The Sun and the Void is a folklore retelling fantasy that centers on Reina, a half-nozariel (i.e., a species with catlike ears and tail a strong gift for use of magic sources and who were once enslaved by humans and still are to some extent), half human girl who lost her father very early in life and is trying to return to her paternal grandmother, a sorceress who works with a great valco family (i.e., a species that is known for its powerful magic abilities and antlers), the Águilas. While she is getting to her, she is harmed, and it puts her on a journey of reliance on a powerful but rare magic, iridio. We also follow Eva, a girl who is half-valco but never met her father. She grew up in an area that believed her valco heritage makes her an agent against their god. We follow these girls as they are thrown into adventure, and the potential awakening of a great god.

First off, Romera Lacruz is excellent at worldbuilding. That is the first thing I noticed about this book. The layers of history and people she has here is amazing, and the amount of work she does at describing the world is fascinating. I also very much enjoyed reading a fantasy that this incorporated South American folklore, and it makes me want to seek out other South American folklore tales and fantasy. She is a master at writing this fantasy, and I loved that. This book is definitely more in the high fantasy realm with its length, but it has modern attention to descriptions and people involved with the book, and I give her all the accolades for undertaking these books.

I also greatly enjoyed the characters she chose to focus on and their twisting and turning motivations. It did feel like a lot of the times people weren’t fully right or wrong, just real humans (in our sense of the word). I really really liked Reina as a character. She was complicated, often wrong, but you still felt for her in a lot of moments. She is a victim and product of her environment, and when she asked for things, even at the expense of others, you feel her desperation to just exist in a world that does not value her or want her in many ways. Every character she interacts with is a battle for them to see her as a person, and that is a difficult place to be put in time and time again. However, she is very much a person in that she forgives some and can’t do it as fast with others. It shows how people can react in oppressive situations.

Eva is fascinating as well, and I love the description of her. She really feels like she will become a powerhouse in the next novels, and that we will see her continue to grow as she removes herself from her history and treatment. Eva is even more fascinating because she was often privileged but also oppressed. It is an interesting look in someone who is inherently a complex figure.

Overall, Romera Lacruz gave us a plethora of diverse characters with mixed characteristics. That said, there was a little bit that held me back from absolutely adoring this book, and it mostly had to do with the pacing. It felt like this was a very plot-driven novel, and less about internal conflicts of characters. Since we only have two complicated characters, we don’t get a lot of analysis of other’s internal motivations, and that left me feeling frustrated with how characters would react in any given situation. I didn’t often understand where they were coming from or what to expect from them.

Further, because I’m not a huge plot person, sometimes there was a lack of setup before we got the action, and it left me feeling a bit confused. That could be 100% on me, but I did feel like some of the character shifts and reveals happened so suddenly and didn’t always have the best setups that felt satisfying when we got there. Overall, I definitely liked this book, but didn’t love it. I also have a lot of hope that this is a setup to an even greater story coming in the next books we see from this author!