The Sunforge

Sascha Stronach
Completed 9/10/2025, Reviewed 9/10/2025
2 stars

Ugh, I did not enjoy reading this book.  It is a mess of characters and mangled plots.  Reading the first book in the series, The Dawnhounds, only barely prepared me for this one.  Despite the fact that I only read the first book about month ago, I had the damnedest time trying to cognitively get from the end of that book to this one.  The timelines jump all over the place, new characters are introduced, and most of the chapters are so short, I wasn’t able to sit with any one plotline long enough for it to stick in my head.  The end has big flashback reveals that help piece together the world building, but it was too little too late.  I wanted to DNF this book so many times in the five days it took to read it.  I’m glad I kept with it though because now I can give an honest review.  This book is a 2025 Lambda Literary Award nominee.  If I was voting, it wouldn’t have been on my shortlist.  

Yat was the main character of the first book.  Here, she has been taken over by a god.  Sometimes Yat speaks, sometimes the god speaks.  This was something I did not put together for a long time.  It wasn’t until late in the book that I realized the two were fighting for control over Yat’s body.  I’m not positive, but I think Yat was located on the Kopek, the lesbian pirate ship from the first book.  Here it is stuck in port as there is a blockade by an invading enemy.  This enemy also has some kind of microwave weapon that burns anything in its rays’ paths.  The weapon nearly destroys the capital city.  Sen was previously a major character who was searching for Yat.  Here, he’s trying to help save the country with Kiada, another pirate.  They band with Ari, a thief and black-market dealer, to help stop the invading army as well as someone named Auntie, who is also know as Spider.  Amidst all the fighting, there are dopplers, which I eventually figured out are android doppelgangers.  They were supposed to be helpers but now seem to be nearly sentient soldiers in the battle to obliterate the city and the country.  

The main characters in this book are Kiada, Sen, and Ari.  Perhaps the most confusing character arc was Ari’s.  His story begins a few years before the rest of the action.  He’s interspersed between chapters in the present to catch us up on him.  I found this very confusing.  The chapters were short, so just as I was getting what was going on, the POV would change in the next chapter.  Eventually, I came to like his character.  He seemed like a sweet young man who was just trying to survive.  The best part of his arc is that he interacts with a very young woman who turns out to be a sixteen-year-old boy.  He helps the boy establish manhood while still keeping his secret so he can present as a woman.  They both fight the invading enemies, helping the local population acquire such things as food and medicine.  

I was rather impressed with the last third of the book.  Some major characters give their back story, revealing they have lived a very long time, back to the apocalyptic event that got the world to where it is now.  While this revelation was too long in coming, it did help me put together some of the pieces of their relationships and motivations.  Up to that point, I was so lost, I nearly put the book down for good at least once a day.  

I give this book two stars out of five.  I don’t like not having any idea what’s going.  Having a lot of characters compounds that dislike.  The payoff in the end was interesting, but not good enough to have made it a satisfying read.  This book ends in a more obvious cliffhanger than the first.  I knew this was supposed to be a trilogy, but it made me angry anyway.  I have no intention of reading the next book.  I can’t imagine putting myself through this again.