The Bone Shard Daughter Review + Cosplay

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

An Asian-inspired epic fantasy set in an empire of drifting islands, out now from Orbit, available anywhere books are sold

Personal Rating: I’d give my bone shard to Lin to command as she wishes, except she wouldn’t take it because she’s too good for that 🥺

Reasons to Read: Asian-inspired queer-normalizing world, clever magic system that works like coding, sci-fi post-humanism tropes told in a fantasy way, determined protagonists, adorable animal companion

So, I never liked the strict division of sci-fi versus fantasy in publishing. My favorite works tend to be those that combine the tropes of both, especially sci-fi with grand, beautiful worldbuilding. This is the first epic fantasy I’ve read that borrows brilliantly from sci-fi tropes, though. Its magic system made me go WHOAAA OMG once I realized it worked like coding. Basically, the empire takes a bone shard from behind everyone’s ear when they’re 8, then if you carve the right commands on the shards in a special language, they can remotely drain the person’s lifeforce to power magical constructs made of animal parts. BUT, if the commands don’t work with each other, it can cause the whole construct to break down. (Where are the programmers out there…relatable content for you.)

Constructs weren’t people, even if a few bore human parts. The lives of the shards in their bodies powered them, and the commands written on them gave them purpose. But depending on how tightly those commands were written, well, they could be subverted. And despite the smooth work on this construct, it was a dockworker and would be lower-tier. Fewer commands, more loopholes.

The empire spans hundreds of drifting islands and was established by the Sukai family, who defeated the Alanga people that once ruled the islands with their supernatural powers. The Tithing Festival that gathers the bone shards necessary for magic is a painful and dangerous one, with one wrong move meaning the chisel could hit the brain and kill the kid, but the empire justifies it by constantly warning its citizens about how the Alanga might come back. Though by the start of the story, this fear of the Alanga isn’t strong enough to pacify people anymore, so revolutions are brewing in every corner of the empire. It doesn’t help that the emperor has holed up in his palace to focus on bone shard magic experiments instead of keeping the political system running.

But the constructs kept us all safe. They were as numerous as any army. My father always said the Alanga would one day come back, and when they did, they’d try to reclaim the Empire. All the Alanga had powers, but their rulers had more than most. When one island’s ruler fought with another, the clash of their magics had killed so many hapless bystanders. Enormous walls of water, windstorms that flattened cities. The greatest of them, Dione, could drown a city while saving all the flies, but most Alanga didn’t have that level of control.

The chief protagonist is the emperor’s daughter Lin, who was meant to be his heir but now faces intense competition from his adopted son Bayan because she lost all her memories 5 years ago. The emperor keeps most rooms in the palace locked and makes Lin and Bayan compete for the keys to unlock them and gain more knowledge. To prove herself worthy of the throne, Lin decides to pull off a string of heists to steal the emperor’s keys and secretly learn the bone shard magic he has kept from her. Determined, hard-working protagonists are my favorite, and she shines as exactly that from the very first chapter. As she claws for more power, she also grapples with the ethics of using this magic at the expense of other people’s lifeforces–is it justified if she’s trying to hold the empire together and save people from warfare everywhere? The direction her story takes is pretty surprising as she uncovers layer after layer of the mysteries behind what her father is really doing.

My father ruled his Empire by proxy, all his power and commands distributed to his four most complex constructs: Ilith, Construct of Spies; Uphilia, Construct of Trade; Mauga, Construct of Bureaucracy; and Tirang, Construct of War. It occurred to me that this must be why he guarded the secrets to his magic so zealously. If I were smart enough, if I were clever enough, if I were careful enough, I could rewrite the commands embedded into their shards. I could make them mine. Father didn’t think I was enough. My memory was lacking. But I knew who I was now. I was Lin. I was the Emperor’s daughter.

And I would show him that even broken daughters could wield power.

Another major protagonist is Jovis, a smuggler who has faced discrimination all his life because he is half Poyer, a minority people not native to the empire. He has spent the 7 years prior to the story searching for his abducted wife, even making deals with a notorious gang to get a boat to sail the islands. Early on, when an island he’s on sinks into the Endless Sea, he rescues the kitten / otter-like creature Mephi, who is utterly adorable and becomes his animal companion. To Jovis’ enormous surprise, Mephi turns out to be no ordinary animal. Not only does he slowly learn to talk, his presence starts giving Jovis superhuman powers to fight off the gang members chasing him across the islands to collect the debt he owes. Jovis finds himself rescuing a string of children from the Tithing Festivals, then as his notoriety grows, he gets roped into helping the underground resistance against the empire. He starts off very practical and cynical, only saving kids for money and not believing in the possibility of a revolution, but slowly comes into the responsibility of using his powers to help those who need it. He has a valid point in that most revolutionaries end up becoming tyrants themselves, though. I appreciated how the rebels in this book were not portrayed as selfless saviors, but possibly shady people who have their own agendas. It made the conflict less black and white and kept you guessing at how everything would resolve all the way until the end.

“I’m not a hero. I never set out to be a hero in the first place. Those children? Their parents paid me to rescue them.”

“The Empire was established to save those people from the Alanga. The Shardless Few is trying to save those people from the Empire. Who, after, will save the people from the Shardless?”

HOWEVER, the book does have one wide-eyed, idealistic revolutionary in the form of bookseller Ranami, who is in a relationship with the sword-bearing, armor-wearing Phalue, daughter of her island’s governor. Ranami and Phalue are an amazingly complex F/F couple who love each other very much, but struggle with sorting out their political differences. Ranami has tried many times to get Phalue to pay more attention to the issues on their island, but Phalue believes her father’s feudal system is a fair exchange and that those who starve just don’t work hard enough. Phalue thinks she’s qualified to make this judgment because she’s Not Like Other Aristocrats. She doesn’t care for luxuries, gives to the gutter orphans whenever she can, has a commoner mother, and interacts often with commoners.

“I know it bothers you,” Phalue continued, “but these things are this way for a reason. The farmers receive land from my father; they owe him their fealty. Yes, I think the way he spends the money is stupid, but it is still his right to send the caro nuts to the wealthier islands, where he can fetch the best price for them. He still pays the farmers their fair share. He keeps order and peace, and that deserves payment.”

I think we’ve all struggled with this type of “come on, it can’t be THAT bad!” people (or were one of them), so I found Phalue and Ranami’s plot thread to be the most compelling of the book. (It’s not just because they’re amazing F/F rep, I swear!!). It takes Phalue a realistically long time to truly understand what Ranami has been saying to her for years, though she still starts off as a decent and interesting person, so you don’t dislike her for what she initially believes. But the book’s point is that merely “being decent” is not acceptable when it comes to addressing oppression. If you have the power to change things for the better but you don’t choose to, you are still complacent in the exploitation of others.

“It’s hard to remake one’s view of the world, to admit to complacency. I thought remaking myself for you was hard enough, but doing that was something I wanted. I didn’t want to realize how much I’ve hurt the people around me, and that’s what confronting my beliefs meant. We all tell ourselves stories of who we are, and in my mind, I was always the hero. But I wasn’t. Not in all the ways I should have been.”

This timely theme of “you should do more” runs through the entire book. Ultimately, I find the Bone Shard Daughter to be a story about all the ways an authoritarian regime can go unchecked because of fear and acquiescence, and how those with the power to make even the slightest things better have the responsibility to do so. It actually reads like a cyberpunk tale, except it takes place on beautiful and fantastical islands instead of urban cities (though there IS constant rain too!). It’s definitely a very unique book, so I absolutely recommend checking it out.

Bonus Cosplay Shots:

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