The novel “In the Shadow” by Steve Ramirez was published for the first time in 2022. It’s the second book in the S’orne Saga and follows “The Great Migration“.
Bellona brought Keldiari to the village where other botari live despite various difficulties, including communication between the two women. The botari welcome Keldiari with relief and the rest of the community welcomes her while Bellona is viewed with suspicion and is practically segregated. Toshi tries to make her understand the situation and teach some botari knowledge but Bellona is very frustrated after everything that happened to her.
The capital city struggles to recover from the attack and the king must work to keep the heart of the kingdom going after the terrible human losses suffered. Princess Dorinda helps the orphans of the capital city and her fury seems uncontainable after some men steal the food intended for them by brutally beating her tutor.
“In the Shadow” continues to show the fantasy flavor of the story but in the initial part, Toshi’s attempts to explain to Bellona the existing hypotheses regarding the multiverse remind us that it’s a science fiction series set on a low-tech planet.
This novel begins some time after the s’orne attack and shows its medium-long term consequences on the protagonists and on the kingdom in general. The danger isn’t over because there may still be around some of the beings that look humans who have superhuman strength and behave like rabid animals known only as s’orne.
This second part of the saga continues the stories of the protagonists that began in “The Great Migration”, offering different points of view with different reactions to the terrible events they experienced. In particular, Bellona and Dorinda find themselves in situations that are still stressful for various reasons and as a result, they struggle to find emotional balance.
Bellona discovered secrets that can make the difference between life and death for the community she brought Keldiari to and for this reason, some of its inhabitants want to kill her. It doesn’t help that Toshi is one of the very few residents on her side but their personalities seem to constantly clash.
In Princess Dorinda’s case, the new problems related to the orphans are important but constitute only a small part of the ones affecting the kingdom. Her father starts involving her in the affairs of the kingdom to make her understand the vast consequences of the S’orne attack and Dorinda discovers situations in which the king and his collaborators must discover traitors who are trying to add more chaos.
Complex and diverse relationships were already important in the first book and are further developed in this sequel. There are old and new friendships but Steve Ramirez also shows the dark sides of the world in which this series is set linked to the natives and not directly to the s’orne. The protagonists find themselves in very different situations but they all have to deal with dangerous people and at least in some cases there are traitors. Even the people who are not their enemies may have agendas for them which are revealed at least in part during the course of the novel.
In my opinion, “In the Shadow” represents a good continuation of the s’orne saga which expands in various ways a fictional universe that was rich from the beginning. Understanding the events and the protagonists requires having read the first novel and this sequel ends with some important events that will be developed in the third book. If it’s a type of story that intrigues you, I recommend reading it with the awareness that you need to read the entire saga to get to the ending. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
