Song of the Abyss

I picked up a copy of this under the impression that it was a standalone, but it quickly turned out that it's a sequel to 2018's Isle of Blood and Stone (yes, it's that similar to the title above - we may be reaching "noun of noun and noun" title saturation point, but I'm confident that they're quite different books!) Reading sequels before their predecessors usually sets off all the brain itches for me, but I'd got far enough into Song of the Abyss, and satisfied myself that the plot, with its significant time skip, didn't require knowledge of the previous book. Plus, I was really into it. So I kept going.

And I'm glad I did! Song of the Abyss follows Reyna, a young woman apprenticed as an explorer on the island kingdom of St. John Del Mar: a seafaring society where this is both a highly prestigious and also highly masculine career. Reyna returning from a mission which she hopes will allow her to become a Master Explorer at an almost unprecedentedly young age, when her ship is attacked by a mysterious force which kills a few of the crew but leads to the complete disappearance of the rest. Barely escaping and harnessing a couple of sea creatures to take her to a nearby island (a slightly left-field development which doesn't really get explored any further, but OK!), she's rescued by a (handsome, yes, why do you ask) prince and, after a few shenanigans, ends up on a collaborative mission to a secretive faraway land.

What follows is a fun adventure which really allows its characters to shine. Reyna in particular is a great protagonist, whose supportive found family on her island and on the ship make for a great contrast to some of the wider social forces she's struggling against. The one awkward note here is in its treatment of the aforementioned faraway land, whose culture is never given the nuance to rise above "glorious but brutal empire", with a lot of real-world references to imperial China thrown in. There's enough variation in the characters from this place, and their feelings about the more problematic traditions of their country, that it doesn't come across as wholesale stereotyping, but it's still a frustratingly problematic note in a book that's otherwise full of benevolent monarchs of western-inspired cultures. Despite that, Song of the Abyss ticked a lot of my boxes and I'll definitely be going back to the first book in the series at some point.