The Chronicles of Elantra — (2005-2012) As Michelle Sagara.
These are stand-alone stories set in the same world. Publisher: Seven years ago Kaylin fled the crime-riddled streets of Nightshade, knowing that something was after her. Children were being murdered — and all had the same odd markings that mysteriously appeared on her own skin… Since then, she's learned to read, she's learned to fight and she's become one of the vaunted Hawks who patrol and police the City of Elantra. Alongside the winged Aerians and the immortal Barrani, she's made a place for herself, far from the mean streets of her birth. But children are once again dying, and a dark and familiar pattern is emerging. Kaylin is ordered back into Nightshade with a partner she knows she can't trust, a Dragon lord for a companion and a device to contain her powers — powers that no other human has. Her task is simple — find the killer, stop the murders… and survive the attentions of those who claim to be her allies!
   
   
 Cast in Shadow
Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara is a book about outgrowing a victim mentality, finding your strength and embracing your purpose. It would be a nice book to give to a 12- or 13-year-old girl, especially one who may be struggling with identity or self-esteem issues. Two things would stop me from sharing it: inadequate world-building and poor writing.
Cast in Shadow’s Kaylin is a “Grounded Hawk,” a human in a law enforcement / espionage unit controlled by the winged race called the Ariens, in the city of Elantra. Kaylin’s sergeant is a Leontine, a lion-like humanoid, and two of her friends are Barrani, a virtually immortal race. There are also dragon lords, although they look human — or humanish — most of the time.
Surrounding the city center is a series of slums or mean streets called fiefs. Kaylin grew up in such a fief, called Nightshade. She was orphaned, but a streetwise boy named Severn took her in. Kaylin and Severn took in two more orphans and created a family, but then mysterious glyphs began to appear on Kaylin’s skin, marks like tattoos, rising spontaneously. Children in the fief began to die, their bodies found later, missing organs, marked with glyphs like Kaylin’s. After Severn committed a horrifying act of betrayal, Kaylin fled the fiefs and found her way into the Hawks.
Seven years have passed, and now the murders have started again. Against her will and her better judgment, Kaylin is teamed with Severn, who now belongs to the cadre of government assassins called the Shadow Wolves, and a dragon lord named Tiamaris. She trusts neither of them, but is determined that no more children will die.
Together Severn, Kaylin and Tiamaris cycle back and forth between the Hawk tower and the Nightshade fief. Kaylin also visits an orphanage run by a Leontine female. Despite their constant shuttling from place to place, the plot feels static. This continues to be a problem throughout the book, even up to what is, or should be, an exciting climax.
One thing works extremely well: the back-story of Kaylin and Severn, and the thing Severn did that drove Kaylin from him. Kaylin’s account of the events is harrowing, and Severn’s motivations are quickly made clear to the reader, making his character complex and compelling.
Kaylin has healing powers, a rare gift that seems connected to the marks on her body. She has not kept her gift particularly secret but Grammyre, the Hawklord, has protected her. She’s something of a pet of his. It is not clear whether this is because she is a wonderful person or because of the marks and his sense that she is something strange and powerful. The Barrani outcast, Nightshade, who rules the fief, is also interested in her and the marks on her skin. He says they are words in an ancient tongue that even he cannot decipher. They may in fact be names, names of the ancient dead.
Sagara explains the variety of sentient species by implying strongly that magic somehow drew some of them to Elantra from different dimensions. She is trying to give us a police-procedural-style fantasy mystery, creating a city full of diverse citizens, but the beat-cop part of the story simply does not work. Of her different species, her conception of the dragon lords seems the most complete, although it is obvious the Leontines are her favorite. Because so little of the world and the city is revealed in the book, the cultural development of the Leontines glitched for me. Leontine cultural mores seem more canine than feline, and Sagara confuses this even more by throwing in the Wolves without telling us whether some of them, like the Hawks, are actual wolves. Instead of showing us the cultures, she wastes prose with tepid jokes about how Kaylin’s always late. The Hawklord and others use magical mirrors to call up images of past events, excavated memories or autopsies. It’s just magical video, about as fantastical as something you’d see on Criminal Minds. Marcus, the Leontine sergeant, grouses throughout the book about “paperwork” but there is no pay-off to that set-up either because there is no paperwork. This is all supposed to evoke the feeling of the bullpen, the overworked urban cop setting in our world, and it fails. This isn’t supposed to be our world.
Small but grounding details are never given. How big is Elantra? Is it a port city? Are there farms surrounding it, or do they import food? Does it have parks? Does it have sewage plants? How did the Ariens become trusted enough by the dragon-lord emperor to be his “eyes on the street?” Is there any kind of transport except walking? The fiefs are somewhat better drawn, but this city never comes to life. Sagara has let her imagination out to play in Cast in Shadow, but it takes a disciplined writer’s mind to conjure the concrete details needed to make a place seem real, and I do not see evidence of that discipline in this book.
Many modifiers. Choppy sentence fragments. For emphasis. Annoying. Really. When she isn’t chopping up sentences, Sagara employs a conversational, discursive style that works well for a first person narrator in a light, romantic book, because we like to think our protagonist is talking right to us, but fails in third person in a book about children being sacrificed.
The ideas here, though, are good. If you find the book used and inexpensive there’s no reason not to pick it up, especially if a long wait or an airplane ride is in your future. —Marion Deeds
 The Chronicles of Elantra
The Chronicles of Elantra is an interesting series. I’m not sure what sub-genre to slot it into. If it were a mystery series, it would be a police procedural. It takes place in an urban setting in another world, but without the usual “urban fantasy” characters — no vampires or werewolves, etc. The dialogue is reminiscent of that found in most urban fantasy novels. The chronicles are the stories of Kaylin Neya, a member of the detective division of the city’s policing agency.
