Wow. When I read The Dawnhounds, it was on a 12 hour train journey across New Zealand. That book was a wild fever dream, and I liked it.

So of course I had to read Sunforge on the train from London to Glasgow, and I LOVED it. There is more depth to the world, more beauty (and pain) in the characters, higher stakes, and so many answers and more questions raised. To be clear, this book is still a fever dream, but with a stronger beating heart at its center.

Everything is cranked to 11 and it all works together so well. I cannot wait for the next book and to see where this crazy journey leads!

Thanks to saga press and netgalley for a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.

"My daughter is a demon who lives in the forest... My daughter is a reckoning. My daughter burns like the sun and you will never catch her.

This is a full brainpower book. Full stop.

I think that my rating will go up over time and as I can read further in the series, but I have to admit that I was just along for the ride on this first read-through and my overall enjoyment was a 3-3.5/5. (It didn't help that I had a physical arc, but several names and tenses and chapter headers were different in the final version which I simultaneously listened to on audio.)

This reminds me in a lot of truly excellent ways of Harrow the Ninth and The Old Guard-- which are franchises that I love. But man does it get confusing when you're not only jumping timelines and perspective shifts but also multiple people might be in a given body at any one time.

I'm definitely looking forward to the next installment, but I think I'm gonna need a notebook the next time I sit down to read this (or to read the analysis of someone much smarter than me so I can truly grasp what's happening).

This series continues to be quite a mind bender. I often times had no idea what was happening but I honestly loved it! You get to know more about the characters of the Kopek and a few new ones are introduced. We are no longer in the living city of Hainak but instead are in a very tech savvy city who is in the middle of a horrifying apocalypse.
I loved loved loved the chapters with Kiada going into the city to investigate WTF just happened to the world.
Most of the book I was honestly confused about what was happening as this is not on a linear timeline. The author jumps back and forth and back again frequently. It all makes sense in the end though and it’s tied together beautifully.
Im so glad I found this interesting series!

Happy Pub Day!

Thank you @SagaPressBooks #SagaSaysCrew for the free book!

This was a mind bender and it had me questioning what was happening more often than not. This Queer AF story picks up from book 1, The Dawnhounds, and sweeps you away in the world building and adventure. There's magic, pirates, gods, and a world in flames. We're introduced to new characters and jump between multiple timelines. I'm planning on a re-read to catch everything I didn't the first time through.

I’m not going to say I truly understood what was going on in this book because I do think that’d be a lie. When the third book is announced, I want to do a reread of both The Dawnhounds and The Sunforge and hopefully I’ll pick up more on a second read.

What I did love, however, was the writing and the in-depth look at more characters. The POV changes and flashbacks were confusing, sure, but also some of my favorite parts of this book. I love how detailed every part of the world this takes place in is, and the constant thread of not only resistance but trying to make a life where queer and trans people can experience pockets of joy too.

I’m definitely interested to see where things end up for book 3, especially with the various gods.

I realized very quickly how little I grasped about the world / worldbuilding and main characters from the first book, and the opening chapters of this one are confusing at best and disorganized at worst. I couldn’t orient myself temporally relative to the events of book one, and the POV switches so frequently between characters that it felt like we weren’t given enough to hold onto. Plus big unnecessarily long paragraphs that sometimes took up more than a page!

I remain intrigued (and confused) by the gods and their relationship to our reincarnating (?) animal spirit magical people? But the writing style dimmed even my curiosity

Whaaaaaaaaaat just happened?

What???

WHAT?!

That was pretty much my immediate reaction to turning the final page of Sunforge.

WHAT EVEN?!

But it’s so good! I definitely didn’t understand it all and I’m going to need to reread it at LEAST two more times to fully catch and process everything, but – IT’S SO GOOD!

I am fucking stunned at how much Stronach can fit into so few pages. I was a little disappointed when I loaded my arc onto my ereader and saw it didn’t quite hit 300 pages – I like my books chonky, and also, how much story can you really pack into 200+ pages?

A LOT. A WHOLE LOT. A FUCKTON, ONE MIGHT SAY. (That’s a joke that will make sense once you read the book.)

And I should have known that, because Dawnhounds, the first book in this series, was also super short, and yet was IMMENSE on the inside. These are books built like the Tardis – and OH MY, the things you’ll see once you step inside! The places it will take you! SAY GOODBYE TO LINEAR TIME AND YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF SPACE!

I thought (and still think)that Dawnhounds was an amazing sci-fantasy. But Sunforge proves that Stronach is a freaking GENIUS.

