Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2019

Category: Epic fantasy

Representation: M/m, side character

Summary: A year has passed since Auric Manteo descended into the haunted depths of a Djao ruin to return a lethal artifact, only to face down a bloodthirsty, imprisoned god. Now his daughter Agnes comes to bring him back to the capital with promises of hidden secrets finally revealed.

But the city decays, poisonous disorder is rife, and whispered prophecy foretells of cataclysm and doom. Summoned by their no-longer human queen, Auric and Agnes are commanded to carry out an impossible task, one that can be accomplished only with the mysterious blade Szaa’da’shaela, gifted to Auric on a lunatic’s whim.

Can Auric and his daughter survive a journey fraught with blood, menace, and madness? And can they pay the price demanded by a being every bit as evil as the Aching God?

My thoughts: While I didn’t enjoy this as much as the first book in the series, I’m still glad to have continued on. What really stood out was my lack of emotional investment I had in the characters and their fates due to the mediocre characterization and relationship development. Agnes and Auric are the chief examples of this. Shel does work to show their fraught father-daughter relationship, and there is technically substance there – Agnes resents Auric for undermining her career and abandoning her after the deaths of her mother and brother. At the same time, Auric feels guilty for neglecting her and wants to protect her, which only fuels her resentment more. Unfortunately, I felt absolutely no emotional connection or attachment to the relationship despite the author’s attempts to flesh it out. This really, really stood out to me in the scene where Auric sacrifices himself to save Agnes’ life – it is clearly supposed to be a massive tragic moment, but it just didn’t land in a resonant way for me at all . I was watching The Last of Us and playing The Witcher 3 around the time that I read this book, so the Auric/Agnes relationship’s weakness and flatness stood out even more.

I found Kennah’s death similarly unmoving, but as a whole, I think the new group of adventurers is more interesting than the group in the prior book. Chalca is probably my favorite of them, and I appreciate some of the very brief discussions of masculinity and homophobia that he brings up by not caring at all about the discomfort of his more “rigidly masculine” party members. One of Shel’s most interesting little touches of characterization is Auric grumpily thinking to himself that he doesn’t have a problem with people “like that” as long as they don’t flaunt it…such a Dad Moment.

There are moments like this trying to address identity and bias throughout, and some of them work better than others. The most iffy example is probably the introduction of racism along with the introduction of some new characters of color. For instance, there is a N-word equivalent for Black people in this world, and people from the Eastern continent are described as being beautiful with eyes like almonds or “having the stink of the East” about them depending on who is talking. I think that cutting the relatively small number of lines/descriptions of this nature could have totally eliminated one of the book’s elements that felt the most awkward and least tasteful to me.

I really liked how the first book explored Auric’s PTSD, and this is a much less prominent aspect of Sin Eater because of how Auric is being soothed and placated by his magic talking sword. It is clear that his dependence on the sword for guidance and comfort/numbing is unhealthy, and I don’t trust the sword at all! As before, I most enjoyed everything involving the gods themselves and the dungeon-crawling adventures. Shel is able to evoke a really marvelously creepy and dire atmosphere during these parts of his books. I would have enjoyed this one more if he had really doubled down on these elements or strengthened the characters and relationships so that they were actually impactful; as it stands now, the result lies somewhere awkwardly in the middle. I will definitely be finishing the last book because I still really want to know what happens next, but I’ll do so with measured expectations.

At one point, some cultists release a drug into the city and it makes people become incredibly violent. Agnes gets sexually assaulted and almost raped by two men on this drug and later gets groped while they’re traveling by ship. The book doesn’t really dwell on her reactions to these events in depth. While she has a couple of strong lines about how perpetrators make excuses for themselves and how the drug only brings out what is actually already inside of people already, the overall use of sexual violence just doesn’t sit quite right with me because it mostly feels like it is there to be gross and raise plot stakes. I don’t know that I would call it especially offensive but more simply par for the course for dark fantasy as a whole.