Siggy Aleksov is a young woman with few connections, she’s an orphan and has drifted through various foster homes. When we meet her, she’s living in a trailer working a job she doesn’t like and, oh yeah, a demon only she can see constantly hovers in her presence. Siggy soon finds her life becoming even more chaotic with her trailer burning down soon after receiving a letter from a family member she never knew she had.
Siggy Aleksov sees demons and talks with creatures she knows aren’t really there. Taken from her family as a child, she is dogged by memories of abandonment, abuse, and mental health issues. Siggy suffers from a hot temper, cluster headaches, caffeine addiction, and terminal foul language.
She complicates her life even more when she saves the life of a talented assassin sent to kill her. Deciding to get the hell out of Dodge, Siggy travels to the Alaska bush to find out who she really is. The answer is more fantastic that she could have imagined—and she can imagine a lot.
Like many urban fantasies, Siggy is the narrator of her story and your enjoyment will largely rely on how well you get along with her, empathize with her, and want to know more about where chaos takes her. Luckily for me, I liked Siggy from the start, from the snark to the uninhibited approach to what falls in her path. When the novel starts with the main character narrating that she sees a demon on a man’s shoulder, then the tone is set for a novel where there are things in this world beyond most character’s understanding.
About a third of the novel is set up for who Siggy currently is and the life she is living in Bearpaw, Michigan. Wolf does a great job of creating a character who feels so extremely real and believable. Her trust issues, her ability to still have hope despite the plate of shit life has served her is part of what makes her so endearing.
After seeing a glam-rocker named Bane perform with his band, she decides she wants to meet the man. What she doesn’t expect is that she has to save his life using the martial arts skills she’s learned and honed for most of her life. Not long after, Siggy’s life is thrown even more into turmoil when she is hunted only to be saved by Bane.
The only thing she retains from her destroyed trailer is the note and the plane tickets to Alaska. What’s a person to do when their home is destroyed and they are unemployed? Siggy eventually decides to leave Michigan behind for a time and head to Alaska, where her arrival gives her even more surprises about herself. Her arrival in Alaska does not go unnoticed by locals and even some folks from Michigan.
I don’t want to reveal too much more, but the last two thirds of the novel made for a thrilling and fairly addictive read. I’ll say that Wolf did a wonderful job with the atmosphere, Siggy’s reactions and interactions with the people she met and came to know, too. Just about everything Wolf did with the combination of character, plot, setting, and milieu had me eager to keep listening and has me now anxious to find out what happens next to Siggy after a very bombastic conclusion to Split Feather.
The only real issue I had with the story and plot of the novel was that characters had a somewhat annoying tendency to withhold information for dramatic plot purposes. Siggy was very understandably eager to learn more about herself, but some of the characters either expected her to know more than she did or seemingly held information willingly that could have otherwise helped her.
In the audio version, the narrator Kasey Lee Huizinga did a really nice job giving Siggy a tough edge. The voice she used for Siggy had a very tough, lived in quality that also conveyed emotion. Sometimes narrators aren’t able to pull off voices for their opposite gender (men voicing female characters, women voicing male characters) without sounding too forced. For the most part, Huizinga’s voice for each character was unique and genuine.
Split Feather promises to be the first of a duology, I’m not sure what Wolf has in store for the next novel featuring Siggy, but I hope to find out. Split Feather was a fun, entertaining Urban Fantasy that reminds me I need to dip my toes into this subgenre more often and that I’d really like to give Wolf’s Epic Fantasy, The Dragon’s Legacy, a read.
The novel itself is recommended as is the quality audio edition.
A Daughter of the Midnight Sun Novel
Narrated by Kasey Lee Huizinga
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Hachette Audio
Published Septermber 2017
http://www.deborahwolf.com
Excerpt: http://www.deborahawolf.com/?page_id=151
