Review: Child of the Daystar by Bryce O'Connor

Child of the Daystar by Bryce O'Connor is another great book I picked up in the r/Fantasy megasale. I picked it up based on the cover, which featured a humanoid dragon figure, and even though I had not read the description and didn't really know what to expect I ended up enjoying this book a lot. In fact, it's been one of the few books I've been able to actually enjoy in the past few months. 

The protagonist Raz, the "Child of the Daystar" from the title, is a toddler from the dragon-like race of Atherians, who starts off at the beginning of the book in chains, being transported through the desert by human slavers. The boy is very strong, though, and in his bid for freedom he ends up seriously injuring some of the slavers and killing two of them. In the struggle, one of them hits him over the head and he is presumed dead and left in the desert next to the bodies of the two dead slavers. He is found, and eventually taken in, by a family of desert dwelling nomads. The family dynamics and culture of these nomads, including their interaction with this "lizard" they've adopted are so well done and interesting and I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the book because of them. The other characters in his newfound family were also very well-written including his adopted father, mother, uncle, and the grandmother. 

If the story had kept going along this line I would have absolutely loved it. Unfortunately, in the middle of the story the main character suffers some pretty big losses and very abruptly there's a time skip that shows him at a point in his life where he's "lost his way" and has kind of drowned in the dirty underworld of one of the cities. I was really put off by the sudden turn the character took, especially where it was done after a time-skip so we didn't get to see any of the build-up to that point. I also feel that there were some missed opportunities to keep developing the nomad characters/tribes with the same depth and care that had been used in the first half of the book. For these reasons I really didn't enjoy it as much personally, but readers who enjoy more action, assassinations, etc, would very much enjoy this second half of the book. 

The second half of the book puts a big emphasis on Raz's strength and fighting ability and shows him in many different battles. For me personally, the blow-by-blow descriptions of battles are something I usually find my eyes kind of glossing over as I don't really care much about that type of action, but readers who do enjoy it will find much to like here. 

This may be a good time to mention that while the book contains slavery and human trafficking and other such terrible and illegal activities in it I didn't find that it dwelled on them too much so while it was dark in a sense it wasn't overly gory or "grimdark." 

I also really did not enjoy the chapters featuring the priests/albino girl from the North, which I had no reason to care about and so they seemed to be a waste of time. They also kind of put an emphasis on "oh this terrible society of horrible people where so many poor people suffer" without necessarily humanizing these actual victims. If there had been more chapters from these POVs I might have begun to find the missionary-style aid work that these priests did in these different parts of the world really irritating, but thankfully there wasn't that much of it. 

The final section of the book picked up for me because it put the focus back on Raz's internal/personal growth a little bit and so I was able to care about the battles and stakes a little bit more. This made reading the last quarter of the book much more enjoyable for me than the middle section and I was able to kind of get behind the story again. 

I should probably mention that each chapter (with the exception of a couple here and there) started off with an epigraph. Most of them were about Raz and they were like extracts from history books or accounts from that world. This helped set up the character's importance within his world and give him a kind of "chosen one" feel even though many of the quotes weren't necessarily praising him. It gave a sense that he's going to become such an important figure - one way or another - that everyone will be writing about him in their history books, which was cool. It also helped give a sense of history and culture to the world and flesh it out a bit, which was great. 

TL;DR

Overall, a great read that was well-written with good character development and a good backdrop that was well-thought-out and developed. I absolutely loved the first part of the book and would recommend reading it if only for that. And for fans of more action-oriented books you'll find a lot to enjoy in the second half as well!