Blurb:

Every oath holds power.

In a land where the Earth spawns terrible beasts capable of moving through all but stone, the Sky bestows power to those bound by Oaths.

As earthbound creatures invade, bringing with them chaos and whispers of a coming war, protector and Overseer Tehran fights to keep his people safe. After losing his best friend to the beasts and with the stability of the region deteriorating, Tehran heads to the Capital to plead for support from the Order of the Sky.

When his friend’s widow stows aboard the transport, determined to hold the Order accountable for the death of her husband, Tehran’s plans are derailed. Torn between upholding his responsibility as an Overseer or honouring his friend’s memory, Tehran must either choose the Oaths that have forged him or trust new bonds to guard the fate of the Mercurial.

Review:

So… I got FOMO as an SFFI reviewer at the time where it seemed that the entire team was reading “Earthbound”l at one point or another, which led me to reach out to Katee Stein for a digital copy. And then, after I had finished, I scribbled a note on graph paper for a review and proceeded to get hit by the same slump as last year; just a bit later. And since I have gotten back into reviewing/reading prolifically that it’s a miracle I am still sane with all the stories in me, I found the piece of graph paper and am going off those notes, being reminded, ever so slightly, of what happened in the book, flashes of a full picture fleeting across your mind. It’s a good novel when it sticks with one forty-five novels later, with the same clarity as it was when reading every time one sees a reminder, causing a smile or frown, depending on what moment the memory dumped you in. Is it the moment of silent horror as you see the ground open up and eat a main character or is it the moment of hilarious overthinking to the extreme when the other main character does something drastic to keep another character safe? It’s impossible to tell, which is nice, because it keeps the story alive in the mind.

But let me go away from that tangent of thought and pitch a sale to you, reading this, wondering where I am going with the previous paragraph:

“Tehran and Knox are best friends, sharing an occupation as overseers, until Knox is stripped of his power. Shortly after that, tragedy strikes.”,

alongside my usual question of if you’d like some more knowledge of “Earthbound”, and if you want some more, just keep reading past this paragraph. If not, there’s plenty of other reviews here to peruse. 

To get this rambling train on the move, we have the three main characters, Tehran, Knox and Emilia. Tehran is the family friend of the other two, who are married. I usually do not go off bantering the other characters names, but for the sake of my sanity and yours, I’d like to refrain from too many “hims” and “her husband” and “he went to get him” in one sentence, it’d drive anyone mad when I try to paint the plot with that.

To start off, let’s look at Tehran. From what I remember, and it comes back to me as I write, he is driven by the ideals of the overseers, by the binding oaths they must follow and the customs they adhere to, however strict and however odd and peculiar they may seem. This sets him aside from everyone else, even those closest to him, isolating him in hermitude, self-imposed, and distant barrier that only his best friend can ever really understand, what with his best friend also being an overseer. As the novel unfolds and tragedy and adventure strike repeatedly, he grows out of his shell, opens up a bit, and is a bit more daring in his flaunting of the rules - that is, if you go from nil to getting a stick and pointing it over the line imposed by the Order of the Overseers.

Then, there’s Knox. Take an optimistic adult, married, imagine him being a fanatical Presbyterian when it comes to following the rules of his creed, and have his ideals and emotions tossed into a blender when he gets kicked out of his organisation one week for being an expectant father and gets swallowed by a earth monster sometime in the short period after that. We’ll leave him alone for now, he needs a minute.

Leaving Knox in his pocket of earth for now, let's look over at Emilia. She’s there, doing her thing, being a supportive wife, with a child on the way, when Knox gets chomped. What does she do as a response to that? Put herself in a situation where she can get her husband reinstated into the order for a proper burial. Nice sentiment and all, but it doesn’t do much when one is surrounded by earth that could, at any moment, decide to end you with granite monsters from hell. So she hitchhikes and learns the meaning of “I have jumped off into the deep end with mild preparation and what have I gotten into?”. Just like Tehran and Knox, she gets out of her comfort shell a bit and leans more into the world around her, going new places and talking with Overseer leaders.

From there, we have the plot. Or, rather, the plots. There’s a myriad of them gathering about, knocking into one another, weaving, spinning, dancing about, leaving us readers with a cohesive enough line to follow to the end.

One plot follows Tehran, another Elmiria, and another line I won’t elaborate too much for book reasons and spoiler reasons. For the two aforementioned humans, their plots are intertwined but oh so different. 

For Tehran, his goal in the novel is to bring the news of his friend's death to the Overseers council, as well as warnings that sabotage and other strange happenings were happening. This brings many, many poor events to him as he tries to hold to the elaborate code that they have. Especially since he wasn’t planning on the presence of his traveling companion who decided to hitchhike against wishes from everyone in the immediate family and beyond, due to the fact that, well, she was with child. And that brings me to Elmiria’s plot.

