It has been roughly three years since Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief released to great acclaim (including a very positive review from yours truly). Readers have been anxiously awaiting the next tale in this world and with The Daughter’s War, Buehlman delivers, though somewhat unexpectedly. He takes the story back a little, giving readers a prequel that focuses on and is told through the first person narration of Galva as a young knight entering the Goblin Wars, the Wars spoken of as a bloody, violent event of the past in The Blacktongue Thief.
Enter the fray in this luminous new adventure from Christopher Buehlman, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief.
The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men.
They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and still they wage war.
Now, our daughters take up arms.
Galva — Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill — has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind.
The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted — not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.
This is a novel of war and how harrowing it can be, how unsettling it can be, and how painful it can be. What makes this war all the more horrible is that the enemies will literally eat Galva and her allies. The goblins are not quite like what we’ve seen in Lord of the Rings or Dungeons & Dragons. No, these creatures are truly alien, not of the world in which the story is set and have something of a hive-mind.
With such a monstrous enemy, the human (or kynd as they are referred in the book) side of this war devises a rather unique way to combat the goblins. Corvids (i.e. ravens/crows) have been bred and magically imbued with higher intelligence (and they are already intelligent birds) to the point they have limited speech, are exceedingly protective of their humans, like to feast on goblins, and are considerably larger than normal birds. Since we see the story though Galva’s words, we get intimate details about these birds especially since two are bonded to her.
Galvicha (Galva) dom Braga recounts her story to us as if she is speaking to somebody? Maybe her journal? But she is not the only person from her family in this military, her brothers Pol, Migaéd, and Amiel also serve, though in different squads. She shares letters with them in her journal, as well as their letters with her. She is still very young, just out of her teenage years so not the war-weary knight we see in The Blacktongue Thief. This comes through in her words, at times stilted, at times emotionless, but unflinching. I’ll admit it took a few chapters for me to get in sync with her language and matter-of-fact delivery, but as I caught the rhythm, I came to realize how potent a characterization tool it was for Buehlman to utilize.
As I suggested in my review of The Blacktongue Thief, the scenes of death and destruction are where Buehlman’s strengths in horror storytelling meld effortlessly into a military fantasy story. The goblins – or biters – are horrific creatures, the fear a goblin horde strikes in the characters feels real and somewhat overwhelming.
Buehlman said he wanted to write this novel in order to get to know Galva more before moving ahead in the series after The Blacktongue Thief. Kind of a bold move, but it is a move that benefits readers because this novel is largely a character-building novel. Seeing how Galva went from a rather enthusiastic young adult to where she was by the end of the novel was engaging for me, as different as she was from Kinch in the previous volume.
My only, minor, criticism is that the ending felt a little bit rushed. Despite all my comparisons to The Blacktongue Thief, The Daughter’s War is its own novel. While it informs the character prominent in the that previous volume, it is a novel that can stand on its own and be read without having read the previously published novel in the series. As a Military Fantasy novel, it is powerfully effective and a gripping character study. I found The Daughter’s War to be an entertaining novel, it wasn’t an easy novel throughout but sometimes those difficult novels prove to be very rewarding.
Recommended.
© 2024 Rob H. Bedford
Tor Books | June 2024
Hardcover | 400 pages
Excerpt: https://www.torforgeblog.com/2024/05/03/excerpt-reveal-the-daughters-war-by-christopher-buehlman/
Author Web site: http://www.christopherbuehlmanauthor.com/ | Twitter: @Buehlmeister
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
