This is one of those novellas that has some really strong aspects for me, but also some pretty weak ones.
+ The dragons/suon are great, and I really loved how they interact with the Ba'Suon.
+ The worldbuilding is really good - I can clearly imagine this western inspired world, and the ways the different cultures clash with the nomadic Bra'Suon.
+ I managed to get pretty attached to the characters!

- I found the writing pretty stilted at times, which at times made me confused. It also made it difficult to understand some of the aspects of the characters motivations and what was going on plotwise. I'm hoping this will improve in the sequel (spoilers: I just finished the sequel and there is a vast improvement!)
- I found Méka's characterization got drowned our by Raka and Lilley, which is a shame since she's the POV character.

So yeah, a bit of a mixed bag for me but the world got me invested enough to keep reading the series!

Thank you NetGalley and Solaris for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

The premise for this sounded incredible, and even better it’s 150 pages. I really liked the dragons in this, but otherwise the execution just did not work for me. It surprised me how much I struggled to get through such a short book. It’s well-written but I still had a difficult time actually engaging with the work, and more than anything this feels like a me problem and a mismatch between book and reader. I don’t know, maybe I’ll try again at a different time and change my mind, but for the most part I just thought this was a tad overwritten and I couldn’t find an emotional depth to it.

Ahoy there mateys! I was absolutely ecstatic to see new work by Lowachee because she is an author I don’t see enough of. And this has dragons! It is part one of a trilogy. No one is sadder than I am that this novella did not work for me. I read 63% of this 150 page book (about 96 pages). After starting this at the beginning of October and never picking it back up, it is time to let it go.

The positives of this are the dragons. They have a weird way of speaking and they are in charge of the bond with their chosen humans. Of course they are tortured and misused by the ruling class. I did enjoy the main character, Méka, and wanted her to succeed.

One major issue was the politics. It is about the effects of colonization. The land is war torn and about about 10 years have passed since the Kattakans won. Méka is from the Ba’Suon nomadic tribe who lost their island. The Kattakans are very one-dimensional. I know this is because only really see them from Méka’s viewpoint. I found the politics to be very black and white and I would have liked a little more nuance.

The other issue was the length. The novella format does not leave a lot of room for explanation and so the reader is trying to pick up the intricacies of Méka’s quest. The dragons are supposed to help maintain the environmental balance. Méka has to get the king dragon for that purpose but I am not 100% sure why. Or why she agrees to give the dragon to the enemies. Or how her earth sense really works. I wanted more details about the ritual – both its use in the past and present. I also wanted more psychology and feelings from the characters. There really wasn’t much besides light hints in dialogue. I don’t normally say this but I also think I wanted to see viewpoints from the other two main characters. I think a longer length story could have fixed these problems.

In trying to determine whether I wanted to push through or not, I looked into what the next novella is about. It switches to a different character and the plot does not thrill me. Lots of crew loved this one so give it a shot if the blurb sounds interesting. Arrrr!

This is proof that fantasy books don't need to be hundred of pages long to be fantastic.
This is one of the most unique fantasy book I have read in a while. Lowachee writing style is very different to other authors of this genre, which I think lends itself better to a novella style format.

The writing style and length of the book combined create a very fascinating reading experience, that is very compelling read.
I really liked how the dragon has very distinct roles in this novella. I also liked they bonded to riders and not just left as wild animals.

I would strongly recommend this if you want to read something utterly unique and want to try thing different.

This is a common review for both The Mountain Crown and The Desert Talon, the first and second instalment in the Crown Ishia fantasy series
It's an entertaining a promising starts: dragon, action, good world building, and an entertaining and tightly knitted plot
I thoroughly enjoyed it and cannot wait to read the last instalment
4.5 upped to 5
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Karin Lowachee tells a tale after the war between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor ended, Méka came to Kattaka to capture a male dragon and return him to Mazemoor for breeding. She is one of the Ba’Suon who can empathic connection to dragons. Lord Shearoji insists she bring the captured dragon from The Mountain Crown (paper from ‎Solaris) and sends Raka, a huge traitor to the Ba’Suon, along with Lilley, a one handed veteran, to ensure the dragon is returned to his city. The problem is that Raka has emotional problems and a love/hate relationship with Lilley. Interesting.

