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WORK TITLE: Crossroads of Canopy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.thoraiyadyer.com/
CITY: Sydney
STATE: NW
COUNTRY: Australia
NATIONALITY: Australian
https://us.macmillan.com/author/thoraiyadyer * http://www.torforgeblog.com/2016/12/07/qa-with-thoraiya-dyer-the-author-of-crossroads-of-canopy/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Australia.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and scientist. Former veterinarian.
AVOCATIONS:Bushwalking, archery, travel.
MEMBER:Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
AWARDS:Aurealis Award, 2011, for short fantasy story “Yowie,” 2012, for short fantasy story “Fruit of the Pipal Tree,” 2013, for short story “The Wisdom of Ants,” 2015, for short science fiction story “Wine, Women and Stars,” and 2017, for short fantasy story “Where the Pelican Builds Her Nest”; Ditmar Award for best novella/novelette, 2011, for The Company Articles of Edward Teach, and 2013, for The Wisdom of Ants.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, Running Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2014; War Stories, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak, Apex Publishing (Lexington, KY), 2014; Defying Doomsday, edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, Twelfth Planet Press (Yokine, WA), 2016; and Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Solaris (Oxford, England), 2016. Contributor to periodicals, including Apex, Cosmos, Clarkesworld, and Analog.
SIDELIGHTS
Australian fantasy writer Thoraiya Dyer is a novelist and short-story writer based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. She is well known for her short fantasy and science fiction stories in publications such as Analog, Cosmos, and Clarkesworld and in anthologies such as The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, Defying Doomsday, and Bridging Infinity. She has received Ditmar and Aurealis Awards, both prestigious Australian awards for speculative fiction, for her short work.
Dyer’s career has revolved so much around writing short fiction that she told an interviewer on the Tor/Forge Blog that it made writing a novel-length work of fiction a challenger. “I think many years of writing short fantasy fiction made me not only succinct, but enamored of the mysteriousness of my succinctness. One real challenge for me was to flesh things out in this manuscript,” Dyer told the interviewer.
In Crossroads of Canopy, Dyer’s debut novel, she “introduces an unusual fantasy world set in the different levels of a giant forest and plagued by social strife,” stated a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The city of Canopy is a richly imagined environment set high in a gigantic forest that spreads for an unimaginable distance across the surface of a planet. This immense canopy of tress is divided into thirteen distinct kingdoms, each devoted to the worship of a different god or goddess. These divine beings are continually being reincarnated into human bodies.
The access to sunlight and other natural resources makes Canopy a rich and exclusive realm, occupied by a wealthy, deeply tanned class of elites. It is fully separated from two other realms below it: Understory, the area centered on the trunks of the trees occupied by merchants; and Floor, the menacing ground level where pale-skinned slaves that support Canopy live and where demons, monsters, and other frightening creatures dwell.
Protagonist Unar, a headstrong teenager with formidable magical abilities, has managed to escape her parents’ plan to sell her into slavery by becoming a gardener for the goddess Audblayin, protector of birth and life. Unar believes she will become the reincarnated Audblayin’s bodyguard, but she is passed over for the position. In response, she sets out to find the reincarnated goddess, and as she does this she discovers many disturbing facts about Canopy and its society, particularly about the exploited and abused residents of Floor.
“Dyer’s debut nicely balances lyrical descriptions with faster-paced action sequences,” commented Booklist contributor Biz Hyzy. The Kirkus Reviews writer called the book an “epic fantasy that builds an intriguing setting.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded: “Readers will be delighted by Dyer’s polished prose and an exquisite new world of intricate mythology, rituals, and politics.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2016, Biz Hyzy, review of Crossroads of Canopy, p. 32.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of Crossroads of Canopy.
Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2016, review of Crossroads of Canopy, p. 55.
ONLINE
Illustrated Page, http://theillustratedpage.wordpress.com (January 17, 2017), Sarah Waites, review of Crossroads of Canopy.
Macmillan Web site, http://us.macmillan.com/ (July 22, 2017), biography of Thoraiya Dyer.
Thoraiya Dyer Home Page, http://www.thoraiyadyer.com (August 16, 2017).