The world of Elantra has six different races/species of peoples all living in one large city surrounded by fiefs — slums ruled by fieflords outside the influence of the police and mostly ignored/tolerated by the Emperor. There is more to the world, an ocean and plains at least, but these are very seldom referenced and don’t seem to have any influence on the city. The people of Elantra, for the most part, live peaceably together.
Kaylin was orphaned young in the fiefs. She survived for the next few years with the help of Severn, a boy a few years her senior, and somehow they both managed to leave the fiefs and find work in the Halls of Law. When the series begins, she is about 20. There is a lot to like about Kaylin. She is a pushover for children and uses her healing powers to assist the city’s midwives. She cares passionately about the law and her job. That said, Kaylin can also be annoying. She is a slob, she is perpetually late for everything, and she has no interest in learning anything except what she needs to do her job. And for some reason, everyone just shrugs and lets it go. “That’s just Kaylin.”
Reading the first book, Cast in Shadow, I wasn’t sure if I would continue with this series. However, the secondary characters grabbed me and kept me reading. I like Severn. The Barrani are amusing and the Tha’alani intrigued me. I loved Tiamaris, Kaylin and Severn’s dragon partner in the first book. And I enjoy Lord Sanabalis — Kaylin’s longsuffering magic teacher — also a dragon. I have a thing for dragons and I love Michelle Sagara’s use of them in this series. They get some of the best lines in the books.
My pet peeve with The Chronicles of Elantra is the Sagara’s need to tell us every time Kaylin swears — and she swears a lot — which of 3 or 4 languages she is swearing in. There are a couple of languages she hasn’t bothered to learn since they don’t have any good swear words for her use. We never see any of the actual swearing, just which language she has chosen to utilize. We also are told which language everyone is speaking in any given conversation. Part of this is necessary since insulting someone in High Barrani seems to be an art form, but it became intrusive to the point that I felt like swearing at Sagara’s editor after a while myself. I just couldn’t decide which language to use.
In Cast in Shadow, Kaylin is forced to revisit a haunting episode from her past. Someone is killing children. The murders exactly emulate a series of killings that happened in the fief where she lived when she was thirteen. Kaylin is forced to confront her past while doing everything in her power to stop the killings, even if that includes the use of her forbidden magic. She is paired up with Severn, the boy from her past whom she hasn’t seen since the time of the first murders. Together with a dragon, they go hunting a murderer. Along the way she is “marked” by Lord Nightshade, an outcaste Barrani fief lord, as belonging to him. Kaylin’s involvement in this case is due to markings that appeared magically on her body during the first set of murders, markings that are once again appearing on the bodies of the dead. Overall, Cast in Shadow is a good first book. Sagara tells a complete story while setting the stage for future books by introducing the characters and the various races of Elantra.
In Cast in Courtlight, Kaylin finds herself in the Barrani High Court. The Barrani are the Elantran equivalent of elves, and their court is a place of excruciatingly correct manners and behavior. Kaylin is not known for her tact, manners or ability to behave well in public. But Kaylin is a healer, the only healer that is not a part of the Dragon Court. She is called upon to use her healing magic on behalf of the High Lord’s heir. There is more to the story than is evident at first, and Kaylin finds herself healing more than just the heir to the throne. Once again she is faced with darkness and danger, and once again she must muddle her way through with her half-learned magic abilities. Again, this is a complete story. I appreciate not having cliff-hangers in series books. I enjoyed the court intrigue and the resolution was well-done.
In Cast in Secret, Kaylin is asked to find an item stolen from a merchant. The item in question is ancient and holds great powers of darkness, and there is at least one missing child involved. In this book, Kaylin has to interact with the Tha’alani, a race of telepaths. The Tha’alani are required as part of their citizenship in the city to provide mind-readers to the Emperor and are viewed with fear by many. Kaylin had a bad experience with one in her youth before the stories began, though she does change her view on them somewhat in Cast in Shadow. Here, the reader gets to see deeper into their part of Elantra. Kaylin has to use all her powers and find some new ones this time in an attempt to save the city from destruction. This book seemed somewhat slower paced, and I was impatient at times for things to move faster.
Cast in Fury begins when Kaylin and her partner are assigned to assist the Imperial Playwright. He has been tasked with the writing of a play to sway public opinion of the Tha’alani and their part in the near-disaster in Cast in Secret. But Cast in Fury is actually about the Leontines, a race of lion-people. The author seems to be giving us glimpses into each of the races of Elantra. Kaylin’s sergeant, Marcus, has been relieved of his duties and is awaiting trial for murder in the Caste Court of the Leontines. Marcus is the only Leontine who serves the emperor in the Halls of Law. Kaylin is like an adopted daughter to Marcus, but is told by everyone in authority to stay out of it because it is a caste/clan matter. Why anyone thinks she would listen is beyond me. Kaylin immediately starts interfering while still attempting to fulfill her obligations to the job she was assigned to do. While reading this book I had a sense of “finally, this is the one I’ve been waiting for.” Kaylin is starting to grow up. Plus, Sagara has toned down many of the stylistic annoyances that bothered me in the first three books.
I like the world that Michelle Sagara has created. I like that there is no war among the races; they all manage to get along. The races are not original — I’ve seen them all done before — but they are all interesting and well-written. Sagara doesn’t spend much time in world building. The reader doesn’t get a very good sense of the rest of the world, but it isn’t necessary. The Chronicles of Elantra is about the characters and their stories. So far, I’ve enjoyed all of the Elantra books and look forward to more. Kaylin annoys me, and there were times I considered not starting the second book. But the other characters and the plots were good enough to keep me reading, and I’m glad I did continue. The Chronicles of Elantra are on my keeper shelf for future re-reading. —Sarah Webb (guest)
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