Méka is Ba’suon, and she arrives in the Kattakan settlement of Fortune City, as the first step on her journey to a mountain range where dragons nest. She and her people have a form of telepathic communication with dragons, and me,beds of her people must regularly travel to the crown of the mountain to gather a king shown to keep the dragons from becoming too populous there and becoming pests, and inadvertently drawing the ire and guns of Kattakan hunters.

The Kattakan are a conquering nation, with no respect for the Ba’suon, or other peoples. When the Kattakan came to conquer, the Ba’suon chose not to fight, instead moving into camps, or working as lowly servants and the like, preferring balance and peace in their interactions. When Kattakan went tomwar, some Ba’suon enlisted and fought on dragons for their conquerors.

Now, a greedy official keeps Méka’s identity papers and says she must bring him the king dragon she is after, and must take one of his men with her. The man is Ba’suon; he returned from the war a shell of who he was. He will not open up to Méka, and refuses to engage with the unusual Katyakan man Méka convinced to accompany her. His name is Lilley; a former slave, he went to war, fell for a Ba’suon man who returned home after the war, leaving Lilley alone and sad.

Lilley and Méka get along, and with the help of a couple of much smaller dragons, travel with the taciturn Raka up the mountain.

There is a palpable sense of menace author Karin Lowachee introduces early in the tale, which only grows deeper at the start of the journey up the mountain, and the further they travel with the frustrating Raka. When they realize that the official has sent a party of men after them, I expected a confrontation. What I did not expect was the explosion of violence that happens after what had been till then a quiet story of people reckoning with the costs of invasion, war and trauma, and loss of a loved one. I genuinely gasped and put the book down when a cruel, unprovoked act was the catalyst for a shocking amount of violence.

Then, like the Ba’suon need for balance, Lowachee gave us the result, which has Méka choosing her words and actions carefully and deliberately to find a peaceful way to move forward. It’s communication, and some measure of trickery and boldness under a veneer of calm that has Méka finding a path forward that allows her to fulfill her intended mission, and bring home a wounded spirit.

The novella takes a while to get going, and I noticed the author’s tendency for poetic phrasing resulting in confusing text gradually tapered off to the point that the narrative began truly resonating for me.

The story starts out slow, and I had a little difficulty getting into it initially, as I found the author's overly poetic prose difficult to parse at times, but thankfully, this diminished as the story progressed and the sriting became more straightforward, enough to really enjoy this tale, and grow attached to Méka and Lilley. Lowachee left me wanting to learn more about the Ba'suon and their intriguing empathic culture; it's no surprise that someone like Raka, suffering from his Kattakan war experiences and refusing to seek healing would be such a conundrum to Méka.

Though the novella ends with a peaceful resolution (thanks to a powerful dragon overhead), I wonder what is next in this complex world.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Rebellion for this ARC in exchange for my review.

I truly enjoyed my time in this world. I wasn't expecting the Western vibes, but it didn't affect my reading at all, though seeing the word "posse" in a dragon book was a little jarring haha.
You're thrown directly into the story, with things being explained along the way, which could be a bit jarring if certain things weren't explained exactly. Despite this, the story felt very grounded, and I simply can't properly convey the near reverence that was in these pages for the story that was being told.
Everyone felt so solid and I wanted to understand the Ba'Suon culture more and more. The ability that they possess to connect with living things in an empathic sense was really interesting to read about, though the way the suon/dragon's thoughts were conveyed were a little confusing to me at times, and I felt some things could have been clearer in general it was still an enjoyable read.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

This story feels like it began LONG before the book does. This story reads like it has been years in the making, and that the slice of it that we are getting is a bit in the middle in a world that has been going to hell in a handcart for quite some time, and has now reached a level of FUBAR that STILL isn’t anywhere near as bad as things are likely to get before the end.

