Angelica by Sharon Shinn

Set 200 years before the first novel, Archangel, Angelica is a prequel in the Samaria series. The Archangel is named Gabriel Aaron, but called Gaaron by most, and he, too, must find his Angelica to sing the Gloria to Jovah once a year. So he goes to find out who Jovah decrees his Angelica will be, and finds that it is a young woman of the Edori tribe named Susannah. Just like Gabriel, Gaaron must find his bride, since the Edori are a travelling people that crisscross the land of Samaria, settling nowhere and living everywhere.

Susannah has some problems of her own, as she is in love with a man of another tribe named Dathan, and has left her own tribe to follow and be with him. But Dathan has a wandering eye, and when he begins to take up with another young woman, Susannah finds herself heartbroken, but still willing to try and make the relationship work. But when they find a burned and broken campsite, all the people in it dead, the entire group is upset, and when Gaaron comes to their campsite seeking rumors of such attacks, he and Susannah meet.

Susannah is not like other women. Unlike most Edori, she has been baptised and a crystal called a Kiss implanted in her arm. But she is unique in that she has two Kisses, one in her arm and another in her neck. And ever since she was a child, she has dreamed of a place that is all gleaming white and silver, with glass screens set in the walls. And of a strange male voice that speaks to her of a task she must fulfill.

When Gaaron becomes aware that Susannah is the woman that Jovah has decreed to be his wife, he, in his steady and considerate way, tells her what the Oracle has said. She is in just enough pain from her broken relationship with Dathan to agree to go with him, but she finds life at the Aerie to be very different from that among the Edori. For one thing, unlike the Edori, everyone in the Aerie sleeps alone, and Susannah quickly finds herself lonely in bed alone. But luckily, she quickly makes friends among the humans and angels at the Aerie, and persuades them to sleep over in her room, including a little Jansai girl, orphaned by the death of her clan and found by angels on patrol, including Gaaron.

But the little girl cannot speak, or perhaps she simply doesn't want to. While Susannah looks after her, and Gaaron's sister, Gaaron speaks with the Jansai, hoping the girl will speak to her own people, and be reunited with them. Susannah is most often paired with Gaaron's sister, who is often bored and causes trouble to alleviate that boredom or to punish those she feels has wronged her. But what she really wants is attention from her brother, and when he takes her with him to call for help when plague strikes a farm in Gaaron's lands, she has an encounter with a stranger unlike any in Samaria.

The man's skin is black, his hair bright red, and his eyes blue. And one moment he is there, and the next he is gone. Gaaron believes his sister Miriam when she tells him what she has seen, and posits that these black men are the ones responsible for the attacks that have killed so many. Reaction to this is mixed, but while everyone thinks the raiders must be dealt with, some wish to return to the old, forbidden weapons, like guns and bombs, to do so. But the angels know that Jovah proscribed those weapons for a reason, and are resistant to calls to do so.

Meanwhile, Miriam has gone too far and begun an affair with a married, much older man. But when his wife surprises him in bed with her, she kills her husband and sends Miriam fleeing for her life. Gaaron has had enough, and although she confided in Susannah and not him, he knows she cannot stay in the Aerie any longer. While the man's wife didn't know her name or even what she looked like beyond a vague description, Susannah has an idea and sends Miriam to work at the home of an Edori who settled in Luminaux.

But Miriam decides to punish her brother and Susannah for sending her so far away by joining the band of Edori that Susannah left when she came to live with Gaaron. Although the life is hard, Miriam soon adapts and learns willingly to live in harmony with the Edori lifestyle. And when the camp is attacked one night by the black men who have been attacking ever-larger encampments of people around Samaria, it is her action which saves the lives of the Edori from the fire-weapons of the strangers.

One of the men is badly hurt, and Miriam and the other Edori decide to take care of him and not let him die. Since Miriam was the first one to voice the thought, she also volunteers to take care of him, and slowly begins to befriend him and learn his language, while teaching him her own. The stranger, who names himself as Jossis, doesn't seem to be all that violent when parted from his people, and soon he is helping the Edori as if he was one of them, even if not all of them trust him.

But they must tell someone that he exists, and as Gaaron clumsily tries to woo Susannah and he joins with the other angels to fight off the invaders, Susannah is becoming frustrated by her relationship with Gaaron, who she has fallen in love with but who has never heard words of love from him. And the dreams continue to plague her, of that strange place of gleaming white and silver, so she goes to the Oracle Mahahla to try and understand these dreams. But Mahahla knows better than Susannah can dream of what Jovah wants, and soon Susannah has a far greater role to play in the defeat of the black invaders than she ever guessed for herself...

Well, this book was actually the fourth in the series, not the second like I had guessed, but at least it lived up to the background promised in the first book. Although having just finished the third book, Jovah's Angel, I am now wondering why the "second Kiss" didn't appear there, as it would probably have come in handy in solving the problem in that book.

This was another interesting story set in the world of Samaria. Sharon Shinn seems to like female Edori characters, since the two stories I have read so far feature them, even though the first heroine, Rachel, was only Edori by adoption, she did pick up many features of their lifestyle. And in this book, Susannah was full Edori. The book's major tribes seemed to be tied to modern religion, with most humans being Christian, the Edori Jewish, and the Jansai Islamic, what with their protecting women from pollution by men by making them wear enveloping robes and shunning the Jansai girl who inadvertantly spent time with men among the angels.

The story, too, this time had more fantastic elements, or I should say, science fiction elements. Teleporting (which I gathered early on was how the "black men" were so quickly and easily disappearing) and then later on, we see it happen to Susannah as well. But the appearances of the enemy of the book were kept superficial enough that the denoument of the novel still ended up being something of a surprise. And with the fate of Jossis also explaining why there are no black people on Samaria.

In fact, that troubled me more than a little. Samarians are all white, or at least, light-complected. That the dark-skinned alien humans were all violent and doing nothing but attacking people smacked a little bit of racism, even if it wasn't quite presented in that way, and I think the depiction of Jansai as slavers is more than a little troubling as well, since they seemed to represent the Islamic peoples, as I have said.

Yes, the book was about war and violence, and how the human race seems unbearably attracted to wiping out parts of itself because of its differences, but the book seemed rather too biased in very many ways, and I had a harder time enjoying it for that reason. It's not a bad book, but it wasn't as enjoyable for me to read as Archangel, and I still prefer the first book more.