Color of the Islandmaker

Color is not just scenery in Color of the Islandmaker—it's politics, faith, hunger, and the price of survival. I didn’t expect the opening chase to hook me that hard; Lost ST-Pierre snaps it shut like a trap, then keeps tightening the screws until you can almost smell the moss and the panic.

The story follows Anglica and Raymon—ex-clergy fugitives with too much knowledge and too few safe places—who gamble on a shabby tavern, a stranger guide, and the impossible: yellow portals. I kept leaning in every time they took another “shortcut,” because I knew someone would pay for it. What begins as an escape becomes a trek through a humid, hostile world where every myth has teeth and every “good cause” hides a ledger. I loved how the book keeps shifting the ground under your certainty: you’re not only tracking the runaways, you’re also pulled into the Clergy’s machinery through Revanna, an inquisitor who is competent, sharp-edged, and—most interestingly—capable of doubt. By the time legends of the Islandmaker and the “sun” start to rhyme with real tactics, the scope blooms from pursuit into something closer to a cultural reckoning; I stayed up longer than I meant to for the last stretch.

The characters feel purpose-built for collision: Anglica’s guarded tenderness, Raymon’s bruised sincerity, Joriel’s slippery charm (and his awful jungle snacks—I'll admit I laughed and winced), Revanna’s disciplined ego, and the chilling banality of higher clergy ambition. The prose is vivid and tactile—mud, sweat, smoke, and magic all have weight. A few taxonomy-heavy magic lessons slowed my pace a touch, but I’m glad they’re there; the finale lands harder because of that groundwork.

By the end, this isn’t a simple “fight the monsters” fantasy; it’s an argument about power—who hoards it, who suffers for it, and what it takes to remake a world without becoming your enemy.