Tor Web site, http://www.tor.com/ (February 3, 2017), Alex Brown, review of Crossroads of Canopy.
Tor/Forge Blog, http://www.torforgeblog.com/ (December 7, 2016), “Thoraiya Dyer Talks about Worldbuilding, Giant Rainforests, and Crossroads of Canopy,” interview with Thoraiya Dyer.*
Thoraiya Dyer Talks about Worldbuilding, Giant Rainforests, & Crossroads of Canopy
DECEMBER 7, 2016TORFORGE
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Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya DyerWelcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today we are sharing an interview with Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning author Thoraiya Dyer about her debut novel Crossroads of Canopy. This highly-anticipated novel is set in a mythical rainforest controlled by living gods and will become available on January 31st. You can sneak a peek of it here!
Crossroads of Canopy is set in a giant, rainforest world, and you drew upon a lot of scientific research to imagine this realm. What was some cool facts about this environment you were excited to include in the book? Or, was there something you really wanted to mention but couldn’t find the right spot for?
I was excited to include monsoonal weather patterns, aka the “big wet” in northern Australia.
In the temperate south of the continent, we have cold, rainy winters and hot, dry summers. However, in the tropical top end you get something like 75% of the annual rainfall dumped all at once in the summer (although they wouldn’t necessarily call it summer; the locals observe something closer to a six-season cycle.) Between October and February, Darwin gets an average of 1267mm rain. Which is a pretty cool fact!
On a trip to Nepal, I remember using elephants to get across a river because the monsoon had just finished and jeeps were useless.
Yeah. Monsoons. Exciting!
What else. Gap-axe wood really is too hard to cut into without ruining your axe. Fish really can climb up waterfalls. Sandpaper fig leaves, while not to my knowledge recorded as being used for depilation, are pretty good for smoothing spears. Sun bears don’t hibernate in the real world, but their appetite for honey and co-evolution with the tualang tree has produced in the latter a glassy, slippery trunk which prevents bears from climbing the trees and keeps the hosted giant honey bees, Apis dorsata, happy and safe.
As for things that didn’t fit, when I first tried to convince my agent, Evan, that a rainforest setting would be a good idea for a fantasy novel, I’d just seen a brilliant exhibition at the Australian Museum on the Aztecs. The words “jaguars and sloth gods” may have flown excitedly from the keyboard.
I found a place in Canopy for jaguars and their souped-up versions, the chimera. Possibly sloths got a mention once or twice, but the sloth god itself got canned.
Sorry, sloth god.
Greek mythology has a subtle influence in this worldbuilding along, including Canopy possessing its own pantheon of gods and goddess. How did you decide on these thirteen deities and their specific ruling “specialties”?
In the Greek stories of Odysseus and Atalanta, which inspired many of my characters and their arcs, you find prominent mention of the following immortals: Artemis (wild animals), Aphrodite (love), Zeus (thunder, ruled the other gods), Rhea (mother of gods), Hermes (emissary, travel, trade), Helios (sun), Thetis (sea) and Poseidon (also the sea).
Because I wanted things to be cyclical with reincarnation, not linear with mother and father gods, Rhea was left out, and Zeus became a tamer, lightning-only type of god. Canopians didn’t travel much outside the forest, so Hermes got cut. Canopians consider the sea to be practically mythical, so Poseidon didn’t survive, either. That left wild animals, the sun, and a freshwater goddess of the monsoon.
Love was an interesting one. If you look at the religion of the Indus Valley civilization, which preceded Hinduism in Nepal, you find a mother goddess, a father god, deified animals and plants, indications of water worship, and giant stone genitalia.
No mention of love.
I combined love with the sun and kept it, because I was doing the compromise thing. If you look at the geographical half-way point between Nepal and Greece, you find Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of fertility, love and war.
If you visit the Temple of Eshmun near Sidon, Lebanon, you find hundreds of marble statues of babies. Eshmun was a Phoenician god of healing. His origin story goes like this: He was born an eighth son in Beirut. As he grew into a young man, Ishtar/Astarte romantically pursued him, to the point where he fatally castrated himself with an axe. She then resurrected him and turned him into a god.
