Beyond the Shadowed Earth by Joanna Ruth Meyer (review)

Meyer, Joanna Ruth Beyond the Shadowed Earth. Page Street, 2020 [400p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-62414-820-0 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-62414-821-7 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12

Nine years after newly orphaned Eda bargained with the gods for an empire, her efforts to rule the nation of Enduena, wage imperial conquest, and restore worship of the gods are going badly. When she's betrayed, first by her wayward Barons and then by her supposedly supportive new husband, Eda flees her capital and sets out to claim revenge on the gods. Eda's not easily likable, but she is complex, her imperiousness and cruelty masking desperation and political naiveté. Her initial willful obliviousness to the true price of her bargain with the mountain god Tuer renders her downfall both inevitable and perversely satisfying. The stakes of Eda's journey widen from personal to cosmic significance: shadow demons threaten the very fabric of the world, and Tuer is powerless to act, trapped by his own sorrow in a labyrinth, where at last Eda faces a monumental choice. The culmination of Eda's quest resists redemption for her prior actions, leaving her physically embodying her lingering trauma and guilt but also transformed and open to life's hopeful possibilities. Meyer's charismatic, flawed pantheon and numerous homages to the Queen's Thief series will make this novel attractive to fans of Megan Whalen Turner. Readers familiar with Meyer's previous novel set in Enduena, Beneath the Haunting Sea, will appreciate the extended political drama better than newcomers, but this companion novel can also stand firmly on its own as an impressive villain-turnedantihero mythic quest.