THE SILVER SAIL (THE COSEEMA SAGA)

A teenage aspiring fantasy author teleported to the dystopic star system of her own fiction tries to protect her friends and elude pursuit by destructive forces, including a frighteningly corrupted superhero.

Portman continues the Coseema Saga, a YA epic fantasy/SF series that began with The Twin Stars (2021), featuring a teen writer haplessly lost in the far-out fictional universe of her imagination. Olive Joshi, 16, is trapped in an exotic star system she conceived in her notebook, an abandoned storytelling effort. It is nightmarish, an unstable arrangement of dying dual suns throwing solar flares on the planet Lyria, where “a brutal tyrant” named Burnash is the main villain—until the resurrection of his sister, Coseema. Originally a superpowered figure of virtue and strength (faintly resembling the self-doubting Olive), Coseema returned from her death/defeat a vengeful, sadistic, bat-winged fiend who covets limitless power that she may achieve by obtaining her creator’s notebook. After her narrow escape from Coseema, Olive has the notebook, but the superhero has the matching custom pen for writing in it. Now, as Coseema and Burnash viciously search Lyria for the Earth girl, Olive and her allies escape via spaceship to outer planets in the system, where an escape space-ark craft, the Wave-Rider, may remain as a last resort for Lyrians. The odyssey brings Olive and her friends (whom, don’t forget, she originally wrote, and for whom she feels tremendous, guilty responsibility) to new revelations and surprising and shocking reunions. Meanwhile, descriptions and narratives in Olive’s notebook continue to appear. But written by whom? The story’s ambiance is a blend of science and sword-and-sorcery magic, and often it is difficult to get a sense of the ground rules at work. But then again, one could argue this is exactly the dilemma that would be faced in a tyro effort from a novice author coming to grips with her inner Neil Gaiman, with half-formed characters and sketchy conceits taking on lives of their own. This sequel does suffer from middle-chapter syndrome, with interconnected ensemble characters whose entrances and exits and backstories are hard to trace without a chart. But by the ending, readers should be sufficiently hooked to follow the vivid, ominous threads into the next volume.

An engaging installment of a complicated SF/fantasy series about a besieged writer.