books | "The Dawnhounds" by Sascha Stronach

This week I finished The Dawnhounds, the first book of the The Endsong series by Sascha Stronach.

This book has been compared to Gideon the Ninth, which I think does it a disservice, because while there are enjoyable things about it, if you go into it expecting The Locked Tomb, I think you're going to be disappointed. They are not on the same level.

Protagonist Yat's homeland—the port city of Hainak—is implied to have been colonized and fought a revolution to escape that, but while some of the changes have been welcome—the embrace of "biotech," freedom of determination—her home is in the throes of sliding from one abusive regime to another. They have thrown off the yoke of colonization, but as Yat comes to slowly realize over the course of the novel, what they replaced it with isn't much better.

Yat is in a prime position to realize this. A former street rat turned cop who joined the police in hopes of making a positive change for people like herself, she's been slowly worn down over the years into someone who simply closes her eyes to the worse abuses by the government and partakes herself in the lesser offenses. The kick-off for the story isn't any of that though—it's that Yat is demoted after her coworkers learn she's patronized a queer bar. She's blundering through the fallout of that—continuing to patronize that same bar, and using drugs to cope—when the fantasy plot hits her in the head.

Unfortunately, here is where the novel began to lose me. I think the comparisons with The Locked Tomb arise from the way The Dawnhounds throws the reader into the plot with the promise of revealing more information later. Except that where TLT is a masterclass in subterfuge and gradual reveals that make perfect sense in retrospect, and in some cases reframed entire characters and story arcs, The Dawnhounds just...never really reveals the information.

By the end of the book I could not describe anything about the antagonists—who they were, what their goals were, how Yat defeated them. And although the city of Hainak is omnipresent—it's almost a character in itself, and much of Yat and Sen's motivation surrounds wanting to do right by the city—I could not tell you anything about how its government functions or why there are problems with it (or what those problems are at the core, besides wealth disparity and abuses by the criminal justice system). It's suggested at one point that the specious specter of violence or re-invasion by their former colonizer is being wielded to allow some to gain power within the city...but we never learn who those people are, what they want, or how they're able to do this. Given how much lip service is paid to politics in the book, this feels particularly jarring since it's precisely the kind of thing Yat and her pal Sen should be really invested in.

Early in the book, the confusion about the magic system and the import of various characters and objects is forgivable, because Yat herself doesn't know any of this. I have no problem with an author who wants the reader to feel the protagonist's confusion and sense of being overwhelmed. But the book never gets around to explaining anything.

As mentioned, this is the first book of a series, which may mean that more information about who the antagonists are and what they actually want is revealed later on, but I can't say I'll bother with the next book. This one just did not give me enough to care about and I'm not willing to dive into a whole new book on the hope that it might explain things the first book failed to explain.

And for a truly nitpicky complaint: the title has no relevance to the book. The term "Dawnhound/s" never comes up.

That said, if you set aside the obtuse nature of the plot, the book is still fun. I liked Yat as a protagonist. She's certainly a flawed person whose general attitude at the start can be summed up as "careless," but it's a kind of self-enforced carelessness, because she is too afraid to really open her eyes and see what Hainak has become, and what she's assisted them in doing as a cop. Her transformation from someone largely passive into someone with the courage to take real action is nice to see.

Stronach has the bones of something interesting in Hainak, but I wish we had gotten more time to explore it. Stronach is trying to fit a great deal into a midsized novel, which makes the boat detour to some random island we never really find out much about and thin hints towards Captain Sibbi's past feel a little frustrating in retrospect, and I think the book would have benefited from more room for all of these things to breathe. Sometimes it feels like Stronach was trying to cram everything she personally thinks is cool into the book, and that does not benefit it.

I don't feel that I wasted my time with The Dawnhounds, but I also don't feel compelled to pick up the next book in the series. I think I've seen enough of Hainak.

Crossposted from my main.