160 years ago in the world of A Shadow in Summer, a civil war broke out that tore the great Empire to pieces and reduced wide swaths of its territories to wasteland. Only the Cities of the Khaiem were untouched and to this day are the power brokers, the "super powers" that call all the shots. While other lands and cities fight amongst themselves or resort to war to get what they want, the Khaiem have supernatural allies, or to be more blunt, slaves, that almost serve as an equivalent to our nuclear weapons. These beings are called "Andat", cursed spirits that failed to take the right side in a long forgotten war among the Gods. Each one of them takes the form of a human, but humans more beautiful and perfect than any ever created by nature. Each Andat has a power that might not sound like much, but used the right way, can be used to make a city prosper or die. And in turn, each Andat has a human keeper, called a Poet, that has bound them to servitude for as long as the Poet lives.
A Shadow in Summer is about a plot by an Andat named Seedless whose powers have been used to make the Khaiem city of Saraykeht the center of the cotton trade. He wants to be free and the only way this can happen is if his master, the Poet Heshai, were to die. So he (it) enters into a bargain with the non-Khaiem city of Galt to make this happen. This plot begins to involve characters in the know and those who have no idea what is going on.
Otah Machi was being groomed to be a Poet until he rejected the call and started a new life as a common laborer in Saraykeht. His lover is Liat, an apprentice overseer, or steward, for the Galtic house involved in the plot. Lastly, we have Maati, a young Poet who will one day take over the duties of Heshai who arrives in the city just as the conspiracy begins to unfold. It turns out that Maati's life was changed Otah many years ago.
I have to say that I was surprised that I read this whole book. The single most important thing you have to in a fantasy novel is to world build. You have to construct it and make it architecturally sound. I'm not saying you have to spend decades like Tolkien did making up whole mythologies, but a writer has to somehow convey that the world is a lot larger than the reader glimpses in the pages of the novel. That the world existed in the past and exists in the present. Daniel Abraham does very little of this. To me, this story could have happened in any typical fantasy city with any typical fantasy characters. The Andat is the only concept that really stands out, and even this reminds me a little too much of the powerful spirits bound to ninja in the manga Naruto that were supposed to protect villages. I think like ONE paragraph was spent on how the world we are reading about came into being. We also get very little info about the other Khaiem cities and those without the Andat like Galt. I got the sense that even Abraham himself knows very little about the setting of the book.
All of the characters in the book are weak and lost. Maybe except for Seedless and Amat Kyaan, Liat's boss. The three main characters, Liat, Maati, and Otah, don't have a clue. But I don't think this is because of their characters. I think it had more to with the ineptitude of the author. If they aren't crying and waxing poetic with their dicks or vaginas, they are making moves in the story that are completely ludicrous and out of character. In fact, I could say one of their prime motivations is to screw each other, LITERALLY. They think they are really good friends but they treat each other so terribly that the author never justifies why they are so willing to sacrifice so much in the name of friendship. Because of this inconsistencies, the climax of the book is a bit bumbling and doesn't make much sense.
I guess in the end I can say there was JUST enough story, JUST enough characterization to keep me interested, but not enough of either to continue on to the second book in this series.
My Grade: C-
Published by Tor
Available in paperback or e-book for $7.99
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