Black Sun

I enjoyed this quite a bit as an entertaining story. Some good characters, I particularly liked both Serapio and Xiala. Well constructed book too, she does a good job fleshing out characters and the world without belaboring it with a lot of background exposition.

Also the story was interestingly structured. It took me awhile to grab hold of it at first, different POV characters with seemingly unrelated stories. But it comes together pretty deftly by the end of the first third of the novel, first with vibes and then with the details of the plot itself.

But I felt totally cheated at the end of the novel. She does such a great job building the action to an apocalyptic conclusion, lots of death and mayhem. Only at the end to pull a "are they dead or aren't they? Find out in the next novel..." sort of thing. It felt like she tacked that on at the end too, maybe her original plan was to write the one novel and call it concluded. I wish she had.

I appreciated the author's goal of writing fantasy grounded in something other than European medieval environments. It felt broadly inspired by American cultures and stories but not too much specifically of any one culture or tradition, which is fine by me. What I know of Pueblo culture that she drew from worked well here.