And that’s a fascinating way to write a story, because worlds generally DO exist before a particular story in them gets told, and go on existing after the last page of a particular story in them gets turned.

Méka has returned to the land where she was born. A land that once belonged to her people, but no longer does. Even worse, a land that has been conquered by a rapacious empire that has chosen to act as if her people aren’t people at all – merely slaves for their use.

Including the dragons that her people, and only her people, have the capacity, not to control, but to bond with. A bond that the greedy, rapacious Kattakans exploit in order to use both Méka’s people, the Ba’Suon, and the dragons, the Suon, to strip mine the land for gold.

The Kattakans have turned a beautiful place into a steaming, belching wasteland on a par with Mordor. (Auditions for the part of this world’s Sauron are possibly ongoing – I jest but not nearly enough.)

Méka has come to this once-home for a right of both passage and preservation. It is her time to bond with one of the Suons that still live free in the mountain crowns far to the north. Both to refresh the dragons in her adopted homeland and to prevent a single king dragon from taking over too many herds and reducing the genetic diversity in the crowns.

Of course, the powers that be to rape and pillage interfere with her quest – even though it has been sanctioned by her adopted country and the court of the, shall we say, greedy bloodsuckers.

She is duty bound on a quest to bond a dragon. She is being coerced to retrieve a dragon for a criminal’s nefarious purposes. But control of any dragon is illusory at best – and a dangerous illusion at that. As the greedy bloodsuckers are about to discover in fire and blood.

Escape Rating B: The Mountain Crown is an ‘in media res’ story. In other words, it feels like it starts in the middle of things. It’s a method of storytelling that CAN get the reader caught up in the action from the very first page. Howsomever, it can also give the reader the feeling that they’re missing something, or a whole lot of somethings, and not feel like they have what they need to get stuck into the story.

The Mountain Crown read like it straddled that fence, where the problem with straddling a fence is that one gets splinters in the ass. I had a difficulty time, at first, getting into the story because I didn’t feel like I had enough to figure out how the situation reached this pass in the first place. It does not help at all that the primary characters of this story, Méka and her companions Lilley and Raka, are all parsimonious with their words – even when they are speaking to one another.

There’s a LOT that doesn’t get said – even when something is being said at all.

All of which led to my brain attempting to spackle over the bits that were missing with analogies to other stories and other places. The ramshackle mining monstrosity where Méka first arrives sounds a lot like the gold rush encampments of the Klondike, including the weather conditions. The nomadic nature of Méka’s people read like an amalgam of many nomadic cultures around this globe – even if this story isn’t set on any version of our world.

In the end, what brought the story together was the way that it reflected on colonialism and empire, shone a light on cultures whose fundamental principles are greed and acquisition and then explored the possibilities of another way – a way of stewardship and community.

And took the problem of might making right to a whole different level by adding dragons into the mix in a way that both put a temporary check on the ‘evil empire’ AND sowed the seeds for further contention between peoples who were once one.

I have to say that by the end, I really did enjoy The Mountain Crown and that I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, The Desert Talon, coming in February, as well as the third book, A Covenant of Ice, arriving in June. (There’s an irony that the desert book is coming in the depths of winter and the ice book is coming as summer heats up.)

I’m hoping that the rest of this novella trilogy will not just continue this fantastic story but also fill in the blanks and answer my many, many questions about this particular world came to this particular pass – because it has to be a doozy. I can’t wait to find out ALL the answers

Even though this is a novella by wordcount, it felt more like a novel in the best possible way. The worldbuilding is very rich and detailed and the characters are complex. I especially loved Méka with her connection to dragons and the world around her. She’s quietly competent, not here to prove herself, but to do what she has to do for the good of her people and the world with the least possible bloodshed. I can’t wait to get my hands on more!

