A high fantasy following a young woman’s defiance of her culture as she undertakes a dangerous quest to restore her world’s lost magic in Ilana C. Myer’s *Last Song Before Night*. Her name was Kimbralin Amaristoth: sister to a cruel brother, daughter of a hateful family. But that name she has forsworn, and now she is simply Lin, a musician and lyricist of uncommon ability in a land where women are forbidden to answer such callings-a fugitive who must conceal her identity or risk imprisonment and even death. On the eve of a great festival, Lin learns that an ancient scourge has returned to the land of Eivar, a pandemic both deadly and unnatural. Its resurgence brings with it the memory of an apocalypse that transformed half a continent. Long ago, magic was everywhere, rising from artistic expression-from song, from verse, from stories. But in Eivar, where poets once wove enchantments from their words and harps, the power was lost. Forbidden experiments in blood divination unleashed the plague that is remembered as the Red Death, killing thousands before it was stopped, and Eivar’s connection to the Otherworld from which all enchantment flowed, broken. The Red Death’s return can mean only one thing: someone is spilling innocent blood in order to master dark magic. Now poets who thought only to gain fame for their songs face a challenge much greater: galvanized by Valanir Ocune, greatest Seer of the age, Lin and several others set out to reclaim their legacy and reopen the way to the Otherworld-a quest that will test their deepest desires, imperil their lives, and decide the future.
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BenT-Gaidin (verified owner) –
I’m conflicted on this book. The ending felt rushed, almost out of tempo after the leisurely, character-building scenes that marked the first three quarters of the book, but I was already on my guard by then because of the tragic nature of everything. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, given that both the title and the summary (a desperate search for the lost magic that might stop an evil sorcerer and the plague he called forth) could have told me this wasn’t a happy novel, but the relentlessness of it was more than I wanted. The message seemed to be that magic — and by extension, the poetry and music that creates it — would only truly come from a deeply wounded soul, and that the characters’ various heartaches and tragedies were what made them great and worthy. It’s a discomforting message, because it’s so easy for that to turn into the toxic idea that ‘only I have been truly hurt, my unique pain entitles me’; it’s not what the book intends, but it kicked me out each time a character mused on how loneliness and isolation were the wellspring of true art, and how their pain would be the seed of greatness in their work. Between that, and that the only characters who seemed content were those who were sacrificing themselves, it just wasn’t something I could enjoy right now.