K. N. Salustro was one of our Author's Alley participants at last year's CoKoCon and I was happy to pick up a bunch of her books. I was fully intending to dive into “Cause of Death: ???” first, which looks like fantasy told with dark humour; but I ended up starting with this one instead. It's a standalone novella set in a world she's had great success with, through 'The Star Hunters' trilogy. The series proper is space opera that I presume is written for an adult audience, but this is, I presume, much simpler and more YA in nature. It took me back to my teens when I discovered the Menolly trilogy within 'The Dragonriders of Pern'.

And Anne McCaffrey isn't a bad comparison, because it's pretty obvious that her fire lizards were cats and her dragons were horses. Salustro goes with arkins, which I presume look exactly like the cover art, because she painted it herself. That means they're sort of big cats sporting the wings of dragons and, like McCaffrey's dragons, they serve as a fantasy/science fiction take on horses. This isn't about riding free, though; it's about one of the sports of kings, horse racing, as the author is keen to make clear in her introductory note that also highlights that Dark Mirage, one arkin we'll meet in this novella, is named for a real horse who's been unjustly forgotten by history.

We'll meet Dark Mirage soon enough, but she's not one of the principal characters. The lead for us is Rosario Dellaventura, who goes by Ro and is a highly successful former arkin rider who has been kicked off the circuit. She's now dipping her toes back into that world by seeking a stud partner for her arkin, Paprika, an arkin she "rescued" after one of her wings was damaged in a race. That word is in quotes because "rescued" technically means "stolen" here, even if Paprika was going to be put down and Ro has taken care of her ever since.

The reason we have a novella is that Ro finds that stud partner, through a lady called Amina who's got a mission of her own hinging on the partnership. I won't spoil the details but that provides us with three character arcs here, which is plenty for a hundred and twenty page novella.

Ro aches to be back out there on the circuit where she feels she belongs, racing arkins, though she serves even more importantly as a trainer here. I should point out that she's human, born on one of the Terran colonies where I believe her native tongue is a dialect of Spanish. However, we're not there for this book, instead shifting to Amina's spacious estate on Earth where Ro trains Paprika's new kit, then following the racing circuit around the galaxy to the Omega Race on Arax. She has a nemesis, a fellow human who works for the Za Jurrak racing dynasty, who have quite the monopoly at the highest level of arkin racing, because of their exclusive breed, the Storm Riders.

Amina has a history with the Za Jurraks too, though we have no idea what that is. What we know is that she's a very willing threat to their exclusivity, because she has a Storm Rider and she is more than willing to mate it with Paprika, a former champion, to create a new hybrid for Ro to train and either shake the pedestals the Za Jurraks' arkins occupy or topple them entirely. She's Ro's ticket back in and it's all the more valid a ticket because Amina has a vested interest in seeing both her and the kit, officially named Wings of Aquila but dubbed Char by Ro, succeed.

The third arc ought to be Paprika's, because she went in a single instant from being a champion to being worthless. Nobody wants an arkin that can't fly and Paprika's wing was beyond saving after Ro pushed her too hard in a race. That means that she's living on borrowed time, secure only in an air of obscurity. Even Ivan, Ro's nemesis who helped her steal her, had no idea that she'd kept her. However, her name has to go on the paperwork and so that secret's out. Of course, her arc begins with history and transfers, after her troubled pregnancy, to her kit. We don't know how high Char will climb on the circuit, though we do have obvious expectations, but we're always aware that his achievements could have been his mother's.

There's a lot to praise here, even though these arcs are relatively inevitable. I haven't spoiled any detail here but I'm sure you can read between the lines and extrapolate out and end up not a long way from where the book does. I didn't figure everything out early, but I nailed most of it. I can see that as being a negative, but it's the only one. Everything else isn't just positive but strongly so.

For a start, this is a great-looking book. I don't just mean the cover art, though that's uncluttered and highly effective, a perfect visual to lead us into the story. I mean the layout of the book itself, which was published through KDP but very professionally put together first. The old school fonts combined with no nonsense typography makes the book seem elegant and worthy.

And talking of old school, the depth of worldbuilding is effortless. Sure, this surely benefits from being a standalone novella tied to an existing trilogy, but Salustro juggles alien races, planets and other details with an ease that many full time writers would covet. I never felt lost when she introduced characters of new species, languages and customs, because she condensed the detail down into all that needed to be there. I felt just as surrounded by the alien as in an "Uplift" book by David Brin and just as comfortable with the experience. It makes me eager to read the trilogy proper.

That doesn't just apply to characters or indeed places, when we get to the point of shifting from planet to planet for successive races. It applies to the whole sport of arkin racing, which is clearly rooted in horse racing but adapted in a clever way to this science fictional setting. It isn't as easy as translating something we know into something we don't. There are a whole bunch of reasons why doing so would fail and Salustro's on the ball enough to see them all and tweak accordingly, meaning that we can thrill to a fictional sport we can grasp immediately even though it's done in wildly different ways.

Another success is how Ro feels acutely like a YA heroine, even though she's obviously older than such tend to be. She's had a career and enough time has passed that her blacklisting out of it has mostly been forgotten. Amina isn't young either, with plenty of history of her own told before we join her in this book. That means that the only character who ought to fit in a YA novella is Char, a young arkin who, unlike McCaffrey's dragons and so many other equivalents, can't communicate with anyone in words, whether they be spoken or thought. Yet, I could see each of them animated in a feature form of this novella and thrilling young kids the world over.

That's a lot of successes and not a heck of a lot else, because the simplicity and inevitability of an admittedly time-honoured story that can't be avoided is really about it. I may come to regret not starting into Salustro's work with “Cause of Death: ???”, which looks to be right up my alley, but I'm certainly not regretting starting out here. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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