I really wanted to like this one. Unfortunately I couldn't get over the writing style. Something about it wasn't for me and it got confusing at times.

A quick read with dragons? I think yes! Novella fantasy is one of my favorite genres. I love Nghi Vo, Neon Yang, and so many other writers of short stories with beautiful prose. The Mountain Crown fits that vibe.

The story moves quickly. Being the first in a novella series, there is a lot of description and worldbuilding packed into the short pages. It takes a little bit to really get going, but I think it is worth it!

It’s like a little bite of epic fantasy!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance read of this title. All opinions are my own.

The first book in a new series of novella length epic fantasy (again with this excellent trend!). This is an epic adventure with dragons amidst the aftermath of a bitter war.

I admit I had a hard time engaging with The Mountain Crown, which I strongly suspect was more a me-problem than a book problem. The writing is lush and descriptive, and there is plenty of action with engaging characters. The worldbuilding may be a tad complex, but as the first book in a series of novellas, it's worth its expansiveness. I look forward to reading the next book in the series.

The Mountain Crown is an epic yet compact novella that weaves an intense dragon-rider quest with deep cultural lore, reminiscent of Empress of Salt and Fortune meets Temeraire. The story follows Méka, a member of the Ba’Suon, a nomadic people who share a deep, empathic bond with dragons. Having been exiled for a decade, Méka returns to her homeland under a fragile truce between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor. Her mission is to capture a king dragon from the Crown Mountains to maintain the delicate balance of the land. However, Méka’s journey grows more complicated when her compassion towards an imprisoned dragon and a Kattakan war veteran named Lilley draws the attention of the imperial authorities. Joined by a Ba’Suon traitor, Raka, the trio embarks on a perilous adventure through treacherous landscapes and political tensions.

One of the novella’s strongest aspects is Méka herself. As a protagonist, she is resilient, capable, and carries the weight of her people's history and the deep connection they share with dragons. The lore surrounding the Ba’Suon’s traditions and their empathic relationship with dragons is wonderfully crafted, adding a layer of depth to the world that is both intriguing and emotional. The novella brilliantly balances action and character development, with the journey itself providing a compelling backdrop to the events of the story.

The only element that took some getting used to was the lack of traditional chapter breaks. The entire story unfolds in a single, continuous flow, which may be disorienting at first. However, once you settle into the rhythm, the novella moves quickly, and the story remains engaging throughout.

Overall, The Mountain Crown is an excellent, emotional read. It packs a lot of rich storytelling into under 200 pages, and Karin Lowachee masterfully creates a world filled with dragons, lore, and compelling characters. Fans of condensed epic fantasy stories will find much to love in this beautifully told novella.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

As a fan of Warchild, I was totally on board with reading whatever Karin Lowachee was going to write next, so I was very pleased to have received the arc for the Mounain Crown. I did not, however, notice that the story was a novela and not a fullsized novel: thus my surprise! That aside, I had a great time with the characters of the story, and enjoyed a narrative that's so anticolonial and antiwar at its bleeding humanist heart as I know Lowachee's stories to be. Looking forward to the continuation very much.

I am a sucker for a good dragon story especially when the story involves the bond between humans and dragons. It was missing a little something to fully round out the story because the ending felt hobbled together and incomplete compared to the amount of time spent setting up the setting of the story and the basis of the world that was being created. There’s a great underlying theme of colonialization and the damage that can be done to the environment, people, and the cultures of lands that are exploited for the gain of a single group of people. I think the story being told is one that many people will recognize and the dragon-human bond provides a nice novelty to an important theme. I will give a word of warning that at times the writing becomes very flowery which some people might find putting in a short fantasy story. I don’t think it removes from the story but it did take some time to get into the flow of the story. This was a story that was a super quick read and I’d be happy to continue reading the series when knew installations are released!