>You want my help? I give you instead the strongest curse of my people: yeah nah, I’m good.”<

We heard a bit about Radovan in Dawnhounds, and it’s the setting of this book – a setting that, at least at first, seems much less weird than Hainak! Hainak was a living city with mushroom houses; Radovan has, you know. Buildings that aren’t alive and people who haven’t modified their bodies with plants! It has a kind of Cold War vibe, except for the androids all over the place. Not too hard to wrap your head around!

Which is fortunate, because everything else is very hard to wrap your head around. You thought Dawnhounds was weird??? Yeah, not so much, it turns out. Sunforge makes Dawnhounds look like white surburbia with 2.5 kids and a dog – and if you’ve read Dawnhounds, that should give you an idea of what kind of oh shit levels of ABSOLUTELY OUT-THEREness we’re dealing with this time around.

I sprinkled it with sugar and ate it up with a SPOON, and my darlings, it is DELICIOUS.

>“Bury me deep,” he spat, “wrap me in ten shrouds and twelve chains and throw me in the ocean; put my carcass in your largest cannon and fire it at the sun; put as much distance between me and your God as possible, because if you don’t, I will come back as a curse. I swear on my blood and the blood of my people, I will be there when your children are buried; I will be there when their children are buried; I will be there a thousand times over, until the stars lose their fires. I bestow my soul to whichever god or spirit is clever enough to find it; I bestow my curse upon Empire and all her vicious children. Now, hurry up and kill me–I’ve got places to be.”<

That being said, I have no idea how to sell you on it without MASSIVE spoilers, so.

Hmm.

I guess we can start with: if you don’t like your SFF brain-breakingly odd, then you should probably quit while you’re ahead. Can you deal with a character whose name changes from sentence to sentence, because he’s existed for MILLIONS (if not billions?) of years and is – sort of – switching between the personas/people he’s been in different lifetimes? How about multiple characters sharing the same name for quite alarming reasons? Are you willing to dive into the nature of divinity and examine what gods might actually be (at least these ones)? Are you inextricably attached to your sense of time and reality? Because there really is a great deal of timey-wimey stuff going on here (but not, I hasten to assure you, time-travel. It’s so much weirder than time-travel!

Time-travel I can understand. THIS MAGIC-MUSHROOM JAMBOREE, ON THE OTHER HAND, I STRUGGLE WITH.)

And hey – this book is…lots of painful things happen in this book. The plague in Hainak was nightmarish, but nobody we knew got caught in that; in Sunforge, not everybody makes it out alive, and it hurts. So as well as everything else, you need to be okay with books that gut you.

>We like to pretend that pain is a crucible, but that’s just survivorship bias for the soul. Somehow we forgot a very simple truth: most pain just hurts.”<

But if you ARE okay with that…then Sunforge is a domino-chain of awesome, with surprise lining up after surprise, with reveals you’ll never see coming and no safety-net everywhere and gods continuing to meddle. We have a living ship and Extremely Important toy cars and a spider I would not want to piss off, and a story split between the present day and glimpses of everything that’s led up to it. Radovan is infected with a growing tide of fascism, and wow is it uncomfortable how familiar and too-easy-to-believe it is, lots of pathetic little people deciding they’d rather burn the world down than let it be something they don’t like, and caught in the midst are a group of very cool people somewhere between activists and rebels, doing the best they can in a rapidly decaying system. I loved these new characters, all of them, I want to keep them all, and I couldn’t help grinning like a loon when I realised Stronach had gone ahead and made this series EVEN QUEERER. Yesssssssssssssssss!

It’s an amazing cast all-around, full of complicated people doing complicated things for complicated reasons. Everybody has a past, everybody has a motive, and everyone is fiercely and powerfully connected to the rest, points in this breathtaking, diamond-strong web of community that has these very different people working together, guarding each other’s backs, fighting for each other. Sibi’s bands of misfits are even more misfiting in Sunforge, and I’m glad – it makes them feel human, feel like real people, all messy and full of mistakes and absolutely glorious. I loved that we got to dive deeper into so many of the characters we only glanced at in the previous book; Kiada, as you might guess from the blurb, but also Ajat, the trans woman with her people’s archive in her tattoos, and Luz, who is not to be trusted but has so much to share.

It’s not just the characters; Sunforge is a spiralling deep dive into the worldbuilding and the backstory, the backstory I didn’t even guess was there waiting for us, and if I had guessed I would have guessed wrong because gods, nobody was ever going to guess this.

