I really enjoyed The Last Sun by K.D Edwards. My friends have been going on about it for months, so I was pretty sure I’d like it, but ohhh I loved it. It’s fun and funny (great banter, many highlights, wow) and fast and full of everything. It’s the first of planned 9 book series, with book 2 coming out on dec. 17. Book one wraps up the first story pretty well, but there’s also a lot of groundwork laid down for the future volumes and a lot of mysteries remain unexplained.
My friends, mostly @Sharadeereads and @suprstardrifter, who kept talking about this book and how much they loved it failed to emphasize enough just how awesome the magic is. I love a good magic fight, spells flying from people’s hands in colorful powerful bursts? hell yeah! I wouldn’t have thought guns and grenades would be a good addition, but despite the fact that “ you don’t bring bullets to magic fight, it offends our sense of spectacle” they turn it all up to 11.
I always miss the memo about a book being urban fantasy. What I’d remembered about The Last Sun was that it featured Atlanteans and Tarot cards, so I was pretty thrown when cars and cellphones came into it.
As urban fantasy mixes go, this has more magic than I’ve usually seen. There’s a pretty hard, high magic system, with different classes of spells, all manner of magical creatures and occasional god-like bursts of power. A lot of UF is from the perspective of a human being introduced to the strange world, The Last Sun is about an Atlantean who only tangentially interacts with the human world. Rune is however a detective/mercenary for hire, so that much is traditional.
What my friends did rave about was the sweet, gay, budding romance. Now, I’m generally more likely to leave it than take it with romance, I especially hate it when it feels tacked on. So I was thinking a bit along the lines of, eh, sure, whatever, we’ll see. Well I saw, and it was lovely and heartwarming, and I ship it so hard. I was a huge fan of how natural it felt, part of the story but not overpowering it. I really enjoyed how it went from tentative flirt to “I’m pursuing you, but also giving you space” without any angstyness involved. I’m also a huge fan of people being open and honest, but not too pushy, about their romantic interest, it’s the sort of healthy relationship that I want to read about.
There was also a great bromance, between Rune and Brand, his Companion and bodyguard. I loved how they are both protective of each other, and trusting in each other’s competences. And in general all the different friendships, both existing and new in the book, were sweet and positive. I was a bit concerned about how a teenage crush would be handled, but it ended up all good and not creepy.
The pacing is intense right from the get go. It starts with a party-turned-bloody-raid and then as various threats get introduced the danger scales up. There’s a mystery to unravel, hidden alliances to figure out, hordes of undead to fight, an evil forest to cross. There’s really a lot packed into a relatively short book.
My one complaint is something I personally struggle with a lot, keeping track of the names and who’s who. Cause some people are referred to in connection with their house names (these are tarot names so justice, death, lovers, sun, tower, etc), their normal names, Geoffrey, Michael etc, their family names which are all Saint -something- and the house leaders also have another title sometimes. I could manage most of them, but the Saint something didn’t stick to me at all, and everyone is someone else’s sister or brother, I was pretty confused at one point thinking we were talking incest, but nah, it was fine.