He was the patron deity of Sidon from about 500BC. If your child was sick, you’d have a stone replica carved and sent to the Temple in the hope that Eshmun would heal them. No matter where they are in space or time, no matter what they believe, people want to keep their children safe.
In Canopy, the god Odel, Protector of Children, holds a special place in my heart.
Many characters seem to leap from great heights in a death-defying way! How much climbing research (or hands-on experiences!) went into this book?
Here’s where I confess that I suck at rock-climbing. Once, I abseiled with my uncle into this amazing cave system in Canada. We dropped down seventy metres into pitch blackness. Waited for pumps to evacuate water from “the birth canal” before squeezing through it. Endured waterfalls in the face and having to balance in foot-width, ice-cold watercourses to avoid touching and ruining the crystal-covered walls. All that was fine…but climbing back up? Ahahahaha! Talk to my stepson. He’s good at that stuff. I’m an armchair Ninja Warrior.
My stepdaughter advised me to google the extreme climber known as the Monkey Man. So I’m confident in humankind’s ability to do the things I described. Just not me personally. Although I have stripped off a bit of bark and inadvertently grabbed a spider before. So there’s that.
The idea of one having a great destiny is what motivated Unar to start her adventure. Do you, too, believe we all have some sort of fate awaiting us?
I’m a scientist. I believe in statistical likelihoods. Which, I admit, can sometimes seem like destiny.
Crossroads of Canopy is your novel debut, but readers mostly know your award-winning short fiction. What are the challenges between writing short versus writing longform?
I think many years of writing short fantasy fiction made me not only succinct, but enamoured of the mysteriousness of my succinctness. One real challenge for me was to flesh things out in this manuscript. How did Unar and Aoun meet one another? In a short story that’s not my problem! What are they wearing? They have insects and bark, you work it out! Except, no, here it’s my job to make sure you smell the patchwork of pressed leaves, see Aoun sitting by the closed Gate of the Garden, and feel the silk as you stroll through the market.
If you could be a goddess from any mythology, who would you choose and why?
Artemis, for sure. I like deer and dogs and I wish I was better at archery.
THORAIYA DYER
Thoraiya Dyer
Cat Sparks
THORAIYA DYER is an Australian writer whose more than 30 short stories, as well as a novella and short fiction collection published since 2008 have racked up 7 wins from 17 Aurealis and Ditmar Award nominations between them. Her debut fantasy TITAN'S FOREST TRILOGY is published by Tor Books.
Thoraiya Dyer is an Australian writer based in Sydney, NSW.
Her short fiction has appeared in magazines including Clarkesworld, Apex, Cosmos and Analog, and anthologies such as "Long Hidden," "War Stories," “The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women,” “Defying Doomsday” and “Bridging Infinity” (for a full list, see thoraiyadyer.com ).
Dyer's time-travel pirate novella, "The Company Articles of Edward Teach", won the 2011 Ditmar Award for Best Novella/Novelette and Dyer was awarded Best New Talent. In the same year, short fantasy story "Yowie" won the Aurealis Award in its category.
The following year, "Fruit of the Pipal Tree" from Fablecroft anthology "After the Rain" took out the short fantasy category again, and in 2013 a science fiction story about genetically modified metal-eating arthropods, "The Wisdom of Ants," won both an Aurealis Award and a Ditmar.
Dyer's collection of four original stories, "Asymmetry," available from Twelfth Planet Press, was called "unsettling, poignant, marvellous" by Nancy Kress.
“Wine, Women and Stars,” a short science fiction story originally published in Analog, won the Aurealis Award in 2015, while "Where The Pelican Builds Her Nest" won the short fantasy category in 2017.
“Crossroads of Canopy,” a Titan’s Forest novel, was published by Tor Books in January 2017. The next book in that world, "Echoes of Understorey," is forthcoming in February 2018.
Dyer's novel-length work is represented by the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency. She is a member of SFWA. A lapsed veterinarian, her other interests include bushwalking, archery and travel.
Crossroads of Canopy
Biz Hyzy
Booklist. 113.8 (Dec. 15, 2016): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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Crossroads of Canopy.
By Thoraiya Dyer.
