Land of the Frozen Sun is the first installment of a six-volume science fiction adventure series. It introduces Aranae, an Earth-like planet on the far side of the galaxy, tidally locked to its pale, yellow star and home to a telepathic species known as kezel. One of these kezel is a grieving young female named Fire of the Storm--or Lightning--driven by hunger and curiosity to venture out onto the Forbidden Plains. What she discovers there will challenge everything she's been raised to believe, resulting in exile, mortal danger, and unintended consequences that ripple throughout space and time.
The emotive, intriguingly non-human first entry in Malloy’s six-book Moonstorm series offers rousing fantasy that dares to be fantastical. At its heart is Lightning, a young kezel—spiked, tailed, telepathic creatures—who has lived her whole life in the stony caves of an “accrete” with the rest of her telepathic tribe. Her world is a place of hunger and violence where nonconformity and change are not tolerated. While out hunting, Lightning discovers a “hairless, beak-faced creature” she's never seen before, one that, shockingly, is able to hear her thoughts and respond in kind. Lightning hides her discovery, naming the creature Joy for the warm feelings that bloom between them. Joy’s inevitable discovery eventually forces the pair from the community into the frozen wastes, where they endure extreme survival adventures before Joy helps Lightning to form a very unlikely friendship with bombas, the avian-like food source for kezel. As Lightning and Joy forge through distrust and make their home among the Bombas, relying on manners and empathy to build trust, often facilitated by Joy, Malloy’s descriptive and imaginative series breathes life into the land of Aranae, a wild landscape regularly buffeted by extreme weather. Characterization is as engaging as the gripping scenes of braving the environment, especially as Lightning and Joy discover their connection. Malloy’s prose is crisply efficient, never losing narrative momentum as it captures danger, wonder, and uneasy social situations with real power, all while Lightning fears she’ll never be able to go home again.
Malloy builds this world’s creatures, civilizations, and more with imaginative precision, developing languages, belief systems (even illustrating where different tribes diverge on various points), and arresting creation mythologies. Malloy adds enough attitude and emotion to allow readers fairly easy access to an entirely novel world built with wholly unfamiliar language. Though there are no human characters, the relationships, societies, family structures, and concerns are deeply human. A unique world breeds familiarity and feeling in this rich series starter.
Takeaway: Strong fantasy of surprise connections in a wholly original nonhuman world.
Comparable Titles: Martha Wells’s The Cloud Roads, Tad Williams’s Tailchaser’s Song.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: B
