WARNING! INEVITABLE SPOILERS BELOW!

Second in author Leslee Sheu’s Kumasagi fantasy saga, Kandargiri shifts focus from the triangular romantic tension among destin Asta and the two brothers Najat and Jayan Gampoban to the latter of the brothers on his river expedition to the titular Kandargiri cliffs with this story’s most central protagonist, Padir Dagarapan. As one would come to expect from Kumasagi, Part 1: Destin, the saga sequel is rich with in-world cultural and religious lore, geographic detail, and now more than before, wildlife ecology. For Padir Dagarapan, though he settled down as master of the blackrock mines in northeastern Dagaragiri, is determined to finally fulfill his fantasy of flying atop the back of one of Kandargiri’s massive, murderous lopperbeaks.

As hinted in the introduction, world-building continues to be Sheu’s strongest suit in the saga. Throughout all of Kandargiri, environmental as well as architectural elements are fleshed out in greater detail than any real-world travel log, blog, vlog, or guide. Each winding stretch of the Nagi River from Destin’s locale, Shakti Lake City, to the southwestern costal town Nichapur is colored with its own set of obstacles with which the expedition team must contend. As a modern reader in a world with such conveniences as cars, interstate highways, and GPS mapping, the slow, arduous boat travel, preplanning of routes and lodging, and ever present dangers along the way read refreshingly in much the same way as one feels reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Each new town was truly its own place with its own peoples and subcultures, economies, and way of living.

The highlight of the setting by far Kandargiri itself. The moment Jayan, Padir, and the rest of the crew arrive, a sense of ill omen fills the air, wafting off the momentous skeletons of the carnivorous lopperbeaks. The town of Nichapur proves even more foreboding. The omnipresence of skyward-facing, sharpened stake defensive structures suggests danger could descend from the sky at any moment. Enhancing this effect are the people of Nichapur themselves. Sheu makes it clear via the villagers’ bodily conditions and dispositions that being maimed is a common enough occurrence in southern Kandargiri that it doesn’t warrant the horror exhibited by Shakiti Lake City’s visiting university students. Sharks, lopperbeaks, and possibly other predators are more than a possibility: they are the reality in Nichapur.

Herein does the plot of this book connect the setting and characters. Padir wants to be the first man to fly on the back of a lopper, and now he finally has his chance. As it turns out, there is a mystic in Nichapur named Shigarin who possesses the unique ability to psychically control the deadly birds. One such bird, Blossom, has been tamed and measured for the purpose. Padir has seen to it that a saddle be constructed, and now all there is to do is to run the experiments and discover if it is really possible.

And this is where Kandargiri falls a bit flat narratively.

The plot itself is actually well structured: it is a classic tragedy (I’ll say that hopefully without giving away too much). A man with high aspirations sets out single-mindedly to make his dream a reality, no matter the risk. However, the execution of the pacing strains reader investment for the first half of the book. Put simply, the trip down the river, while vivid in detail, isn’t really even exposition for the conflict at hand. To a reader, that means the story doesn’t start in earnest until many chapters in. That’s nearly a hundred pages of world-building, characterization, set-up for future books without also giving the readers a central conflict to feel invested in.

On further reflection, this hyper extension in the beginning of the book seems to be the consequence of nearly everything in the Kumasagi series being rendered in scene as opposed to summary. While this plethora of scenes give Sheu ample opportunity to flesh out her setting, which she does with great detail and skill, it also bogs down the pacing to an absolute crawl—at least until action begins its rise. Then the scenes each have something at stake which the reader desires to find out about on the next page.

And there are, indeed, characters of interest, though as mentioned, they are not Najat nor Jayan in this part of the saga. Padir Dagarapan, Amala Mirigar, and Shigaran are the three people of greatest interest: Padir because the whole expedition is really a front for his attempted flight on the lopperbeak, Mirigar because of her past relationship with Padir (they were former lovers), and Shigaran for his mental instability, special psychic powers, and apparent bloodlust.

However, these are but three characters among more than a dozen who feature prominently throughout the book. There are many, many more, including a few students from Patal University where Jayan works, a few blackrock miners from Dagaragiri, multiple Amalas and their attendants plus diver mystics, and the friends and families of this already daunting cast. Because there are so many characters “on-the-page” most of the time, none gets much attention and therefore little characterization separate from his or her connection directly to the setting. The result is that most of the cast comes across as fairly flat and static, and those rounder characters—namely Padir, Mirigar, and Shigaran—don’t get as much as much fleshing out as the story could have handled (e.g. We know there was a love affair between Padir and Mirgar that died out, but we don’t see any real significance or consequence of it; we know that Shigaran has been plagued by his powers and also made sadistic, but we don’t get to see the details of how that impacts his relationship with his wife or parents; and lastly, we see a burgeoning love affair between Dorigar, Shigaran’s wife, and one of the students, Jadil, but we are not given Dorigar’s motivations for taking such desperate risks—her husband could definitely and seems likely to kill her if she got caught).

In short, on the side of the characters, Kandargiri set up quite a bit of potential, tried to juggle a huge cast across what is a relatively short-to-medium length novel, and spread its characterization thin as a consequence.

In final note, some words should be shared about the style of the prose. Following from Destin, the omniscient third-person point-of-view fits perfectly for the almost mythological / historical story-teller voice of the narrator. it reads very much like an epic, which given the attention to world and setting, is likely precisely what Sheu was going for. That being said, the Kumasagi saga so far is very discursive in its language. Where figures of speech are employed, they are always executed well, and so many, many more are welcomed in the novels to come. The already rich setting would be much enhanced by a shift toward poetic description. Such would transform the prose from epic in tone to tonally an epic poem.

Comparing Destin to Kandargiri, the sequel is simultaneously much of the same and a stark departure. Padir’s experimentations with the lopperbeak and the literally high-flying action provide a welcome sense of tension and risk after the relationship-centered first book. After finishing Kandargiri, readers ought to be primed to dive back into the deep, emotional conflict among Jayan, Asta, and Najat—which is assumedly the central conflict of the third book in the saga, Wife.

And so the story goes on. Join in the adventure and drama by picking up your copies of the Kumasagi series by clicking on the cover above.