Jan. 2017.336p. Tor, $25.99 (9780765385925); e-book (9780765385932).
When Unar's parents decide to sell her as a slave, she flees to a Garden ruled by the goddess Audblayin, where Unar learns to use magic. When Audblayin dies, her soul is reincarnated, but the baby's identity won't be apparent until he or she reaches puberty. Although Unar's friends are chosen to serve the new, unknown deity who replaces Audblayin, Unar is denied that prestigious position. Determined to be a bodyguard anyway, Unar trains on her own and searches for the newborn, a journey which takes her into other gods' domains as well as to Understorey, where the people shun deities as well as slavery. There, confronting her past, Unar must decide whether or not to aid a rebellion to overthrow Canopy, her home. Dyer's debut nicely balances lyrical descriptions with faster-paced action sequences. Defined by her ambition, Unar can be vengeful and entitled, but she learns some humility as her worldview becomes more complex. Recommended for readers who appreciate nuanced world building, as both Canopy and Understorey are strange, fleshed-out lands thrown into turmoil.--Biz Hyzy
Dyer, Thoraiya: CROSSROADS OF CANOPY
Kirkus Reviews. (Nov. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Dyer, Thoraiya CROSSROADS OF CANOPY Tor (Adult Fiction) $25.99 1, 31 ISBN: 978-0-7653-8592-5
In a debut novel, Dyer introduces an unusual fantasy world set in the different levels of a giant forest and plagued by social strife.Canopy is a great city that spreads across the top level of a giant forest. Divided into 13 kingdoms, each devoted to a different god or goddess whose soul is constantly reincarnated into a human body, the world of Canopy holds itself carefully separate from the realms on the forest's lower levels. The city basks in the abundance that comes with plentiful sunlight and shores up its power and wealth with the labor of slaves. Unar, an ambitious and fiercely determined teenager, escapes her parents' plan to sell her into slavery and becomes a Gardener serving in the Garden of the goddess Audblayin. When the goddess dies, Unar finds herself passed over for promotion to a new level of magical power and service. Adrift from what she assumes is her destiny, she sets out to find the new reincarnation of her goddess and stumbles on to uncomfortable realizations about Canopy and her own past. The world of Unar's story is complicated and sometimes difficult to visualize, afflicted with profuse but often haphazard detail. Careful descriptions of clothes and people and the various fantastical quirks of the forest feel like notes for worldbuilding that the story does not quite have the strength and momentum to knit together. Race seems to play an important role in the social hierarchy of Canopy, but the story hesitates to make a strong, or even clear, statement. It is unclear whether the Canopians hold themselves above the pale-skinned residents of the lower levels because of their race or simply because they have the privilege of cultivating tans. An epic fantasy that builds an intriguing setting but never quite comes into focus.
Crossroads of Canopy
Publishers Weekly. 263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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* Crossroads of Canopy
Thoraiya Dyer. Tor, $25.99 (336p) ISBN 978-07653-8592-5
An ambitious young woman fiercely chases her destiny through an enormous, lush forest in Dyer's superb, epic, and hypnotic debut, which launches the Titan's Forest trilogy. In the great Forest, where the trees are "seven hundred people-lengths tall" and a single tree can house an entire city, 13 gods inhabit the upper Canopy, where the brown-skinned elite live luxurious lives in the sun and are protected by a magical barrier that keeps out the poor pale citizens of the lower darker Understory and Floor. In Canopy, Unar pledges herself to Audblayin, the goddess of birth and life. Unar feels in her heart that when the goddess dies, she will be reincarnated as male and therefore will require a female bodyguard, a position Unar is eager to fill. But after rescuing a slave who's been sentenced to death, Unar must flee to Understory, where she witnesses the consequences of slavery, meets an angry little girl named Frog, learns humility from three supportive brothers, and is ensnared by a dangerous revolutionary, who enlists Unar's powerful magic in her war to destroy the barrier and unite everyone into the so-called One Forest. Readers will be delighted by Dyer's polished prose and an exquisite new world of intricate mythology, rituals, and politics. Agent: Evan Gregory, Ethan Ellenberg Literary. (Jan.)
