Last Song Before Night

This was one hell of a pleasant surprise!

I expected an interesting fantasy, having thought the premise looked promising, but I hadn't realized I was stepping into a wonderfully pure story. Every character was crystal clear and everyone changed naturally, proving to be much more than any single trope, growing into wonderfully *likeable* people. Even the antagonists were exquisitely balanced.

I fell into this novel as if it was always meant for me, and I never once had to use any of my willpower to plow through either plot, circumstance, or reversal. This was pure candy, leaving out everything except the elements absolutely necessary for the protagonists, the over-story, and the magic.

Best of all, Poetry is Magic, and poets are powerful show more in the realm. How cool is that? Sure, they're bards, and a few of them rule from behind the throne, but most glorious of all, words have power again.

No fireballs, no uber-powerful assassins, no young girls overthrowing kingdoms... oh wait... that last one is true, but how it happens is simply and truly delightful.

The old ideas are made fresh. The people want to bring magic and enchantment back to the world. To do that, the poem must be found to open the door to the Otherworld. Of course, magic always comes with a price, and the old Poet who had gone there and come back was not willing or able to pay it. It's fresh because it is written so damn well. I feel the draw of the magic, the efforts of our heroes, their pains and their hopes, and, eventually, their tragedies.

Everyone shines and the pacing and characterizations are divine.

It is one of the easiest reads I've had this year, but don't assume it's not smart. It's very adult and it's very modern classic, focusing on better writing, evocative events, and practically no exposition. It has got to be the most organic and natural fantasies I've read in a long time.

Even the ones I swore by over the past few years seem rather contrived with stylistic tomfoolery compared to this novel.

There's only a few places where the time of events is reversed, but it doesn't feel bad or seem like a mistake. It just propels the plot forward and keeps the overall pace perfect.

Myer is going to be an author I'm going to follow with great anticipation from now on. Something this deeply enjoyable and spot-on is rare and just plain lovely.

I will say one last thing: I was frankly amazed and in awe of the fact that women weren't raped willy-nilly through the tale. Men were actually behaving with honor, and I am even including the bad guys.

I kept expecting coercions of one type or another, and indeed, they do happen fairly regularly, but it's an open question as to who is coercing whom. Lin is the exception. Her brother was a real bastard to her.

But in the end, I never thought that any character was without agency. They were all heroes to their own stories. I liked Lin, Darien, Rianna, and Marlen. They all start out as archetypes but they definitely grow into their own and I never once had a problem with believability.

What I did bring out of this novel was not a throwback to old fantasy themes, but a purifying of them. show less

Reviewed from copy provided by Pan Macmillan Australia. They don't pay me (damnit!), and I’m quite happy to be honest in my reviews.

Occasionally you meet a book that defies expectation, and usually it's for a reason you can't quite put your finger on. Last Song Before Night is one of those books, for me. You know that feeling of wanting everybody to read a book so that the world will understand your thoughts, but at the same time you wish nobody else would read it, so you can keep it all to yourself? I’m having that sensation right now..

Firstly, let me say that the synopsis is vastly inadequate in portraying the real depth of this novel, and it really only describes the trimmings that pretty up the peripheries of the actual story show more line, that runs through Last Song Before Night. I was incredibly surprised by the true nature of the book; it went from a rather safe story about bards on a journey, as gleaned from the back’o’book - to something with such incredibly hard and far reaching undercurrents.

Myer has written this gauzy dream like narrative, that lulls you into a false sense of security. Gradually, behind that floating curtain that flits about with the breeze, surrounded by sweet songs, and sighing maidens, something dark creeps behind the veil.. Then it builds, and there is a bloody brutality that you feel you are watching through this blind fold of lace, so the full force doesn't quite touch you.. Bit by bit, you realise your vital empathy organs have begun to hurt. And when that blindfold slips off, you want to reach into the book and hug everybody, because it's all so personal, and it's all so haunting..

Read the full Review at Book Frivolity show less

This is a standalone, not a series. I think this book defies my every attempt to encapsulate it into a single synopsis. Let’s break it down to a cast of very unreliable narrators, every one with secrets, in a land where music is magic. A band of poets, facing down an evil censor in a battle for truth and art in the face of a plague that tells them that evil magic has once more been resurrected. The book is beautiful and lyrical and the city is atmospheric in the same way that GGK often is, and the story’s many threads weave themselves together to create an epic whole. Myer’s background as a journalist and living abroad is definitely reflected in her writing.

This is a remarkably well-crafted book, especially for a first novel. The reader is immediately pulled into this world, caught up in its mysteries, and connected to the characters. Settings and characters alike are carefully, intimately drawn, but with an economy of words--exactly the right words to make them come alive with no tedious paragraphs of description to endure. Politics, romance, intrigue, mystery, danger--this book has them all, balanced against each other. This reader hopes it will not be long before Myer publishes more books to join her debut novel.

This is a standalone fantasy with big world and big consequences, faceted and journeying characters having immensely personal stakes, and a stately, careful, poetic turn of phrase. I should have loved it to bits.

I didn't. Unfortunately, all those elements that I love (and that come together so dynamically and effortlessly in, for instance, Guy Gavriel Kay's work) more inhibited and enhanced each other in this book. The core central plot never really drove things, because the focus was more on the characters. But I didn't feel desperately connected to the characters, perhaps because of their density in the short space of pages (exacerbated by the distancing prose); their big moments seemed to take forever to come amidst elegant show more descriptions of what was happening, and then to seem rushed when they did come. In particular, there are two pivotal finale decisions--why one character doesn't do a thing, and why another character does--that just seemed arbitrary to me, not emotionally ineluctable expressions of the inevitable tragedy.

At the end of the day, I wish this book had focused on perhaps half the number of principle characters (still contained the rest, but not devoted space to exploring and developing their inner story) so as to be more about those characters. I think that might have made this more compelling, more thrilling, more immediate. Because as it stands, it is beautiful, but not quite essential.

Still, I am curious to see where the author goes from here, because the vision, style and ambition of this are all things I'd like to see develop and deliver. show less

While Last Song Before Night is a remarkable first novel for Ilana C. Myer, it is also one which, for me, doesn't quite live up to what I believe is Myer's full potential as a writer.

The plot line is a good one, albeit not particularly new: old magic lost, a new menace, innocents led to suffering and slaughter, a reluctant heroine. These elements are the stuff of epic stories, and the reason we return to them over and over again.

And certainly Myer's prose proves lush and evocative.

So, why am I raining all over this parade, you ask. Well, because, and again this is purely my own perspective, Myer relies too heavily upon known tropes and literary devices. One could as easily be reading a Guy Kay novel, or any of a myriad of other fantasy show more novels. It is all so familiar. And one wearies of the familiar and longs for the startling.

A good escapist read. Comfortable. Familiar. But left me wanting the entrée after the appetizer. show less

In a somewhat bog-standard medievalesque fantasy world, bards used to be able to do magic, but that power left them decades ago. A number of them, including a woman on the run from her abusive family who hopes to be a poet even though there are no female poets, and a few non-bards converge around the attempt to restore magic and stop the corruption at the heart of the realm. Although the characters I’m pretty sure we were supposed to like generally didn’t approve of the misogyny/emphasis on female “purity” of the dominant culture, they were still operating in an otherwise apparently unchallenged system and I didn’t like any of them enough to justify spending my time there.