Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In this second installment of the Dark Star Trilogy, James returns to Iron Age Africa with the story of Sogolon, introduced in Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) as a sometime antagonist, sometime ally of Tracker. The first part Sogolon's story is told in third person as she recounts the days of a youth more than 150 years in the past, where she encounters the Aesi, the sinister chancellor in the court of Fasisi, and discovers the uses of her own fickle magic. Shifting to first person, James describes the family Sogolon makes with a shapeshifting lion, which is devastatingly disrupted by an attack from the Aesi. Spending most of the ensuing century in the bush, Sogolon becomes the "Moon Witch," a self-appointed vigilante for hire. Sogolon is possibly immortal, but she is also deeply human and filled with rage and bitterness, searching for a purpose as history swirls around her. If Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a penciled comic panel, Moon Witch, Spider King is the version rendered by James the inker: the geography, myth, magic, and people of this epic setting are revisited to add shading and detail in a recursive procedure that results in a vibrant tapestry begging for infinite return trips. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Fans are clamoring for the second in a trilogy that is described as an Afrocentric Game of Thrones. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.
Kirkus Reviews
Stories as ambitiously made up as this aren't expected to so intensely engage the shifting natures of truth and reality. This one does. A chorus of enthusiastic comparisons to George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice greeted James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) upon its publication. This second volume in a projected trilogy set in a boldly imagined, opulently apportioned ancient Africa shows that the Man Booker Prize–winning novelist is building something deeper and more profoundly innovative within the swords-and-sorcery genre. In this middle installment, James doesn't advance his narrative from the first volume so much as approach its main story, Rashomon-like, from a different perspective. This, then, is the story of Sogolon, the 177-year-old Moon Witch, whose path crosses in Black Leopard with those of the one-eyed Tracker and his motley entourage in a far-flung and fraught search for a mysterious young boy who's been missing for three years. This novel, told in the main character's patois, which is as witty, richly textured, and musically captivating as the story it tells, begins decades and decades before, back when Sogolon is an orphaned child and indentured servant who first becomes aware of her dark powers when she repels her master's violent sexual advances with some involuntary—and deadly—violence of her own. From then on, a force she identifies throughout the narrative as "wind (not wind)" is summoned to carry her (and often rescue her) through years of travail and adventure across several kingdoms and wildernesses, encountering such wonders as a city that levitates at sunset and such perils as the witch-hunting Sangomin gangs. Through calm and stormy times, she's always aware of being stalked by the Aesi, known from the previous installment as chancellor to Kwash Dara, alias the Spider King, but here Aesi exists mostly as a demonic spirit that can dispatch invisible assassins and manipulate people's minds for its own ends. There's barely enough space to talk about James' many inventions, from children capable of changing into lions to a river dragon known as a "ninki nanka." So much is densely packed into this narrative that it sometimes threatens to leave the reader gasping for breath, especially at the start. But once Sogolon's painful, tumultuous initiation ends and the Moon Witch's legend takes hold, James' tale picks up speed with beautifully orchestrated (and ferociously violent) set pieces and language both vivid and poetic. The second part of this trilogy is darker and, in many ways, more moving than its predecessor. Copyright Kirkus 2021 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
PW Annex Reviews
Sogolon, the antagonist of