Daughter of Redwinter by Ed McDonald

(Gollancz, 2022)

Reviewed by John Dodd

Raine can see dead people, this isn’t a sixth sense, and she’s not the only one that can do it. The book opens on her finding a woman by the side of the road and having to consider if they’ve been dead a while because she can’t see a ghost near the body.

She’s not dead it transpires, but she is on the run, and so Raine helps her because it’s the right thing to do. Or is it? In the first part of the book there’s a fight with an elder god, a death that sets the stage for the true story, and the realisation that the world that Raine thought she knew, is very much not that world. From an encounter with a warrior priest, we learn that some of Raine’s natural talents have been curtailed, supposedly for her own good, and she must find a way to learn what she is truly capable of, and more important, what she wants to be when she finds out.

There are political moves going on. The Draiohn are possessed of powers beyond those of mortals, and seek to control the future by finishing the moves before anyone else realises that a piece has been picked up. The other clans have their own power, but rather than focusing on battles, the clans are political factions, all with believable reasons for doing what they’re doing and a variety of interesting characters that don’t always behave as you would expect them to.

What interested me most about this was the character of Raine, a stark departure from Galharrow of Blackwing fame. Raine is a complex character, strong in her own ways, but also uncertain in matters of politics and not always willing to take the path she needs to; her growth as a character was by far one of the high points of the book.

In many ways, this book is cut from the same cloth as Blackwing, but where Blackwing had a lot of action scenes and was very visceral in its nature, Daughter of Redwinter very much moves in slower, but more intense circles. While there are less action scenes, they are well written, and there’s less focus on the nature of the action than on the resolution of it, which works well given that the main character is somewhat wide-eyed and learning throughout the book. The enemies are not always obvious; indeed, the true villains are held just off centre throughout, and there is no plot armour for any of the characters. Mainstays that you think will be there the whole book are often left by the wayside, bleeding from a number of puncture wounds. There aren’t many supernatural creatures in the book, but that makes them far more striking (literally) when they do turn up.

Daughter of Redwinter is planned as a series of books, just as Blackwing was and if there’s one thing that’s clear from this book, it’s that Ed McDonald has become far more adept at weaving the long story, rather than trying to make sure all the loose ends are tied up in a single book. While there is a very definite end to this book, it isn’t the end to the story, and there are sufficient plot lines still waiting to be finished to make the reader want to pick up the next book.

It's easy to think that an author only writes one type of book, and that everything they write will be a copy of the ones they’ve done before, but this isn’t what’s happened here. Daughter of Redwinter is engaging on a different level, the stakes aren’t world ending, but from the beginning, with the encounter with dark powers, it’s clear that at some point, the world is going to be the stage, and that will be something to look forwards to.

Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.