AURORA’S ANGEL

In this fantasy debut, two shape-shifters form a bond that may change their world.

As Noon’s sprawling novel opens, readers find a mysterious woman named Aurora skulking through a mine that’s crawling with poisonous spiders. She’s hunting for valuable ethian crystals when she’s brought up short by the last thing she expects to encounter in such a dark, forbidding place: a beautiful song. Tracing the tune to its source, Aurora is enraged to find a cutter’s den: “A place of unimaginable horror, where shapeshifters were imprisoned while their bodies were systematically harvested for the high price their parts fetched on the black market.” Aurora lives in Nordarra, a region populated by many different, scattered clans of shape-shifters—mer-people, tiger-shifters, wolf-shifters, and avians, who can grow enormous wings out of their backs. These beings are presumably the descendants of the folks who came to Nordarra from the human world and were taught magic that allowed them to transform into shape-shifters. (Another theory is that those first human visitors were the servants of Nordarra’s original inhabitants and interbred with them.) In this realm, avians are frequently characterized as untrustworthy. It gives Aurora pause to discover that the song in the mine comes from a captive avian named Evie, but the two form a wary partnership. In exchange for Aurora’s dealing with the mine’s guards, Evie will fly them both to freedom. When Evie is injured and rendered temporarily flightless during their escape, the two are thrown into a close, earthbound struggle to survive—and to fulfill Aurora’s primal vow to track down all the parts of her father’s tiger form that were harvested by cutters years ago.

Noon handles the gradual unfolding of the story’s plots and subplots with a remarkably sure hand. Virtually none of debut novelists’ typical mistakes—clunky dialogue, incomplete concepts, and especially great blocks of undigested exposition—crop up in this book’s 500-plus pages. The political interplay of Nordarra’s various clans and factions is intelligently rendered as a backdrop for the tale’s central, most touching thread: Aurora’s and Evie’s (in reality, Evangeline Aquilar, oldest child of a powerful avian leader) gradually easing their personal and cultural barriers as their necessity-born friendship deepens into something more. The author has a straightforward, unadorned way of showing her characters clearly to readers, and it’s genuinely involving to watch Aurora overcome the lessons of her traumatic childhood in order to feel tender emotions again. The two women’s ongoing discovery of each other’s attributes is the story’s highlight. “You’re quite extraordinary and a little scary,” Aurora tells Evie at one point. “You’re like a kitten that looks all sweet and cuddly but you have sharp claws. Remind me never to cross you.” There are stretches in the narrative where Noon’s vivid personal revelation scenes almost overshadow the other pieces of the multifaceted plot structure, but these episodes are infrequent. The various levels of drama are usually kept in a balance that’s expertly maintained right through to the exciting (albeit, predictable) climactic scenes. The world of Nordarra—and the mechanics and psychology of shape-shifting—is drawn with an appealing intricacy that will make readers hope to return to this setting in future novels.

An impressive and confident tale of two women finding love in a realm of shape-shifters.