Her plot? Get her husband reinstated into the Overseer's order via petition to the council for a proper burial. Sounds simple enough… at least in theory. The practical part, that practical part of the plan, that gets difficult very quickly.

And this is where plans converge and the shenanigans start happening. Oh, do the shenanigans start here; unbreakable oaths get made under the watchful eye of the sky, political intrigue plays out in unpredictable manners, as it should, and situations with the happenings get worse and worse. And all that is happening while Tehran and Elmiria are trying to fulfil their own individual goals, dealing with their own relationship as friends, with them  being more than friends by the end of it. The last, final plot line is just doing it’s own thing away from the other two, just tuckering along without interacting with the shenanigans of the aforementioned plots at all until the penultimate showdown at the end of the novel. That, I’ll leave that one alone while the person driving the plot is suffering a bit.

Now, jumping from plot to world building, let us take a look at the Overseers as an order. They follow the sky, the spark of light that drives the world. And so, they are aptly named Order of the Sky. Everyone who joins swears a primary oath to the sky itself and then a multitude of others that need to be followed to a letter. After that it splits into the nerds and the bodyguards, the acumen and the overseers. From there, a conclave of everyone exists, which holds each part of the world within their power, to the best of their ability. Think of them as the Jedi council with the moral compass of a goldfish, with the elders and the elevated, each trying to put their own ideas through, with some good and some bad in the mix. On the other side we have the earthborn, the monsters of the book. There’s various names for them, with the largest being able to cause mass destruction easily. How do they do that? They liquefy the earth around them and eat things off the surface. Which is why people have decided to live above ground or over large quantities of rock, since the earthborn only liquefy the more moveable ground. Some earthbound are herbivores, others carnivores, some scavengers and all dangerous to humans and other lifeforms. Take that, combine it with the map of the world (yes, we have a map, yay!) and you get an immersive survival of the strategic placement of the settlements. But wait, there’s more! Technology exists. And centered around not touching the ground/keeping the earth t-rexes out. Do they work? Yes, to a degree. Once the big ones start popping up, the not touching ground tech can keep people alive, the other stuff… Invision a club against a giant tank. The tech is the club… And that’s the tech to keep the small critters away, and the larger critters just don’t care about it as much. Which is where the Order of the Sky with their Overseers and weapons that utilize the sky. And that solves all their problems, to a degree. But that society ain’t the only one. Which just adds more and more twists and turns to an already intrigue ridden story.

From there, lastly, we have the oaths of the Order of the Sky……. And this could be added to the world building, but the world building section is long already, and the oaths are basically the base oath of serving the sky and then whatever else slapped on by the various elders and elevated, which make life for any in the order a solitary one. Now what happens when those oaths get in conflict with other oaths made under the sky? Madness and death, or a rescinding of one of those two oaths. Which is where the fun of this story starts, because it plays with these dilemmas a few times, whenever the characters are acting a duress to enact change or when interacting with anyone, really. Does it make the story more action packed? Yes. Does it make sense that oaths sometimes behave paradoxically? Yes. Do I think that the characters made a dumb decision with the oaths they toss around at times? Yes. Does that detract from the story? No.

But, like any novel, especially the first or second ones, there is a lack of proper explanation in parts, especially when taking the glossary into the picture. Sure, we get all the explanations as to who is who and what tech is what. But the lore. What drove civilization to act the way it does? Why is there so much infighting, besides the lure of power, in the Order of the Sky? It’s either this just being book one with more on the way, or everything is as it always has been, and I’d like answers to that. But that is just a minor gripe, and it’s been a while since I’ve read it, so my critique might be non-existent for you. It’s all in the reader's own interest, and in the end, that’s what I’d like to do, get someone, anyone, to read the books that are on this world and see the things people have concocted with their imagination.

Overall, if you like stone golems of death, infighting, intrigue and magic with the power of the sky, Katee Stein's novel is for you.

As usual, if you’ve made it this far into the review, thank you, and I hope I’ve helped nudge you towards your next read. If my review’s been a bit rambly at spots, here are some more reviews from fellow SFF Insiders that you can jump in on, if you’d like.

→ Amanda Simas, with a collection of the central themes of the novel

→ Joshua Walker, with a short but precise review, and comparisons to other books

→ Erika | Daughteroffantasy, with a lot of comparisons to other beloved series.

However, if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, don’t fret, here’s a random, picked at random, not chosen by me whatsoever, link to a review for a novel in a completely different direction than this one. You might’ve read it already, you might not know about reading it, but that’s the fun of a random link, you don’t know what’s going to come out once you click it, just that it’s part of the site.

Wherever you are reading this lengthy review, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!