Rainbird is a novella from Rabia Gale, a self published author who I managed to quite fortunately stumble across earlier this year.
Rainbird is also the name of our half breed protagonist Part Eerie part human she is seen as a lesser being in both societies.
She works with her human father, helping maintain the Sunway, an amalgam of wires, conduit and metal bolted to the great skeleton of a long dead dragon.
Rainbird danced on the sunway to the singing of uncountable stars, music that only she could hear. Her trench coat, too large and shabby, smelling of cigar smoke and mothballs, flapped around her.
Under the thick third hand fabric, her wings whispered, satin-starch-slither. Her long-toed bare feet skimmed the bumpy bone of the sunway, worn smooth and glittering by centuries of inspection. Her oversized lungs pulled in the thin cold air.
The setting, for such a short piece is stunningly original and vivid. I want to say it has elements of steampunk in the description of the mechanics of the Sunway, in the description of the clothes and the attitudes of the Morality League. That doesn’t quite do it justice though. It would be too easy for you to go “pfft more steampunk” and roll your eyes.
That would be an injustice, for I think Rabia Gale has crafted a world that has echoes of several sub genres and seamlessly woven them together. Rainbird leaves me wanting more of the world that Rabia has created – a feature rarely experienced in reading self published work and not as common as you would like to experience in traditional publishing either.
To top it off this well sketched work has a nice little engine of an action story powering it.
It’s a truly original tale of action, love and redemption.
At $2.99 it’s well worth it.
This book was provided by the author.
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