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A review by emcgillivray
The Brightest Night by Tui T. Sutherland
4.0
The Brightest Night was a satisfying wrap-up to the first arc in Wings of Fire.
As a character, Sunny needed a growth path on her own and to expand from her belief in them as prophecy fulfillers to dragons who can change their culture. She needed to do this on her. Unfortunately, it meant that in our last book, we didn't see Sunny interacting and changing the inner group dynamics among her friends as she was mostly on her own.
Sunny is the character most attached to non-violent methods, and she has to be the one to figure it out. <spoilers>Of course, while Sunny does not use violence, Thorn, Burn, and Blister do. While our hero dragons don't come away unscathed (interestingly enough, our boy dragons Clay and Starflight are disabled, and none of the girl dragons are harmed physically), we don't have any deaths amongst our crew. Even as the dragons memorialize those who died, I'm unsure how much readers cared about those dragons. Tsunami's killing of her father (unbeknownst to her and in a manipulated POW gladiatorial ring) still stood out as the most personally horrific to our five heroes.</spoilers>
I don't know how I feel about expanding the Scavenger interactions here and bringing humans into the story. Though, seriously, the dragons should realize that Scavengers are intelligent if they can do art! (Me pointing at the "AI" (aka LLM copy machines) that cannot do art, and some humans are convinced can replace artists.)
I wanted more of Sunny and Thorn, as having a healthy parent-child relationship was nice.
The epilogue quickly tried to wrap up too many other details and set up for the next part of the series. <spoilers>Queen Scarlet still alive means she will continue as a big bad or play a red herring. </spoilers>
As a character, Sunny needed a growth path on her own and to expand from her belief in them as prophecy fulfillers to dragons who can change their culture. She needed to do this on her. Unfortunately, it meant that in our last book, we didn't see Sunny interacting and changing the inner group dynamics among her friends as she was mostly on her own.
Sunny is the character most attached to non-violent methods, and she has to be the one to figure it out. <spoilers>Of course, while Sunny does not use violence, Thorn, Burn, and Blister do. While our hero dragons don't come away unscathed (interestingly enough, our boy dragons Clay and Starflight are disabled, and none of the girl dragons are harmed physically), we don't have any deaths amongst our crew. Even as the dragons memorialize those who died, I'm unsure how much readers cared about those dragons. Tsunami's killing of her father (unbeknownst to her and in a manipulated POW gladiatorial ring) still stood out as the most personally horrific to our five heroes.</spoilers>
I don't know how I feel about expanding the Scavenger interactions here and bringing humans into the story. Though, seriously, the dragons should realize that Scavengers are intelligent if they can do art! (Me pointing at the "AI" (aka LLM copy machines) that cannot do art, and some humans are convinced can replace artists.)
I wanted more of Sunny and Thorn, as having a healthy parent-child relationship was nice.
The epilogue quickly tried to wrap up too many other details and set up for the next part of the series. <spoilers>Queen Scarlet still alive means she will continue as a big bad or play a red herring. </spoilers>