Darkborn
by Allison Sinclair

I know I usually have some little anecdote here about how or why a book grabbed my attention, but I got nothin’ today. This may partly explain how I got myself into the middle of such an overwhelming number of books; I just got a little greedy when it came to dragging things home from the library, when I should have been waiting for something to really stand out from the crowd.

Not that I regret reading this one.

The premise here is one of a divided world – due to an ancient curse, half the people can exist only in darkness, the other half in continual light. The story is set in a rather unusual city, where through cooperative effort and well maintained walls, the two groups live practically side by side. Our main character, Balthazar, is a Darkborn physician and a member of the council that negotiates the peace between the two groups. He even maintains a friendship with a Lightborn, an assassin named Floria, whose house adjoins Bal’s childhood home via a sound-permeable paper wall.

Not everyone takes such a positive view of relations between the two groups, and are always looking for trouble as a excuse to cut ties. This trouble comes to Bal in the form of an old acquaintance name Tercelle, who arrives at his door just at the sunrise bell, very pregnant by an unnamed lover. A lover she claims visited her in the daylight hours, yet was unharmed by the total darkness either. Bal does not really believe her, but when her twins are born the next night, he makes a startling discovery: the babies seem to have sight, an impossibility among the Darkborn.

The story is a serviceable mix of adventure, espionage, and romantic drama – a little too much of the last for my taste, but it does contribute to the overall plot, so I won’t quibble. The real strengths of the story, however, are the building of the characters and the world in which the reside.

Clearly considerable thought went into creating a world where humans live in utter darkness. The Darkborn have developed sonn, a thing rather like sonar, to replace sight. Their fashion is ruled by textured embroidery, their art by sculpture. And while the building of these elements was carefully done, the explanations are perfectly casual, befitting narrators for whom this world, so strange to the reader, is simply daily life.

In standard fantasy novel fashion, the major plot points are resolved in the second-to-last chapter, while the final chapter serves to arrange the players for the sequel, several of which are promised in the author bio on the back flap. As long as they don’t slide from “fantasy with some romance” into “romance with fantasy elements”, I’ll likely read future installments.

RA notes: written for adults, both reading level and subject matter fine for teens; recommended for readers who like unusual fantasy with clever world building; probably won’t be too popular with readers of sword & sorcery and other such “manly” genres.