*FLAILS*

So many sneaky sentences that hit me like an electric shock, tucked away in the middle of long paragraphs as if Stronach meant to slip them past me; so many tiny details planted in exactly the right place; so many lines that sang like poetry, that I want tattooed over my knuckles and up my wrists. Stronach isn’t playing nice; she goes for your throat, your heart, and there’s no beating the bush about it, no slow build-up: the (relatively) low page-count is a whole series’ worth of prose distilled down, so that every word burns on the inside of your eyelids and every scene strikes like lightning right on the bull’s eye. I’ve occasionally seen writing this powerful – but not this freaking efficiently, with zero wasted space because every syllable is vital and precise and perfect. It would have been so easy for someone trying to write this way to end up with a book that felt rushed, a story that felt cramped, but not Stronach, gods; Sunforge is, if there is such a thing, efficiently decadent – and if that’s not a thing well, Stronach has just invented it: moving at light-speed but still with so much time and room for exquisite description and lingering, aching emotion, gorgeous prose that crunches immensely satisfyingly between your teeth and goes down sweet as syrup.

>My daughter is a poem written in blood. My daughter is a reckoning. My daughter burns like the sun and you will never catch her.<

This book is so queer, and not just in its representation: it’s the found-family and the bared teeth and the absolute indifference to genre tradition and boundaries, gleefully queering space and time and religion and magic. It’s the huge middle-finger to fascism and Empire, especially the British Empire; is there any evil on earth that doesn’t trace back to Empire eventually? It is even, I would argue, the New Zealand-flavoured English, queering the freaking language to anyone used to British or American English – and that’s without even touching on the Māori influences in the worldbuilding, which continue to be absolutely intoxicating; yes, please, blow my mind open, show me something that is not yet another fake-Medieval cishet white-boy wet dream, make me think and double-take and see another point of view. Yes!

Is there anything to not love about Sunforge? No. I mean, it broke my heart multiple times – but this is the kind of book that makes having your heart broken feel like a privilege.

You’ll see what I mean if you read it.

So read it!

I love this weird, strange world and the characters that inhabit it. They get even messier in this one and there is a lot more world building and universe building as things are bigger than they seem here. I really enjoyed learning more about the origins of the gods and some of the characters that have been around for a while. Things that made less sense in The Dawnhounds come together a bit more here in The Sungforge.

I feel like I don’t have much more to add about this one versus The Dawnhounds as I feel the same way after reading it. It is not often that a book and its sequel will actually be able to elicit the same emotions, but The Endsong series manages to do just that, which speaks to the consistency of the great writing.

Thank you to @SagaPressBooks for the ARC of this book. All thoughts are my own.

4/5 Stars

Thank you to Saga Press for sending me an arc to read.

I dove right into this one after finishing the Dawnhounds and I absolutely love this series so far. This is one of the most diverse science fiction books I have read and I loved how the author managed to have trans characters and talk about what we can assume is hormone replacement. While book 1 was very queer and had a lot of lgbtq+ characters this one had a lot of trans characters on top of all the queer characters and it was amazingly done. I love the maori inspiration for the world and this series has changed how I think of science fiction.

I love the ensemble casts of this series and I truly enjoy all of the characters. I do think this one a bit a more confusing than book 1 but in an intentional way that was still enjoyable. We follow most of the same characters from book 1 but add in some more from the new portion of the world we are in. I think this one does suffer a tiny bit from middle book syndrome but not enough to be unenjoyable just it did feel like it was at times just setting up for the last book. I do 100% plan on reading book 3 whenever I either get an arc or it releases as I can’t wait to see how this series ends.

We get to see more of the magic system in this book and it was really fun to explore. It is god based magic which is always a favorite of mine and it was fascinating how it worked and how it was used in both good and bad ways. I enjoyed learning also about how the world got to where it is and we see glimpses of the past which help flesh out our world a bit more.

I do recommend this series if you are looking for one of the queerest books I have ever personally read and I think this series also is a decent starting point if you want to get into Science fiction. I really didn’t think I liked science fiction before this series but I think I just hadn’t found the right ones yet.

Another excellent mind bending adventure! This one got me in my feelings more than the first book. I was more connected to the characters, and why did they have to go through so much pain?!

I thoroughly enjoyed being confused and also learning so much more, what an insanely clever tale that traverses time and space in a unique (to me at least) way! Some unexpected turns were taken and I'm already looking forward to reading book 3!