The Bone Shard Daughter

The third book in this trilogy came out last month so I took the time to comfort reread the first two books before I read the third one for the first time.

Overall, this book was super enjoyable even on a reread. It has four point of view characters, but each of them had their own unique intrigue and appeal. Unlike some other fantasy series, I never felt impatience to "get back to the good character". There's Lin the secretive emperor's amnesiac daughter, in competition with her foster brother to be heir, trying to learn bone shard magic. There's Sand who lives in a haze on a thinly inhabited island who suddenly regains her memories of other places. There's Phalue the daughter of a corrupt governer, who is trying to woo somebody who challenges her liberal "just world" beliefs. Finally, there's Jovis, a navigator turned smuggler, who tried to get out of the smuggling game to chase after his stolen childhood sweetheart, who meets a strange creature and gets increasingly suckered into helping people.

The world-building overall is a lot of fun. I enjoyed the bone shard magic idea a lot, where people inscribe (human) bones with commands on them and combine these shards (into dead animals) to form animated constructs. Big magical programming vibes. The flip side of this system is that these bones come from living humans to power these constructs, and requires all children to "tithe" parts of their skull. When the bones are in use, it drains the health of those people and causes them to waste away. It's a really neat way to think about "magical externalities" and especially who bears them.