Knight is the second installment in the Sibyl’s War series, and this review will contain some spoilers for the first book, Pawn. The story is a direct continuation of events in Pawn, and I highly recommend reading that first.
As one of the special humans who can communicate with the starship Fyrantha, Nicole found herself of even more mysteries and trouble than the others kidnapped to work as the ship’s repair crew. Now parts of the ship itself have chosen Nicole as its new Protector, a role that will be particularly difficult since she needs to keep the competing factions from realizing the true potential of her fellow humans if she wishes to save her planet.
Pawn was a good start to Sibyl’s War that presented an extremely interesting world with decent characters whose actions and characterizations felt occasionally unnatural due to the necessities of the plot. Overall though I enjoyed it and was curious about where things would go from there. I wasn’t able to confirm this 100%, but I think this is a trilogy which would make Knight the middle portion of the ongoing story.
Knight has a slower, more deliberate pace than Pawn, with a LOT of establishing geography, etc. Zahn manages not to turn these sections into info dumps, but there’s still a lot of detail in constant streams woven throughout. I could see and certainly understand some pushback over this style and the resultant pacing, but I actually found it appropriate and enjoyed this book a touch more than the first.
I found characters’ actions more reasonable and internally consistent which allowed me to get even more caught up in the intrigue and Nicole’s efforts to outplay the various competing influences and figure out what was truly happening on the Fyrantha. The build for the next installment felt natural and the revelations in Knight set things up for another direct sequel while feeling like this story still had a suitable end point. I like the way things are building and will be impatiently waiting for the next book since I’m now caught up with what’s been published thus far.
Derailments of Thought 