This book took me entirely by surprise. A nuanced yet powerful discussion on colonialism and occupation, the book also provides a new take on dragons and is a quick and exciting read. It reminded me a little of The Unbroken and also somewhat of A Memory Called Empire.

I devoured this book. The prose is so engaging in that it was highly descriptive and moved at a great pace, yet took the time to slow down and include lyrical, elegant language, often in descriptions of emotions or the landscape.

The world-building is rich for a novella. Not only do we have the concept of the occupation and why, but hints as to the outer setup of the world (it’s by no way implying this is the lone occupied land) are given. We also have the dragons, which are magical beings that the Ba’Suon can link with telepathically yet don’t try to control. The dragons are somewhere between an animal and sentient and act a bit like horses and dogs. The Ba’suon also have the ability to telepathically link with their fellow Ba’suons and are able to read their emotions and other things about them. These aspects of the world building tie into the story, so nothing feels over-explained or needlessly included.

I wanted more of this story when it was done! In a good way, though, not a “I feel like I’m missing something”. I don’t think we’re meant to get more to the story in this volume because it’s not something that can be wrapped up easily. One person can’t end a regime, just as one person can’t carry one out.

In terms of the characters, I really liked how Meka was not some girl on her first mission. She’s mature, knows what she’s doing, and is entirely confident in her abilities, yet she’s not arrogant. While everyone seems enamoured by these fierce, openly angry young women in books today (I mean, fair), a woman who is fierce and angry yet keeps it contained and boiling under the surface is more interesting to me because that sort of character is harder to convey. Her strength and resolve are shown in the things she doesn’t do, the passive, rigid resistance she espouses by her actions. She complies when needed but isn’t afraid to renege on promises she made to someone she doesn’t respect. She also has a light, soft side that rounded her out. She’s not the most gregarious or even interesting of characters in terms of backstory, but she bears a weight that carries the story through.

I also really liked the other two characters, Lilley and Raka. One is openly likable and brings in a bit of fun to the story (after his initial introduction), and Raka is mysterious and taciturn. The more we learn about these men, the more we grow to like them, despite their initial rough presentation. There is also a complex relationship that forms between the three of them, something I won’t spoil, but which felt mature and natural and I really liked it.

The story itself is very simple. Meka is trying to bring a dragon back to her people to prevent fighting between males and to help populate the dragons in a different region. It's something her people have done for centuries, much like controlled burning. There is a very subtle environmentalism thread running through this novel, as well as the direct attack on unjust war.

The three characters together represent sides of colonialism we often see in media: the colonized person fighting back, a person from the colonizing force who has grown to appreciate the other culture and, in a sense, finds more community with them than their own people, and the colonized person who is complacent, or perhaps complicit in their own people’s subjugation. As much as I just characterized them, this is only how they appear at the start - the novel shows how these perspectives are varied, complex, and can’t be boiled down into simple designations. This book reminds us that not only is colonialism and occupation of lands - whether by force or more subtle means - always destructive, people aren’t all bad, and making connections and understanding and respecting one another is how we can break these mentalities. And, also, that fighting back is sometimes the only option.

Now, that being said, that’s just what I read in the story. You can go into this thing reading it entirely at face value and finding it utterly entertaining, but I would argue this book carries with it a deeper purpose that is poignant and relevant to today.

If you couldn’t tell, I loved this book. I thought it was fantastic.

I would have liked this to be a little longer. I liked the unique setting (it's giving wild west gold rush boomtown town vibes), Meka and Lilley, the dragons (dragon riders have been done many times, and I appreciate that it a slightly different take), the anticolonialism, etc. I would have liked all those things to be more fleshed out. I would have liked more of the Ba'suon and their camp and their culture and ways too.

