“Turning Darkness Into Light” by Marie Brennan

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Rating: 4/5 Stars

An excellent stand-alone follow-up to her “Lady Trent” series, this book involves the granddaughter of the original Lady Trent and largely depends on information revealed in the original series. As such, it is best to read this only after reading the original series first.

The book is written mainly as a series of entries from the private dairies of Isabella Camherst (Lady Trent’s granddaughter), along with written entries from other supporting characters and occasional newspaper snippets. As such, the narrative is not one of following the characters as they make discoveries, but rather of one where they reflect on matters at the time of making the entries. Depending on your taste, this may or may not irritate the reader.

The book is mainly about the discovery of ancient tablets of the Draconean race (a race of intelligent dragons that inhabit the world) by a collector, and Isabella’s initial attempts to translate it, later aided by another scholar (Kudshayn) and the discoverer’s niece. As the story progresses, we start to read the contents of the tablets, and it would be revealed as a long-lost origin tale (or myth) for the Draconeans.

But as the translation progresses, other events intrude and start to reveal that some things are not quite right, starting with an attempted attack on Kudshayn by a group of anti-Draconeans who are violently opposed to the idea that Draconeans deserved to be treated as more than ‘just’ animals. Hidden motives are implied, and becomes more explicit when an unwanted character from Isabella’s past becomes involved.

As the climax approaches and the translation is near completion, Isabella and Kudshayn discover that the tablets reveal an episode from the past that may well confirm people’s worst fears about what the Draconeans did to humans. Yet, it is only when an act of violence just as the contents of the tablets are to be revealed to the world does she realize what is at stake for her and the Draconeans as she must rush to discover and reveal the real truth about the story told in the tablets.

At certain points of the story, the author reveals some information to the reader just prior to Isabella finding it out, giving readers a (faint?) chance of deducing that something unexpected has happened that will change the flow of the story.

For those that enjoyed the Lady Trent series, this is a good follow-up that reveals more about the Draconeans’ place in the world, and what they may have done in the distant past before their rule of the world fell, and they retreated from humanity before being revealed to the human world once again by Lady Trent.

Book read from 2019/10/15 to 2019/10/21