Review: Black Crow, White Snow

Black Crow, White Snow by Michael Livingston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This has been my week of reading in genre, and I gave this fantasy a shot because it was free on Audible and it was short.

Both turn out to be positives.

I read more fantasy than I intend. Every so often there’s something deeply satisfying like Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and it lingers long enough to trick me into reading something mediocre in its wake. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing except for the great Achilles Heel of fantasy: books that run on at anywhere from three times too long (I’m looking at you Robin Hobb) to ten times too long (cough, Robert Jordan, cough). For the record, those are not exaggerations.

So, here, the brevity comes as a breath of fresh air. We open with the seeming failure of a desperate attempt by an out-gunned society to recover the lost technology of their ancestors. Our heroes’ warship has been crushed in arctic ice, and they have to proceed in small boats and eventually on foot through hostile terrain.

Weirdly, the plot is similar to a short story I wrote a year ago, at least in the way it’s an all-female group of women who have to discover some of the latent powers (and limitations) of their seeming strengths while on a near hopeless quest. And who have highly regimented distinctions between the different warrior and specialist castes.

As such, I’m drawn to the story itself, though I think it might be a bit flat. And then, as fantasy, it’s awfully generic. Maybe the 1200-page sequel to this answers the question, but it isn’t clear why the ancestors would abandon their one-time capital and conveniently leave the flying-shop technology for anyone to find.

So, before too long, it becomes clear that our heroes are going through the paces that every group of fantasy heroes goes through. A few of the details are compelling – they fight polar bears with cutlasses, which is pretty cool – but most of this is predictable.

The single exception to that predictability, of course is that this is over so quickly. I can’t say it leaves me wanting more, but it seems a strong point in its favor that it ends before I reach the point of counting pages to the end or wondering what’s wrong with the editors in the field.


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