Sixth of the Dusk is trapper who manages to survive on the deadly island of Patji through the use of his canoe, a few tools, his well-honed skills, and his bond with birds called Aviar that give him supernatural abilities. Starling is a young dragon, in human form, who leads the crew of a starship. In this book, the two of them meet up, and you get a combination of a coming-of-age story with Starling and a save-the-old-ways story with Sixth of Dusk. If that sounds like a strange combination to you, that’s because it is. Honestly, just writing up that three-sentence description was a challenge!
I’ve read just about everything Brandon Sanderson has written, but I found this story to be a strange clash of two worlds: one with primitive hunter-gather-like people and one with futuristic starship pilots. To an extent, this is intentional: Sixth of Dusk’s entire story is one of figuring out what to do when people at very different stages of technological development end up colliding. But it felt like multiple totally different books glued together, which made for a jarring reading experience.
And it didn’t just feel like it, it really is multiple books glued together from various parts of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. Sixth of Dusk was originally a character in a short story in Arcanum Unbounded. Starling and her spaceships come from some totally different universe that I couldn’t place, but it felt similar in many ways (including the coming-of-age tale) to the Skyward Series. There were also lots of references to the various peoples and shards of the Stormlight Archive and lots of discussions of investiture that reminded me of the Mistborn Saga.
Brandon Sanderson is a fantastic writer, but as his Cosmere universe grows, his stories have more and more internal references, and even if you’ve read many of his books, it can be hard to follow. In fact, I gave up on the Stormlight Archive series because it got so complex that it became a chore to read. I suspect many of the references in this book were to later books in the Stormlight Archive that I didn’t get to, which made this book a bit of a chore to read too.
And that’s a shame, as there are some strong story elements here: creative magic (one of Sixth of Dusk’s aviars can warn him of danger by showing him an image of him dead), interesting characters (Sixth of Dusk in particular is great), and a decent premise (what happens when you mix futuristic technology and a primitive society). But they pieces didn’t quite come together for me into a satisfying whole.
