The Bone Shard Daughter: The Drowning Empire Book One

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The Bone Shard Daughter explores three interrelated themes that feed into one another: empire, agency, and identity. The Phoenix Empire literally drains its people of life and potential, as the bone shards collected from trepanning ceremonies and used to power the emperor’s constructs sap their living humans’ energy to work. I’ve previously touched on the cost of colonialism in terms of human potential through the lens of Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising. The opportunity cost that one is born into as a colonial or imperial subject is once more explored in The Bone Shard Daughter and ends up being a recurring theme in speculative fiction written by people in Asian diasporas—unsurprisingly, as many of us are postcolonial subjects.

The Bone Shard Daughter tells the story of Lin, the daughter of the Emperor who cannot remember a semblance of her life before five years ago, and Jovis, a wanted smuggler on a fruitless search for his lover who’s been missing for seven years. It also follows three other characters—Phalue, Ranami, and Sand—whose paths weave intricately with the others to create an overall compelling narrative. It all leads up to a huge battle that has ramifications for the third and final book, which, thankfully, I already have in my hands. I’d thought nothing could hurt worse than my father’s betrayal, learning that he’d never actually loved me, but merely the ghost I would never become. My heart was guarded against such things, I’d thought.There are many things to love in The Bone Shard Daughter. The first line is a powerful hook: “Father told me I’m broken.” In just five words, Stewart piques the reader’s interest in a number of ways: What kind of family dynamic is there that a father would say such a thing to his daughter? How is she “broken”? Is he right? I immediately hoped that the confrontational first line would be challenged in the narrative, and I was deeply satisfied with how Stewart handles Lin’s growth as a character and subverts the idea of Lin being broken. Ranami: a commoner and freedom fighter at heart, she is now in a relationship with Phalue, and working to convince her of the inherent injustice of the hierarchical and exploitative social structure. Those five words immediately swim through a thousand questions flooding the reader’s mind. The questions will be answered eventually— most of them, anyway—but not before Andrea Stewart makes us at home in the minds of four different narrators. In that sense, the plot of The Bone Shard Daughter feels like a fist clenching a tangle of threads, and the most vivid of those threads begins with Lin.

Sand and co. manage to take the cove and the boat. It’s revealed that Sand is actually Nisong, the Emperor’s wife.

Recent Comments

I just want to go around screaming at everyone to read this series. Especially if you want an Adult High Fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic style fantastical world with the awakening of magic and animal companions. One foolish choice is like a rat you let go. It will spawn more consequences than you first thought possible.”