If you've been seeing a lot of dragonriding books lately but wishing they were a little more speculative fantasy than romantasy, you'll want to check this out.

Meka is part of the Bo'Suon people, nomads who prioritize living in balance with the natural world - and dragonriders. They manage the wild herds of suon (dragons!!!), and are able to communicate with them. When their island was invaded, they chose not to go to war, which is out of balance, but rather to try to maintain their traditional ways even as they were displaced. Meka is back on the island of her birth to "gather" a male dragon. But the new administrative rulers of her ancestral lands love needless bureaucracy as much as the next imperial overlords, and they decide to make things as difficult for her as they can...

This novella has a good mix of action and philosophy, as Meka makes friends, enemies, and reluctant allies while on her quest. I heard echoes of The Word for World Is Forest in Meka and Raka's struggle to do the right thing by their ancestors while also resisting their colonizers' fundamental misunderstanding of their culture. I was less convinced by the inclusion of Lilley, a former soldier who fell in love with a Bo-Suon and now feels an affinity with dragons. But, this is a novella, and I am looking forward to seeing what Lowachee does with the relationships in the next book!

This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novella.

Highlights
~dragon cubs!
~don’t touch the swords
~maintaining eco-balance
~unexpected queerness
~the cosmos is definitely listening

I’ve been hearing Lowachee’s name for a long time, but never managed to read any of her books until Mountain Crown showed up on Netgalley. I figured a relatively short book + dragons would be a good introduction for an author I hadn’t tried before.

SUFFICE TO SAY, AFTER THIS NOVELLA I WILL BE DEVOURING LOWACHEE’S ENTIRE BACKLIST!

The plot is pretty well covered by the blurb, so I won’t go over that much, but the WORLD! Please picture me swooning. Lowachee wastes no time establishing her setting; the sense-of-place is so strong and clear, and rings unique, like not quite like anything I’ve seen before. Mostly in terms of the Ba’suon, the people Méka, our MC, belongs to: we learn about Méka’s – let’s call it psychic empathy, for lack of a better term – on the very first page, and it’s rapidly confirmed that this is an ability all Ba’suon have. It’s absolutely fascinating to see how this is clearly Méka’s primary sense – think of how humans are intensely visual creatures, and now imagine all that weight placed on a kind of psychic ability. Lowachee’s worldbuilding is phenomenal on every level, but I especially loved how this one detail – the Ba’suon’s empathy – informs and influences absolutely everything about Méka and her culture.

His energetic presence was a hollow clang to her, an empty bucket struck by the hammer of the cosmos.

But in a way, Méka’s empathy – magic? – is almost defined by absence, in Mountain Crown. Because non-Ba’suon don’t have this ability, and weirder and worse is the way that they feel dead to this sense. Ba’suon can sense each other, and animals and birds and so on…but not humans who are not Ba’suon. This is a direct reversal from the other times I’ve seen fictional cultures with this kind of magic – think the Lakewalkers from Bujold’s Sharing Knife quartet, where non-Lakewalkers don’t have this magic, but Lakewalkers can still see/sense them just fine. So I wonder what it was like, when the Ba’suon encountered other peoples for the first time? Like the Kattakans – imagine being invaded by people who look human, but ‘register’ as completely dead? That must have been horrifying, and it says a lot about the Ba’suon that they haven’t demonised outsiders because of that. It would have been very believable for a people in that situation to become intensely xenophobic…but they’re not.

(I mean, they’re not pro-Kattakan, with really good reason. But there’s no sense of only Ba’suon people are real people, you know?)

That’s important. What we can infer about the Ba’suon from that…almost, I think, gives us the heart of who they are. What defines them as a people.

That, and the dragons, of course. Which the Ba’suon call suon (and the way I flailed when I realised the Ba’suon named themselves after dragons! Or named the dragons after themselves! Again, tiny details which imply SO MUCH!)

larger adults flit back and forth like jeweled bats upon stalactites.

