Ravencry – Book Review
Contains spoilers for book one…
Ravencry is another fast paced and well imagined installment in the Raven’s Mark series and while I’m at it “GOOD GOD WHY HAVEN”T YOU READ IT YET!” If you are a fan of the darker side of adult fantasy then stop what you’re doing and go get these books…….aaaaand welcome back. You’ve made the right choice.
Ravenscry picks up a few years after the siege of Valengrad and the defeat of Shavada, the Deep King lured into the Nameless’s trap. Ryhalt Galharrow is still reeling from the loss of his unrequited love Ezabeth, but has settled into a rhythm as Captain of the Blackwing, alongside his good old buddies Nenn and Tnota. He’s even begun to forge something like a family with an orphan he has employed and the steely eyed woman who takes care of the Blackwing’s day-to-day operations. Sure, they aren’t the Cleavers, but they look out for each other. And then it all goes to shit. A clandestine meeting with an informant ends in bloodshed, and a stolen relic signals that the Deep Kings are on the move again. Like fucking always, it’s up to Galharrow to sober up enough to get to the bottom of this shit and save the city from a total nightmare massacre.
Many of the characters who caught our eye in book one continue to pull us deeper into the story in book two. Ryhalt Galharrow is once again our hard-boiled narrator and main character in Ravencry, and his complicated love affair/obsession with Ezabeth is just as central to our story as it was in book one. This novel takes a unique angle toward this, since she is basically killed in book one. Now, her supercharged connection to Phos magic has imprinted some of her essence on the world’s magic, a spirit that sometimes appears to the residents of Valengrad. But is her spirit really trapped in the aether, or is it just an after image of the woman she was burned into the Phos magic neighboring the Misery? Gallharrow wrestles with the notion that she may be gone, or that she may be genuinely trapped and he is the only one who can save her. This one-sided obsession needed another leg to stand on and so McDonald introduced Valiya, a tattoed, ginger, sauce pot with brains and gumption who has taken the reins of the Blackwing’s expansion in the aftermath of the Drudge siege of Valengrad. I really liked Valiya, and rooted for Galharrow to drop his obsession and see the real woman before it was too late. Love triangles are not a favored trope of mine, but this one felt unique, and added to a romance subplot from book one that didn’t fire on all cylinders for me.
The setting of the Reach and the Misery continued to impress. Valengrad is a city on the edge, literally a city bordering the strange land ruined by out of control magic, known as the Misery. But also a city on the edge of defeat. Internal and external forces lend an air of desperation that McDonald expertly nuances with weird cults, corrupt idiots, and mad-sorcerers all throwing the dice as the last few sands drain from the hourglass. There is a multi-dimensional soft magic system at work here that has a coherence to make it believable and unique, without the sort of nitty-gritty nuts-and-bolts play-by-play that bogs down certain hard-magic systems like Brandon Sanderson’s Allomancy. (P.S. That is the most hyphens I have ever jammed into one sentence) I love that there are monsters, but almost all of them are humans mutated by magic. I love that there are epic level baddies at play, but that the struggles of one drunken tough guy really matter because he is willing to say ‘fuck it. If I die I die. I’m going in.” This is not cookie cutter medieval fantasy.
One of my favorite selling points for McDonald’s novels is the pacing. These books are sleek, well-oiled death machines. You won’t find an ounce of fat here, every word is calculated for maximum devastation, and it makes for a stellar reading experience. After completing two thirds of this trilogy it is well on its way to being at the very top of my list of favorite fantasy series. As much as I loved Blackwing, Ravencry was better, I can’t wait to finish this story. Even if I’ll have to face the soul-crushing truth that it’s over, like Ryhalt with a bottle of Whitelande brandy, I just can’t help myself.
