Sinclair, Alison - Darkborn

[oyceter]

In the world of Darkborn, there are the Lightborn and the Darkborn. To the Lightborn, darkness is anathema, whereas the Darkborn can be hurt by the tiniest stream of light. They both coexist in the same city without ever interacting with each other. But soon, Darkborn Balthasar Hearne, his wife Telmaine, and Ishmael di Studier, who is an outcast because he is a Darkborn mage, get tangled up in a conspiracy against both the Lightborn and the Darkborn regarding the birth of two special children.

One of the most interesting bits about the worldbuilding is that all the Darkborn are blind. They do, however, have sonn, which basically operates like sonar. Sinclair has neat details on how sonn changes social conventions; if you sonn someone too deeply in a fairly public place, it's fairly rude, as everyone else can tell how deeply you're sonning, and you can sonn underneath their clothing. It's very cool having a book populated almost entirely (Balthasar has a Lightborn friend) by blind people, although I have a few reservations about having sonn as a "special power" to still give them sight.

I also liked the looks into Darkborn society, from Balthasar, who's a bit on the outskirts, to Ishmael, who's an outcast, to Telmaine, who comes from aristocracy and has to live with loss of status due to her husband. I liked Telmaine a lot, as well as the other female characters I came across. I wish I had liked Ishmael better; he wasn't a bad character per se, but there were things about his role in the book that particularly irked me.

Spoilers

Argh! Love triangle! And so far, it is an unresolved love triangle, and done so in a way that I don't know what will work. I am actually guessing that Ishmael will end up the "winner," since I seriously doubt Sinclair is going for an open marriage or polyamory, sigh. This is why I was so frustrated with Ishmael in the narrative even though he's a perfectly fine character. I'm always sad there are very few stories with established romantic relationships (married or not) that further develop those relationships, so I was rooting for Balthasar and Telmaine from the start.

Also, I find the power dynamics between the two much more interesting, given the breaches of trust, the social standing, and their history together.

Anyway, now that is off my chest...

I remember tearing through this when I first read it over a month ago, and I still find many elements of the story, especially the worldbuilding, fascinating. A solid fantasy, but not (yet) something that blows me away.

Comments

[inkstone]

Yeah, I think that's part of the reason why I'm so resistant to the idea of Telmaine and Ishmael. "Oh look, here's YET another narrative in which the woman finds a "better" match for her." Even though I kind of liked the idea of Telmaine working on and furthering her relationship with Balthasar, you know?

That said, I really really liked Balthasar's Lightborn assassin friend. Or maybe I was just enamoured by their neighboring townhouses with the shared wall.

[oyceter]

Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking as well! It's particularly bothersome to me because I have the niggling feeling that Balthasar isn't seen as a "manly enough" hero, ergo Ishmael.

Oh! I forgot about her! She was awesome and I hope she shows up more!

[anime_babble]

Jumping in to say Floria was my favorite; practical and deadly. I hope we see more of her in the sequels.

[nojojojo]

Huh -- I saw this and thumbed through a few pages, but didn't buy it. Sounds more interesting than I thought; I'll check it out now.

[oyceter]

It's definitely interesting, and I'll borrow the next two books when they come out, but right now, it's still a "get from the library" book for me.

[jesuswasbatman]

I would think that eyeless fantasy beings with sonar of equivalent quality to human sight are simply not analogous to blind people in any way. If the writer overtly tries to allegorise it like that it would be a bad idea, but if the ramifications for world-building were simply dealt with as a cool hard-SF or hard-fantasy concept I don't think it trivialises real world disability in the way you worry about.

[oyceter]

Well, my problem with that is a) determining who counts or doesn't count as "blind" given what I've seen of people going "Oh, she's just a guy with boobs" or "They're not POC, they're aliens" and b) even if they don't count as blind, I think that's still harmful because of the lack of representation of people with disabilities in SFF. I mean, I can list a number of characters who are blind but have special abilities that somehow are supposed to compensate for it, but very few non-super-powered blind people.

[oracne]

I have this in the TBR...am not sure when I will read it. It looks interesting, but the first few pages didn't seize me in their talons.

[oyceter]

It's interesting, but more of a fun read than a particularly deep one for me.