in
both books, repeatedly talking about the bigotry of her people and why she had
to hide: but we never see this. Literally not one member of Clan Weaver turns
on Mari for being half Companion Tree-Person. Not one. But she repeatedly tells
us of the lengths she has to go to to avoid this non-existent bigotry. She
continually refers to this non-existent bigotry to bludgeon the surviving Clan
Weaver women to just ABANDON their society.
We have something similar with the Companions - with Nik and Mari assuming the Companions will definitely try to kill her and return to their slaving ways. Perhaps there’s more
justification in assuming the slave holding Companions being regarded with more
suspicion - but we don’t see it; no real wide spread rejection or hostility. The only
Companion who really clings to real negativity towards the Earth Walkers is
Thaddeus - who is infected by the Skin Stealer disease. But Nik decides to
leave his people at a time of utter peril, taking with him Laru (his pet dog
and the alpha. Which sort of makes him leader. It’s like a Canine Excalibur)
when the ONLY opposition he gets is from Thaddeus the diseased one. He leaves his people literally to die for the sake of a prejudice that we never see.
And despite everyone
knowing Thaddeus killed the last Sun Priest, no-one does anything about it. He
just wanders around being evil, gathering followers and everyone just shrugs
and moves on -not for any reason other than the author NEEDING Thaddeus to run
around being super evil to advance a plot. Reasonably these characters would
have killed/banished/dropped him down a hole but the plot needs him to be there
This whole lack of
actual prejudice is a problem because both Nik and Mari use this supposed
prejudice as an excuse to abandon the Companions completely (despite having
lost over half of their population in a devastating forest fire and desperately
desperately needing help, they have no healer, no home, few resources and lots
of wounded) and force the Earth Walkers to completely change their way of life.
This prejudice NEEDS to be real to stop Nik and Mari being completely self
absorbed and utterly callous towards others and without it being depicted they
still look self-absorbed and callous… but also weirdly paranoid. “Everyone
hates me!” but… no-one does. I mean, ever.
This prejudice is
even used as the driving force for Mari deciding the Pack needs to relocate to a whole new unknown land -
this prejudice is an essential driver of the plot and it’s NOT THERE
The books also really
fails to examine, well, anything in any real depth. Like Mari and Nik are
building this new society and, then, deciding to move to the great unknown to
live with pretty horses - but it’s ok everyone going with them choses to
follow. Except the Earth Walkers will pretty much die without Mari to wash
them. And the Companions are vulnerable to the death fungus which means
basically half of them die if they suffer even a minor break of their skin: an
ailment that Mari can cure. Oh and now we have the Skin Stealer disease which…
only Mari can cure. At no point does any character even slightly hint that Mari
has complete power over everyone and how little free will everyone else has
because of this. Mari herself never thinks for a second about the ethics of
everyone’s dependence on her - even when she threatens to leave or abandon
people. Just some level of thought would be nice
Which brings me round
to how Mari is just the most ridiculous Mary Sue ever. Mary Sue is a much
abused term and is often used by sexist readers to dismiss any half way
competent female character - but Mari is such a classic example. She has ALL
THE SHINY POWERS in incredible amounts and even Thaddeus wants to capture her
to use her special shininess. She is everyone’s saviour since she can heal the
Skin Stealer Plague - but it’s not just her powers; it’s the way everyone
treats her. Unless you’re actually designated Evil, you love Mari. Everyone
loves Mari. Everyone agrees with Mari. She’s radically changing society and
gets barely more than a token protest. People line up to love her. When one of
the Skin Stealers is fleeing her people she prays to the Earth Goddess and MARI
HEARS THE PRAYERS. She’s also getting some very House of Night-style
divine guidance as well adding to her specialness. And this is why the whole
prejudice themes fail - because the author just can’t bring herself to have
people dislike Mari.
This book also brings
some really unnecessary sexual abuse themes in: the Skin Stealers have become a
terrible morass of rape and sexual assault for no other reason than to drop
some “designated evil” markers on them. The leader is possessed by the god of
Death and is all Evil, but why would Death rape? Why would Death be interested
in sex at all? We could have had him being abusive and frightening and driving
Dove away without this. It’s gratuitous. We also have a really unpleasant plot
line developed between Antreas - the plot-convenient-Lynx-Companion - and
Danita, the Earth Walker girl (about 16 years old) who was abused and raped
last book. She’s duly traumatised because of her terrible experiences. She
takes a lot of comfort from the presence of the lynx who follows her around and
helpd her and it all seems very protective and comforting. Until we learn
Antreas is looking for a mate and in their culture it’s the cat that decides.
It’s not even subtle, Mari and Sora joke about what a pickle Antreas is in
because he doesn’t agree with his cat’s choice
Ho-ho, the lynx is trying
to push this grown man to mate with an adolescent girl who has just being raped
and is deeply fragile but trusts the lynx because she thinks the cat will
protect her from other abusive men. How drole! How amusing!
We do have two LGBTQ
characters, both of whom have their same-sex partner briefly mentioned, both of
which are now horribly dead. Neither character even spends any real time
mourning them
But the hardest thing
to deal with in this book is the writing. As I mentioned, it is a long book
that covers, at most, 2 weeks in the life of the characters. The story is split
into three sections: the Companions in their ruined forest city where
everything is bleak and terrible and sad and awful and rotting and dying (and
generally making Mari and Nick look terribad for not giving a shit). The “Pack”
are kind of just hanging around waiting to leave and declaring Mari the most
amazing thing ever. Which leaves the Skin Stealers with the burden of actually
DOING SOMETHING - and they do. But even then it’s slow, evil and slightly
ridiculous (honestly it’s almost work reading this book just for the names:
Dead Eye, Lizard, Rebel, Steel Heart, Bones, Midnight, Joker, Lily. Wait… what?
Yes, Lily. We have all these names and then there’s Lily just wandering around
like she’s forgotten there’s a naming convention). But most of this plot is
Dead Eye just being evil between occasional bouts of plague spreading
There’s just not
enough plot to fill the book. And even though it was a long long book to read
it also felt weirdly short because the first 80% of this book was prologue. I
kept waiting for the plot to start and it didn’t… not until the book was
normall over.