The characters are amazing. I loved Méka; I loved getting to know her, learning who she was. She’s so different from most of the main characters I see; practical but unyielding on the things that matter to her, with a pride that almost doesn’t seem like pride, compassionate without necessarily being forgiving, an unfamiliar kind of optimistic. Her…reverence is almost the right word, but not quite…for the natural world is a beautiful thing to witness, to be inside of for a while. She has a very non-individualistic outlook and attitude that is – pretty foreign to Western culture, really!

I don’t mean to suggest that she’s some perfect Enlightened being: far from it! In her POV the Kattakans are an ‘infestation’, and while she doesn’t offer violence to insults, she definitely invites idiots to Fuck Around And Find Out, with a mien of such steady, implacable surety in her ability to wipe the floor with anyone who tangles with her, that I had to go find a fan.


The two major secondary characters – Lilley, a disabled Kattakan Méka rescues from slavery, and Raka, a Ba’suon with that all-important empathy closed-off – are also fantastic. Just Lilley’s name helps drive home that we are Not Anywhere Familiar (‘Lily’ as a man’s name is not something you generally come across in the English-speaking world!), and both Lilley and Raka’s backstories have the same effect, giving us a glimpse into a history that feels subtly alien (mostly in its approach to queer love and fantasy gender roles). The two characters added a lot to the book; it would have been wildly different, and lesser, without them.

The dawn eked from the night in silver and rose with the sun pinned like a brooch on the hilly breast of the eastern horizon.

Lowachee manages to very quickly convey the ‘sense’ of the world she’s created in the opening pages, while still having plenty of surprises for you tucked into the worldbuilding. The tiniest details are hidden gems, and each one impressed me more than the last, had me falling more and more with this world – and mourning it, because Mountain Crown is set in the (not immediate) aftermath of a war that drove most of the Ba’suon, Méka’s people, from their homeland. We don’t get to see it unmarred, and the contrast between Méka’s inner reality and her outer one – her sense of self, her memories, and what the Kattakans have made of her home – is enraging and heartbreaking. There’s a streak of…not exactly environmentalism…that’s fundamental to the Ba’suon and also the plot, in that it drives the entire ‘rite’ that is Méka coming to collect a dragon/suon; and it hurts, because we see how connected the Ba’suon are to the natural world, and I can’t help wondering how different our world would be if we had the same kind of empathy/sensing-of-life that they do.

It’s things like calling baby dragons ‘cubs’ that reinforces, over and over, that we are Somewhere Else, that this isn’t our world, that the cultures we see are radically different from our own in some pretty intrinsic ways. I’ve never seen anyone call baby dragons cubs before! It’s a quick, easy way to divorce us from the genre expectations we bring with us from book to book, a way to bypass our thinking minds and get us right in the guts with the fact that we’re not in Kansas anymore. I realise I keep making this point, but it’s because I just can’t get over how effectively it’s done, and how efficiently! And how this alien-ness, this unfamiliarity, allows Lowachee to…take a not-quite-standard approach to the storytelling. Present us with some concepts and ideas that we don’t see that often, that challenge some of The Way Things Are in SFF. The approach to forgiveness; the strangely fluid pride; the resistance to violence which is not pacifism.

that fear and suspicion imbalanced the world into chaos, and they couldn’t be ignored or controlled by avoidance. That even the ones who betrayed you in love deserved a reckoning with love.

It delights me, and I hope we see more of that in the next book. Which, yes, I’m going straight off to pre-order, because gods DAMN do I need more of this world, this series, and Lowachee’s writing. HELLS TO THE YES!

The Mountain Crown is breathtaking, a book I wanted to reread the moment I finished it. It feels new, without being so challenging as to become off-putting or difficult. I loved the world, the dragons, the characters, and the prose; there’s nothing at all that I want to change or critique.

Instead, I’d like to push a copy into your hands and insist that you READ IT ASAP!