The Tree of Life and Death: Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya Dyer
Alex Brown
Fri Feb 3, 2017 12:00pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]
In a world made from a massive, interconnected forest, thirteen treetops form the kingdoms of Canopy. Each one is the domain of a god, the physical embodiment of traits necessary to keep the great forest alive such as rain, life, and death. Below and cut off from Canopy by a magical barrier is Understory, a sometime trading partner and most often raiders to the sun-soaked privileged above. And below Understory is Floor, a sinister, dark place full of demons and the bones of the ancient deities slaughtered long ago by the first incarnation of the thirteen sitting gods.
This is the world in which Unar is born. After the tragic loss of her baby sister, Unar commits herself as a servant in the Garden, the sacred temple of Audblayin, the goddess of creation and life. Unar believes her role in life is to be the bodyguard of the next Audblayin. But when she loses her chance at a promotion, her pride pushes her to extremes. Act act of brazen empathy leaves her cast out of Canopy and into the depths of Understory. Determined to take what she believes is her rightful place near the top of the Garden hierarchy by any means necessary, Unar embarks on a quest filled with blood, lies, pain, and sorrow. Her arrogance and selfish disdain for the feelings of others may be her own undoing when she inadvertently aids a force of evil so great not even the gods can challenge.
Crossroads of Canopy is a solid start to what I expect will be a crackling series. It’s filled to the brim with mythology, traditions, and belief systems practiced by a broad range of people and cultural groups. Dyer doesn’t waste anytime introducing the reader to Unar’s world, and she keeps that brisk pace up the whole book. In case it isn’t obvious, I was intrigued by the world Dyer built and the characters she populated it with. I just wish she spent a little less time on all the nitty-gritty details and more on what those details add up to.
The worldbuilding is both very good and not nearly enough. Dyer fills page after page with vivid detail about how people dress and look, variations on skin color, the evocative sounds and smells of Canopy and below, the intensity of what magic feels like. But for all that, she hints at her point yet never actually makes it. Canopy is a world built on socio-political hierarchy. Deities and kings are at the top; after that, rank is determined by where on the great trees one resides. Canopy itself has an internal hierarchy of royalty, wealthy landowners and merchants, workers, and slaves, with a dash of patriarchy—wives of powerful men are named, in The Handmaid’s Tale tradition, after their husbands, and we never see powerful wives with socially weak husbands.
Race also plays a part in determining social rank. Those above in Canopy have dark brown skin and those near Floor are pale white, and all Understorians above the barrier are enslaved. Dyer implies that this wasn’t always the case, but the reasons for that are barely addressed. Race is important only so far as it directly impacts Unar’s quest, but for a reader, particularly a person of color, Dyer’s avoidance of the bigger conversation does a disservice to the story and the audience.
The biggest glitch for me was that in the end I wasn’t all that enamored with Unar herself. Unar is, intentionally, selfish, proud, and over-confident. When she’s not boasting of her future role as Bodyguard to a reincarnated god or showing off her magical prowess, she’s sulking over some perceived slight or bemoaning her lowered circumstances. It was easier to tolerate Unar’s rather irritating personality when it was tempered by secondary characters like Edax or Aoun. Unfortunately she spends most of her time with secondaries who are either just as grating as she is or so passive as to vanish under Unar’s dominance.
To be fair, Unar does go through a whole helluva lot in Crossroads of Canopy, so it’s not like her sour attitude isn’t merited. And she does eventually learn her lesson. Although it’s also worth pointing out that much of her situational distress is caused or worsened by her superiority complex. I’m sure my dislike for Unar is more subjective opinion than objective criticism, so take my grumblings with a grain of salt.
Structurally, the only thing I found frustrating was how short and often abrupt the chapters often were. It was hard enough to get settled into an event or expositional moment only to get jerked out of it after a few pages. Even worse when a section break would cut an already short scene even shorter. The constant start-stop-start-stop made it hard for me to really sink into the experience. I kept finding myself constantly going back and re-reading sections because I unintentionally skimmed over important bits in anticipation of the inevitable jump cut.
