Daughters' War

Galva defies her family and enlists in the Raven Knights, a fighting force raised only because the goblin war has already killed most of the men who would have filled it. Goblins have burned the fields, enslaved the cities, and killed the horses. Now the army sends women where it once refused them.

The knights are paired with giant corvids grown through dark magic, birds strong enough to break a goblin line and just as likely to turn on the handler holding the tether. Galva tells her own war in the first person, part memoir and part confession. Pages from her younger brother Amiel's journal break in now and again, tracking the brother she is trying to keep alive.

It reads as grimdark war fiction: slower than a quest story, heavier on drill and grief than on banter. Buehlman stays unsentimental about what a body and a family both cost in a losing war. The corvids are as likely to maim their own riders as the enemy.

It is the prequel to The Blacktongue Thief, set years earlier in the same war, and it can be read before that novel or after it.