…Sairu stood a long moment in silence. Then she said, “I do not believe in dragons.”
“It’s time you started,” said the cat.
If you’ve been reading Anne Elisabeth Stengl’s series Tales of Goldstone Wood you’ll already be familiar with the fantasy world she’s created, filled with dragons, unicorns, fairies, reluctant princes and benevolent goddesses. Each one of her books starts with a familiar fairy-tale premise that will suddenly make a left turn into something you completely didn’t expect. And just when you think you’ve gotten a character figured out, their motivations become much more complicated. Not everyone gets their happily-ever-after in these stories, and those that do either no longer want it, or find it where they never thought to look in the first place.
If you haven’t been reading this series, well, you’re missing out, but you’ll also still be able to enjoy Golden Daughter. The first book of the series that’s printed under Stengl’s own imprint, Rooglewood Press, this book takes place in the same reality, but an entirely different part of the world as the other six books in the series. Long time readers will recognize several familiar elements from the original books, and the worlds are linked in many important ways. But the story itself is entirely new.
The Golden Daughters: beautiful and deadly, each raised to become the wife in name only of a patron who they will secretly serve and protect for the rest of their lives. Masayi Sairu is the most skilled of all her sisters, but instead of marriage she chooses to become the handmaiden and guardian of a temple Dream Walker. Sairu must protect her mistress from assassins, religious fanatics, and demons, and she must hide her from whatever it was that left her comatose and with a burn in the shape of a handprint on her face. And the only companions Sairu can trust are her three dogs…and a cat who talks way too much for his own good.
I adored the character of Sairu from the moment she was introduced. She has a level of confidence that would be annoying if it wasn’t totally justified: Sairu is good at what she does. There are quite a few scenes of her taking on people twice her size, sometimes several at once, and it’s always satisfying to see her knock her opponents to the ground using only two knives, or a few well-placed blows. Or her smile. Quite a few fights end before they’ve even begun when Sairu smiles; even when people don’t know that she’s a deadly warrior and favored daughter of the Noorhitam Empire, there’s something about Sairu’s smile (and the cutting observations she makes about things that shouldn’t be able to know) that make it seem like a pretty good idea to go bother someone else.
Her mistress Hariawan is more problematic. Hariawan is a Dream Walker, possibly the most skilled one in generations, and definitely the only female with the talent traditionally reserved for men. She was attacked in the Dream by…something…while looking for an un-named treasure on behalf of the priests of the Crown of the Moon, and when she finally wakes there seems to be something missing. At first she seems to be just traumatized, but her personality gradually changes to something a little unsettling. Focused, or maybe driven, but you’re not sure what she’s driven for. I kept wanting to sympathize with her, but her cold and impersonal need to find out the meaning between Life and Death makes her do something horrible, and she does it so casually. There are multiple times when Sairu wants to shake her, or worse, and it’s hard to blame her. Hariawan only gets worse when they stumble across a handsome captured slave who for some reason has the same Dream Walking abilities she has. Jovann meets her in the Dream, and of course falls head over heels in love with her.
Jovann and his half-brother Sunan are the central figures in the second storyline of the book; the struggle of the Chhayan people to reclaim their nation and their land from the ruling Kitar. Both brothers are linked together by their heritage and their domineering chieftain father. They both hate also each other, and sadly it’s for pretty understandable reasons. That’s a theme that Stengl returns to again and again in her books: the danger of hatred, even if (especially if) it seems to be perfectly justified. All of the characters in this book, even the most unredeemable, have at least one thing that they love and want to keep separate from all of the betrayals and violence they’ve resorted to. And what invariably happens is that whatever deal they’ve made comes back to taint the only good thing in their lives, or they sink so far into their rage that even what used to be precious to them no longer matters.
Sometimes our Path leads through darkness, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t walk it. Sometimes our Path leads to loss. But that doesn’t mean we’ve gone astray.
Golden Daughter works as a stand-alone story…but I really recommend that you start from the beginning of this series with Heartless. Stengl creates a beautiful spirituality in this book that has a little more impact if you’re familiar with the pantheon of gods and goddesses and fairies, and how all of them interact with each other. There are also a few elements and big revelations in the story that make more sense if you’ve seen them before, like the identity of Jovan’s songbird guide in the Dream, and the unique way Dragons have of marking and claiming their own. And of course there’s Monster, the mysterious cat who follows Sairu around while giving her a little information and a lot of attitude. Monster has consistently been one of my favorite characters in this series, and while it’s enjoyable to read his chapters in the current book (he’s the only person who never seems to be intimidated by Sairu) there’s a lot more to the character than what we see here.