That being said, all the plot machinations within the chapters was thrilling. Unar has harrowing adventure after harrowing adventure. Her romantic entanglements are titillating and the action set pieces raucous. Watching Unar try to outwit her way out of every sticky situation and get outwitted in turn by her enemies kept me on the edge of my seat.
Crossroads of Canopy felt a lot like Young Adult fiction. Seventeen-year-old Unar hits the same bildungsroman mile markers as the average teenage protagonist in a YA novel—particularly the references to her newfound sexual and romantic attractions. While sex and violence are frequently referenced, the depictions are oblique or muted. How Crossroads of Canopy ended up as adult fantasy rather than YA I couldn’t say, but older teens and adults that like YA will probably get the most out of the reading experience.
While the characters didn’t connect with me, the story sure did. That’s what kept me hooked and staying up way past my bedtime to finish just one more chapter…maybe one more…and one more after that. Still unsure if Crossroads of Canopy is your cup of tea? Check out this excerpt and prepare to be enticed. To have something so expansive and creatively rich come from a debut author is impressive. Bring on the sequel!
Crossroads of Canopy is available from Tor Books.
Alex Brown is a teen librarian, writer, geeknerdloserweirdo, and all-around pop culture obsessive who watches entirely too much TV. Keep up with her every move on Twitter and Instagram, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on her Tumblr.
Review of Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya Dyer, by Sarah Waites
Posted by COOLCURRYBOOKS on JANUARY 17, 2017
29939303Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya Dyer. ★★★
I cannot figure out why I didn’t like this book. It has so much that would normally appeal to me – an inventive fantasy setting, a flawed female lead, a diverse cast – but I just could not get into it. I procrastinated on reading it quite a bit, and it felt like work to reach the end.
Unar lives in the Canopy, the part of the forest city closest to the sun and thus the most elite. However, she has to flee her destitute family when her parents plot to sell her into slavery. She finds a place as a Gardner in the temple of the goddess Audblayin, where she uses her innate magic to help the growth of plants. When Audblayin dies, Unar sees it as a chance to fulfill her destiny by becoming the next incarnation’s Bodyguard. But Unar’s choices will lead her in a direction she never could have imagined.
As far as we know, Unar’s world is one giant forest, divided into Canopy, Understory, and Floor. In turn, the Canopy is divided into thirteen kingdoms, each the domain of one of the gods or goddesses. The forest had the feel of a tropical rainforest, and apparently many of the planets belong to the author’s Australian home. It was brilliantly imaginative and yet it left me cold. I never felt immersed in the setting or fascinated by it. I am at a loss to explain why.
Possibly some of my ambivalence regarding Crossroads of Canopy is because it’s a coming of age story, which I generally dislike. Crossroads of Canopy also heavily features one of my least favorite aspects of the coming of age genre – the young girl’s Sexual Awakening. I get that this is an important narrative for a lot of people… but I don’t relate to it at all. While this isn’t specifically on Crossroads of Canopy, I feel like this narrative tends to get treated like it’s universal, when not everyone experiences it. I also found her fixation on that one guy she’d barely talked to creepy, especially how she imagined that she’d awaken his innate sexuality and make him feel things that he’d never felt before. Urgh, save me now.
In general, I didn’t like Unar. I found her arrogant and self centered. She’s convinced that she is special, and I found it highly obnoxious. I’ve been analyzing myself and trying to figure out if I would judge her so harshly if she was a male character, since readers tend to be less tolerant of heavily flawed female characters. Yet, I can think of female characters who I love that are also arrogant and self centered. Maybe it’s because most of those tend to be anti-heroines while Unar’s presented as more of a straight up heroine? Or maybe because they had more life experience to back up their absurd arrogance? While Unar did have some self-reflection and growth towards the end of the book, it was too little too late. The story had already lost me.
Disliking Unar might not have been so bad if there was a supporting character I could latch onto, but I disliked most of them as well! The only ones who I thought were okay (the three Understory brothers for instance) also felt very forgettable and bland.
Anyway, I’m not recommending Crossroads of Canopy or planning to read the sequel. I do have the feeling that this could end up being one of those books that most people love except for me. If you try it, may you have better luck with it than me.
I received a free ARC of Crossroads of Canopy from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.