The first volume in an ambitious sci-fi/fantasy series offers an exciting mix of adventure, drama, and aromatic character interaction.
Review: Shadow Cast
Arilin Thorferra
If you visit the Zyearth website, the first thing you might think is: wow, there’s a whole damn lot of worldbuilding here. And you wouldn’t be wrong. Shadow Cast, the first volume in the Zyearth Chronicles, blends science fiction, fantasy, and furry into an ambitious, galaxy-spanning mix that still manages to stay focused on character. You won’t have to learn all of this worldbuilding here; you learn a lot in the first volume.
Isabelle “Izzy” Gildspine and Matt Azure are young (by local standards) quilar, a hedgehog-ish race, both aspiring to become Golden Guardians—high-ranking magicians in the Defender Army. As we meet them, they’ve both applied for the fourth time. Matt in particular has come to suspect that the Master Guardian, the one with final approval over their application, is rejecting them for reasons that have less to do with their qualifications than his own personal demons.
During an award ceremony—not for Matt and Izzy, as they’ve been rejected yet again—the Defenders are attacked, first by magical birds with specific elemental powers, then by a strange quilar with control over all elemental magics, not just one, an almost unheard of talent. To compound the strangeness, there are definite signs that this quilar, Ouranos, is controlled by something else that’s driving him to attack—and driven specifically to attack Matt, who holds some kind of special power that the controlling attacker wants.
As the Defenders regroup, the plot becomes ever more complicated: Ouranos has crash-landed a spaceship on their planet, and that ship may be a long-lost colony ship from the Defenders themselves. His sister Natassa has stowed away on the ship, trying to help Ouranos break free from the force controlling him, but when Ouranos learns how she wants to help, he rejects it. Another fierce fight leaves Matt apparently dead, Natassa under arrest, and Roscoe—one of the Defenders, and Izzy’s husband—transformed into a strange, nearly invincible black goo monster. This may sound like a lot, and we haven’t gotten into just who is controlling Ouranos, the mysterious “Black Cloak” (a person, not a piece of clothing), just what Matt’s role in both freeing Ouranos and dooming everyone else might be, how gem magic works…
Okay, that is a lot, but once the plot’s in motion, Meenan keeps it all steadily moving forward and expanding without letting it all get either overwhelming or sloggy. I will note that once the plot’s in motion is doing some work in that sentence. Characters in the first act spend a lot of time reflecting not just on past events in their life but on large swaths of how their society works, clearly for the reader’s benefit. A lot of this could probably have come out more naturally over the course of the novel, even if it left readers in the dark for a while.
That quibble aside, this is a solid adventure story, with a lot of tense moments as well as a few moving ones. Matt, Izzy, Ouranos, and Natassa are well-drawn characters, and there’s more than enough here to keep you engaged. You can argue we’ve seen a lot of these tropes before, but they’re put together here in an original way, and—well, the word I keep coming back to in my head is, simply, “fun.” Shadow Cast is young adult appropriate, although it’s got definite moments of darkness. (It’s not a real spoiler to let you know that not all named characters make it through the story alive, let alone unharmed.) While the story isn’t explicitly queer (or romantic at all, for that matter), the setting is established early as explicitly queer-friendly.
Note: While the ebook version of Shadow Cast is normally $1.99, during September 2025 all the Zyearth books are free from the Zyearth website.