This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the author in exchange for an honest review. The Mountain Crown will be released on October 8, 2024.
Karin Lowachee had been hanging around the middle of the TBR for what seemed like forever before I finally pulled Warchild off the stack this year. I loved that book, so when I saw she had a new novella series starting this year, I jumped at the chance to get an early copy of The Mountain Crown.
The Mountain Crown follows a member of a people who had lived in close communion with the land and the dragons inhabiting it, to include regularly gathering enormous king dragons from their mountain homes, allowing the smaller life to flourish. But all this had become much more difficult when an imperial army took control of the land and sent many of its people running for safe haven on another continent. The trouble is, the dragons haven’t moved, and so the lead must make a pilgrimage back to her ancestral home to gather a king. But while the occupying empire officially sanctions such action, they’re in the business of exploiting as many resources as they can, and they don’t want to waste an opportunity to get their hands on a king dragon.
The plot that follows is largely a standard quest narrative, but with plenty of fallout from past hostilities intruding both into the current quest and the setup for what is planned as a trilogy of novellas. The lead finds herself with a pair of companions who’d fought in the war, with plenty of physical and psychological scars to prove it. And so the story is much less about finding a king dragon—something the locals had been doing consistently for generations—than it is about trying to keep that dragon out of the wrong hands, all the while trying to heal a companion who possesses tremendous power but whose psychological instability makes him a danger to everyone around.
As I’ve said in past reviews, I don’t tend to be especially compelled by the shape of quest narratives, so I appreciated The Mountain Crown focusing just as much on the characters as it did on the major quest. That said, with the novella length and the most significant arc coming from a secondary character, the book doesn’t get the chance to really dig into a character study in the same kind of way that Warchild does. It delivers a solid arc, but not one that will stick in my head for years.
I actually found myself more compelled by the background conflict, for all that exploitative empires conquering the indigenous groups who keep the land in balance aren’t exactly a new topic in SFF. The wrinkle in The Mountain Crown is the staunch pacifism of the people, who had mustered little resistance because fighting back would fly in the face of their entire way of life. But by the time of the book’s setting, it’s undeniable that the occupation is a corrupting force that sickens everything it touches, and not fighting back is akin to letting the land die. This poses a philosophical conundrum that isn’t resolved in the first book but leaves plenty of material to explore in the sequel.
In general, The Mountain Crown does a good job balancing telling a complete story with leaving those hints of the full series arc to come, though I personally found the elements hinted for the future a bit more compelling than the smaller-scale focus of the first book on one group of characters and one dragon. Still, Lowachee writes well, and The Mountain Crown tells a complete story for fans of character-focused quest narratives.
Recommended if you like: character-driven quest stories, anti-colonial stories.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Published in 2024 by an Author of Color and features a Character with a Disability.
Overall rating: 14 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.