Having just finished reading The Blacktongue Thief, I was excited to read The Daughters’ War. This prequel novel is the good kind of prequel, one that doesn’t spend all its energy backtracking the original story and telling us how everything got set up, how everyone became the characters that we knew, how they all just missed each other in the past, or met before but didn’t realize they would come together later. Granted, not many prequels are that obvious, but some can feel like hearing a joke when you already know the punchline. True, this is the background story of Galva dom Braga, the corvid knight who, it can be argued, is the crowd favourite character of The Blacktongue Thief. However, it tells a very different kind of story, and virtually no other characters from the first book are in this one.

This is the story of Galva during the war with the goblins, also known as “The Daughters’ War” since most of the men had been lost. She’s shipping out with her special unit of knights, who are assigned to handle the army’s giant, trained corvids, magically created by a wizard to help defeat the goblins. We also get to meet Galva’s noble (sometimes ignoble) family, in particular her three brothers: a general, a brigand, and a magician’s apprentice. Their relationships are fraught, to say the least, and even though events are set against the backdrop of the war, we are mostly following Galva as she works through her relationships with her fellow soldiers/troopmates, and her brothers (who are also involved in the war, naturally).

The thing that is most importantly consistent with the first book, is Christopher Buehlman’s excellent writing. He brings to Galva’s story the same kind of well-considered and smart writing that makes its narrators feel like the most clever, witty and well-spoken individuals. Buehlman’s skillful pen is the best part of these novels for me, and even though Galva is more serious, and much less cheeky than Kinch (the star of The Blacktongue Thief), her narration is very engaging and makes me feel like I’m listening to a real person speaking (but slightly more articulately than they would in real life). Similar to the first novel, the narration is very deep into the persona of Galva. In other words her voice is very clear and it feels like she’s literally telling you the story. Nevertheless, we also switch perspectives a handful of times, particularly with her younger brother Amiel. Buehlman sets these portions up as Galva reading letters from her brother, but I think this didn’t work very well. The narration felt much too narrative and didn’t sound like an actual letter might sound (though Buehlman probably still does better than most writers taking this particular tack). Also, as I read the story, I kept wondering how this letter got written and how it got to Galva considering all the events detailed within the letter. What was worse, the audiobook narrator didn’t do a great job distinguishing the voice of the different characters (I find that female narrators often don’t distinguish male character voices from female as well as male narrators might), so I often had to double back after passing the transition point between two characters’ narrations.

Even though it’s a war story, this definitely has more of a character focus than plot focus. Much of the war happens outside the immediate narrative, and what we mostly get is Galva and the troops around her moving from one location to another, and some of their experiences as they are stationed there. There’s a significant amount of attention on soldiers’ lives, but also more downtime than I’d expected, and even more than one formal dinner party! Compared to The Blacktongue Thief, which was clearly a fantasy adventure tale, this one had a bit of a slow start. It also had fewer fantastical elements, instead exploring more the hard life of medieval soldiers (the procurement of food was a surprisingly prominent theme) and the nearby peasants (who always seem to be the victims of roving brigands and bad knights when they weren’t being eaten by goblins).

My favourite aspects of this prequel story were some of the best world-building details (since I’m a fan of world-building first): the war corvids, and Galva’s devotion to Dalgatta, the goddess of death. Both these elements were mentioned in The Blacktongue Thief, but they were much more fleshed out in this story. In The Daughters’ War, we get to witness the corvids in action during a couple of battles, and we also get to experience the ups and downs of tending them (these birds are a handful, no doubt!). Similarly in the first book, Galva was a follower of Dalgatta, but in this story she first converts to the faith, and grows to embrace Dalgatta’s mythology and her followers’ mottos and beliefs. I really love when fantasy stories explore mythology (not only retellings of the mythology of our world, but newly-created mythology of this fictional world), so the couple of chapters telling those folktales and stories were easily my favourites (Sorry, Galva!). The most prequel-ly storyline concerns Galva’s relationship to the witch queen (the only other character to appear in both novels). As cool as I think the queen is as a fantasy character (she has most of the interesting magic), she doesn’t have much depth and she seems too often like a plot device. I imagine her presence in this story was meant to detail her romantic relationship with Galva, but it unfortunately felt like somethiing from an inferior romantasy novel that was clipped out and sewn on. 

After a bit of a plodding start, I ended up really enjoying this novel. The key was getting familiar and comfortable with Galva herself, and feeling like I cared what happened to her. It took a minute to get there, but by the end, I felt connected to her experiences — especially the losses that she suffered in this war. This is a very good companion book to The Blacktongue Thief, so I’m interested to see how the expected sequel novel will affect that balance (and, of course, to enjoy more of Buehlman’s excellent writing).

4 stars

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