Review: The Black Coast, by Mike Brooks

 

When the citizens of Black Keep see ships on the horizon, terror takes them, for they know who is coming: for generations, Black Keep has been raided by the fearsome clanspeople of Iwernia. Saddling their war dragons, the Naridans rush to defend their home only to discover that the clanspeople have not come to pillage at all. Driven from their own homeland by the rise of a daemonic despot who prophesies the end of the world, they have come in search of a new home. Meanwhile the wider continent of Narida is lurching toward war. Black Keep is about to be caught in the cross-fire of the coming war for the world – if only its new mismatched society can survive.

"Meet the wave head-on, and trust in your ship". Mike Brooks' The Black Coast is the first book in a trilogy dealing with a larger threat to the world, but this first volume sets the stage for a grander conflict, focusing instead on the battle for integration between two people that have only ever been enemies but now need to find a common ground. The clash of cultures and customs feels believable, with one culture pretty rooted in mysoginy and the other teeming with homophobia; but perhaps they can take the best of each other and make something greater. Daimon and Saana, on opposite sides, work hard to make this alliance work.

This is a multi-POV epic that doesn't only deal with this conflict, but also jumps to other two realms to prepare the stage. Here we have a myopic warrior hailing from the same culture as the raiders, the princess of Narida dealing with a dinastic threat against her brother the God-King, and a street-rat stumbling onto a plot far greater than she could possibly imagine. All POVs are well-handled, but since their stories don't seem to come to a resolution, one certainly hurries to return to Daimon and Saana and their fight for the survival of their people.

The world-building is phenomenal. The author does some really interesting things with language, creating a culture where the six genders are represented by different diacritics on the pronouns, and another culture where speakers define themselves by their relationship to the person they're talking to (thus "this servant thinks", "this brother thinks", "this son thinks", and so forth). Also, the dragons are very much dinosaurs. They're called dragons, but the way they're described makes it pretty clear that they're our dinosaurs or something very similar.

One of the cultures is very queernormative: queer people can marry and adopt children. While the two main romances of this book are straight, there are a few queer POV characters and it certainly seems like there will be more of that in the other books of the series.

The Black Coast is a solid introduction to a fantastic epic story.

✨ 4 stars